iPad Apps for Music

edited April 2011 in General
I recently bought an iPad and have been underwhelmed with my choices for listening to music. Pandora is (so far) the best thing I have found. Last.FM's app is an iPhone app, so it is not all that thrilling. I do enjoy the NPR app, but that is not really what I was looking for either. There is no real chance that Amazon's cloud player will make it into the Apple App store, sadly.

Naturally I can use iTunes, but thought something more "cloud" would be better considering space limits. Anyone 'round here use an iPad for music? What am I missing?
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  • edited April 2011
    While 90% of my iPad usage is reading (Reeder, Instapaper, Flipboard, and iBooks and Evernote for my PDFs) and the remainder being video (Netflix, Hulu, VLC before it was yanked) I've been fairly entertained with Aweditorium. It's sort of like Flipboard but for music.

    *edit*
    Totally forgot, Garageband. Not for listening but damn is it fun to sketch music on.
  • Just this minute figured out how to stream from my music library, which is one of the main things I wanted to be able to do. Considering all the music living on various computers around this house, I could listen for a long time without having to resort to the cloud.

    Haven't really looked at the apps yet. If there's a Kindle for iPad, is Amazon cloud for iPad an impossibility?
  • How about Audiogalaxy?
  • "I've been fairly entertained with Aweditorium." Ok, that is pretty cool. Sorta a pop-up video music explorer.

    "If there's a Kindle for iPad, is Amazon cloud for iPad an impossibility?"

    Maybe not impossible, but since the main competition for itunes is Amazon, I think it unlikely. The current version uses flash, which will not work on Safari. That also means Last.FM will not work via Safari.
  • @Germanprof: Audiogalaxy is exactly what I was looking for. Not sure how it works, but it does. Scrobbles to Last.FM, too!

    Many years ago (in internet time) audio galaxy was a peer-to-peer file sharing site, probably the first I ever used. Might have pre-dated Napster, it was at least around the same time.
  • @Plong, please keep us posted on how Audiogalaxy works for you. Would also be interested in how it works, since it doesn't involve uploading.

    Meanwhile, I am all home-shared on iTunes. There seems to a (new?) option for updating play counts w/ sharing, yet to see if those plays will scrobble.
  • I'm glad to see this post! I picked up an Ipod Touch earlier this year and apps have made a difference beyond it being a mp3 player with web browsing abilities.

    try Spark Lite, it's an international radio browser. I've used it to find classical music stations. It works well, though better with a home network than say at a coffee shop wi fi.

    Jazz Radio is nice too with different channels for different kinds of jazz

    Pandora has an app

    Many public radio stations do, like my local station KXT which is an indie/local, eclectic station.

    Oh and if you have a mac computer, you can use the apple remote program to control itunes. It's quite fun and rather amusing to unsuspecting parties.
  • I spent some time yesterday with Audiogalaxy. The desktop app scans your system for music, the iPad app then streams the music from your desktop. If your desktop is online, then your music is online (your own personal cloud?) I have not tested it beyond the confines of my home, but the reviews had people saying they were listening to their music from just about anywhere they could get a wifi connect.

    It looks to me like you can create a public folder to share with others, in which case I foresee EMusers creating playlists and serving them from their own desktops, like mini pirate radio stations. "Gimme Ten Ambient" is on the air. This seems to merit more exploration, but I also think this is where AudioGalaxy skirts the law.
  • I installed Audiogalaxy hoping it would make it easy to listen to music from the computer downstairs by streaming it to the stereo upstairs via my iPod touch. And it does. The one thing I've run into which has kept me from actually using it much yet is that when I am upstairs that usually means one of my kids is on the computer downstairs...and if a different user profile is open on the computer (Win 7) then the audiogalaxy agent is not loaded and my music is not online. I asked their support about this and they pointed me to very technical-looking Microsoft support articles about running executables as services that were a little beyond my capability without some serious study. If anyone figures that one out let me know. It was also about the same time I installed audiogalaxy that I had all my fatal emusic DLM problems - but I think that may have been coincidence as I uninstalled both and then still had problems with a freshly installed DLM. If anyone else has DLM problems after installing audiogalaxy let me know that as well - it might be a clue.

    I don't know which ones also have iPad versions (most software for the touch seems to) but some apps (in addition to basic streamers like Pandora and ooTunes) that I play with a bit on the iPod Touch are:

    Musicrazor - free, and gives you detailed statistical breakdowns of your music listening (e.g. most listened to genre, artist, album, song, option for weighting by song ratings, last played distribution, etc.). I've actually found it a good tool for prodding me to explore less listened to stuff on my Touch. As far as I know it only works for music on the device.

    TapTunes - when I'm in the mood I use this instead of the built in player. Its basic innovation is that instead of menus and lists of bands, it shows you a scrolling sea of images pulled from the album art and you tap on one to play. A visual music browser for when you feel like just seeing which album cover appeals to you instead of pecking through menus.

    Attic - pulls up half a dozen albums that you have never listened to and keeps them there until you listen to them.

    Albums - the screen shows an image of a table top, and when you select an album, it gets thrown as a CD case onto the table top (even makes appropriate noises if it bumps into other CDs you already have there). Tap to play. I use this as a holding pen for albums I want to remember to play - you can keep a little cluster of them on the table top and then throw them off when you're done.

    New Albums - scans your music on the device and connects to an online database ands tells you which artists in your collection have new albums out that you don't have.

    Amp music player - I neither use nor much like this as a player, but it does have a feature that tells you which artists on your device have concerts coming up in your area.

    Smart playlist - allows you to build and play sophisticated smart playlists on the iPod Touch itself. ZipTunes is a simpler/quicker version of the same thing.

    Song Sift - when it works (it's been crashing on me a lot lately) it allows you to set a slider so that the music menus only display artists and albums that have at least a certain number of songs. Useful when I know, for instance, that I have a 30 minute walk and don't want to change the music half way. (There's another one called Play Albums! that filters out single tracks from the music selection menus).

    All are in the app store.
  • Wow thanks GP. Hae you had any trouble with Attic? I know reviews on iTunes should always be taken with with salt, but many people say it crashes often on them. Have you had that trouble or anyone else that has
    used it so far?
  • edited April 2011
    Attic has as far as I can remember worked fine for me. I don't remember a crash - can't be certain that it never has but certainly not enough for me to remember. I've used it for several months. It had an update relatively recently and has been working fine for me of late. It has some function limitations (e.g. I'd like a button to refresh the whole list; at present you have to delete albums from the list one by one to get new ones if you don't like the choices it made when pulling up albums; and sometimes it seems to pull up albums that have in fact been played and claim that they have zero plays), but it has been stable for me (4th gen iPod Touch, latest OS) and generally works as advertised. I also hesitated over some of the bad reviews, but my take is that if you have a way of using it that fits its actual functionality, it's a nice little app (I would not recommend it as a general music player substitute, but I like it as a suggester of things long not listened to for when I do not have an album in mind in the morning as I leave the house) with a kind of cool retro interface (you drag representations of vinyl discs into a kind of jukebox slot to play).

    On the above list the ones that have crashed on me noticeably have been Ziptunes and Song Sift. And Ziptunes seems OK again for now after a reinstall.
  • Thanks, I will check it out. I'm happy to have apps that remind me what I've downloaded and not listened to.
  • @GP - Multiple users can be logged into a Win7 machine at the same time. So as long as they don't log you out when using the computer and just switch profiles it shouldn't be a problem.
  • edited April 2011
    I think you have to use Task Scheduler for that, don't you? There's a checkbox that says "Run whether I'm logged in or not," and another one somewhere that says "Run when the computer starts." If you set it up like that you shouldn't even have to log in at all... Microsoft only calls it "running as a service" because they're hopelessly mired in their internal jargonesque terminology and, of course, they also hate us.

    Note that some programs don't run very well that way (because they don't get "Window Activated" messages, so if they have any vital code behind that event it doesn't get executed), but I believe Audiogalaxy should be OK.
  • @thom - thanks, stupidly enough I hadn't tried it with switch user. I'll give it a go.
    @ScissorMan - the stuff that audiogalaxy tech support pointed me to involved doing it manually and editing the registry - but if there's a button in task manager that's easier - I'll dig around some more.
    Thanks, both.
  • Just discovered a new app that has me excited. (Well, about as excited as an app ever makes me). It may be bad timing to mention this, but I think it will enable me to play with my SFLs on emusic - and also my wants from other sites - offline.

    It's called Link Locker and is a universal app (iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad) and costs $1.99. It has a very sleek interface (so sleek I had to get help to know how to use it, but it's intuitive once you're in. Their customer service guy is on the evidence so far second to none - got back to me in hours and answered all my questions in detail and in person). It can be used to store web bookmarks, but I am more interested in its media-related capabilities here. You can run a search from within the app for an album title (or an app name) and the app searches the iTunes store for it. (Right now you can only search by album or track name, not artist; I have emailed the developer suggesting artist search would be handy in some cases, e.g. where the album name is a common one). You can then select the item from the search results and at the touch of a button add its image, details, price etc. to your library. No manual data entry needed, everything gets pulled from the iTunes store. The data that gets populated is cover art, author (artist), title, type (i.e. music album), genre, price, add date, URL. If you buy music from iTunes at all (I don't) you can go to the item's page from within your library. There is a notes field where you can add comments.

    Once an item is in your library, you can give it a star rating and also a color tag. Then you can use these to do some basic filtering of all the items in your library. For instance, one of the filters (called "folders") is for favorites - items given 4 and 5 stars. I am in the process of entering all my emusic SFL list items and using the star rating to prioritize them - as I decide that certain items should be purchased soon I can up their star rating and have them appear in the favorites folder. I am thinking of using the color tags to represent price points, and will store the emusic price in the notes field. (I have written to the developer describing how I'll use it and suggesting some ways price could be displayed in the list view; right now it isn't). You can view all of your items as a list, a grid, or in cover-flow mode. I'll also reserve a tag for items I want to check out somewhere like Spotify to see if I really want them.

    There are some limitations, and as I said I've already been sending off feature requests. But basically, with very quick and easy data entry, I can play with and ponder my SFL lists across multiple sites and tag and code them and do not have to enter the data manually to recreate them on my iPod Touch. Very cool. I see myself using this quite a bit.
  • I just posted this at the other board:

    There's an app in the app store for $2 called Discovr Music that lets you enter an artist name and displays similar artists (and you can then keep going from those artists' names in a branching tree). You can then double tap on artists to get more info about them. There are bad reviews for version 1.8 but I have had no troubles so far with version 2.0. I am so far actually more impressed than I expected to be with the results - I entered the named of a number of relatively obscure experimental electronic artists and it found them all and suggested plausible connections, plus a few new names that I'll follow up. I'm sure I'll find its weaknesses as I go on but for now it looks quite useful, especially in the absence of a recommendation engine at emusic for the time being.
  • edited December 2011
    For those of you who don't want to spend the two bucks, another option is to post a musician name on my app thread and then I will call you up and scream various other artists at you to go listen to, then tell you to go to hell and hang up the phone. (I am totally associated with this product and these comments are based on a lifetime of building my recommendation app).

    Here's where you can access the app.
  • Well, I finally succumbed and bought an iPad. Much as I would love to be cool and sophisticated and critical, I am actually blown away by what I can do with it and how it will streamline my work processes. My next book will likely be drafted on this thing in a variety of locations more interesting than my office.
  • Interested to hear you say that, Prof. I have actually found it more difficult than I expected to integrate the iPad into my daily workflow. Eg, I can sorta kinda write on it, using this or that app, then upload it somewhere, then download it somewhere else, etc. I did just get Onlive, which lets me work in Word...That should help, but then I still have to deal with the upload/download thing.

    I am in fact trying to make a more concerted effort to use the iPad to get out of the office. If I "cut the cord" with the notebook, it will force me to learn how to work with the iPad.
  • I'm still feeling my way through the exact best app combos, but so many of the newer note taking apps have dropbox integration that using dropbox it looks to me as if it will be fairly straightforward to keep documents synced, either by using something like QuickOffice to work on centrally stored Word docs or by using something like Clean Writer to write text-only drafts and dump them into dropbox for later formatting at the PC in the full Word environment.
  • dump them into dropbox for later formatting at the PC in the full Word environment

    See, there you go. Much of my work is producing edited/formatted/finalized documents, for which the iPad is not particularly well-suited. Like I say, I'm trying to work out a process that takes advantage of what it does do well, which is be portable and convenient.
  • edited April 2012
    Are they formatted for print or for online? Notebooks for iPad allows you to create formatted html-ready text. Just started playing with that. You're right though that producing richly formatted documents is not what the iPad is good at, from what I've seen so far. But that's not my big need.
  • So, wasn't it last Nov or so that emusic were making a fuss about their new iPad app, emusic scenes? Having ipad now in hand, I went looking for it. It's not in the store any more, and no mention of it on the emusic page. Was there ever any discussion of this that I missed? Did it not work or something?
  • I use my iPad all day long, for classroom presentations or reading, some writing. I have trouble getting used to the little keyboard I bought, or I would use it more. I bought AmpiTube and and iRig, made a few recordings, I use Perfect Guitar Song Book for lyrics / tabs. And games, I was nursing a real bad Angry Bird addiction for a while. It is only a first gen, 16GB, but I plan on buying a Third Gen this summer and keeping the first for my daughters to play with.
  • Glad you've joined us GP. For me it was an ipad or a netbook, and I know I made the right decision. I use mine everyday for all kinds of things. I was at a conference at Manchester University last week, so I was reading from it on the train via a Kindle app whilst playing music (I can get the books my wife has downloaded for her Kindle for no extra cost), checking on the weather, reading emails, taking notes in lectures, looking for a route to a restaurant etc. I have no regrets whatsoever.
  • edited April 2012
    Just saw this article via MacLife about an unofficial Spotify IPad App maybe in the works. I assume there is an official ipod/ipad Spotfiy app. Maybe they have the same team the that made the eMusic app working on it.
  • edited December 2013
    Does eMusic not work on iPads? I can't believe that's true, but I'm trying to get it so that I can download some music to our iPad (which has become handy for when we go traveling and I have music to review), but I can't find anything on eMusic that lets me install a downloader or anything.

    I'm going to assume that this is due to the fact that I know very little about our iPad and not that eMusic doesn't work on them. I'm also going to assume that someone here has a simple instruction to get it to work that I'm overlooking.

    Maybe?
  • edited December 2013
    No, you can't download from emusic to ipad, just browse.
  • So, what, iPad users just store their music on a cloud and stream from that?

    If so, that might not be the end of the world. Actually, one of the things I need to research is the various cloud options. A gift I'd like to get my wife this year is have all of her old tv show dvds uploaded to a cloud so that she can watch them from her iPad whenever she wants.

    It amazes me how far behind the curve I've gotten with most tech stuff. Clouds, iPads, etc. I'm getting handy with coding stuff on my site and the various plug-ins and stuff, but most other things, I'm just a newborn babe when it comes to familiarity. Yeesh.

    Thanks.
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