David Emery Online

Listening to Music

16 July 2011

For a while now I’ve been trying to settle on the best music player app for my iPhone. This is important – for better or for worse, I do practically all of my listening on my iPhone whilst I’m out and about.

Now, the default iPod app does a pretty good job to start off with; the interface looks nice enough, and it handles playlists pretty well. The big thing it lacks though is last.fm scrobbling support, and I doubt Apple are going to add that any time soon. It strikes me that it would make a lot of sense if the official Last.fm app would have a playing interface that lets you access the music and playlists stored in your library, but at the moment it seems to be all about the radio functionality which I have no interest in.

There’s definitely a gap for a more pro music player app on iOS, but sadly no one has quite filled that gap just yet. I was quite hopeful that NowPlayer would fill the gap, as it focuses on providing a beautiful UI and has scrobbling support but sadly it just doesn’t work that we’ll as a player – you can’t just play playlists, you have to add them to a play queue which is just unnecessary hassle. Also, if you use the lock screen controls to skip tracks it gets all out of sync and doesn’t keep scrobbling.

iScrob looks like it does the job on paper, but in practice it’s pretty bare bones and the UI seriously needs some help from a good designer (don’t get me started on the icon…).

The unlikely new contender in all this is one that’s dominated the headlines in the last couple of days after finally launching in the US – yes, that’s right; I’m talking about Spotify. Previously I’ve – unlike almost everyone I know, seemingly – not been a big user of Spotify. Far too much of the music I listen to on a day to day basis is pre-release stuff (either work stuff or mp3s off blogs), which renders Spotify pretty useless.

At least, it did render Spotify pretty useless, until a couple of months ago they added the ability to use local files as well as ones in their cloud. Now you can mix tracks from your library with theirs, without being able to tell the difference. Even if you’re on the free service you can then sync your files with the mobile app (you’ve got to pay to be able to use their tracks), and handily enough it supports scrobbling. The app also looks really nice and works well – the only complaint I have is that it doesn’t show the currently playing track with artwork on the lock screen, à la the iPod app, but I have a suspicion this is an Apple restriction.

Spotify have evolved their service to a point now where it really is mightily impressive – for me at least, it’s easily worth paying the £9.99/month to have access to their massive catalogue, and now that you can fill the gaps from other services if they don’t have something it beats iTunes hands down. It’s not to say that it’s perfect quite yet – at the moment the UI is very search based, and it could do with far better ways of just browsing artists and albums. Also, having an improved way of recommending new content would be great, and I’m sure that’s on the way.

One of the other benefits of using Spotify is that I can easily show you exactly what I’m listening to right now. I rarely listen to albums start to finish (unless its a really good one), and I rarely listen to anything old (hence not getting on the Spotify bandwagon sooner, I guess). Instead I listen to a playlist of all the new music I’ve got – both albums and single tracks, all mixed together on shuffle. This used to be achieved by a complicated arrangement of smart playlists in iTunes (something else Spotify could do with adding) but now I just add a remove things manually.

You can see that playlist here.

At the moment I’m catching up on a few things that almost past me by, the key one of which is the amazing Metronomy album. I’ve never been a massive fan before (hence being a bit slow on the uptake) but it really is something special. The WU LYF album is pretty good as well, which I’d ignored due to the sheer weight of hype but is worth checking out.

Another interesting album worth highlighting is the new Zomby album ‘Dedication’. It’s not normally the sort of record I’d normally give much play time to, being almost completely instrumental electronic fare, but in the context of how I listen it works really well. One criticism I’ve seen of the record is that some of the songs sound unfinished, and it’s true that most of the tracks are only about a minute to two minutes long but that’s what makes it for me.

It’s the perfect album for shuffle.

Popping up in between other more traditional tracks these songs work perfectly; little breaks that do something interesting but don’t outstay their welcome. The whole thing together gets a little tiring I think, but listened to this way it’s sublime.

As a reward for reading this far for my American friends I have a couple of spare Spotify invites if anyone needs one. Also, you can find my Spotify profile here.