Google’s new to the party, and Apple hasn’t even shown up yet, but mSpot has been helping people build their own cloud music services since 2007 — first by letting them stream songs from their PCs to their smartphones, and now, by hosting it in the cloud so you can play it on your computer,…
Music lockers are a big story this year, in part because big players like Apple and Google are getting involved. But smaller companies, such as tunesBag, have offered music lockers for years, allowing music fans to build their own cloud music services. Our fresh look at tunesBag found that while it has lots of options…
Siri can remind you to call the vet. So when will a songwriting app be able to do the same for music, grokking what you’re singing and turning it into teenage symphonies while you wait for the bus? Plain digital audio files, such as recordings of a voice, are like cassette tapes — a recording of how…
There are “betas,” and then there are betas. Google’s Gmail, which was available in perfectly-functional “beta” mode for years, is a famous of the former. The online recording studio AudioSauna is an example of the latter sense of the word: not ready for prime time. We were impressed by AudioSauna’s nicely-laid-out menu screen and long…
Opal Limited’s Bloom, one of the first music apps for the iPhone, released all the way back in 2008, set a high bar for the burgeoning app industry. An immersive musical ‘pool’ that users simply touch to make sounds that echo as they ripple outwards, Bloom ($4) was released earlier this year for the iPad (Bloom…
The new Fruity Loops (FL) Studio Mobile HD for iPad, released yesterday, hooks you from the start. We freely admit that our review is a day late because we simply couldn’t tear ourselves away from it long enough to finish writing. Don’t believe the haters; this app provides what any good music creation tool for…
Smartphones and tablets are the best music players ever in many ways, but their sound quality can leave a bit to be desired. They simply weren’t built from the ground up solely for the playing of music. Sub-par headphones or speakers, signal noise from compact designs, and other factors can disturb the smooth flow of…
If you’re not already deeply entrenched in the Apple vs. Android vs. Windows Phone 7 vs. everyone else battle, you’re looking for nice-sounding gear — and you’re not an audiophile purist who believes that everything should sound exactly as the recording engineers mixed it, the technology that SRS Labs pre-installs on smartphones, speaker systems, tablets,…
Ouch Mobile’s down-to-earth 10 Band EQ audio processing app loads songs from an iPhone’s music library, then lets you tweak each graphic equalization band up or down by up to 8 decibels. Unlike other equalizers for the iPhone that we’ve tested, 10 Band EQ ($1) changes the sound immediately after you move a slider. You…
The Audioforge Equalizer app for iPhone aims to boost or trim seven different frequencies by up to 12db, which makes for a pretty dramatic change in the sound of your music. However, an ineffective graphic EQ feature and odd track-loading interface sour the mood. Audioforge Equalizer ($3) is a pretty app, and its equalization features…
Elephant Candy’s entry into the iPhone audio processing apps market, eQu, is the most polished of those we’ve tested to date, with helpful presets, full AirPlay support for playing audio throughout the house, and a nice-looking, user-customizable interface. The attractiveness of EQu ($3) is anything but skin deep. Its fully-parametric equalizer gives you complete control…
Fabio Policarpo’s Player+ has a polished interface that lets you play music from your iTunes library in much the same intuitive way that Apple’s own iPod (soon to be “Music”) app does, with the addition of a three-band graphic equalizer and a crossfader for melding one song smoothly into the next. Player+ ($1) provides an attractive…
For $3 from the iTunes app store, 3D Music Player Pro come with a suite of options for tweaking your music collection’s original tone and output signal. Like SRS Labs’ technology below, 3D Music Player simulates surround sound to make your music sound like you’re listening to it in a room instead of coming out of…
Last week brought the news that CBS Interactive Music Group is rolling out a revamped version of MP3.com, with its once highly-prized domain name. The site will now be “partnered with” — or perhaps rolled into — an already-major player among music recommendation services, Last.fm, which is also owned by CBS. CBS Interactive head David…
Tablets are a lot of things: They’re certainly interesting, most assuredly innovative, and even suitable as a laptop replacement for music writers. But despite all the press about how they’re changing the world, they’re not perfect. And they can’t do everything. Not everyone gets this. At Apple’s recent Worldwide Developers Conference, company luminaries spoke of…
