My favorite online streaming music service just keeps on getting better. Today Grooveshark gave their VIP members a peek at their new 2.0 release.

According to their blog post these are a few of the major enhancements.

1. A brand new interface: almost everything has changed in the visual look and feel
2. Add any song on Grooveshark to your library without uploading
3. Sorting: You can now sort lists by Song Name, Artist Name or Album Name
4. Drag-and-drop playlist editing
5. Themes: Make Grooveshark look the way you want
6. Improved player: more room for your songs
7. Better caching: back and next should be much faster now
8. Seeking: now you can skip to your favorite part of a song with the click of a mouse.

The seek bar lets you jump to any point in a song.

The left side navigation lets you seperate different groups of music for easy access.

Bigger album art puts the current playlist front and center.

The new interface is a joy to use. The new sorting options and the ability to jump around to any point in the song make Grooveshark like an online version of iTunes that has an Internet-wide shared library. Bigger album art is a nice upgrade over the thumbnails used in the old interface. It used to be a pain going through your favorite songs but now you can add them to your library (which has much more robust sorting options) with the click of the music note icon. New themes are interesting to keep things fresh. I imagine there will be dozens more added over the next few months.

One of the new features I stumbled on that wasn’t mentioned everywhere were RSS feeds. Right now there are three: Songs I Favorite, Songs I Listen to, My Zeitgeist (which is empty at the moment). It would be nice to see Grooveshark automatically send song info to your Last.fm account.

The only other feature really missing from Grooveshark is a hook in the player for controlling it with global shortcuts. I would really love to set up a key combo to play/pause, skip tracks, and favorite tracks without ever bringing the app into focus. The best part is how Grooveshark listens to their community through Get Satisfaction.

I’m confident this is only the beginning of improvements and I’m glad I plunked down my $30 for a year of VIP membership.