Favorite iPad (2) Apps for Music Listening

I recently acquired an iPad 2 and one of the first things I noticed was that the native Music Player app had some annoying shortcomings. Most annoying is the inability to choose an artist and continuously play all albums / tracks by them - the program limits you to playing individual albums and stops playing when an album ends. The interface is pretty boring as well. So I went on a brief quest to find alternative iPad music players and found a couple of cool ones I thought other iPad users here might enjoy: Planetary, Vinyl Love, and Retro Boombox.

(Disclaimer: These of course are not intended as replacements for good old fashioned hard format listening, but great for when you're somewhere like at the office or on the road where you don't have access to your entire vinyl collection or a means to play it.)

Planetary (Free) [link]

In Planetary, your music collection is a visually stunning galaxy with orbiting movement where you can filter music by artist (alphabetically) or playlist. Artists are stars in the galaxy, albums are planets and tracks are moons. It's a fun way to experience your library and most importantly (to me) you can choose to play all music from an artist continuously. Also, if you "minimize" it to work in other apps, it continues to play. The following video and screen caps don't even do the visuals justice.

[vimeo]23168163[/vimeo]

More screen caps:

Vinyl Love ($2.99) [link]

Vinyl Love is a fun app by Swedish design studio "Color Monkey" that lets you interact with your music library like a digital vinyl collection. Flip through albums in crates organized alphabetically by artist. Select one to slap a virtual platter onto a sleek looking record player and enjoy a subtle "crackle pop" injected into the music. I wish the vinyl "noise" had adjustable settings so that you can choose for example to only hear it between tracks or for xx seconds into the music, or even adjust the level of noise, but alas. It's not that intrusive however and it really does make you feel like you're listening to a record (as much as an iPad can, anyway.) You can also skip tracks by "lifting" / moving the needle across the record and you can "scratch" and rewind the record too. This app keeps playing your music in the background whilst multi-tasking though playback is album by album only and there is no playlist function.

Retro Boombox ($3.99) [link]

Retro Boombox is my least favorite out of the 3 apps mentioned here, but it does have its special features and advantages. Much like a real boombox, the interface is kind of clunky looking and you control it by tapping and turning the various knobs and buttons. Tap the tape slot to choose your music by artists, albums, genres, or songs. You can also "record" through this app which connects to your voice recording library and you can access local radio stations as well. This app has more playback functions and flexibility than the iPad native music player, it's only real drawback being that when you minimize the app to multitask, it quits playing.

If you have any other favorite iPad music player apps, please post them.

whats the sound quality like on the ipad2?

does it have the same average sound as the ipod touch\iphone or does it have the later ipod classic preamp which is supposed to be better?

I dunno how iPad2 compares sound-quality wise to previous devices. But I find it to be more than adequate for listening while out of the house.

I feel like those apps are just gimmicks.

I personally prefer an intuitive, efficient UI in front of a fast, feature-rich application.

  On 11/6/2011 at 7:40 PM, Superstix said:

digital vinyl