Social music site Finetune (profiled here along with competitors) launched their Apollo-based desktop music player this evening. To use it you must download and install the Apollo runtime on your Mac or PC, and then install FineTune. Links to both are here. After installation, you can run the Finetune web service on your desktop, outside of the browser.

The player has been around in beta for a couple of months now (see Ryan Stewart’s review here). It has a number of advantages over Pandora, including playlists with songs on demand (the playlist must have a minimum of 45 songs), and the desktop client is a great addition as well. In my opinion Pandora is still superior to Finetune when it comes to finding related music that you might like. But Finetune wins flat out on design and user experience.