Rara.com review

Streaming music is something of a holy grail – a way for artists and record labels to make money out of users who expect everything to be available immediately at a negligible cost. It’s a lot to ask, but to many users, easy accessibility is often more important than price.

With this in mind, Rara.com has hooked up with the big three surviving major labels (Sony, Warner and Universal, which is in the process of absorbing EMI) as well as a massive number of independents to provide a huge catalogue of music for its paid-for, web-based music streaming service. Unlike rivals Spotify and Last.fm, Rara doesn’t have a free option. Instead, you can try the service for three months for 99p a month – the price then goes up to £5 if you only want to access Rara via your web browser, or £10 if you want to use the Android app to stream music to a compatible phone or MP3 player.

If you use a PC, Rara is a web-based service – there’s no option of downloading music to your PC to listen to offline, although you can cache music if you use the mobile version of the service on an Android device. Whether you’re using the mobile or web-based version, Rara uses Dolby Pulse, a variant of HE AAC v2 at bitrates of between 42kbit/s and 72kbit/s. Audio sounds very good, although Spotify Premium’s 320kbit/s Ogg Vorbis streaming takes a slight edge if you’re listening on a PC.

When you click on an album’s artwork, you’re presented with a track list view, from where you can add tracks to playlists – we’d have preferred a resizable window here – click to enlarge

Rara focusses on curated playlists, called stations, based on genre, era, mood and other content. Although we were initially sceptical, we were almost immediately won over by the variety and quality of the playlists. The first punk list we got included a very credible combination of Bad Religion, Sham 69 and The Misfits, for instance. Most other stations produced equally high-grade selections, although some would benefit from slightly narrower genre definitions. The Electronica station is a prime example; although Ian Van Dahl’s Castles in the Sky and Portishead’s Glory Box both qualify as electronica, they aren’t necessarily the most natural of companions on a playlist. The Dance & House station is even more inexplicable, producing a playlist that included Cascada, deadmau5 and The Chemical Brothers before Rickrolling us with the original 1980s version of Never Gonna Give You Up, followed by well-known house music giants The Spice Girls.

None of the playlists change significantly from one day – or even week – to the next, which means that you’ll soon get bored if you listen to a lot of music. Fortunately, it’s easy to build your own playlists, either by searching for your favourite artists manually or by adding songs from Rara’s suggested playlists. A plus sign next to each track takes you to a screen which allows you to add it to your queue, to an existing playlist or to a new playlist. It’s not as convenient as creating playlists on Spotify, with its familiar click-and-drag interface, but it does the job.

Rara Radar highlights recent releases including albums from artists as diverse as Hawkwind, Feist and Steps, which provides a decent overview of new music. There’s also a Just For You section, which uses your play history to come up with suggestions of other things you might like. Rara did well in noticing our love of Finnish metal, but the vast majority of suggestions were irrelevant to our taste and seemed to be based on broad genre categories. We’d also have liked an option to refine our recommendations by disliking tracks that weren’t to our taste. As a tool for discovering new music, Rara can’t compare to Last.fm’s brilliant ability to construct a limitless station based on the suggestion of a single artist.

We encountered a few errors and a number of omissions, some of them quite major. An admittedly slightly obscure search for avant garde artist Ulver produced one early album, with correct album artwork and track lists, but we were unable to play any of the tracks – the album later disappeared from our searches entirely. Electronic outfit Delirium, singer-songwriter Tracy Chapman and folk-goths Inkubus Sukkubus were all listed when we searched for them by name, but no music was available, which we found more annoying that simply searching and coming up with nothing. We also ran into tracks – usually from compilation albums – which had the right artist data but which didn’t appear when we tried to display the artist’s complete works.

When you favourite a track, it appears on your favourites screen associated with its album artwork – we’d have preferred a resizable window here – click to enlarge

Rara’s interface is designed to be friendly to even the least tech-savvy user. Everything runs inside your browser and is illustrated with a genre or album art thumbnail. Clicking on the thumbnail opens a track list, while clicking on the album information next to it starts playing the first track. Unfortunately, because they’re close together, it’s far too easy to click on one when you meant to click the other.

We were generally impressed by the range of artists that did appear, from LA death-rockers 45 Grave to electronic pioneers Praga Khan, but there are some major omissions and many artists’ catalogues are incomplete. However, we also found a number of artists whose work no long appears on Spotify following licensing disputes. We hope to see improvements in Rara’s catalogue in the coming months, but for the moment, Spotify provides a far more varied and complete listening experience, as well as making it easier to build playlists of your own. Rara is certainly worth a try, particularly if you just want to be able to choose a genre or mood and let the tracks be selected for you, but it has a hard road ahead if it hopes to topple Spotify from its throne.