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.
Free Music Download – MP3 Downloader And Player
This app has such a long title that it doesn’t actually fit in the App Store description field. It’s only via a web search we found out its actual name. However, within the iOS launcher, once installed the app appears as Music D/L, so we’ll use that title here.
Music D/L is faintly reminiscent of the good old days of Napster and is one of those apps that makes you wonder about legality. It offers free access – both downloading and streaming – to the iTunes Top 100, as well as swathes of music in other major categories.
However, a unique feature of the App Store is that all apps are personally vetted by Apple employees against an often ridiculously strict set of guidelines. Legality is, of course, one of them. If Music D/L were breaking the law, then it simply wouldn’t be available.
Our best guess is that the music is stripped from various free online music websites and services, like SoundCloud. This might contravene the services’ usage guidelines, but that’s not an issue for end users of this app to be concerned about. We also suspect (but can’t prove) the quality might be slightly lower than an equivalent iTunes download in terms of bitrate or even sample resolution, but does this really matter? The tracks certainly sounded great to us, and we all got by on the vastly inferior cassette tapes for years without complaining too much.
So what does the app offer? To be blunt, if you’re into chart music, then you’ll be in heaven. As mentioned, the iTunes Top 100 is provided. Tapping an entry shows two tabs: Stream and Download. Tapping either typically shows several choices, presumably from several different online sources, and tapping the plus icon will add the track to a playlist, while tapping the cloud icon will attempt to download it (although this isn’t always successful).
Once tracks are playing, you’re often shown album artwork, and the usual play controls are available (along with AirPlay mirroring if you’ve an Apple TV or AirPort Extreme). Along with typical playback controls, such as the ability to loop the song, there’s also a graphic equaliser with several handy presets, a bar visualiser (that is, a faux LED VU display) and even a sleep timer. Tracks can be added to playlists too.
Outside of the Top 100, you can search for music in categories such as Alternative, Blues, Classical, Country and more. The app shows a US bias here – few UK users are going to be interested in Christian & Gospel, for example – but there’s so much elsewhere that you won’t care. There’s an option to switch your country but switching to the UK showed ‘No Audio Found’, so it’s best to stick to the US setting.
Alas, in-app adverts are aggressive and persistent, with interstitial videos that can’t be skipped and a banner ad is visible at all times at the bottom of the screen. It also appears you’re limited to a maximum of 50 downloaded tracks. A Pro version of the app is available for £2.99.
However, to be honest, we simply don’t care about ads. This is a great little app for teenyboppers who don’t want to (or can’t) spend 99p per track or who don’t want to be forced into data-plandecimating streaming.
Spotify
Ridiculous licensing restrictions mean what we Brits use for streaming varies tremendously from what other countries might use. While Spotify is available everywhere, in the UK it’s perhaps the king of the streaming pile, having established itself early on. It provides a high water line of quality that other services aim for.
However, that increasing competition means you can now use Spotify for free on your mobile device without paying the somewhat stiff £9.99 monthly subscription fee. Alas, there are some limitations, the chief one being you’re limited to streaming and not downloading. In other words, you’ll need an internet connection at all times to use Spotify (you did take out an unlimited data plan, didn’t you?). There are also adverts inserted between tracks and a limit in the number of tracks you can play. It’s claimed sound quality is also better if you hand over a tenner a month (‘high definition’), but everything again sounded great to our admittedly non-audiophile ears. The final limitation is that on the free version you can only create or use playlists. You can’t just look up a song and start playing it.
In other words, Spotify subtly puts barriers in your way that might encourage you to upgrade, but there’s still a useful service underneath. This is how free services should function, in our opinion. In any case, you can sometimes watch videos to get 30 minutes of ad-free music.
On both the iPad and iPhone, the app opens to the Browse screen, headed by the bold statement ‘Let’s do this.’ Beneath, you’ll find various ready-made playlists, as well as Top Lists, New Releases and Discover headings. The former two categories lead to further playlists (‘Top Tracks in the UK’, ‘Top 100 on Spotify’ etc.), while the latter is an intriguing feature that claims to learn from your taste in music and suggest new tracks to you.
Also listed in the browse screen are various nebulous headings like Mood, Party, Pop, Workout, Focus, Rock and so on, and each leads to yet another selection of playlists geared towards the eponymous genres.
Creating your own playlists is a matter of finding tracks via the playlists or simply searching via artist or track name. Once you find a track you like, you can tap the menu button to add it to a playlist, or if you’ve paid up for Premium, you can listen to the track there and then. You can also save it to your favourites list, which is like yet another playlist.
Another key feature of the app is Radio, which lets you tune into a moderated list of tracks, the playback order of which you have no control over – just like real radio, we guess. Often artists have their own radio stations too that play only tracks by them.
The Activity feature lets you hook up with friends and even send and receive messages.
There’s lots more we could say about Spotify, such as the fact it’s AirPlay compatible, but put simply, this is a well-designed service that continues to evolve creatively. The app provides the near perfect experience.
SoundTube
Who would be an app developer? You create a clever app, and then somebody comes along and clones it. And so it was that either the developer behind SoundTube first thought up the idea of collating free music streaming and downloading offerings or Music D/L did (reviewed above), but the two apps are certainly very similar.
Music D/L wins the battle, however. For starters, SoundTube hasn’t been updated for the iPhone 6 Plus screen size. This obviously isn’t an issue unless you like big screens, but it does indicate a developer who’s not updating frequently. Additionally, the iPad version of the app forces you to hold your device in portrait orientation and essentially treats the iPad as a large phone. Yuk! This ain’t Android, you know!
On both iPhone and iPad, the app opens to the Charts listing, and here you’ll find another difference – the cheeky listing of the iTunes Top 100 in Music D/L is an excellent way to access tunes, but in SoundTube the categories are Trending Music, Trending Audio, and then the usual genres such as Ambient, Classical, Country, Dance and so on. There is a Pop genre, which is perhaps the best choice. What’s more, the top charts in SoundTube tend to be very international, with Arabic songs appearing in the lists, for example.
Like Music D/L, SoundTube can both stream and download tracks, and selecting a tune usually offers a handful of sources that you can choose between. A search function lets you find artists you’re interested in, and although it takes quite a while for results to appear, it did seem to work well. Suggestions appear as you type, which is a pretty neat feature, similar to that found in iTunes, and can aid the discovering of new material – typically searching for one artist will autosuggest collaborations with another artist, for example.
Maybe we had back luck, but around 50% of the tracks we attempted to download failed, with a message suggesting we retry. Rather strangely, doing so nearly always managed to download the track, and it seems one of the options you can add in by upgrading to SoundTube Pro for £2.29 is the ability to autoresume downloads. Notably, Sound Music D/L had a similar issue, making downloads as paused or showing them as perennially ‘connecting’.
Additionally, in a similar way to Spotify’s free offering, except this time limited to downloads, songs can’t be played unless you add them to a playlist. This is a little annoying, as are the adverts that appear full screen and are a constant banner presence at the bottom of the screen – but then again these infect Music D/L too.
SoundTube feels like the less capable little brother of Music D/L, which edges ahead with a superior set of features. However, as a way of getting tunes, SoundTube is certainly worth keeping on your device for those situations where Music D/L doesn’t find what you want. Handing over £2.29 for the upgrade ain’t gonna break the bank.
Note that there are many apps with the title SoundTube in the App Store. The one reviewed here was created by developer Gengdong Ma.
Blinkbox Music – Free Music Streaming
Once owned by Tesco, but not any longer following the shopping giant’s recent troubles, Blinkbox was an earnest attempt to corner the UK market when it comes to music and movies. Arguably it even led to the creation of the Hudl tablet, when Tesco executives planned dominance of the online shopping world as well as real life.
As its name suggests, Blinkbox Music is all about streaming, but this is done via ‘stations’ – essentially readymade playlists – which themselves are organised into Collections, such as New Year New You, Feelgood, Wired, Vibe, Blast! and more. Within the categories you’ll find individual stations such as Top 40 Songs, Brand New & Brilliant, Pop Faves, Next Big Thing and so on. These are curated stations created by the people at Blinkbox HQ and are not just computer generated.
This approach does mean that playing individual songs you like is impossible, and while the search function lets you uncover stations partially featuring tracks by your favourite artists, you can’t explicitly search for music only by a particular artist. We’re not sure if this restriction is actually that major, however, and searching for a Pet Shop Boys channel led to music by Bronski Beat, Yazoo, Prefab Sprout and other 80s synthy pop artists. It’s hard to see Pet Shop Boys fans complaining.
Perhaps surprisingly, bearing in Blinkbox Music is supposed to be a streaming service, it’s also possible to download stations for offline listening. This worked well in our tests with AirPlane Mode activated.
You can also compile a ‘My Station’ by favouriting individual tracks. Again, this doesn’t necessarily mean that tracks will appear in your My Station, but it does mean the artist probably will, as well as similar artists.
The app works equally well on iPad and iPhone, with some thought having gone into the interface on both devices. Tapping the play button alongside a Station starts it playing, in which case playback controls fill the screen, and the play/pause button shows an image of that artist or the image for that particular track. By tapping the down arrow at the top right you can switch back to the station and/or category listing, in which case the track name will minimise to the bottom of the screen.
Blinkbox Music is a professional and well-designed app. It avoids cheap tricks such as forcing banner ads into its interface and manages to elegantly combine the ability to listen to your favourite music by your favourite artists with the ability to discover new material. Above all, it appears to be entirely free; there’s no push for you to upgrade to a subscription and no limitations in what you can do compared to a Pro or other style of upgrade. Who knows how long this will continue in the post-Tesco landscape, but we advise you to enjoy it while you can.
SoundCloud
Perhaps best described as YouTube for audio, the SoundCloud website has been quite literally making waves since its inception in 2007 – literally making waves because a key feature of playback on its website and within its iPhone and iPad apps is a waveform display of the track in question.
Although popular with amateur artists seeking a wider audience, several successful musicians have signed up to SoundCloud too, making it a good stop-off point for those who want to explore while remaining safe in the knowledge that their favourite artists are just a tap away.
Our first impression of the app was muddled because on the iPhone we were able to get straight into playing tracks, but on the iPhone we had to log in – either with an existing SoundCloud account or by creating one. It was also possible to sign in using Facebook or Google+. Once logged in, it became clear we’re talking about two separate apps here, and our guess is that the iPad app is a little older. It’s certainly more primitive. While the iPhone app opens to a suggestion of tracks you can listen to and lets you select from a list of categories by tapping the menu button (Trending Music, Alternative Rock, Ambient, Classical etc.), on the iPad app you’re invited to record music, and the only way to discover new tracks is to use the search function.
The iPhone app is therefore of most usefulness, and sadly it doesn’t look like it’s possible to force the iPad to switch to the iPhone way of working. Let’s just hope an update arrives soon.
That said, although the interface on the iPhone app is thoroughly modern and makes it easier to access tracks, it isn’t quite perfect. When a track is playing, the toolbar providing access to the home screen and search feature disappears, which is a bit confusing. Eventually you’ll figure that swiping down brings it back, leaving the track playing in the background. There’s also a Hide button at the bottom right that does the same thing. However, swiping left or right moves you to the next track in the listing – a confusing feature compounded by the fact that dragging the aforementioned waveform display lets you cut backwards and forwards and because the background image also scrolls slowly as the track plays. Simply tapping the screen pauses the track and very neatly hides the artist/tune artwork too, which somehow seems apposite.
The iPhone app also allows the ability to log into SoundCloud, as well as create a new account or logging in via Facebook or Google+. Notably, the iPhone version of SoundCloud doesn’t allow you to record audio, although you’re advised to download the AudioCopy app for this purpose. This is free but comes with in-app purchases. Unfortunately, checking it out was outside the scope of this group test, but the message is perhaps that uploading to SoundCloud is best done via a desktop computer.
The iPad app is a little odd, but the iPhone version of SoundCloud is pretty neat and an excellent way to explore new music – and, of course, audio in general, because SoundCloud is also about podcasts and other types of recordings.