iPad Apps for Music
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?
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?
Comments
*edit*
Totally forgot, Garageband. Not for listening but damn is it fun to sketch music on.
Haven't really looked at the apps yet. If there's a Kindle for iPad, is Amazon cloud for iPad an impossibility?
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
used it so far?
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.
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.
@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.
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.
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.
Here's where you can access the app.
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.
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.
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?
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.