Spotify, the popular music-streaming service with 40 million strong user base, on Monday announced a new way to stream music for free.
Leveraging its video ads for mobile and desktop that have been in limited testing since mid-June and are now rolling out, free Spotify streamers who opt-in to view short 15-30 second videos on their device will receive 30 minutes' worth of uninterrupted, ad-free music. Spotify, which hails from Sweden, opened its mobile service to non-paying users in December.
Folks looking to kill some downtime this weekend should head on over to the Apple Store app. Apple is always offering up free iOS content in its digital storefront, and its latest benefaction is the popular beat-making app 'iMaschine.'
iMaschine promises to put "professional groove production in the palm of your hand." It features 16 pads with over 400 samples, a melody keyboard, and a voice recorder for vocals. You can even sample sounds directly from iTunes.
There's been a flurry of speculation by fans and watchers alike that the popular Irish rock band U2 will be performing live at Apple's media event next Tuesday and even preload its new album on the forthcoming iPhone 6. Thursday morning, an Irish newspaper added to the confusion.
The band's spokesperson purportedly quashed the rumor in a statement released to Independent [Google Cache]. The story got pulled minutes later without an explanation, casting doubt on its veracity.
As Cody told you last night, The Sunday Times newspaper first started this rumor based on vague hearsay among fans and shady photographic evidence in the form of images depicting U2's secret video shoot in Dublin last week, which music promotor Stephen Browne shared on Twitter.
Rdio, the popular Internet radio service, on Thursday launched a major redesign of its mobile app which now aims to compete with the likes of Spotify and rival Pandora by bringing its ad-supported free Stations to 20 countries.
The new look includes your personalized Home featuring an evolving mix of music stories based on your listening history and tastes, a new Browse section which now features both genre and curated Stations, a Trending feature showing what's popular right now, the ability to favorite just about anything, from albums to artists to songs to stations, and much more.
Rdio is free in the App Store.
Music Unlimited, the PlayStation music app from Sony optimized for the iPhone, at last has received its long-overdue iOS 7 refresh bringing it in line with Apple's design language for iOS.
Nearly two and a half years following its debut, the app now finally sits at version 2.0 with half a dozen new features and a fresh new look owing to the use of iOS 7 styling and a flattened Home screen icon.
If you have the PlayStation console and use the Music Unlimited service, you're going to be appreciative not only of its crisp typography and user interface, but also of a lot faster and more reliable performance. Jump past the fold for a quick highlight of the most important new features.
You may recall that I fancy myself a bit of a musician. I’ve been forcing my friends to listen to a variety of my musical endeavors for nearly two decades now. I’m sure they are bored with my stage antics by now. One piece of equipment that is almost as important to a musician as the instrument itself is a songbook.
There are a variety of ways to keep track of songs you’ve written or want to cover, and chords you need to practice, or want to perfect. The dawn of the mobile device has made it even easier than ever to carry your songbook with you through apps specifically designed for musicians. We’ve compiled a list of what we think are the best guitar tabs and chords apps for iPhone and iPad.
If you've been following iDB, you'll remember that Jeff reviewed a status bar tweak a few months ago known as #PlayMe. The same developer has now released #PlayMe2 which is a more stable version of its predecessor with fewer bugs, but it serves the same purpose.
#PlayMe2 makes your Status Bar more informative by displaying the name of the currently playing song along with the artist name in the Status Bar. The tweak will rotate between the time, song name and artist name in the Status Bar. This allows you to take a quick peek at what music is playing in the background without opening the music app or Control Center.
The main purpose of the App Switcher is to display the apps running in the background as well as enable you to close them. PlayTask is a brand new tweak that makes the App Switcher a little more useful by allowing you to play or pause music.
Developed by TheJailPad, PlayTask allows users to play or pause the currently playing song by swiping down the Music app card in the App Switcher. The tweak not only works with the stock Music app but with other third-party apps as well such as Spotify. By default, when you swipe down a music app card in the App Switcher, nothing happens, but with PlayTask, the music will start to play from where you left it or it will pause.
Two nice updates for Apple TV owners today. First, Apple has re-launched the iTunes Festival channel on the $99 media-streming box in time for the 2014 iTunes Festival, which kicks off on September 1 in London.
And second, the firm has also added the Showtime Anytime channel to the device.
Showtime is a premium cable network offering some free content to all users, in addition to live and on-demand shows and events to those who've subscribed to the network through a participating cable provider.
Additional content sources have been added to the Apple TV in select markets, as outlined after the jump.
Spotify, arguably the most popular subscription-based music streaming service, on Monday refreshed its free iOS client with a few improvements.
In addition to adding Finnish language support that recently appeared in Spotify's Android client, the updated software now makes it possible to save albums to Your Music, from any album page. Moreover, you can now easily check out album release dates and total play time, too.
A month and a half ago, the Internet giant Google pushed a nice update which added several useful enhancements to its Play Music for iOS client, including support for gapless playback, playlist downloading and other nice-to-haves.
Today, another Play Music update has dropped. Available free in the App Store, the new 1.3.2.2559 build brings out even more useful stuff like ability to remove cloud tracks on the go, improved playback and accessibility features and more...
If you listen to music regularly before going to sleep, you should probably check out a new tweak called Lullaby. Brought to you by the same developer who created Hermes and Acute, Lullaby ensures that the music playing on your device stops automatically after a set amount of time. Lullaby can also be used for other purposes as well such as while exercising.