Spotify App Finder

Spotify is the latest company to launch its own app store, with the first wave of free apps coming from partners including Rolling Stone magazine, The Guardian and Last.fm.

Most of the apps are for creating playlists. If searching for songs or genres bores you, or you run out of tracks to search for, these apps offer inspiration for new playlists. If you're new to Spotify, the apps are a good place to get ideas for what to add to playlists.

There are some impressive playlist apps, such as Rolling Stone Recommends, which suggests tracks picked by stars including Mick Jagger and Aerosmith's Steven Tyler, and the Fuse app, which creates playlists inspired by music news. The Moodagent app creates playlists depending on how you're feeling (Sensual, Happy, Tender or Angry). However, we found its track suggestions a little too obscure and it never really hit the mark, especially when it suggested Cliff Richard after we clicked 'Happy'.

Our favourite playlist app was Lastfm's. It integrates its own 'scrobbling' tool into Spotify, prioritising t racks and artists that you listen to the most, to give you very accurate recommendations. You do need to have a free Lastfm account to use t his app, though.

To get the apps, simply click the App Finder menu and add each individually the process is extremely fast. You don't have to wait for downloads, and you won't suffer random crashes as can happen in iTunes.

The quality of the nonplaylist apps varies. We like The Guardian's app, which links its music reviews to Spotify albums, and Soundrop, which creates shareable radio stations. But neither TuneWiki, which finds song lyrics, nor Songkick, which finds upcoming gigs for your favourite artists, worked very well.

However, these glitches might be down to the fact that the app store is still in beta. Overall, from what we can see, it has a great deal of potential.