P2P music store Grooveshark extend its already strong free music streaming service Grooveshark Lite last week with the addition of “autoplay,” a Pandora like recommend music service that delivers content based on suggested likes.

The concept for such as feature isn’t new, and many will recognize it as being Pandora’s original model that was later picked up by Last.fm and others. However, Pandora (despite its brilliance) hasn’t been available outside of the United States now for over a year, so great contextual audio streaming has been thin on the ground for the rest of us.

I spoke with Grooveshark’s SB Spalding last week about the product and its legality. Grooveshark already has an adventurous model; users upload songs to the service then anyone can buy those songs from Grooveshark with a cut going back to the user who uploaded it, along with the record companies themselves. There’s a strong emphasis on quality, so unlike Seeqpod (a competitor to Grooveshark Lite) where it can be pot luck sometimes in terms of the quality of the music streamed, Grooveshark tracks a filtered based on quality, guaranteeing a decent track. Grooveshark has still to work out all the legalities with the new streaming service from what I can gather, but they have existing relationships with music companies and as Spalding told me, they spend far too much money on lawyers making sure they stay legal. This is not to say that a music company won’t turn around tomorrow and try to close the new service down, but they are trying their hardest to keep copyright holders happy while still (obviously) trying turning a profit by delivering great products.

If Pandora had a love child with Last.fm, its name would be Grooveshark Lite. Grooveshark’s service lets you input an artist’s name or song and it immediately searches its bank of millions of tunes to find what you’re looking for. Once you pick the song you want to hear first, you can click the ‘Autoplay’ button afterward and Grooveshark Lite does the rest by playing songs that you might like based on your original preference.

On Pandora you can’t replay a song you just listened to and are limited to the number of tracks you can skip. But during my time with Grooveshark Lite, I was able to replay any song I wanted — it shows a cover flow of albums to trace your steps — and I skipped a slew of songs without any dialog box telling me I couldn’t. On top of that, I could also decide if I liked or disliked a song, much like Pandora, so I could keep the songs for later in my queue or get rid of them entirely if they weren’t so great.

As much as I tried, it was hard to find faults in Grooveshark Lite. It’s extremely well-designed and is easy enough to use for those that are tech-savvy and those that haven’t seen a computer in months. More importantly, it gives you full control over the songs you listen to in a way that’s simply unprecedented.

Grooveshark Autoplay: Pandora for the rest of us

Windows only: Back up your messages and nearly everything else associated with an email account with Amic Email Backup, a free download for Windows. Amic only works with desktop-based mail clients but covers a wide range of them, from Outlook and its Express sibling to IncrediMail to Opera, and beyond. Amic grabs email account info, address book, sender lists, stationary, message rules, and more and tucks the data away anywhere you want it to—and can even do it automatically on a schedule. While previously-posted MailStore Home is a more open-ended, Amic's dead-simple interface, scheduling abilities and comprehensive settings capture make it a worthy installation for relatives who don't do the backup thing or refuse to move out of their familiar email client. Amic Email Backup is a free download for Windows systems only.

Amic Email Backup [via Download Squad]

PDF Download is an all-in-one PDF toolkit for Firefox that just got even better. It features a new "web to PDF" feature that enables you to send a web page as email attachment in PDF format. Alternatively, you can save the web page as PDF to your local drive.

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Any dreadlocked white guys finding this article after Googling "Drugs Rule" should know that we've given this list about drugs a rule. To make the cut, an accomplishment has to be considered great by people who could pass a field sobriety test. So no Grateful Dead music. We're sure someone somewhere has enjoyed the Dead perfectly sober, just as there are probably non-Christians who listen to Christian Rock. But we're just as sure that in the grand scheme of things, those people don't count.

In fact, because we're masochists, we gave ourselves a strict no music policy, leaving us with ... well, not a whole lot actually. Turns out most great things were accomplished by people who just said no, at least immediately prior to accomplishing them. Except for these five:

1. Francis Crick Discovers DNA Thanks to LSD
2. Freud and Cocaine Invent Psychoanalysis
3. A Coke Addict Makes a Coke-Flavored Cola and Calls it Coke
4. Dock Ellis Trips His Way to a No-Hitter
5. Moses Takes 'Shrooms, Shits Out Ten Commandments

Read the original article (by Jack O'Brien) on Cracked.com for further details...