OnCue Is The Music Player Your iDevice Will Thank You For

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oncue5.jpeg

Apple should be embarrassed by the awful iOS music app. Fix it with OnCue

Unless you really hate yourself, or are just plain weird, you probably throw up in your mouth a little every time you launch the iPad’s music app. Ugly, with tiny controls and no way to customize the various navigation buttons on the bottom row (terrible for podcast or audio book fans), it is worse in almost every way than the player it replaced.

So why not ditch it altogether? There are plenty of alternate players in the app store, but OnCue 5 has a great drag-and-drop interface, and will let you create (as its name suggests) play queues, along with a lot of other neat features.

OnCue is a universal app, but I tried it out on an iPad. You get a big, but not full-screen, pane in which you navigate your music as normal. To play a track now, tap, hold and drag it up to the player at the top of the screen. To add it to the play queue, either drag it to the column on the right or just tap it to add it as the next song in the queue.

All your playlists are there to be accessed, and you can also save a queue and it is turned into a playlist (only available inside OnCue).

Another neat feature is Smart Filters. These are like smart playlists, and you will be familiar with their configuration. You could create a smart filter for your favorite artist, or one to play music you haven’t heard in at least a week. With imagination, this could be quite powerful.

It works very well, although the interface takes some getting used to. In order to prevent accidental skipping, the only way to play and pause a track is to use the buttons. Double tapping (as noted above) is just for adding songs, not playing them. And swiping a song supposedly lets you display lyrics, but I’m damned if I can find out how to do it.

OnCue is just $3 in the App Store. At that price, it costs the same as the cup of coffee you will drink while you test it out.

[Via Mac Stories]

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