Spotify Apps have been available to developers for nearly two months now. It’s changed the way I’ve listened to music. Actually, it’s more subtle than that. In the way that the best products disrupt deeply ingrained habits, Spotify + Apps combines services I already use and makes them more powerful and easier to use. A lot of people had been trying to persuade me to use Spotify, but I wasn’t convinced until now.

I started using Spotify a little over a year ago while living in the U.K. My initial impression was poor. I didn’t want to pay for a music service, it’s why I never subscribed to Rhapsody or Napster (or any form of satellite radio). I also didn’t want music with commercials – I might as well listen to music I already have or visit a blog that lets me find and listen to new music without ads.

When Spotify launched in the U.S. I had moved to New York and decided to give it a try again. The biggest disappointment to me, even with all of the Facebook integration, was the lack of tools to discover new music. Any content provider faces the same problem – how do I help users find something when they don’t know what they’re looking for. Netflix has struggled with perfecting their recommendations and Amazon usually does an impressive job of helping you find a new product. Spotify lets you follow your friends, but no Pandora-style discovery special sauce.

Now let’s talk about the game changer – Apps.

Last.fm has been one of my favorite services since I first joined. The funny thing about last.fm – it’s been showing me what my friends listen to for the past 5 years and well…I don’t use last.fm to get recommendations from friends. This confirms I need something else for discovery. The magic combination = Last.fm + Spotify. That formula has made both services more valuable ot me.

If you don’t have an account on last.fm yet, I can’t promise that this app will be useful to you. But once you hear about it, I think you might just give it a try. Last.fm tracks what you listen to to share with your friends and create radio stations based on your interest. So it knows what you listen to and sticks it into its recommendation engine. Opening the last.fm app inside Spotify gives you a list of recommended albums and because you’re a Spotify subscriber you have access to all that music and other albums by the same artist. I now listen to about 8 new albums a day.

It gets better. If you’re on the go, you can turn the entire list of recommendations into a playlist and sync it to your phone (iOS/Android).

Okay, you’re not convinced by last.fm…and that’s why you’ve never used it. There are three other apps that hint at the potential greatness of Spotify Apps – Pitchfork, We Are Hunted and Billboard. The Pitchfork and We Are Hunted apps fill the gap between music reviews (whether on a blog or a magazine) and the listener. Sometimes you’ll be lucky enough to get a sample track when checking your favorite music blog, but you’re often left empty-handed. Inside the apps you get everything – the rating, the review and the entire album. Instead of using a recommendation engine, these apps leverage the curated content from their sites.

Want to just listen to the Top 100, but don’t want to buy 100 songs or listen to commercials on the radio all day? Well, the Billboard app will help you out. Noticing a theme here? Existing content that you know about but can’t access in one place all of the sudden at your finger tips. Yeah, that’s what’s happening – great sources of new or popular music all incredibly accessible.

Spotify Apps do two things particularly well. One, it kills the MTV curse – the trend of all things music related having nothing to do with music – by just giving you music. Two, it gives you immediate access to the music you want.

One app that doesn’t feel ready for prime time is the Rolling Stone app. I’m not sure if this is still in beta or just another example of print media not getting it. The app loads slowly to the point where I lose interest.

2 Spotify Apps I’d Like to See

1) Dropbox Integration
You’re first thought here is probably nooo way – connect a music streaming service to an incredibly easy to use file sharing and storage site! Well, if you’ve ever tried to create a shared playlist with songs from your iTunes library that didn’t make it to Spotify you’ll understand why – it doesn’t work. Have a great remix you want to put on your shared playlist? Can’t do it. It’d be great if Spotify dropped the song into a folder that it shared with anyone with the app on the playlist.

2) Hype Machine
If you don’t use Hype Machine, take a look its a great way to find music from all over the music blogosphere. Songs are ranked by the community based on likes and listens. Having this delivered through an App where you also get access to entire albums would be another great discovery tool.

How would you change Spotify?

Make Apps Even Better

My favorite thing about Spotify Apps is that it connects awesome sites together and the sum is more than parts. To make a truly superb service, Spotify needs to take this to another level. When I add the Pitchfork app, integration of Pitchfork reviews should occur throughout Spotify. If last.fm is recommending me a new album, but Pitchfork gave it a poor score I can skip that album.

It’s still early though and I’m excited for the possibilities.

By: Hillel Fuld

As I have mentioned a few times in the past week, I am about to finish reading the Steve Jobs bio and loving every second of it. One thing, among many, that has become very clear from this book, is that Jobs was way ahead of his time. Take iTunes for example. He nailed it when many thought such a project was not nailable (Yes, I know that is not a word. Sue me.)

Jobs made it very clear throughout his life that end to end integration and taking full responsibility for a product from software to hardware to the retail experience to the smallest detail such as the color of the first Macintosh’s case was necessary for its success.

When Larry Page visited Jobs toward the end of Jobs’ life, Steve talked to the new CEO of Google about focus. He told him to focus on five products that were to be the main projects of Google and to drop the rest. Jobs also made it very clear that he believed both Microsoft and Google blatantly copied Apple on the Mac OS UI and iOS respectively. He stated that the two companies didn’t have good taste and that their open model might win in market share but would end up producing “bad products”.

Well, putting aside these debates for a second, Jobs’ thinking proved right for many years, and some might say stand true today for certain things, such as Android. When it came to iTunes, Jobs created a seamless music service that synced your portable music devices with your PC and turned your computer into a “Digital hub”. For many years, that model was not successfully duplicated and Jobs benefited from somewhat of a monopoly on the digital music industry.

Well, if anyone can create a ripple in that monopoly, it is Google. While it is too soon to tell, especially since I am located outside of the US, so I cannot test the service, but Google Music, the newly launched digital cloud-based service from the makers of Android has some seriously impressive features that would worry me if I were Tim Cook.

Two of the most impressive features in my opinion are the free 20,000 song upload option and the sharing features. One thing Apple has not conquered and shows no desire to, is the social Web. With Google Music, you can pay for a song (on your mobile operator bill), and then proceed to share it with your Google+ circles.

“Big deal, you can do that with Facebook and Spotify too!”. Nope, when you share a song or album from Google Music on Google+, your circles can then listen to that song/album in its entirety, for free. Obviously they cannot download it, but they can hear it and decide if they want to purchase it. That is music discovery if I ever heard it.

Another impressive initiative in Google Music is the attention the service gives to the artists behind the music. Exclusive deals, personalized landing pages, and the ability to set your own price. You can read more about what Google is calling Artist Hub here.

Android is exploding at ridiculous speeds with over 200 million Android devices worldwide and over a half a million new devices activated daily. Google+, while many are still skeptical, is also taking off with well over 45 million users.

Now, Google cannot compete with Apple on the whole integration thing, but the fact that your Google music is available on any browser, deeply integrated with a successful social network, and seems to offer a pretty decent user experience in terms of cloud syncing, i would say, all in all, iTunes dominance now has competition.

To be fair, Gizmodo disagrees with every word I said here and thinks Google just recycled an old concept and did no innovating here. Adrian points out the Zune also let you share music with your friends, even more than once, which Google Music limits you to, and we all know how that turned out.

Gizmodo makes some valid points but I do think the wide adoption of Google products and their integration will lure people to switch from iTunes or Amazon to Google Music.

How ironic. Wider integration will bring consumers from Apple to Google? What has the world come to?

Take a look at the Google Music ad below as well as the full announcement of the new service beneath it.

The iPhone and iPad scream music. With the latest release by the Gorillaz being completely recorded on an iPad, more people are starting to take the iPhone and iPad more seriously as a music creating machine. The problem for most of us is that unlike the Gorillaz, we don’t have the most musical talent even though we may claim to. Thanks to apps like Smule’s incredible “I Am T-Pain” app the door has been opened for even the least talented to make good quality music from the comforts of your own iDevice. Keep on reading to see just what O-Generator Acoustic Music Maker For iPhone is all about.

O-Generator is a new breed of music software. The best way to think of O-Generator is to use it as a sketchpad. No matter what your musical talent level is, you can learn, compose and develop new music in many different styles. Using a very simple interface, O-Generator allows you to make some very sophisticated sounds. At the most basic level you can choose and arrange chords which is a great building block for understanding the simple concepts of music. At a deeper level, you can choose individual notes to create different beats using everything from guitars to drums. The App allows you to choose from a wide variety of notes ranging from major and minor to 7th and 9th. Another nice feature is that once you arrange your chords or notes you can copy and paste it allowing for you to keep the same idea over a variety of instruments. The basic of idea of O-Generator is creating music on individual tracks, you have six to use per song, using sixteen circles that represent notes.

After you pick the chord you want to work in you can manipulate the note to play at different times and then create a beat by moving down, bar by bar. After you set up your notes and figure out the amount of bars you want it to play for, you can move on to using the other five tracks to add more instruments. Another nice feature is what the developers of O-Generator call the D-Generate function that allows you to de-construct the sample song that comes with the app to learn a little more of how it all works. The app has more sample songs coming as well. Whether you’re Mozart or a musical beginner, O-Generator Acoustic Music Maker is a great tool, and available for your iDevice for a considerable $4.99. We’d recommend it if you like creating interesting and fun tones to keep yourself occupied whether you’re alone or with your friends, go check it out now! Our Rating: 4/5 Download Link

Let’s face it, 8-bit is and always will be cool. The app store has been flooded with a ton on Nintendo 8-bit style throw back games and they seem to be doing very well. This may be way before your time but when the original Nintendo gaming system dropped in the U.S. 8 bit graphics were the business and games like Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda and Metroid were all the all the rage.

One of the forgotten pieces of these games was the use of 8 bit music to increase the gaming experience. Now we have full blown soundtracks from today’s hottest stars but back in the day it was all 8 bit and to be honest, I think the music may have been better. Everyone knows the theme to Tetris and Super Mario Bros. but what few people know is that the gaming classic soundtracks are easy to find and download for free and now with noiseES you can listen to them at any time on your iOS device.

The ES in noiseES is short for Entertainment System. The original Nintendo was actually called the Nintendo Entertainment System and commonly known as the NES for short. Every game contained a small file known as the Nintendo Sound File or NSF for short and these files were super small, in the kb’s to be more specific.

NoiseES is essentially an iPod for the before mentioned NSF files and allows you to listen to an entire game’s soundtrack. When you launch noiseES you are greeted with what can be described as a 8 bit ghetto blaster. A quick Google search for NSF will lead you to many sites offering these files for free and once you have downloaded your favorites you simply impor them into the app using iTunes connect.

The app allows to than browse and play files in a very familiar iPod layout. You can choose to search albums, artists, songs, companies and even years they were made. The artists tab is kind of cool as many of us have no idea who actually programmed these classics. Another cool thing is the year tab that allows to not only listen according to the year the game was released but also date just how long some of these games have been around.

Once you pick the 8 bit jam you want to get down to the app plays the song with the NoiseES splash screen in the background adding another level of nostalgia. The app does offer a search by song name option but most of these are labeled song 1, song 2 and so on so this is not the best approach.

NoiseES for iPhone may not be for everyone but for old school gamers like myself this is a must have. The app costs $1.99 in the app store, I recommend it!

Our Rating: 4/5

Download Link

The iPhone is an incredible tool for musicians. I Am T-Pain brings auto tune to your finger tips. The official Glee apps gives you three part harmonies. Apps like Pandora, and Last.fm allow for music streaming. There are ton of piano and drum apps for music creation and then theres PocketGuitar. PocketGuitar transforms your iPhone into a strummable guitar filled with different sounds and effects. The app is only $.99 and gives you the ability to play a acoustic-electric, electric, classical, muted guitar along with a electric bass and a ukuele.

For less than a buck this seems like more than enough but the app doesn’t stop there. You can spruce up your instruments with some really cool effects like delay, chorus, distortion, etc. PocketGuitar also allows you to tilt the iPhone to either raise or lower the pitch to a sensitivity level you determine.

The app opens to a acoustic guitar fret board. Once you have allowed the app to load you are greeted with six strummable strings. Being a musician myself with over ten years of guitar playing I was both surprised and excited to hear how right on the sound of the app is. I also have played with some other guitar apps and have always been disappointed with how limited the strumming was. Not with PocketGuitar, you can play whole chords and strum the strings to get a very realistic sound.

If you want to create a plucking effect you simple tap on each string. One of the cool preferences this app gives you is the ability to turn on auto-strumming so you can worry about the finger placement for the chords. This is a great tool for someone trying to teach themselves how to play.

Let’s walk through setting up the guitar that is perfect for you. After launching the app you simply hold down the settings button on
the bottom left of the screen, choose show settings and let the fun begin! I am acoustic kind of guy so I really like the acoustic-electric preset. Now for the effects, for the purposes of this review I will use the delay. After clicking on the delay pedal you get to play with the pedals settings.

I don’t want to get to crazy so I will turn down the time and feedback leaving me with a light delay effect. Next up is the tilt setting. I really like raising the pitch so that’s what I will choose now. Now to the tuning, I am going to stay in standard tuning but if you want to get adventurous you can switch to drop d, open d, open g, dadgad or create your own custom tuning. Now for where to position the neck of the guitar.

The only downfall to guitar on the iPhone is the limited amount of space you have, the app gives you a adequate work around by allowing you to move up or down the neck of the guitar. Lastly you can pick auto-strumming, string bending, open hammer on and pull of to open note functionality. Another great tool built into PocketGuitar is the ability to save and
rename your custom preferences for quick reference.

PocketGuitar is a well built and fun to use app. If you are a a master guitar player or someone who just wants to mess around with different sounds you can’t go wrong with this app. Pick it up in the app store for $.99 today.

Our Rating: 4/5

Download Link

By: Joel Klassen

Keeping up to date with your artists in your iTunes library is a hard task. If you have a large music library, like myself, finding out when the next album by your favorite band comes out is sometimes impossible. Knowing what albums you’re missing from your collection can also be a difficult task. Searching on Google or on the iTunes store does work however, if you have 500 artists or so, it’s going to take way too much time. I only have time to search up my favorite bands like The Jonas Brothers and Miley Cyrus. I mean… *Coughs.* Anyways, I have a possible solution for you which comes in the form of an application for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

Tune Finder 2 (free) by Opsive scans your iTunes library on your iDevice and lets you know what albums and songs you are missing for each artist or select artists of your choice. Along with showing each album and the songs within them, you can play 30-second previews or follow the link to iTunes to make a purchase. This can all be done over Wi-Fi or 3G but obviously the former will be faster. You have the options to show only the artists you want and on/off switches for showing album singles and explicit albums.

Before any of this, you need Tune Finder to scan your iPod which takes some time if you have many artists. Each artist can take anywhere between four and thirty seconds depending on the amount of content that artist has. This means that you’ll have to let the app run for a while, and unfortunately, at this stage the app does not run in the background (at least not on my attempt) which means your phone will be held up for around two hours depending on the amount of artists you have. You are able to skip the artists you don’t want scanned and plugging in your phone speeds it up but it still felt like a long slow process which questioned the usability of the app. Already, the app has been improved a few times and I trust the developer is working to make this faster.

It would be nice if the app could automatically inform you when a new album is out from one of your artists. It could use push notifications and you could have the option of choosing only a few artists to get these notifications. Also, it could connect to your home iTunes library computer via Wi-Fi and scan that collection as well.

The app is a fairly solid one with well designed graphics and a good user-friendly interface however, the slow speed of the app scanning your music library drops the rating. Also, there could be some major updates which would improve the app greatly. Get this app if you want to stay up to date with your music library but only if you have the time to sit through the scanning process.

Our Rating: 3/5

Download Link

Developer: Opsive

By: Joel Klassen

Ocarina is an instrument for the iPhone based of the original ocarina: a small flute like instrument with an opening to blow through, and four holes which can be covered to produce different notes. Ocarina is currently $0.99 in the App Store and is meant for the iPhone. Watch a review of the app below!

Thanks for watching! Subscribe to the AppboyBlog YouTube channel for more reviews to come.

Download Link

Developer: Smule

By: Hillel Fuld

The battle between Android and iPhone is continuing to heat up. With the new Evo4G on the market and the iPhone HD to be announced within days, both platforms will be able to offer consumers true “superphones”. The debate about usability and which OS is more user friendly has no clear winner. With Froyo’s speed and enhancements, Google is sure giving Apple a run for its money.

When it comes to the debate over specs and capabilities, phones like the Nexus One, the EVO4G, or the Droid Incredible definitely have more processing power and screen real estate than the iPhone, not to mention their picture-taking capabilities, but with the iPhone HD coming, we will have to see who wins that fight.

The one thing that there is no debate about is syncing capabilities. While there is a debate about Apple’s closed eco system, which is what enables such seamless syncing, the fact that iTunes works so well with the iPhone OS is a huge advantage over Android. Android has no official media syncing software, and its native media player also pales in the shadow of the Apple media player.

doubleTwist wants to change that with their brand spankin new media player for Android. They already enable you to sync your mobile device with your smartphone and they support multiple platforms such as PSP, BlackBery, and others, but now they also offer a native media player for Android. Android’s default media player definitely leaves room for improvement if I am going say it nicely, and doubleTwist with their beautiful UI and audio and video capabilities, truly delivers the goods.

The developers of doubleTwist do not try to hide the fact that they are trying to offer an iTunes-like solution for Android, and with that, they made a smart decision, since that model seems to be working pretty well for Apple. They might have taken it a little too far with the design of the desktop app looking almost identical to iTunes, but then again “If it aint broke, don’t fix it”, right?

The doubleTwist native media player is now available for free on the Android Market and the desktop software is also available for free online.

Have you tried doubleTwist? What did you think? Can it compete with iTunes or is it just a cheap knockoff? Please let us know in the comments.

In the middle of DJ’ing a house party you’re called away from your desktop forgetting to cue up some tracks.  To your amazement, iTunes cues up your live version of “Like a Virgin” after a kicking Beastie Boys track — your guests recoil in horror.

This tragedy could have been avoided with an app like Djay Remote.

Djay Remote is a sleek fully-functional remote for Algoriddim’s music mixing software, DJay 3.   Using the iPhone, iPod touch or iPad users can mix, scratch, loop and sync tracks from their Mac’s iTunes collection– no importing required.

The app’s user friendly interface displays the tracks on two virtual turntables, album art included.   After cueing up two tracks users can sync the beats per minute or tap automix  for quick and seamless blending . Both songs can be manipulated on-the-fly by flipping back and forth between track 1 and 2 screens.

Djay Remote includes audio FX favourites like pitch, echo and reverb to change the acoustic environment of the song.   Mixing the audio levels and EQ is easy as there’s a built-in digital mixing board –just like a pro DJ would use.

Some of the more advanced functionality of Djay Remote includes the ability to loop and cue.  Set up multiple cue points to quickly jump to different parts of the track or use the nifty looping feature which will record and playback specific segments or riffs.

Since the app requires you to have the Djay 3 desktop software running on your Mac you will need to grab the free trial or purchase the licensed version for $49.99.  The $4.99 price point is a bit high for a mobile app that companions paid software but it’s cool none the less.

This may not be a solution for a professional DJ but it’s a fantastic app for those who love music.  I promise it offers lots of time wasting fun.  Just try mixing Snoop with Tom Jones.

Djay Remote works on a WIFI connection (two-way-synchronous).
Compatible with the iPad, iPhone and iPod touch.
Djay3 software is available on Mac.

By: @razorianfly

Since the App Store’s launch back in July 2008, we’ve seen an absolute explosion in both novelty and full-featured music-based apps for the iPhone. From the very company who started it all off, MooCowMusic, showcasing their versatile suite of instrumental based apps, to arguable potentially game-changing offerings such as the digital contribution to the mobile DJ’ing experience, TouchDJ from studios like Amidio Inc. Of course we then have the new players, like RockStar Games and their celeb-endorsed Timbaland title, Beaterator.

Among them all though, one category seems to stand out as being the most popular – Games. When you bring a multi-touch interface and music-based content together, in my eyes, you’ve got sheer recipe for success. I mean, just look at Tapulous and their highly successful iPhone-exclusive franchise, Tap Tap Revenge. When the company dropped the price over the holidays, TTR3 saw 2 Million downloads. But, there’s a new player in the music game scene.

Tag Games, creators of the GTA-like diddy, Car Jack Streets for iPhone are announcing B-Boy Beats. B-Boy Beats is a unique, all action, hip hop rhythm game set in 1980’s New York City. As the lead member of a new break-dance crew looking to gain respect, you’ll need to learn the latest moves and battle other crews to claim new turf across various city locations. Gameplay rocks out on a virtual dance floor .. you just have to place your fingers on the screen and get ready to move! Simply tapping though isn’t enough to succeed in B-Boy Beats. In some instances, you must hold your fingers on the screen and wait for the next steps. Overall, there are 10 break-dance moves to learn within the game, with each one requiring even greater skill, timing and confidence to pull off. With 7 hardcore crews each breaking on their home turf to take on and ultimately beat down in your quest to be the best in the city, B-Boy Beats is probably going to keep you entertained for a while. Visually, the game looks exciting however I haven’t managed to get my hands on it fully, yet. More thorough reactions from me though, once I do!

The creators are also providing us with a full video developer diary on how their getting on with developing B-Boy Beats, over on their official YouTube channel, so we can follow them each and every step of the way. According to the studio the game is set to hit the App Store starting February 14th, with a launch price of £1.79/$2.99/€2.39.

Developer: Tag Games