Digital music service Finetune on Tuesday announced the launch of a preview release of Finetune Desktop, an application that enables you to stream music from the online service to your Mac or PC.
Finetune is part digital music player, part social network. A free service, users create their own playlists and access music both familiar and unfamiliar through an online catalog of major and independent labels. As a Finetune user, you can create a playlist, put in on your blog with the Finetune player widget, and let other users listen in.
While Finetune has, up to now, been restricted to usage through a Web browser or embedded Web page software, the service is now extending to the desktop. Finetune Desktop leverages Adobe’s Apollo — a code name for the runtime software currently in development that extends Flash, HTML, AJAX, and other Web-centric technology to the desktop.
Finetune Desktop lets users listen to custom playlists, tune in to “artist radio” playlists inspired by your favorite artists, listen to radio based on genre, and share playlists on your blog or Web site. What’s more, Finetune integrates into iTunes — the software can generate playlists based on the contents of your own iTunes library.