Couch Player: Finally, A Music Player Worthy Of The iPad

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If you had asked me yesterday what I thought a “couch player” might be, I would have guessed that it was some stoner kid sat at home in his parents living room, checking the price of Glocks online and listening to bad hip hop.

But that was yesterday. If you asked me right now, I’d tell your that Couch Player is an awesome new music player for the iPad.

The iPad has been around for almost three years, and yet most of the music player apps have been rejigged iPhone apps. That or they are needlessly complex. But Couch Player is an app that takes full advantage of the big-screened tablet.

Instead of One Big List (I’m looking at you, Rdio), the app is divided into always-visible panels. To build a playlist, you navigate in the source pane, then drag the songs you want over to the playlist panel on the right. And that’s almost it, visually at least. There are also some little icons for choosing a source (artist, album, track, search), and for adding a new playlist (multiple lists exist as tiles that you can swipe through to get the one you want.

Reordering songs is as easy as dragging them around. Play a track by tapping on it, and play/pause/skip/scrub using the persistent controls, which are always on screen (or invisibly present in full-screen mode).

The experience is slick and intuitive. And by that I mean it works just as you’d expect, without any of the stupid learning that you have to do with so many minimalistical gestural applications around today.

There are a few oddities. To pick your Airplay speakers you’ll need to use the system sound controls – there’s no in-app picker. There’s also a mystery binocular icon down by the current track’s thumbnail. I’m investigating that right now…

In all, then, this is a solid $2 music player which excels in browsing and building playlists. Combine this with something like the excellent Groove for iPad for rolling a radio station automatically from your own music, and you’re done. One final thing: Couch Player works great with iTunes Match/iTune In The Cloud.

Source: iTunes Store

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