Lets face it, GrooveShark is pretty cool. Everything is there from popular songs to really great covers of songs, all for free. One inconvenience is needing your browser open all the time.
WinGrooves is the best application available to bring Grooveshark onto your desktop. Take a look and see how it works and why it has the potential to be your default Music Player.
WinGrooves is essentially a browser-free version of the GrooveShark site. If you were to look at them side by side, you will be hard pressed to see any differences. That being said, lets dive into what you can do with WinGrooves.
The difference between the GrooveShark desktop application and WinGrooves is with the GrooveShark app, you need to have Adobe Air installed. If for what ever reason you do not like or want Adobe Air on your PC, WinGrooves is a great app to fill that void.
Layout
If you have been using GrooveShark via a web browser, you will be very familiar with the operation of WinGrooves. For the noobs, here is the lay of the land.
The left sidebar is the main control area. There are a couple of sections you will want to play around with because you will be using them a lot in the beginning. The first area is My Music. This is how you will access and interact with your library of songs. There are options to manage all of your music right from the sidebar, including creating and managing playlists and the option to upload music. If you are in the mood to see what others are listening to, you can click Popular and possibly find a new favorite.
The next area is your Playlist. As anyone who has a lot of digital music can tell you, playlists are a must have. They help you separate your songs in what ever way makes sense to you, be it by mood, genre, time period or something else. All that matters is having the perfect pairing of songs that blend together seamlessly.
Scrolling down a bit, you should see a bunch of genres. These are different internet radio stations. These are great for finding new music too. Choosing a genre like indie will play a lot of lesser known groups, while Rock will play everything from Classic Rock to modern songs.
If you’d like to add more, you can do just that by pressing the + . There are currently 26 different genres available in the Stations section.
At the very bottom of the application, you will see the player. This is where all of the songs will be displayed.
Searching for music
The search function is really cool. You don’t really need to know what you are looking for. You can type in keywords or phrases. The search results will show a bunch of songs that will have something to do with what you searched for.
Controlling WinGrooves with Keyboard Shortcuts
Part of what makes WinGrooves great is the customizable hotkeys. By making a hotkey combination to skip songs, pause, hide/show the window or others will make controlling your music much easier than having to open the window each time you want to like a song or skip to the next one.
Uploading your own music
Uploading your own music collection is super easy with WinGrooves. By clicking on the Upload button near the top of the left sidebar, you will see your browser open and you will be whisked away to the GrooveShark site to upload your songs.