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Whyd is a colorful take on voice-controlled wireless speakers
Just two years ago, Whyd was trying to mix up the music streaming world, with a service that let you collect tracks from around the internet, and put them in one place. Today, it's moving into hardware with a multi-room wireless speaker. Don't worry, if you were into its aggregation service, (as you likely know) it wasn't killed, but made open source earlier this month. Starting today, though, the Whyd brand will live on as a multi-room speaker system.
Whyd's music-streaming aggregation now open to the public
It was, according to our calendars, nearly 14 months ago that we first checked out Whyd. The music service pulls songs scraped from sites like YouTube and Soundcloud, letting you build streaming playlists out of music often not available through the likes of Spotify and iTunes. And while we haven't heard so much as a peep out of the service in the intervening year-plus, it's clear that the team has been working on something over there. Today, the site is finally shedding its long-standing invite-only status, opening up to one and all. The news also brings with it an, ahem, wider variety of features, including Deezer-compatibility, comments, revamped profiles and more to help nudge you in the direction of yet another streaming-music offering.
Whyd mines YouTube, Soundcloud and others for songs Spotify can't deliver (hands-on)
Remember how long it took Spotify to end up in the States? The issue? Music rights, of course. Before it could make its way to our shores, the service had to strike deals with a bunch of record labels, making sure the artists, the executives and EMI janitorial staffs all get paid. Whyd, a new French music service that will be clawing its way out of beta later this month, offers a bit of a workaround to that conundrum, pulling music from sources like YouTube and SoundCloud, aggregating them into a single dynamic location. That means that all content can be brought in, from some kid playing acoustic originals in her bedroom to long time music streaming holdouts like The Beatles and Led Zeppelin. Once you signed in via Facebook or created a new account, you get started with the search field at the top of the page. From here, you'll find tracks posted by other users. Click on a track and you can watch / listen, Like it, add it or post it to Twitter or Facebook. Songs that are added pop up on the Your Tracks page, a sort of central hub for the site. Playing the tracks from here will pop up a toolbar on the bottom of the page that lets you pause, scroll through the track and skip between songs. For the sake of organization, it's also possible to divide songs into different playlists.
