I listen to music just about all day long at work so whatever I use has to work well. Rdio, does not. I first heard about Rdio about 3 years ago when they were still in private beta, I didn’t get in. A year or so 
later when they opened to the public I wasn’t very interested due to having looked at Spotify and decided the streaming music wasn’t for me. Then about a month ago I got sick of having to constantly download new music that I wanted to listen to and started looking around again. A couple guys at work used Rdio and spoke highly of it so I went ahead and bought the $10/mo plan so I could use it on my phone/desktop/web. I have been using Rdio for about a month and here are the issues I have noticed with the desktop/mobile client:
Desktop:
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If the network ever drops or has any minor issues then Rdio skips to the next song. This is highly annoying, it should do a better job of buffering and handling network hiccups instead of giving up and moving on to the next song.
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Often the interface becomes unresponsive and I have to either reopen the app or right-click -> reload .
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The interface is slow even when the network is working perfectly, this is due to the "app" essentially just being the webpage in a webview wrapper. FB was guilty of this on iOS with their app as well, Rdio: Bite the bullet and write a real app please
Mobile: -
The app does not "remember" if you have enabled shuffle/loop.
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The app does not "remember" if you have enabled shuffle/loop.
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The app does not "remember" if you have enabled shuffle/loop, oh oops, I forgot I had already typed that… But this is REALLY annoying, if I am quickly scanning through my playlist in my car and I hit the end of the playlist then I have to unlock my phone, launch the Rdio app if it’s not already open, select playlists, and click a song to get music playing again. A) This is not safe to do while driving and B) It is a terrible user experience, the least they could do is have the playlist open when I open the app
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The shuffle "feature" is horribly broken. It shuffles in both directions so if I have shuffle on and I am trying to find a song I want to listen to but I click "Next" and then decide I DO want to listen to that song I cannot hit "Prev" to get back to the song. The thing that drives me nuts about this is the desktop version of shuffle works the way you expect and are used to.
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Whenever you hit "Play" after having it paused and disconnected then it restarts the song so when I get out of my car then get back in and hit play the song restarts. Maybe this doesn’t bother other people but when I listen to 90% of a song on the way to work and then get in my car after work and it is restarted I get annoyed, the least they could do is just skip to the next song.
I am very lukewarm on the idea of subscription based music and before Apple started to allow background music from apps I wouldn’t have gone anywhere near it. However I do enjoy the community playlists, I am extremely lazy so I really like subscribing to a playlist that someone else took the time to make, that said I have a complaint with Rdio’s playlists. You either have to love the entire playlist or tough luck. There is no way to "clone" or "copy" a playlist, I want this functionality so that I can take a popular playlist that is 85% what I want and remove some songs and add others. Really I would like the ability to "branch" a playlist and remove/add songs but still have new songs that are added to the original playlist added to my "branch", of course if I don’t like the song I could remove it.
Tonight after work I will canceling my Rdio subscription and signing up for Spotify to see if the grass is any greener.
Josh Strange 