Rara.com review

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.