GrooveShark

Grooveshark is a streaming service that allows you to pick any artist, song or album and simply create playlists to listen to on your computer, tablet or phone. Unlike Pandora or IHeartRadio, it does not give you new artists/songs based off of your listening preference. Instead, it's more like just streaming the music you want to hear with no experimentation.

The HTML5 site works well enough on Windows Phone for streaming in IE9 but Grooveshark have stated they have no intentions for a dedicated client for Windows Phone. That's too bad. However, the developer of MetroRadio (an unofficial Pandora app for Windows Phone) is now working on Groovyshark, an unofficial Grooveshark client for our devices.

We took the alpha build (i.e. pre-beta) for a test drive just to show you that indeed you can hook-into Grooveshark. We also got a sneak peek at the new "screensaver" function that's coming to MetroRadio too which is very reminiscent of Zune's music player on the Zune HD and Zune Desktop. That latter feature is something many have wanted Windows Phone to have built in so it's nice to see someone is working on it.

Groovyshark will hopefully be out in a few weeks to the Windows Phone Marketplace with full queue and playlist functionality built in. We'll keep you posted on  its developments right here at WPCentral.

A few weeks ago, Grooveshark.com announced an HTML5 version of their music-streaming site which made many of us excited--after all, IE9 on Windows Phone is all about HTML5. But alas, the first to complain that their browsers wouldn't play anything were Windows Phone users despite attention paid by the web developer for Grooveshark, James Hartig. In fact, he detailed his experience in a blog post laying blame on Microsoft: "Windows Phone Plagued by IE9's Flawed AJAX".

That didn't stop Microsoft's Ben Riga, Technical Evangelist on the Windows Phone team and Eric Lawrence, Program Manager on Internet Explorer, from trying to help out. And in a new blog post, the Grooveshark dev has now been able to figure out how to properly get Grooveshark running on HTLM5 for IE9.

We just loaded up the site (html5.grooveshark.com) and not only does it load quickly and look beautiful, but gosh darn it actually plays music (even under the lock-screen). In other words, all is good and while we'd still prefer a dedicated Grooveshark client, we'll take this mobile HTML5 site for now, thank you very much.

Kudos to Ben, Eric and James for working this out.

Source: Dev Jar; via @benriga

Although it's been talked about at XDA, creating a GrooveShark client for Windows Phone has so far eluded most of the developers there. But it looks like Devalane has managed to pull it off, releasing a free app for the music-streaming site. (For those who remember, we had the pretty awesome GrooveFish & NanoGroove for Windows Mobile.)

MusicShark, just released in the Marketplace, allows you to search for any artist and basically stream whatever is available on GrooveShark's site--which is quite extensive. Interestingly, outside of the app's logo and name, it makes no mention of accessing GrooveShark's music library (perhaps for legal reasons). But if you do a search on both, you'll see they match exactly in content. In addition to streaming, you can add songs to the queue and create a playlist. Unfortunately as of now, you can't login to your GrooveShark account, but for creating and streaming playlists, it seems to work well enough.

For being v1.0, free and the first of its kind, we're not complaining. Grab it here in the Marketplace.