Soundrop, the Spotify app that lets you join virtual rooms to listen to music along with friends and like-minded strangers, released a new version on Monday morning with several improvements designed to make it easier to find your Facebook friends on the service as well as rooms playing music you might like, plus fun new…
A capella music — the kind that consists of just the human voice, was once strictly the domain of college glee clubs and barbershop quartets. Now, it is having something of a cultural moment. The mega-hit TV shows Glee and The Sing-Off are the most obvious proponents (Glee even inspired its own karaoke app), but…
The combination of apps and traditional FM radio broadcasts might seem unnatural, but they actually work well together in at least three cases. Many of the most popular music apps on all platforms merely repackage online streams from FM radio stations; a company called Jelli crowdsources radio programming in cities across the country; and now,…
Thanks to the DJ Jazzy Jeff and a free web app, we’re wondering why Darnell Jenkins is so important. How did we get here? First, Jazzy Jeff Townes made a whimsical video about his road manager Jenkins being the most important man in the world, and then he tweeted it. I follow Jazzy Jeff on Twitter, so the video was…
The internet seems endless, with a similarly vast population of music blogs, many of which post MP3s to demonstrate their points. To bring them within closer reach, a Facebook app called Music Blogs lets you browse hundreds of them and stream their music from within Facebook. Of course, because it runs on Facebook, Music Blogs lets you…
It’s still in an unreleased “vaporware” stage (update: not anymore), but nonetheless we’re intrigued by Spectral Layers, described as “a kind of Photoshop for sound” by its developer, Divide Frame. In more scientific terms, what it does could be described as spectral analysis and re-synthesis. This Mac/Windows desktop software is a little outside the Evolver.fm wheelhouse, but…
You might think of Björk as a quirky, charismatic singer known for her otherworldly pipes, innovative songwriting, or perhaps the notorious swan dress she wore at the Academy Awards ten years ago. But the singer has another, less noticeable side: the ability to assemble a top notch team to accomplish her latest vision in the studio, on…
Within a week of its release, Apple iTunes featured Dynamic App Design’s Metronome Plus in its New & Noteworthy section, which is saying something for an app whose chief function is to beep or thump until you tell it to stop. This workhorse is the sharpest-looking metronome we’ve seen for iOS. But behind its polished faceplate…
If you studied Western music theory at some point, you’re probably familiar with the circle of fifths. Without getting too far into it, the circle of fifths is a way of organizing pitches to show their relationship with each other. Comprehending it helps with playing scales and chords, remembering the number of sharps and flats…
In its first two weeks, the Rock N’ Roll Hall of Fame app for iPhone and iPad has done something remarkable in an industry where most news about music buying is about how people don’t do it anymore: It convinced people to pay for music. The $2 app includes information about 600 “songs that shaped…
Any band can put an app together these days, but the best ones truly resonate with what a band is all about. We already wrote about one such example today — the excellent Korg iElectribe Gorillaz Edition. That app works perfectly for the Gorillaz, because they made their last album largely on the iPad and…
Digital music is too easy for people to focus on it properly, according to the creators of the VinylLove iPad app, pictured above, which they claim restores key attributes of the vinyl age: digging through crates to find an album, dropping the needle on a particular track, and sitting back with friends as the record…
David Bowie plans to push the envelope once again this summer with an iPhone app that lets anyone remix his classic song “Golden Years” (live version above). The song’s original producer Harry Maslin created eight stems for this app, which is only half of the song’s original 16 tracks, but the inclusion of eight tracks…
It’s notoriously difficult to convince people to pay a buck for an MP3. But what about the same song delivered as an interactive remix and recording app? MusicShake, a Korean company that made a name for itself with an impressive little web remix app back in ’07, hopes people will pay $3 for an interactive iOS…
Having already scored internet hits with Conductor/MTA.me and Stringer, Alex Chen of Google Creative Labs has more neat stuff up his sleeve: Crayong, an HTML5 app for smartphones and tablets that will let users create a virtual stringed instrument on the fly. By today’s standards, stringed-instrument apps are gray-bearded veterans of the touchpad scene. Take PocketGuitar, for…
