We all hate iTunes—it’s the fashionable thing to do. The smarter amongst us have switched over to Rdio and Spotify or another streaming service, and use iTunes solely as a way to sync our iDevices.
But Vox is a new app (launching today) which will give you access to your iTunes library without all the cruft that makes it almost impossible to use for, you know, tunes. It’s pretty sweet.
Apple has uploaded a new iPhone 5 ad today to its YouTube channel that showcases FaceTime video calling. Entitled “FaceTime Every Day,” the one-minute clip continues the “Every Day” series which began earlier this year, promoting features that are more popular on the iPhone than on any other smartphone.
Apple has begun giving away free content today via the App Store app for iPhone. Its first giveaway is for Color Zen, “a new and addictive kind of puzzle game” for iOS which is available free for a limited time “exclusively for Apple Store app users.”
Apple seeded a new Apple TV beta to registered developers on Monday, and there were a couple of new features that the Cupertino company did not mention in its release notes. One of those features is a new, one-tap setup option for those with iOS devices, and the other is the ability to purchase music from the iTunes Store.
One of my most-used Mac apps is Rogue Amoeba’s Airfoil, a utility which hijacks the audio from any app you like and pipes it to your AirPlay speakers. It synced audio and video over AirPlay before Apple added the feature (back when it was called AirTunes), and is a great way to send the same music to every one of the stack of wireless speakers I’m testing at any one time (it’s like a bad disco in here).
Now, there is Airfoil Remote, which lets you control Airfoil for Mac from your iPhone.
Apple has today announced Logic Pro X, the most advanced version of Logic Pro to date, which boasts a new interface, new creative tools for musicians, and an expanded collection of instruments and effects. Logic Pro X also introduces new features like Drummer and Flex Pitch, and Logic Remote, which lets you play and control Logic Pro X from your iPad.
They say that the kids these days don’t listen to vinyl records, nor CDs. And apparently they don’t even use Rdio or Spotify. They use – get this – YouTube.
Which is presumably why Eltima software has made Airy, an app for downloading YouTube videos and extracting the audio to an MP3 file.
iTunes Radio is here – and it’s looking pretty cool. One of the more Pandora-like options in iTunes Radio is the ability to create a station based on your favorite artist or song, and even mix and match artists for a custom bunch of songs you can play uninterrupted, like, well, radio. You can even tell iTunes Radio what songs or artists not to play in the mix, as well as manage which types of songs (Top Hits, Mix, Discovery) from each artist to play.
Here’s how to add a new artist or song to iTunes Radio in iOS 7 beta.
Sennheiser must have thought what I thought: That their amazing-sounding Momentum headphones perhaps appeared a tad too Teutonically severe (in the case of the red-and-black version) or stuffy (in the case of the brown version) to appeal to everyone (read: women).
So the Germanic, family-run company gave the Momentum a big fashion makeover, dressing them up in three soft pastels — pink, blue, green — with a fourth in a chic ivory-earthy combo.
Do you ever stop to think about how many albums your iPhone will hold? Probably not, as you most likely filled your iPhone or iPod up with music from the iTunes Store, or you stream from Spotify or Rdio. And even if you filled up your iTunes with music by ripping actual physical disks, you almost certainly didn’t do it from vinyl records.
I did fill my first 15GB iPod with music from ripped CDs, so I know just how big the stack was that I had to work thorough. But if you head over to ConcertHotels.com and click the little arrow, you’ll be treated to a stack of vinyl big enough to fill a 160GB iPod. That’s 40,000 songs in total.
What do Woz and Stephen Fry have in common, besides a fascination with technology and love of all things Apple? The answer: They’ve both been using (and plugging) a free iPhone app from Ireland called Soundwave Music Discovery that lets you see — in some rather novel ways — what other people are listening to. In a way, it’s sort of like Twitter for music.
Twitter’s #music app for iPhone is supposed to become one of the best ways to discover new and popular music. To help users fine tune their discovery needs, Twitter updated #music today to include a new Genres feature for its charts.
The new Genres feature expands the number of areas users can select to search for music. You can now browse for music in country, hip-hop, pop, R&B and more. Twitter’s also included new categories for Superstars, Popular, Emerging, Unearth and Hunted charts.
Here’s what’s new:
Apple will pay music labels more than Pandora for its new iTunes Radio service, according to terms reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. In addition to a set fee, the Cupertino company will also cough up a cut of its net advertising revenue every time a song is played.
Rdio has updated its family subscription plans to allow up to five people to enjoy its music streaming service at once. The family plans aim to prevent sibling squabbles over just one Rdio account, and they’re cheaper than buying separate subscriptions for everyone in the home.
Sony Music Unlimited for iPhone has been updated to offer offline playback and high quality 320 Kbps music streaming. These features were first introduced to the Android version of the app back in January, so it’s nice to finally see them on iOS with the version 1.3 update.
This is a fantastic idea. When Apple overhauled iTunes in the latest version, they did something pretty with Album View, so that the color of the Album View was matched to the dominant color in that album’s artwork.
It’s a nice effect, and as Reddit user Bostonlbi has shown, it looks even prettier on iOS 7, especially if you change the color of the rest of the interface elements with the second and third most dominant colors. Come on, Apple! It’s not too late to take this idea and run with it!
Q: How Does Bob Marley like his donuts?
A: Wi’ Jam in [1].
And Jamn is also the name of this little pocket software toolkit for musicians. It’s an iPhone app which shows you the notes in a any scale in any key, but it has a rather clever gimmick that makes it a lot easier to read: the notes are on a wheel.
If you stayed in any but the most flea-bitten of hotels in the last few years, you will have seen an iHome dock on the nightstand, ready to be mostly ignored until you need a place to charge your iPhone at night.
And as you eyed the clock/radio/speaker you may have chuckled to yourself and muttered something about the poor hotel owner, who just wasted like tens of thousands of dollars on now-obsolete 30-pin connector-equipped boxes.
If only he's waited, he could have had this new Lightning version, which also works with older models.
Nestled amid the gentle rolling hills of my old stomping ground of Westlake Village sits Blue Microphones, little more than a half hour north of Los Angeles. There’re actually two lakes in the area: beautiful Lake Sherwood, and the grubby, man-made boating pond of Westlake Lake. Neither, to my recollection, has ever had a reported sighting of a monster.
Blue Microphones’s new USB mic is named “Nessie,” which I guess means now the area has at least one lake monster. Only in this case it’s the good, super-friendly kind of monster.
Apple finally announced its long-rumored iTunes Radio service yesterday at WWDC, and even though it doesn’t officially launch until this fall, we’ve been taking it for a spin in the iOS 7 beta. Initially, iTunes Radio has left us fairly impressed, except for one huge omission: all the curse words are missing.
When you stream music via iTunes Radio stations, all songs with profane lyrics are streamed in an edited edition, even on user-created stations. We’re not just talking about radio edits where more family appropriate lyrics are dubbed in. Nope, iTunes Radio just strips out the whole word so you’re left with awkward gaps in the song as your favorite artist chokes out a horrific blast of profanity.
During our time playing with iTunes Radio we haven’t come across a single explicit track that isn’t censored, so if you love to bath in the crass lyrics of hiphop’s greatest living legends, you’re out of luck.
It’s our own fault. We all asked Apple to dramatically change the look and feel of the iOS operating system, which, until yesterday, remained largely unchanged since the introduction of the original iPhone back in 2007. And we all complained when it didn’t do that with iOS 6 this time last year.
But I can’t help but feel the Cupertino company is now punishing us for all those requests, and all that complaining we did before about its skeuomorphic designs.
When it comes to design, iOS 7 is vastly different to its predecessors. It still functions in much the same way — though there are some new features you’ll need to get used to — but it looks completely different. As soon as you power it up for the first time the minimalistic feel is staring back at you, but it isn’t until you’ve completed the setup process and arrived at your home screen that you want to vomit in your own lap.
Later.fm is like Instapaper for music. And like Instapaper, it is beginning its life as a web-only app, although it works so well in Mobile Safari that you won’t care about the lack of an actual iOS app right now.
Music is what started it all for the modern Apple with the iPod back in 2001.
Today, the consumer electronics giant released a new TV ad entitled “Music Every Day.”
Rdio just updated its music streaming app for iOS today to version 2.2. The new update includes a new ‘Find People’ feature that makes it easier for users to find their friends as well as providing recommendations of other artists to follow.
Also included in the update are some UI improvements, most noticeably to the menu on the left side of the app. The app comes with a new Labels feature too that lets you search for a record label to find top albums and artists.
Here are the full release notes:
This week on The CultCast: Google Maps gets prettier, smarter, and faster; Hangouts is a new chat app with some innovative features; Google Music is too late to party; Erfon eats H’orderves on a space jet with Tim Cook and Richard Branson; and Leander dons his powdered wig to judge an all new Faves ‘N Raves.
All that and more on this week’s CultCast! Stream or download new and past episodes on your Mac or iDevice by subscribing now on iTunes, or hit play below and let the good times roll.
Show notes up next.
