My music setup is pretty heterogeneous. I have a decent vinyl and cd collection, a 160GB iPod Classic that syncs with my digital iTunes collection, a Spotify Pro membership. This setup allows me to listen to my favorite artists wherever I am, whenever I want - especially since I bought the iPod Classic I can enjoy my collection while driving with my car through the beautiful landscapes of Italy. Ok, maybe we haven’t got that landscapes here.
But anyway, I missed something: I wanted to have another device that allowed me to play some stuff while working, without having to open iTunes or put a disk into my superdrive. I thought syncing only some music to my iPhone was a good idea after all. I mean, the iPhone is always next to the MacBook during the day, I could just copy some of the albums I’m currently into and periodically update the playlist. And it worked, as you may have seen from the screenshots I posted on Twitter last week.
But being that music nerd that I man, the “iPhone Weekly” playlist ended up in being a 2GB monster sitting in iPod app and, even if the selection of artists was limited, I wasn’t really listening to some of them. But fortunately, I got accepted into the beta testing group of this new application called Attic which, in the words of the developer, was aimed at changing the way you listen to the music you have on your iPhone. Rather than offering a new UI for browsing music (I don’t know if that’s even possible) Attic helps you in re-discovering the songs you have but haven’t played recently.
After some weeks of testing and daily usage, here’s our review of Attic. And also, we’ve got 5 promo codes to give away.
When I say that good applications are (to the users’ eyes) ”just magic”, I do mean it. When a piece of software is beautiful, it works and requires minimal effort to accomplish the task it was meant for, that’s just magic. Attic surely resides amongst the “magical” apps for iPhone, as it doesn’t require anything from the user except having some music synced on the device and enough play counts to let it retrieve the albums you’ve played less.
Attic is a music controller for listening to albums you haven’t played recently. It automatically indexes your music collection on startup, uses songs’ metadata (play count, last played date and skip count) to understand what music you’ve forgotten about and it finally displays up to 15 albums in a beautiful jukebox-like UI. The loading / indexing process is fast and takes 2-3 seconds for a 1GB music library; after that, you’ll be able to see Attic in all its glory.
Getting music to play is dead simple. You just have to hold you finger over an album art, a vinyl will appear and you’ll have to drag it into the player at the bottom. Done. To pause and skip tracks you can press the buttons right below the player. Tactile feedback is great, it really gives the feeling of controlling a real thing. While we’re on it, let me talk about the user interface of Attic. Designed by the Iconlicious team, Marcelo (Marfil, our interview here) and Emanuel (Sà, our interview here) have proved once again that they can bake delicious looking pixels, powered from perfect usability. Attic is beautiful, I just can’t say anything more than this.
As for the music algorithm itself, Attic doesn’t replace albums immediately so you can listen to them for a while. This also allows you to jump back from a saved state and see everything back from where you left off. After 4 hours have gone by, it will update the albums shown on the shelves. If you don’t want to manually choose the album you’ve probably forgotten of, tap the magic wand button and let the app pick it for you.
Attic is one of those utilities you’ll come back to every once in a while, and you won’t regret it. It does one thing and does it well, all inside a gorgeous looking design that makes re-discovering music a real pleasure. At $.99, that’s a real steal.
And if it’s not enough, we’ve got 5 promo codes to give away to you guys. Follow the rules below, and go sync some music to your iPhone.
Rules
- Follow @macstoriesnet on Twitter and tweet this message: “Win a Copy of Attic on @macstoriesnet http://mcstr.net/ddBF7Y /@viticci”
- Leave a comment, and tell us which artists are you currently listening to.
As usual, you have to include a link to your tweet. We’ll pick up the winners on Wednesday, March 3rd.
Good luck!
