Music streaming to the lounge - Qriocity on PS3

Having had a play around with Spotify last year and been impressed, I was keen to try Sony's Qriocity Music Unlimited music streaming service which was added to the Playstation 3 at the turn of the year. While the service may seem steep at £9.99 per month, it's ad-free, allows you to sync your existing music library and play it back on a number of different devices. Most importantly for me, it allows me to music streaming service in the lounge, playing through the home cinema system and with a gorgeous HD GUI which can be easily controlled with the PS3 bluray remote.

Having spent an initial evening playing with the service and deciding that the range of music, interface, sound quality and ease-of-use may justify forking out for it (we're on a 30-day trial at the moment), I then popped upstairs and installed the Music Sync app on my desktop. This is where things started to go wrong. On install you're prompted to specify folders containing you music and the app minimises to the systray and starts to churn away. After a few minutes I decided to check the progress and was met with the message "Adding - Added 2 of 9014 songs". Okay, I thought, time to go make some coffee.

Coming back a few hours later the Music Sync app had progressed to 7 out of 9014 songs. Given that Spotify synced my entire library in under 10 minutes, this could be considered a little tardy, but I decided to give it the benefit of the doubt and sleep on it.....

Next day, however, it was still stuck on 7 songs. Worse than that, you can't even shut the thing down with actually killing the process in Task Manager. Doing this causes it to scan the folders again and start re-adding files, which it'll gamely do until - oh, about a dozen or so, tops.

Getting in touch with Sony's support proved frustrating as they seem to be only barely acquainted with the application. Initially the asked me to try adding just a few tracks. After a few hours of this, this was the state of play:

Yep, 0 out 6 songs added. Subsequent exchanges with support have included them asking me to mail them a non-existent file from a non-existent directory and suggesting that the reason that 8900+ of my 9000+ tracks were not being added due to DRM and/or codec issues.

So, while I wait for them to sort it out I installed Songler on the netbook which is currently connected to out TV in the lounge. This handy little extension to Windows Media Centre works with Spotify, last.fm and Youtube to give you a nice GUI front end, which allows you to use a remote to search for and browse streaming music content from the comfort of the sofa. Kind of what Qriocity does, except for free. Oh, and apart from a couple of niggles, it works.