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Tunerec Not Ready for Prime Time

A good idea that might go bad.

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David Grissom's had his first solo foray out for a while. The erstwhile session guitarist who's otherwise a hard hitter has a sleeper hit at the end of 'Loud Music' - the incredible power ballad 'Midnight Drive'.

And ironically that's the first song that popped up after logging into the other Swedish music startup Tunerec. But trying to get that track to just play twice in a row over the next twenty minutes saw the web app hanging and crashing half a dozen times, forcing a logout, one time the app just logged out with no such request - and everywhere the spinning wheel of spin could be seen.

And that was on Firefox. Try the same thing on Safari and this is what you get.

Tunerec is not another Spotify. It's a different idea. Tunerec 'records tunes' on Internet radio stations and puts them in cache for you. You get to make playlists from the tunes in your cache. That's what you can listen to.

The first play of 'Midnight Drive' went well. And it's a brilliant track. Grissom's done session work with some of the greats. You've probably heard his music without realising it.

Second Time Around

There's no repeat function in Tunerec. You can't add the same track to a playlist. You can't queue the same track for play one time after the other. The program's riddled with half baked freshman assumptions about what's usable without real knowledge of what that means.

And you're sort of stuck too - because this is entirely web based. That's good - they tell you it's good - but that's not a certainty. Far from it.

Tunerec has to deal (and cope) with myriad web clients. It puts up code it hopes the clients will know how to read and act on. That by definition means you're not going to know from one day to the next if your product is still working.

Spotify is a 2.4 MB download and takes 2.4 MB on disk. And that's it. Spotify keeps its web traffic to an absolute minimum. It uses the Internet to stream the tracks (at 160 Ogg) and send alert codes when necessary. The actual messages themselves are already baked into the Spotify client's executable.

That's a propitious design.

Tunerec wants you to load the logic in your web browser using JavaScript, AJAX, plugins, etc. And all those elements are beyond Tunerec's control.

That's asking for it.

Tunerec might be a good idea but it's way too early to tell with so many bugs in the software as things stand. And the risk is early adopters will get a bad impression, that Tunerec will not get the buzz of better products like Spotify, and the startup will fall flat before its official release.