AUDIO STREAMING

Rdio

Rdio, pronounced “R-dee-o”, is another service from the USA that was launched to the market in 2010. The founder Janus Friis is famous from his other very successive company Skype that is a Voice over IP service. With over 15 million songs in the library has the same size as Spotify and the believed Grooveshark. The service is limited to North America, Brazil, New Zealand, Australia and a few countries in Europe.

Rdio does not offer any free version apart from a trail period of 7 days for new users so there is two subscripted versions, “Web” and “Unlimited”, to choose from.

• Web: This is the basic version that gives access to the online-service with all its music
   
• Unlimited: The more expensive choice that gives the user the possibility to use Rdio offline and on the go with mobile devices

The reason of having no free version is that the service is completely ad-free and the focus is to give the users the most pleasant music experience possible. The offline mode works as with Spotify where the user synchronize protected downloads with the software. Streaming quality is not defined and Rdio is testing various codecs and bitrates to see what fits the best but the highest bitrate for desktop and web-users is 320 kbit/s.

Since the software is web-based it uses pure streaming from servers both for desktop and mobile use.

The service offers both a desktop application and streaming from the web-browser. Rdio is also famous for its ease of use to explore new music tracks. Users can also connect their Rdio account with Facebook, Twitter and last.fm to share and explore tracks.

www.rdio.com