New feature: Favorites

Magnatune Members now have a bunch of features wrapped around the concept of "favorites".

The main benefits of this are:

1) one-click add albums to your favorites as you listen to them. Download them later, when it's convenient.

2) listen to all your favorite albums (sequentially or as a shuffle mix) on the web with our flash player, or inside your own media player via the m3u/ogg/xspf links.

3) personal podcast: if you subscribe to your favorites using podcast-download software (such as iTunes), then the albums you mark as favorites are automatically downloaded in the background, and added to your iPod. Favorites are automatically downloaded and added to your Windows Media Player Library, when you use the free "Juice" podcast download program.

Both the stream and download memberships have access to these features (though the stream members can't download the albums, they can do everything else).

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Here is a detailed breakdown of how these features work.

A new "add to favorites" button appears

through the magic of javascript, the button (once you've clicked it) changes into "Added to your favorites!" with a link:

If you click on the favorites link, you'll get a list of albums. Here is what mine looks like:

If you have a download membership, you can click "download" on each album, and you'll be able to grab the files you need right away:

Click "play" and each album is sequentially played. Click the "shuffle" button play a randomized mix:

And finally, here is the feature I like best. Magnatune will make a personal podcast feed for you, of your favorite albums. If you subscribe to it in iTunes, then your favorite albums are downloaded in the background. If you have set your iPod up to sync podcasts, then your favorite Magnatune albums are automatically added to your iPod.

The "subscribe" page is pretty extensive, because I wanted to explain how it worked. Here is what the page looks like:

I like this feature because I have lots of computers and iPods, and now I can mark my favorite albums at Magnatune, and have them automatically downloaded to all my computers and devices. I add a new album to my favorites, and every device & computer gets it automatically.

Here is what the final result looks like in iTunes:

By the way, instead of using this "personal podcast" feature to download your favorite albums, we also have an "instant iTunes import" feature, which you can find on the bottom of the "play" page. That feature lets you listen to the albums as streams from within iTunes, without having to download the albums.

And this will work with any software that supports podcasts. In Windows, I tried this "Magnatune personal podcast feed" feature with the free-and-excellent podcast downloader "Juice". Here is what it looks like:

Juice (which is is free, by the way) automatically adds your favorite albums to Windows Media Player. You'll find your favorite magnatune albums in the "Library" tab of Windows Media Player, under the "My Playlists" section, under "Magnatune favorite albums".

Because Windows Media Player loves to try to sell you stuff, in the graphic above you can see that they are showing your favorite Magnatune album for sale at Napster. This is actually fairly useful, because it causes Windows Media Player to show you a) album art b) release date c) number of songs and d) song names. Just ignore the "buy" buttons.

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As I add albums to my Magnatune favorites, Juice (or iTunes, or whatever you're using) automatically downloads them in the background. Cool!

And I personally really like having the newly added albums added to my iPod automatically.

So... here's another reason to become a Magnatune member...