When you think back to the special moments in your life, it's likely that there's a song attached to each one. Any time you hear that song, you are whisked right back to the emotions you felt at that particular time, and its connection has been imprinted in your memory. That's the power of music. The technology available to us to make music an integral part of our lives is staggering, and luckily, it just keeps getting better. Everyone knows about Pandora, Last.fm and Spotify, but the following 10 apps, which have mostly flown under the radar, deserve props for making it easier for us to enjoy the music we love.
1.) Soundhound: Have you ever heard a catchy tune on the radio, sang it all day long, but had no idea what it was called or who sang it? This fun app can actually recognize a user humming or singing a tune and will pull up all the relevant matches it finds. And it really works — SoundHound was even able to recognize and identify a hum from my friend, who we'll just say, has less than perfect pitch. A free, lite version is available as well, but it limits the number of songs you can ID to five a month.
Cost: CHF 5.50
2.) Earworm: There's nothing more annoying than getting a bad song stuck in your head. If you're cruel and want to impart that annoyance onto someone else, use Earworms to send an audio clip to someone in the hopes that it'll stick. This fun app features 20 songs; all you have to do is pick which one you want and email it. Cost: CHF1.10
3.) oo Tunes Radio: If you want to mix up your radio station listening experience and you crave a huge variety of genres and styles, including talk radio, ooTunes Radio is a great app for limitless listening pleasure. Compiling audio from more than 30,000 streams in 150 countries, ooTunes Radio lets you create the exact playlist you want and gives you the chance to listen to radio shows from around the world. If you hear a song you like, the app also lets you purchase directly from iTunes for instant download, as well. Cost: CHF 5.50
4.) Sir Sampleton: At first glance, this app appears to be a simple keyboard that you'd let your kid play around with as you wait in line at the grocery store. But on closer inspection, sir Sampleton is actually a sophisticated and feature-rich app that lets you do everything from recording or changing sounds to mixing beats, adding vibrato, and even saving recordings. It's a fun way for both novices and more seasoned beat masters to get their groove on. Cost: CHF 3.30
5.) Concert Vault: Concert Vault is a great app for music lovers who would prefer to listen to live music recordings. It really is a veritable cache of recorded treasures from past decades, including artists like Jimi Hendrix, The Rolling Stones, Grateful Dead, Queen and more. The app, and up to 10 hours of streaming, is free for every user. Cost: Free
6.) Adaptunes: If you run with your iPhone, drive with it or listen to any kind of music on the go, you know what a pain it can be to constantly adjust the volume to adapt to your listening environment. Adaptunes takes care of this conundrum by automatically adjusting your volume based on speed and motion-based sensors. There are also different activities you can choose from that provide different modes of sound adaptation, such as driving, mountain biking, jogging, skiing, exercising, etc. Further, you can create playlists within Adaptunes for on-the-spot volume adjustment. Cost: CHF 1.10
7.) Tune Wiki: Have you ever thought you knew the lyrics to a song and realized you were way off base? It happens frequently, but with TuneWiki, you can memorize the lyrics to your favorite songs and ensure that you have it right from the get-go. TuneWiki is both a radio player and lyrics decoder and provides a wide array of music streams to choose from. You can either listen and get lyrics through TuneWiki's radio options or use your own iTunes library. You can even search for songs if you know just a line or two of the lyrics. Cost: Free
8.) Audiogalaxy mobile: Are you one of those music hoarders who have thousands upon thousands of MP3 files on your iPhone, so much so that your library is starting to affect your storage capacity to the point where you can't add new apps? If this sounds familiar and you are constantly picking and choosing which tunes to store and play on your iPhone, then Audiogalaxy may be the answer for you. This app gives you cloud-based access to your entire music library without the need for syncing your phone or worrying about space. After downloading the Audiogalaxy helper program and syncing your music library to your account, you are all set to stream your music to your iPhone. Audiogalaxy also enables you to access your music from any computer and a large number of other handheld devices.
9.) Top 100's by year: Top 100s by Year is a great app that provides a huge database of the 100 most popular songs from each year from 1947 to today. You can search by year, see the full year's listing and listen to the songs (the app automatically has each year's songs in shuffle mode). It also allows you to buy any song on its lists directly from iTunes and/or see its accompanying music video on YouTube. This is a great reference app for pulling together playlists or just waxing nostalgic on songs that were hits when you were in eighth grade. Cost: Free
10.) Fireworks: Just tap the screen and watch the firework show. Tap with two fingers and watch as the iPhone/iPod touch handles two fingers at once and displays fireworks in two different places. iFireworks is an interactive visualization program designed to run in tandem with your iTunes library. Cost CHF1.10
Well this list should keep you rocking for a while...until then...keep on dancing baby!!!
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