In the last couple of years, services like Spotify and Rdio (and to an extent iTunes Store + Match now) have become immensely popular and have become the de facto standard sources of music for millions of users. These services have great web apps, equally amazing mobile apps and a large collection of Music available to the users. However, one service that was once very popular as the best source of on-demand streaming music is now very rarely spoken about. Grooveshark started losing its popularity after it was riddled with multiple lawsuits one after the other, along with the lack of a desktop or iOS app. The Desktop app that the service offered back then was built using AIR and their iOS app was only available on Jailbroken phones, as Apple would not approve the app for the App Store. That said, Grooveshark still continues to be a great service for anyone who cannot opt for Rdio or Spotify, prefer to upload their own music to the service and it still has a stellar web app.
The folks behind Shiny Frog and FFFABS, who recently released worked together on the StatNut app for iOS, have just announced another stunning new app called ‘Shiny Groove’. Shiny Groove is a phenomenally good looking Mac app for Grooveshark. The app essentially brings the power of Grooveshark’s web app into a neatly wrapped Cocoa app that sits in your Dock and Menubar. You can fully use Grooveshark from the app to search, queue, create playlists, like and add songs to collection. But Shiny Groove improves on the experience by offering a gorgeous miniplayer that displays the song meta data & controls. When you enable the miniplayer, you get the Album Art of the current song in a tiny square view sitting on your Desktop. When you mouseover on the Album Art, you are shown player controls along with the Song & Artist/Album info. This miniplayer has a lovely flip animation when you change the song — it looks incredible. The icon in the Dock is dynamic — it shows Grooveshark’s shark fin when no song is playing, but changes to a Play/Pause icon depending on the state of the player. There’s also a menubar icon to show/hide the app quickly. As a gimmick, you can shake the miniplayer to hide it.
Shiny Groove not only works with the mouse, but also has support for the media keys on the keyboard, Apple Remote and even the standard iPhone headphones. From the moment you land on Shiny Groove’s website, it’s evident that the designers and developers set out to make it the best Music app for Grooveshark. The amount of polish that this app has undergone is splendid. The app will be available on the Mac App Store and Shiny Frog’s website for $3.99, but the former will unfortunately not have support for media keys, remote and iPhone headphones due to Apple’s policies.
For now, you can download a beta of the app for free from Shiny Groove’s website.