Recent songs are cached as they play, and library info is maintained locally. So if you know you've listened to a song you should be able to go back and play it offline.
v1 doesn't have a good interface for showing you which songs it's got cached though -- that might arrive in an update :)
Does "shuffle" intelligently shuffle through cached songs while offline? That'd be handy.
And is there an "offline" toggle in the app, or would you have to put the device in airplane mode?
I like the idea of having my music in the cloud. I just don't like the battery drain of constant streaming. Or the "what happens when I'm on a train/a plane/a crappy-2G connection?" cases. Robust offline support would be totally awesome.
I totally agree, it just didn't make sense to build all the offline stuff into v1.
Obviously I'm just getting started on this, but I'd prefer not to have a switch, but just to do the right thing, and give some cues so you know if it's going to have to stream to play a song or not.
That's mostly the case now -- files should stream once, then be cached. This version uses a 250mb LRU cache, so figure the last 50-60 songs you listened to.
I get that you gotta ship sometime :)
Looks great though, I'll definitely be keeping an eye on it.
Though I would urge you to reconsider the switch. There are plenty of times when I technically do have a data connection, but for various reasons, would rather hold off on streaming. (e.g. traveling through a series of deadspots; trying to prevent 3G overage charges; trying to preserve battery; generally slow data connection).
