Round Surround Sound!

Is it pronounced Wide, or Widd? It’s the GIF/JIF story all over again, but all the name related speculation aside, the Whyd is a pretty cool speaker. Its cushion aesthetic makes it look rather huggable, but behind its soft exterior is a mammoth of technology. Whyd isn’t your conventional ‘pair-and-play’ speaker unit. It’s seriously smart. You can talk to it, requesting songs, or artists, or even playlists. It pairs with your favorite music provider to give you a seamlessly hands-free music experience in a way that seems really natural. Imagine walking up to a musician and requesting a tune. That’s what talking to the Whyd is built around. For the old-school interface lovers, the Whyd has a slick capacitive glass panel on the top. Tap, swipe, pinch to control various playback features.

Whyd’s cylindrical shape gives it a hardware edge too. The speaker can throw sound in 360 degrees, giving you a complete surround sound experience. You don’t even need to look for the speaker’s ‘front face’ because no matter which way you face it, you’ll have crystal clear audio backed by hard-hitting bass filling up your room. The cylindrical shape also gives it a likeness to EVE from Wall-E, doesn’t it?? Way to make audio adorable, eh?

Designer: Arthur Kenzo

Buy It Here: $299 $499

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Whyd mines YouTube, Soundcloud and others for songs Spotify can’t deliver (hands-on)

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Remember how long it took Spotify to end up in the States? The issue? Music rights, of course. Before it could make its way to our shores, the service had to strike deals with a bunch of record labels, making sure the artists, the executives and EMI janitorial staffs all get paid. Whyd, a new French music service that will be clawing its way out of beta later this month, offers a bit of a workaround to that conundrum, pulling music from sources like YouTube and SoundCloud, aggregating them into a single dynamic location. That means that all content can be brought in, from some kid playing acoustic originals in her bedroom to long time music streaming holdouts like The Beatles and Led Zeppelin.

Once you signed in via Facebook or created a new account, you get started with the search field at the top of the page. From here, you'll find tracks posted by other users. Click on a track and you can watch / listen, Like it, add it or post it to Twitter or Facebook. Songs that are added pop up on the Your Tracks page, a sort of central hub for the site. Playing the tracks from here will pop up a toolbar on the bottom of the page that lets you pause, scroll through the track and skip between songs. For the sake of organization, it's also possible to divide songs into different playlists.

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Whyd mines YouTube, Soundcloud and others for songs Spotify can't deliver (hands-on) originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 12 Nov 2012 15:30:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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