Adobe AIR Showcase

Finetune Desktop

Entertainment innovator uses AIR to move its music discovery service from the web to the desktop—creating a powerful, persistent, branded desktop service.

• Download Finetune Desktop
• Watch how Teknision and Finetune leveraged Adobe AIR

Finetune is a music discovery service that helps users find and listen to music from a comprehensive music library that the company licenses from major record labels. When customers type an artist’s name, the Finetune proprietary recommendation engine creates lists of related songs for users to hear. Users can also create their own playlists, browse artists, review professionally managed playlists, and embed playlists into blogs and social networking pages.

For Finetune to compete in the digital music services industry, it needed compelling technology that would differentiate its services. "We wanted to rise above the competition and move the listening experience beyond the Internet," says Martin Kay, CEO of Finetune. Essential to accomplishing this was overcoming traditional limitations with Internet-only services and providing customers with a low-impact, high-performance application that would run reliably on their computers.

Previously, Finetune relied on applications written in Microsoft products. The applications were locked into Internet Explorer, required heavy client downloads, and were unstable. In contrast, Finetune wanted a more open solution that worked across computing platforms and independent of browsers—to mirror the environments used by the company’s diverse customers. "We’ve used Adobe technologies for years and have always been impressed," says Kay. "We wanted to continue using Adobe solutions to deliver services that could reach as broad an audience as possible."

Using Adobe Flex 2, Flash, and AIR, Finetune developed its latest product—Finetune Desktop, which brings the power of the company’s web service to a convenient desktop application. The AIR application can capture music preference information stored on a customer’s desktop—such as details in a user’s iTunes libraries—and feed it into Finetune’s recommendation engine. The customer is then offered well-matched song recommendations based on artists, genre, and playlists. The application streams MP3 files, and the only thing needed to use the desktop service is downloading the free Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR).

Extending existing Adobe assets

As longtime Adobe developers, the Finetune team used Flash versions 7, 8, and now 9 for parts of the application and for the player. The Finetune AIR desktop player invokes a series of embedded Flash 8 SWF files and reskinned Flex components to show playlists in the display area and make calls to the web service. Also, a reskinned Flex component handles the navigation that looks at the user’s desktop iTunes Library, calls a web service, and instructs the recommendation engine to generate more customized playlists on the Finetune Desktop. 

The Adobe Flash Communication Server is used to securely stream audio and video within the parameters of the license agreements that Finetune has with record labels. "With Adobe technologies, we have helped raise the standard of interactivity and rich experiences for digital music services," says Kay. "It’s an exciting time in our industry."