If you’re an Rdio user, great news. The official iOS app has just been updated to optimize the music-streaming service for iOS 8. And it gets even better if you happen to have an automobile with CarPlay installed.
This isn’t actually a small update. There’s a lot of great stuff, including:
• Optimized visuals. If you have an iPhone 6 or 6 Plus, you’ll get a different experience, automatically downloading high-resolution images and album art when you stream a song.
• Interactive notifications. Using iOS 8’s new interactive notifications feature, you can now play music and follow people directly, just by tapping on an Rdio push notification.
• CarPlay support. Joining other streaming services like Spotify, Rdio now allows you to control playback and navigate your favorites and playlists from the built-in display in CarPlay-enabled cars.
• Pick your sound quality. Adjust the sound quality of streaming music and downloads from data-efficient 64 kbps all the way up to virtually lossless 320 kbps. You might want to be careful about turning the dial all the way up if you’re streaming entirely on an LTE plan, though.
Rdio’s long had the best app amongst the a la carta music subscription services, and the new update makes it better than ever.
You can download Rdio free from the iOS App Store.
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
