iLike and iTunes – what you can do with the sidebar and website
May 7th, 2007 by AndieCZ
iLike is quite a new service, providing social networking to music fans. It has almost the same functionalities as Last.fm, but its user interface and mainly the sidebar is much more comfortable and I am very satisfied with the services offered by the website and a sidebar.
After signing up to iLike web, which takes just several seconds, you are asked to download a sidebar, which will become part of your iTunes. Installing is very easy and it will stop iTunes automatically, if they are running during the installation. After re-launching iTunes, you will see a a new sidebar attached to the main window of the application.
What you can do with your iLike:
- organize your music and your music collections;
- discover new music through recommendations and browsing the tastes of your friends in the network;
- and share your music tastes and recommendations with others connected to iLike.
The sidebar is really very easy to use, it has just three basic tabs, you will need:
- Related – which shows the related music to the song or artist you listen to – this is really an excellent feature, which has no comparison on the market. When you click on the song, at least 30 seconds are played directly in iTunes. Also, it offers a selection of free music by the new artists and you can download it directly to iTunes with a single click, a new Playlist- “iLike Downloads†is shown in your playlists and all the songs are stored there. The source for the free songs is GarageBand.com.
- Friends – you can easily browse your friends and check, what music they listen to to be inspired in the motion of your music taste.Be careful about selecting your friends as you can allow them to browse through your playlists and library to see what songs you have in them.But you can manage the information shown to the other users by a very strong privacy setting options and through playlist management options.
- Profile – this tab is the centre for the setting and upgrading your profile. Also, you have a quick access to your posts on this tab.
The website, which is an essential part of the whole service, offers you to find other friends and to see all the possible statistics, you can wish to see. Also, quite a huge section about artists is available and you can explore new kinds of music, you could like /maybe love/.
When you have a feeling, you listen to the same songs all the time, I can fully recommend to install this small sidebar to your iTunes to discover new music worlds. The work with iLike is much more comfortable than with AudioScrobbler and Last.fm and you will enjoy very easy downloading of new portions of music directly into your iTunes.
Just Windows users can be a bit unlucky as iLike currently fully supports just iTunes, but for us, Mac OS X users, it makes no sense to think about a different application. But the sidebar is told to have almost the same features for Windows and Mac OS X.
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