On Simfy

I suppose Simfy is the only serious alternative to Spotify in Germany (Spotify isn’t available here yet). You pay about 8 Euros a month to be able to stream arbitrary music from their library to your mobile device. Fortunately, when signing up, they provide a few days of “premium” features as a trial. I believe there are several other advantages to their premium plan, but I was primarily interested in streaming to iOS, so that’s what I tried.

For my tastes, their selection of available music is completely sufficient. But to listen to streaming music, you need a streaming client — which, within the first hour of use, gave me the following error messages.

Network unavailable

As you can see in the screenshot, I was on a Wifi network — my home network, in fact. When I tested the connection shortly after the first error, I found a download rate of 2 Mbit/s and an upload rate of 1 Mbit/s. This might not be the fastest connection ever, but it should suffice for streaming a bunch of MP3s.

I can only explain the first error by assuming Simfy’s server were too slow and the client figured *my* connection must be at fault (“your internect connection”). This happened around ten times during about 20 minutes of use.

Playback stopped

This second error happened when I was trying to listen to music while also downloading some tracks for offline listening, a feature of the client. I never used Simfy on a device other than my iPhone.

Playback error

As you can see, the track is playing at one minute, when suddenly “the link to this track has expired”.

In conclusion, Simfy is only usable when used in offline mode exclusively. As they’re in the music streaming business, I guess they’ll have a lot of catching up to do. I, for one, am thankful for the trial period which helped me decide that I will not pay for such a bug-ridden product.