Functionality
There are two primary features that really set nuTsie apart. First is the Serendipity slider, which adjusts the portion of suggested music in your ongoing playlist. The second is your Grab Bag, where all of your stored songs can be accessed later. Combining these two, you could fill up your Grab Bag, play it, and crank the Serendipity slider to create a continually-evolving playlist, as the more you grab from it, the more specific the suggestions would become. You can also veto songs with the harsh “Hate it” button to make sure you don’t hear that kind of trash again. They’ve attempted to bring all of this functionality right to your desktop with an iTunes add-on called sideTunes.
sideTunes from nuTsie
Trust me, this is very much in beta. Couldn’t get a thing to work with it, but as ever, your mileage may vary. It’s a cool idea, and great for folks who are married to their iTunes and don’t want to muss about with a web interface. If it worked, Sidetunes would allow you to do everything from pick friends’ playlists, adjust recommended music, grab and purhase music right as you’re listening to it through the iTunes player. You can always import your playlists the old-fashioned way to your nuTsie account…
Importing playlists from iTunes to nuTsie
It’s really easy, just export the library for your particular playlist, and upload it to nuTsie through the browser. The nuTsie music library is certainly impressive, but I’ve found it’s lacking a lot of the music. For example, a full 18-song playlist I tried to import from iTunes only yielded one match on nuTsie, while one or two others simply didn’t recognize the song title, and I had to search for them manually. As a result, recommended tunes may be based solely on artist or very clear genre similarities. Personally, I found Pandora to offer a more interesting mix. Still, the Top 100 lists are well-picked and are often enough of a fix when you’re looking to find new music.
As far as actual sound quality, I found buffering to be relatively speedy, even on EDGE, and most songs sounded only marginally worse than MP3s. Every once in awhile mid-song, it would dip in quality for a split-second, presumably to get the next track ready, and I did have the odd track completely drop off, which made the overall experience a little frustrating when listening to it for a long period of time, but in short bursts, both of those problems were forgiveable. On a track-by-track basis, most songs were solid quality, but there was the occasional one that sounded like it was straight off of an AM radio station.
The final word on nuTsie coming up!