Archive for category iPhone Music Apps

Review: Christmas Music iPhone App

Dec 14

Posted by Tanya Menoni in Seasonal iPhone Apps, iPhone App Reviews, iPhone Music Apps | 1 Comment

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If you’re looking for the perfect music playlist for the holiday party, NuTsie’s Christmas Music app ($1.99, iTunes link) aims to satisfy with preselected playlists stocked with thousands of holiday hits. While this app is the perfect accompaniment to the holidays and can simplify that moment when it’s time to bust out some Christmas music, the price is a little steep for an app you’ll only use a few days of the year.

Christmas Music is a streaming music app (no music is stored on the iPhone, so it requires an Internet connection) that includes 16 playlists, including Top 100, Christmas Oldies, Rockin’ Christmas, Country Christmas and Classical Christmas. There’s also a playlist of children’s holiday songs.
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Game Review: Rock Band for iPhone

Oct 24

Posted by Tanya Menoni in iPhone Apps With Push Notifications, iPhone Game Reviews, iPhone Music Apps | No Comments

Rock Band is an incredibly popular game on consoles, which is evidenced by the $1 billion in revenue it has collected over the years. While Rock Band is inarguably a top-notch console title, does it translate well to the iPhone? I downloaded the Rock Band app for the iPhone ($9.99, iTunes link) to see if it’s worth the hefty price tag.

Rock Band boasts a ridiculously impressive array of features. Users have the choice to play solo, link up with 2 to 4 friends via Bluetooth (3G and 3GS only), or create a “band” on Facebook. You can receive messages right in the app, and enable push notifications so you’ll be notified automatically when friends are ready to play.

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The app includes 15 free songs, and you can unlock five more. Rock Band supports in-app purchases, so you can buy additional songs once you get tired of the first 20 (which won’t take very long). Each song includes vocal, guitar, bass and drum tracks; you can also choose between three levels of difficulty for each song. Each of the tracks is played by tapping, which makes sense for everything but the vocals. I would recommend skipping the vocal tracks altogether — tapping the vocals is pretty lame and not all that fun if I’m being honest.

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Whichever track you choose, you’ll be tapping on one of four pads that correspond to one of the sliding notes. The drums, guitar and bass have a horizontal orientation along the bottom of the iPhone, while the vocals are laid out horizontally (see above). The problem is that you end up doing all the tapping with your thumbs, which gets very tiring after awhile. Unfortunately, it’s just not that comfortable to frantically tap and slide your thumbs around the bottom of the iPhone. Landscape mode would help enormously in alleviating this problem.

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You also have much less time to react to the notes than you do in the console game, as they slide pretty fast on the iPhone’s screen. And then there’s the overdrive graphic, which lands right in the middle of your screen. The graphic tells you to shake your iPhone to go into overdrive mode, but that pesky little graphic has disrupted my concentration more than once.

Be aware that Rock Band is a large app (158 MB plus songs), and it took at least five minutes to download over a wireless connection. It also takes a good while for each song to load.

Conclusion

Overall, we recommend Rock Band for the iPhone, and we give it an overall score of 7.5 out of 10. It has a slick, elegant design that puts many iPhone apps to shame, and the game is almost as addicting as the real thing. That said, you should keep your expectations in check — tap, tap, tapping on the iPhone isn’t nearly as fun as strumming a fake guitar or belting out your favorite song into a microphone.

At $10, it’s also a large commitment, especially considering that user favorite Tap Tap Revenge 3 is priced at a reasonable $0.99. The developers could easily make Rock Band a better value by adding more free songs (and hopefully landscape mode?) to a future update.

Rock Band is a $9.99 download from the iTunes store.

Review: Pandora Radio App (Best of iPhone Apps)

Oct 12

Posted by Tanya Menoni in Best Free iPhone Apps, Best iPhone Apps, Free iPhone Apps, iPhone Music Apps | 2 Comments

You may have noticed Pandora Radio’s (free, iTunes link) frequent appearance on the iTunes top downloads list, and there’s a reason for it. Simply put, it’s an excellent app that has earned a spot on our Best of iPhone Apps list. If you’re constantly on the hunt for new music, this is the app for you.

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You’ll need a free account to use the Pandora Radio app, although your settings and stations will transfer over if you already have a web-based account. If you are new to Pandora, you can set up an account directly in the app or visit Pandora.com. The app has a variety of preset stations for just about any genre. Seriously, you can find everything from drum & bass to deathcore metal to flamenco — and everything in between.

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If you hear a song you like, you can bookmark it for later. Under the booksmarks tab, you can buy the song from iTunes, create a new personalized radio station with similar songs or email the song to a friend. The customized radio stations are much like Genius in the iTunes store — pick one song and the Pandora Radio app will add it to a playlist along with similar songs. As the songs play, a thumbs up or thumbs down helps improve the selection. The iTunes tagging functionality works well, and it had no problem directing me to the correct listing in the iTunes store.

Unless you’re playing with the app, the iPhone will auto-lock after a minute. It becomes kind of a pain to awaken the iPhone every time you want to skip a song or change the station, so you can turn off auto-lock in the app’s settings menu so the screen will remain lit. This will drain your battery much faster, but if you are near a power source it is much more convenient.

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There are a few inconveniences, but nothing that detracts from the overall value of this app. There is a delay of a few seconds when skipping between songs, and the app takes a little while to become responsive when the iPhone is unlocked. The Pandora Radio app includes ads, which you can turn off temporarily by tapping the ‘x’ in the corner. The biggest bummer is that your music stops if you have to leave the app to do something else on your iPhone, but your song will pick up where it left off when you return.

Overall, I’m sold on the Pandora Radio app, and we highly recommend it. The app has very few hiccups and the song selection is impressive. You’re bound to find some great songs thanks to its recommendations, and it’s just the right app for when your iPod playlist is feeling a little stale.

Pandora Radio is a free download from the iTunes App Store.

Tap Tap Revenge 3 Now Available

Oct 9

Posted by Tanya Menoni in 99-Cent Games, iPhone Games, iPhone Music Apps | 1 Comment

The next installment in the popular Tap Tap Revenge series, Tap Tap Revenge 3 ($0.99, iTunes link), is now available for download in the iTunes store. Tap Tap Revenge is a highly addictive music game that works much like Guitar Hero or Rock Band. The big news from the latest installment is the ability to make song purchases directly in the app, but there are also other new features including customized avatars, quickplay and game resume.

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We’ve previously reported on some problems with Tap Tap Revenge 2, in which the music and game rhythm go out of sync. We won’t know if that problem has been fixed in this latest version until we can play around with it for awhile.

While you’ll have to pay for Tap Tap Revenge 3, the game still includes more than 130 free songs from artists like Fall Out Boy, Stroke 9 and AFI. The Tap Tap Revenge apps are some of the most popular games on the iTunes store, and that trend is likely to continue with Tap Tap Revenge 3. The game has already hit the top of the paid app list on iTunes.

However, it appears that Tap Tap Revenge 3 may be getting some competition in the near future — Macworld reports that Rock Band will be debuting its own iPhone app at the end of October.

Tap Tap Revenge 3 is a $0.99 download at the iTunes App Store.

Music Made With iPhone Apps: Part III

Jun 8

Posted by Alan in Music Apps, Music Made With iPhone and iPod Touch, iPhone Music Apps, iPhone Musical Instruments | No Comments

Another excellent song created from iPhone music apps and sliced together using Final Cut Pro:

Musical instrument apps used:

Link to video on Vimeo.

(Via Just Another iPhone Blog)

More Music Made With iPhone Musical Instruments

Mar 5

Posted by Alan in Music Made With iPhone and iPod Touch, iPhone Music Apps, iPhone Musical Instruments | No Comments

Ah, the sound of a well-tuned iPhone. We previously posted a collection of songs performed using musical instrument apps on iPhones and iPod Touches. Here’s another featuring the group The Mentalists covering the most excellent song “Kids” by MGMT.

Presidents of the United States of America’s (It’s Lump!) Entire Catalog in $3.00 iPhone App

Feb 21

Posted by Alan in Apps From Music Artists, Music Apps, iPhone Applications, iPhone Music Apps | No Comments

The Presidents of the United States of America (PUSA), a two-time Grammy-nominated group behind the hits “Lump” and “Peaches,” is offering up its entire catalog in a $3 iPhone app called The President’s Music – PUSA.

The app’s pricing is interesting because it is much cheaper than their music in the iTunes Music Store, which is $0.99 per song. The app’s music can only be listened to using the app, while the songs available in the iTunes Music Store are DRM-free. The app has a “buy song” button that lets you purchase the song using the iPhone’s wireless Music Store, so there is a subtle but clever sales pitch going on.

Unlike most bands, PUSA owns the rights to its music and can do pretty much whatever it wants with it. The band promised to keep the app updated with “Extras and Exclusives, a regularly updated playlist of demos, live tracks and other oddball stuff.”

The President’s Music – PUSA is a 99-cent download in the iTunes App Store.

Reminder: Ocarina Contest Ends This Friday (Feb 13)

Feb 9

Posted by Alan in iPhone Music Apps, iPhone Musical Instruments | No Comments

Smule, the developers behind Ocarina, the lovable iPhone wind instrument, have already chosen 10 winners for their This Contest Blows song contest. The winners each got $1000 for performing songs with the Ocarina on YouTube. Check out the official contest page for the details. There will be five more winners, so get to recording. Check out a few of the top 10 winners below. Do you think you got what it takes to beat the competition?

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Music Made With iPhone Musical Instrument Apps

Feb 5

Posted by Alan in Music Apps, Music Made With iPhone and iPod Touch, iPhone Music Apps, iPhone Musical Instruments | 3 Comments

One of the growing categories for iPhone apps is musical instruments. Ocarina is probably the most well known in the genre. But are any musical groups using these apps to perform music?

A group called iBand (www.iband.at) is using the iPhone and iPod Touch to write and perform music live. Their website currently has two songs available for download, “Vitality” and “Life Is Greater Than the Internet,” both made with instruments available in the App Store.

Ocarina Mashup of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”

Jan 19

Posted by Alan in iPhone Music Apps, iPhone Musical Instruments | No Comments

Sure, Ocarina ($0.99, download) is everyone’s favorite iPhone musical instrument app. But this is just wrong. Someone thought it’d be a good idea to do a mashup of an Ocarina with 6-year-old Connie Talbot singing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” from the classic YouTube clip from Britain’s Got Talent. Who stays in key better, the Ocarina or little Connie? Find out below.

See the adorable original version of Connie on Britain’s Got Talent here.