Like many people, I have a music library that’s way too large to fit on my iPhone. (Yo, Apple! Can we please get a 64GB model already?) Fortunately, I can still listen to every track I own thanks to Simplify Music 2.0 (formerly Simplify Media).
The app streams tunes from your PC by way of a music-server program that’s available for Windows, Mac, and Linux systems. Download it, install it, then choose the folders you want it to scan, monitor, and queue. (Alas, the program can’t stream DRM-protected iTunes purchases, so it’s time to move everything to iTunes Plus.)
The desktop software costs nothing. The Simplify Music iPhone app has an introductory price of $2.99, but the developer plans to bump it to $5.99 in a few weeks.
Once everything’s installed and configured, just leave your system running and hit the road. When you run the app, you’ll be able to browse your entire desktop music library by album, artist, genre, or song. Tap what you want and presto: the music plays, complete with album art and even song lyrics (which is so cool, it single-handedly justifies the cost of the app).
Want even more variety? Get some buddies on board: you can stream music from friends’ music libraries in addition to your own.
Version 2.0 adds some nifty amenities, including a search function (something the iPhone itself doesn’t have–yet), an add-to-favorites option for building an on-the-fly playlist, and a “scrub bar” for easy backward/forward scanning.
As you might expect, a Wi-Fi connection produces the best sound quality, though 3G runs it a close second when you have four or five bars. Even over EDGE, Simplify Music delivered surprisingly good sound, about on par with FM radio.
Though the app was sometimes annoyingly slow to connect to my PC, for the most part it worked like a charm. And much as I’m loathe to leave my system running 24-7, I’m now hopelessly addicted to having access to all my music.
Simplify Music makes that a reality, meaning I’ll probably think twice about springing for a new iPhone just to get more memory. With the money I save, I’ll be able to buy a lot more tunes.

DigiDrummer for the Apple iPhone, allows users to create and save their very own drum beats using their fingers as the drumsticks. I’ll let you know if it’s really worth your time or if it’s just a gimmick.
Rating

There are a couple of drum machines out there for the Apple iPhone, but so far the best one I’ve come across is DigiDrummer from Magnus Larsson. Think of this application as a drum set that you have at your fingertips, literally.

Digidrummer has at least 23 drum sounds built in to it, and probably updates more than any application I have with new drum sounds. So let’s get down to a little more in depth look at how DigiDrummer works.

When you open the application, you will see eight pads before you. Each one is named in conjunction with its respective drum. For example, you have a tom 1, tom 2, crash, ride, kick, snare and so on. All of the main components of a drumset are here. It is up to you to figure out exactly how you want to play the drums. The combination of fingers to use is completely up to you.

Digidrummer’s controls are very responsive, and very rarely do you get a skipped sound. Now this will all be based on how well you develop a finger skill for playing the drums. It will take some getting used to, but once you are able to throw together a pattern, you can find the best finger combination that fits you.

A really cool feature that DigiDrummer incorporated into it, is the ability to record the beats you play and save them to your phone. As a bonus, once you have them saved, you can select the overdub button. What this allows you to do is actually record a beat over the one you have already saved. It provides you the ability to make more complex drum beats that would be probably be impossible to pull off on a single take. It is a very simple task to apply as well. Simply go into setting and adjust the overdubbing to the on position and you’re set to go.

Except for a few skin selectors and on off switches, there aren’t too many settings to mess with. The only other option you can toy with is the drum roll pace. This will determine how fast or slow a drum roll will sound when you perform one. The drum roll pace can range between one and nine.

One of the nicest things about DigiDrummer, is the sound quality. Obviously, you can adjust the volume up and down with the button on the side of the iPhone, but the sound of each drum is solid. Each drum beat has its own unique sound, from electronic drums to your basic acoustic; and they all sound like their actual counterparts.

The only thing that would’ve been nice to see is the addition of a metronome. It’s nice to create your own beat, but if it’s not on time, then it kind of takes away from your creation. Perhaps it will be something that will be thrown into an update down the road, but for now, you will have to make your beats without it.

So you may be asking yourself, who exactly is this application for? Or, I have no idea how to play drums, will it show me? No, DigiDrummer won’t show you really any basics of how to play drums, it’s simply a drum pad, all of the creation and methods are up to you. That doesn’t mean somebody who has never played drums, can’t enjoy this. I have little to no drum talent, and still I find this a cool thing to mess around with. Another cool feature is the ability to play a song on your iPod, and then open up DigiDrummer and play along with it. That is a good way to build timing and even a little strategy. Also, if you’re not very creative, you can use this method to just jam out on.

DigiDrummer, is an extremely solid application for the iPhone. You get a wide variety of drum sounds, great responsiveness from the touch pads, and solid sound quality. The fact that you can record and save your custom drum beats is a nice little touch (no pun intended). It doesn’t give you much more than simply a fun time killer by playing drums, but I can’t tell you how many times I’ve sat at a bench and started tapping my fingers to a drum beat. Now I have an application I can actually record that drum beat to.

Digidrummer is a paid application, and runs for about $1.99. It can be purchased from the iTunes application store.

While I was playing with FingerPiano to review it my girlfriend asked, “Is that a new piano music app?” and grabbed my iPhone out of my hand and finished my song. I then showed her the song list and she chose the “The Entertainer” and proceeded to play it all the way through. She was positively giddy and when she finished said, “I’ve never played the piano before. That was so fun. I want this app on my iPhone.” And she loaded up the app store on her iPhone and purchased it right away. This has only happened a few times before and I’ve downloaded hundreds of apps.

FingerPiano is a great little app that allows you to play classic famous pieces of music using just one finger at a time. This app uses scrolling guides above the keys to show you what note to play and how long to play each note. It’s a brilliant idea that is simple to grasp and pickup. FingerPiano comes with 88 pieces of famous music including: Fur Elise, Canon in D, Amazing Grace, Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star, Arabesque and many more great pieces. If you aren’t familiar with the songs you can have a listen by pressing play. You may also jam along with the song if you’d like. This is a really neat feature as I wasn’t familiar with a few of the included songs. The only real problem I have is that the playback sound a bit stacatto, quantisized, or robotic. If a swing slide feature was include that would be neat… or another way to “humanize” the playback of the songs

The piano sound is ok and sounds a bit like a toy piano which is ok for this app… it doesn’t really bother me. If you are looking for an iPhone piano with the best sound I’d recommend Grand Pro.

Here’s a YouTube FingerPiano tutorial:

Verdict
Pros: Makes learning classic pieces of music possible for any skill level. Comes with 88 famous pieces of music. Simple to use.

Cons: Playback of included song library songs sounds a bit too quantized and robotic. A swing or “humanize” feature would be a welcome feature.

Features I Would Like To See: The ability to play chords and have them represented by different color guides than the melody notes… maybe use red for chords and blue for the melody. I bet this would be tough to do because obviously we aren’t dealing with much screen real estate. Maybe us a stackable keyboard setup. Also, a built in reverb with adjustable level mix is always a nice effect to have on piano samplers/synths. Slide finger to roll keys.

Coming from a Palm Zire/Treo background, I am familiar with Pocket Tunes (or Ptunes) - the default media and streaming audio player that came with both my Zire 72 and my Treo 680. So when Pocket Tunes came out with a streaming audio player for the iPhone, I said sure, I will review it.
Just a quick note, Ptunes (as I will refer to it) does not actually play media files on the iPhone - that is the exclusive domain of the iPod aspect of the iPhone (don’t touch Steve’s dock!). But it does act as a streaming media player. Also, although I briefly used a few of the other streaming media players for the iPhone, I haven’t used them exclusively - so I won’t be comparing Ptunes to those, but instead looking at Ptunes by itself.

Ptunes starts you off with a genre list of streaming music - Country, Funk, Comedy, Metal, etc. When you choose a genre, you are then presented with a list of stations in that genre to choose from. In the 5 days that I have had this program, the station list has been updated twice, so I think they will update the list fairly frequently. One thing I liked is that they include a featured, aacplus, and hi speed network stations as categories. I do wish they included a few more - like sports talk, for example.
One problem I had was there was no description of the radio stations themselves. For some stations, it was obvious where they were from, but some stations just included the call letters, so you don’t know where it is broadcasting or in some cases, the content of the radio station. As I said, I wish they broke down the “other” or the “talk” categories more - maybe sports, news, politics, etc. Simply listing radio stations under talk doesn’t really tell you what kind of talk radio there is.
On the bottom of the screen, there is a tab for favorites - you can add favorites to this list, including stations that may not be listed. You can also use the “search” tab to search for radio stations. Unfortunately, the few general searches I tried (sports) did not reveal any result, but search for call letters or station names directly can yield hit or miss results.
You can also use the web tab to go to web stations directly. This is useful to go to a specific website for a station and add it directly to your favorite list. Also, the Ptunes website lists some search sites that are good places to start looking through the stations. The web browser can also be used for “normal” surfing while listening to the radio.
Lastly, the now playing screen shows you the current station that is playing. On that screen you can add the current station to your favorites, you can pause, fast forward, or rewind. It also tells you the current song/artist that is playing. You can use the iTunes button to search iTunes for the current artist/music. That is nice, because you can go directly to iTunes to purchase music or albums if you like.
This is a nice interface for streaming music. According to the website, Pocket Tunes will recognize a large variety of streaming audio formats, including MP3, AAC, WMA, and more. The sound quality was nice - I didn’t have any stuttering and hiss, nor was there any interuption of the station while I was listening. Of course much of this will depend on the radio station and the quality of their stream. I tried using a 3G connection, and the quality of the stream still was quite good, but using edge I had connection difficulties (mostly connection time itself and time to buffer the station).
Pros:
Easy to use and add stations,
remembers radio stations,
easy to create a favorites list
Cons:
Can not skin the player,
a little expensive,
some radio station descriptions could have more information
Conclusion
All in all, this is a nicely designed program, and the quality shows. Unfortunately, at $9.99, it is priced significantly more than other streaming audio programs (many of which are free). The interface, program quality, and sound quality may justify some of the cost, but I am not sure how many people will purchase the $10 app when there may be a similar option that is free (even if the sound quality is somewhat worse). Because of the high price point compared to other apps, I would rate this app as four out of five stars, but if you are willing to pay for the quality, it might be worth it to you (and the few other issues were minor).

By: iShred LE

Developer’s Notes:
See iShred LE in action … Check out the video at: frontierdesign.com/iShredLE

iShred LE makes rocking out on your iPhone or iPod touch sound great and easier than ever!

iShred LE starts with a set of high-fidelity electric guitar samples, then feeds them through one of eight exciting stomp-box effects pedals and an overdriven amp simulator. It comes with 6 demo songs covering a great range of guitar styles:
* Classic Rock - some sweet distortion
* Heavy Metal - dark, foreboding fuzz
* Psychedelic 60’s - tilt for wah-wah as you play
* Surf’s Up - classic surf guitar from the beach
* Area 51 - guitar tone on an alien landscape
* New Waver - shimmery, sparkley pop purity

As with Guitar, our advanced acoustic guitar app, iShred LE provides a playing interface that’s both powerful and easy to learn. iShred LE can have up to eight songs. You can create new songs, or modify existing ones, using a huge library of almost 2000 built-in chords and fret positions which you assign to the two rows of buttons at the top of the screen. These buttons give you immediate access to all the chords and frets you need for a song, and let you easily switch between strumming chords and playing melodies. You can even execute advanced moves such as hammer-on’s, pull-off’s, and pitch bends while playing along with tunes from your music library!

To complete your sonic arsenal, iShred LE comes with these fully-tweakable virtual stomp-boxes:
* Adrenaline: Treble Booster for that extra shot
* HK-2000 Delay: For fat slap sound or huge echo
* Hot Fuzz: Get buzzed with an electrifying distortion
* Kömpressör: Power chords just beg for it
* Q-36 Space Modulator: Multi-pattern modulation
* Sybil: Dual chorus pedal to hear your evil twin
* Trembler: Get a healthy dose of tremolo
* Wahsabi: Tilt your iPhone to control this wah pedal!

Description: Listen to over thirty thousand radio stations on your iPhone with WunderRadio. WunderRadio provides a quick and easy way to play thousands of streaming Internet radio stations and other audio streams on your iPhone.

Developer: Weather Underground

Price £3.99 ($6.99)

I thought I would review this app as I felt it would come in useful to me; I was definitely right. I really love this app. It has excellent functionality. This app allows you to access literally thousands of radio stations and there is definitely a radio station for anyone. The app allows you to select the radio stations you like and place them into a “favourites” tab. When you just want to listen to your desired station, the app is pretty simple to use; the ability to search for a specific station makes it quite useful.
Something that attributes to the quality of this app is the simplicity to learn more about unknown artists. When you hear a new artist that you like, simply press the Last.fm button and you’re taken straight to the Last.fm website through the built-in browser to learn more about them. I find this beneficial as it helps me to discover new artists; you can also still be listening to your desired music station at the same time. The radio stations will still stream over 3G and EDGE connections with a minimum of 12Kbits/s, which means it is difficult to not get a connection. Great for listening to stations on the go.

I think that there are some things that could be improved with this app. Browsing through the app to find new radio stations is quite long winded to find anything. For example I can browse music by Genre, which sounds really cool but there is only a choice of about twenty genre’s; considering there are over thirty thousand stations I think that narrowing them down into twenty genre’s is being a bit too general; I select a genre and then I get a choice of about 12 “featured stations”. It gives you an option to look at more stations of that genre, which you select and then it shows a ridiculous amount of stations in alphabetical order. I feel that unless you know what radio stations you like you wouldn’t want to spend ages browsing and trying so many unknown stations.
There are also some points that I am probably being quite meticulous about but thought I should mention. The app just isn’t as elegant as I would like for an iPhone app. This doesn’t get in the way of the apps functionality but I always think that beauty is important when designing software. I find it really irritating that the app can’t be run as a background app. I know that this isn’t feasible but if I’m using this app and I want to send someone a text message for example then I have to quit the app. [Editors note - not technically the developers fault; Apple doesn’t allow applications to run in the background.]

Pros

Over thirty thousand Stations
Web browser, with simple to access to Last.fm
Great for discovering new music
Radio stations will stream through Edge and 3G stations
Cons

Not so elegant
Searching for new stations can become monotonous
Verdict

After reviewing this app, knowing what I know about it I would still definitely recommend it. For such effortless access to an impressive amount of radio stations, which even run on 3G and EDGE connections this app is definitely worth buying.

The iPhone not only has the ability to play music, but thanks to the work of some enterprising developers, it can also make music. One of today’s most interesting iPhone music making applications is Smule’s $1 Ocarina.

PRODUCT:
Ocarina 1,1
RATING
COMPANY
Smule
PRICE AS RATED
$1
DOWNLOAD
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Somewhat like the physical instrument of the same name, Ocarina provides four virtual “holes” on the iPhone’s screen. To play the instrument you gently blow into the iPhone’s microphone port while covering and uncovering those holes to change the instrument’s pitch. (The requirement to blow into this port explains why this is an iPhone-only application. iPod touch owners need not apply.) The resulting sound is a cross between an electronic pennywhistle and recorder. You can add vibrato to the sound by tilting the iPhone down. You can alter the volume of Ocarina by blowing more or less gently.

Tap To Play: Ocarina’s Play interface features four virtual holes that you cover and uncover while blowing into the iPhone’s microphone port.
Ocarina can play in the seven traditional Western scales—Ionian, Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, Mixolydian, Aolian, and Locrian—and a special eighth scale, Zeldarian. You can choose the root note for each scale starting with C on through two octaves of the chromatic scale.

Given that you’re playing your phone, Ocarina is remarkably responsive, though it can make mistakes—particularly if you have one of the many popular polymer protection screens laid over your iPhone’s display or if the display is overly smudged. With a clean screen, Ocarina will nearly always detect your fingers presses and lifts.

Ocarina is a lot of fun to play once you get the hang of the fingerings—all of which you can find at Smule’s Ocarina site—and the interface is beautiful. The icing on this musical cake is the sharing element. Just tap the Globe icon that appears at the bottom of the screen and you can listen to recordings of other Ocarina players from around the world.

World Music: Ocarina lets you listen in on other players.
The location of players is displayed on a globe and the sounds they’ve made are played on your iPhone. Within this globe view you can choose to listen to players from all over the world, within a particular region (you can spin the globe with your finger to display a region—Australia, for example), top melodies, those you’ve designated as favorites by tapping a Heart icon when listening to a player, and any melodies of yours that were recorded.

As people are still stumbling around Ocarina and players have no choice about which of their noodlings gets recorded and sent to the rest of the world (though you do have the option to not share your melodies), much of what you hear isn’t terribly musical. Eventually some decent players will emerge and your explorations will likely get more melodious.

If you’d like to help in the effort to make more accomplished Ocarina players, start by dropping the $1 necessary to pick up an Ocarina of your own. If you have even the slightest interest in making music with your iPhone, this is a must-have application.

New Chordmaster App - Chordmaster is an iPhone application. This unique iPhone application is basically included in the music category of the iPhone applications. The application has hit the market in this March on the 28th. This device is like a revolution for its users. The world has been exposed to this wonder called Chordmaster by the untiring efforts of Planet Waves.

To put this iPhone application in simple terms, it is actually a hand- held guitar chord resource center. After its grand entry into the market the unique product has already tasted high level of success.

What does it do for you? - being like a moving library Chordmaster can take the trouble of putting approximately 7,800 chords at your hand. The innovation flaunts all the important, famous or non famous notes and fingerings. You can also find the chords in different neck positions. Not only this you can even hear the chords in pristine digital audio.

Apart from this you will have in Chordmaster various chord type, chord variants and easy navigation. So explore the world of music with Chordmaster. With this you can grow a deep passion for music. This would cost you only $1.99.

Pocket Guitar Iphone Game review | Pocket Guitar Iphone App - The Pocket Guitar is an iPhone Application dedicated to all you music lovers out there. This application converts your iPhone into a virtual guitar. With this application you can strum the virtual strings in the way you will strum a real guitar. If you thought that is all you get with this music application for your iPhone, well then you are wrong. This application allows you to choose the sounds of 6 different types of instruments- acoustic electric guitar, electric guitar, classical guitar, muted guitar, electric bass guitar and ukulele. And that’s not all. You can also choose different sound effects, such as distortion, chorus and delay. You can also edit the parameters to suit your requirements.

The application also allows you to choose the language in which you are most comfortable. The application allows three different languages- English, French and Japanese. But more languages can be added. The new version has also fixed many problems related to the performance of the application. So, what are you waiting for? Become a guitarist with this one of a kind application for your iPhone. You need to spend just $0.99 to get a copy of this application. Get going and buy today. Happy strumming!