Cadence.FM (free) is an excellent iPhone app that compliments your workouts by providing you with a constant streamof music that consistently matches a chosen tempo — it’s your “on-demand personal DJ.”
Its best feature is that all of the music it plays is streamed from the SoundCloud music community and includes the best popular remixes, trance, house, dub-step and club music — so you don’t even need to store tracks locally on your device to use it. Just choose a channel and specify the BPM to which you’d like to work out and Cadence.FM will select the music for you — and it does a great job of it!
The app boasts an incredibly helpful button-free mode that makes it easy to control the app during your workout. Simply tap to increase the BPM, or swipe down to decrease it; swipe right to skip to the next track and swipe left to pause it. You can also use the controls on your Apple headphones so that you don’t have to interact with your device at all.
It will also plays friendly with your other iOS apps, so you can continue to use your existing workout apps, such as RunKeeper or Nike+ alongside Cadence.FM. However, I would like to see some of the basic features from these other apps built into Cadence.FM. For example, the ability to track your workouts would make this app even more indispensable to fitness fanatics, and could negate the need for other apps for some users.
Cadence.FM also boasts Twitter integration, allowing you to share your favorite tracks — and a link to listen to them on SoundCloud — with your friends.
As much as I love this app, however, there is some room for improvement. For a fitness app, it does lack some basic features such as the ability to time or track your workouts. And with these built-in, many users wouldn’t have to use another app alongside Cadence.FM.
Of course, its only other caveat is that because all of the music is streamed from SoundCloud, it requires a data connection to function — which is no good to those running with their iPod touch or with strict data plans.
However, Cadence.FM does have a cousin, simply called Cadence, which offers the same features but allows you to use your own music from your iPod library as well. Cadence is currently on sale until July 18, 2011, and is just $0.99 instead of $4.99. The team behind the app is also holding a promotion which also ends on Monday, in which you can win some awesome gear including a pair of Saucony Hattori shoes, an Echo Nest sweat sedo (fully body sweat suit), a premium account upgrade for SoundCloud and a clipE headphone cord clip. To be in with a chance of winning, check out the Cadence Facebook page.
[xrr rating = 80%]
