This Week's Sponsor:

Crickets

The first alarm app for families.

Posts tagged with "music"

Smule Wants To Make You A Musician Again With Their Magic Fiddle

There’s no doubt Smule knows how to release popular applications. If you look at their iOS portfolio, there’s not a single app that hasn’t sold thousands and thousands of copies in the App Store: I Am T-Pain, Magic Piano, Ocarina, Glee Karaoke and now, again on the iPad, the new Magic Fiddle.

Just like Magic Piano allowed you to play some sort of digital piano based on its own rules and system, Magic Fiddle recreates a violin on screen you can play with a few taps and swipes. The app is getting rave reviews on many blogs and publications, and while I haven’t tried the app myself (I’m not really a big fan of music apps in general) I have to admit it looks good from the screenshots and video posted by the developers.

The app contains a tutorial section to teach you how to bow, pluck, trill, vibrato and glissandi with your fingers; when you’re good enough to show off your skills, you can play with your friends and aim at the global leaderboards. Graphically speaking, Magic Fiddle looks interesting.

Magic Fiddle is available at $2.99 in the App Store. Check out the demo video below.

Aweditorium Aims At Revolutionizing Music Discovery On The iPad

It’s great when you wake up and you find an awesome new app waiting for you in the App Store. You see, I’ve been keeping an eye on Aweditorium for a while (months, I believe) since Robert Scoble first tweeted he had tested an early demo. The name was cool, the website featured some bands I didn’t know. I was intrigued, so I started following the developers on Twitter.

Aweditorium is now available in the App Store, and it’s more than I thought it would be – but it’s got a few technical limitations I hope will be addressed in future updates. Aweditorium aims at changing rules and conventions, but it has to deal with some iOS restrictions and a few bugs I’m pretty sure are caused by iOS 4.2 incompatibilities. The main concept, however, is all there: Aweditorium wants to change the way you discover great new music on the iPad.

After two hours using the iPad app I’ve already discovered more new music than in the last two weeks reading NME or Pitchfork. Read more

Apple Preparing To Increase The Length of iTunes Previews to 90 Seconds

According to Symphonic Distribution (via MacRumors) Apple has sent notifications out to music labels to communicate that they’re getting ready to extend iTunes Music previews from 30 seconds to 90 seconds for songs that are at least 2 minutes and 30 seconds long.

We have just received the notification from Apple that this will be happening soon and are very excited to report the news as we firmly believe this is a decision that will show an increase of sales for our partners. Below is an excerpt from the email we have received.

As you can see in the screenshot above, by continuing to offer music on the iTunes Store labels agree to the new terms. Previews for songs shorter than 2 minutes and 30 seconds won’t change to the new 90 second clip format.

CNET posted a rumor claiming that iTunes previews were set to change to 90 seconds two days before Apple’s music event in September.

Reggie Watts, An iPhone App, Lots Of Win [Video]

So here’s the thing: I bought some music apps for iPhone, thinking that maybe I could accomplish something good. I mean, have you seen what Atomic Tom came up with? Or all those other iPerformers on Youtube? And DJ Rana June? I suck at music apps, plain and simple. Yet I keep buying them hoping that maybe someday the musician in me will find his way out to be great with a touch screen. Whatever.

Reggie Watts, famous stand-up comedian /musician / life genius, proved once again that if you want to do something great with a music app, you need to have what it takes. While he was interviewed on Sirius XM radio, he told the host and the people in the studio he forgot his stuff and he pulled out his iPhone. He fired up Everyday Looper and started improvising.

The result of what happened is embedded below. Damn, I suck at music apps. [TUAW via CrunchGear] Read more

Volume Controls In The Multitasking Bar with App Switcher Volume | Cydia Store

Many iPhone users, especially jailbreakers who’re constantly tinkering with their devices, think Apple should have enabled more customization options for the multitasking bar. The current version of the “tray” only allows to change between apps, close them, access widget controls and screen rotation lock on the left.

App Switcher Volume is a new tweak available in Cydia which lets you adjust your device’s volume with a slider in the multitasking bar. The tweak will add its slider right under the music widget controls and that’s it. Useful if you really can’t stand adjusting volume using the iPhone’s default buttons, which perhaps you’ve remapped to do something else, like snapping photos.

App Switcher is available at $0.99 under Big Boss repository. Read more

SweetFM 2.0 - Last.fm Mac Client

Chocomoko has released version 2.0 of their SweetFM Mac application. SweetFM is a Last.fm client and player for Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6.4.

Version 2.0 has a completely redesigned UI that is more user-friendly and uses native Mac OS technologies. It also comes with Safari and Chrome browser extensions for Last.fm station control and can open the iTunes store pages from the current track. Other features: supports Media Keys, has an EQ, tagging and social network sharing, device scrobbling, multiple user accounts, hot keys and playlist management. Read more

Review: FLAC Player for iPhone

If you care about your digital music library and you care about quality, I guess you know what the FLAC format is all about. The Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC) is an advanced (free and open source) audio compression codec that allows decompression into a perfect copy of the original audio data. Basically, it’s a high-quality compression method that generates state-of-the-art rips and (here’s the downside) huge data files.  If you lose a CD you care about but have a FLAC digital copy, you have an exact duplicate.

To give you an example, a standard 13-tracks album can go up to 450MB in size. Now think about encoding that Beatles collection you have in FLAC and you get the idea.

FLAC is great, but isn’t as supported by hardware makers as other standards such as MP3 are. Luckily enough for iPhone owners, there’s an for that (sorry Apple, I know it’s a trademark now). FLAC Player for iPhone (and iPad, it’s a universal app) is a simple way to import your lossless albums and songs on your iDevice and listen to them. Read more