Music Apps For iOS

Want to go beyond the walled garden of iTunes? There’s a surprising amount of scope, as Keir Thomas explains with a look at five cool apps

Apple might have cornered the market with iTunes in the digital music arena, but there are many other options and services, including several that are offered within the App Store. This week we take a look at a handful.

As alwa,sm the apps reviewed below are tested on a Retina iPad and, thanks to Vodafone’s largesse (across a painful 24-month price plan), we now also test apps on an iPhone 6 Plus. This allows us to note if any apps haven’t been updated for the larger screen.

It’s important to remember how iOS works when considering many apps below. Although an app might let you download tracks, you won’t be able to subsequently import them into iTunes or grab them off the device, because of iOS’s sandboxing approach. However, the good news is that all the apps below continue playing when you switch out of them, and you can subsequently control them via the transport controls in Control Center.

Remembering… Zip Drives

David Hayward fondly recalls a long lost form of portable storage

Back in the early to mid-90s, the sizes of PC files and folders, games and other programs were starting to expand well beyond the capabilities of the humble floppy disk. Having a copy of Beneath a Steel Sky, Tie Fighter and Blackthorne, along with your college work soon meant owning huge piles of floppies and made the transporting of data from one machine to the next somewhat difficult and tedious.

Network TV & Net Neutrality

Mark Pickavance looks at how the landscape of broadcast TV is being radically changed, even if many in this industry deny it’s happening

Christmas is long behind us, but over the festive people, anyone older than 50 years will probably have been thinking back to a bygone golden era of British TV. In the 1970s, Christmas meant a communal TV experience, where viewing audiences ran into many tens of millions for a selection of festive TV treats.

Almost everyone with a TV watched the Morecombe & Wise Christmas show, and the annual showing of The Great Escape usually nabbed a substantial audience.

At the time, it was difficult to imagine how Christmas would be different and how our relationship with TV would change. But it has, and the changes we’ve seen since then are likely to be dwarfed by those that are coming.

Adobe Photoshop Mix

The iconic industry favourite for all-purpose imaging squeezes itself onto iOS

Love it or loath it, Photoshop is a towering household name in all purpose graphics editing. A jewel in the Adobe application crown, it continues to represent an industry standard hub within the Creative Cloud community. Photoshop Mix is an attempt to deliver that same imaging-editing excellence to iOS devices, harnessing the graphical power and touch support to bring your compositions closer.

Metal Gear Online

War, and its consumption of life, has become a well-oiled machine

Metal Gear Online on PS3, for whatever reason, was an anomaly. It was a blip in the grand MGS4 campaign, a back-of-the-box sidenote that – as compelling as it might’ve sounded – just didn’t translate into much in the way of a playerbase. The foundation was there, the gameplay strong and it maintained much of the series’ blend of quirky mechanics with an otherwise po-faced visage. This was only a few months after Call Of Duty 4, too, proving that gamers were more than willing to flock towards a single multiplayer experience if enticed.