14 DAY TRIAL // Keeping a music service opened at all times is never a fortunate choice if you also plan to use your browser for other activities. Musicality is a “mini-browser” that provides the same experience, while staying out of your way.
Online music services are great because you can listen to your music or favorite stations without having to carry around your iPad, iPod or other similar devices. Furthermore, you get the chance to learn about the latest releases, share what you're listening to with your friends or even subscribe to your favorite singer’s playlist or station.
Of course, there are two sides to each story and staying logged in to such services into your browser has its drawbacks, both in terms of functionality and overall system performance.
Musicality allows you to use your Grooveshark, Last.fm and Pandora accounts in an outside-the-browser environment that can run in the background. Thus, your music won’t get in your way and, when the main window is hidden, the stress upon your resources is reduced. The Looks
Musicality can be viewed as a web browser that has been stripped down of all unnecessary features. The main window’s toolbar includes only back and forward buttons, a drop down menu that allows you switch between the services and a volume slide bar.
Musicality also comes with a status bar menu that includes entries for basic functions such as opening the main window, play/pause, next/previous, like/dislike, choosing the current service or the audio output (provides AirPlay support and you can adjust the volume for each device).
You get to see the currently playing track and its artwork in the status bar menu, but the application comes with Growl support as well. As a result, you will view the title and the artist name when the track changes or if you like/dislike a song.
The Works
Musicality displays the Grooveshark, Last.fm and Pandora websites as any browser would, which means that you can access all their features, but it also brings its own perks. The best part is that you don’t need to have the Musicality window opened to use the services.
Once you setup your current playlist, you can control the application through user set global keyboard shortcuts. Musicality is able to use the standard media keys for play/pause, back/forward, but also allows you to set your own via the Preferences window. Moreover, you can set hotkeys for like/dislike, show/hide the main window and displaying the current’s track info whenever you like (in a Growl notification).
Many of Musicality’s features are focused on being as unobtrusive as possible and you have the chance to find the combination that suits you best. For starters, you get to disable the notifications all together, remove the menu bar icon or choose to automatically hide the main window when running in the background.
You may also run Musicality as a service, which, according to the feature description, should hide both the Dock icon and the menubar icon. In theory, this should be great, making the application visible only when you need it, via keyboard shortcuts. Unfortunately, testing revealed that only the Dock icon is removed, and you cannot hide both elements at the same time.
Hiding the main window is important because it will stop the Adobe Flash elements from reloading, greatly reducing the resources usage. The difference becomes quite obvious if you are, for example, using a freeware Grooveshark account that will continuously display ads.
Musicality also works with an Apple remote: the basic keys have the usual effect, but if you press and hold the volume keys, you can like/dislike the current song. To enable Last.fm scrobbling you must input your credentials in the Preferences window.
The Dislike function is quite useful: although I believe it is mainly intended to eliminate entries when dealing with automatically generated radio stations, it will also stop the track and skip to the next in all cases, even if you manually paused the song.
The Good
The best part is that you can listen to your music without having to make sure you never close a certain tab, arranging the other ones around it and so on. Musicality will simply run in the background, while remaining always just a hotkey away.
The Bad
The "Run as service" feature does not seem to work as it should, which is quite disappointing because it sounds like a great idea.
The Truth
The AirPlay support and the fact that you can use your Apple remote to control it make it suitable for your entire home, not only for your desktop.
Here are some snapshots of the application in action:
