Last week, Apple launched a new feature for Ping users: social playlists. As the name suggests, a social playlist allows you to group two or more songs together and share the playlist with your friends (followers) on Ping.
It’s a very simple and effective concept, but the menu to get started with it is somehow buried into Ping’s homepage. Here’s how you can create your first social playlists. Read more
I know a lot of people who don’t listen to music through their iTunes library, or a Music folder saved somewhere on their computers. Every time they want to listen to their favorite band, they fire up Youtube. This behavior is particularly common among my friends, who find it “easier” to search for a video rather than organizing a media library. Maybe they just don’t want to buy songs and don’t feel like downloading pirated copies, either. I don’t really know why they keep doing this.
There’s also another reason why people listen to music through Youtube: rare footage and live performances. iTunes offers a large selection of official live performances from thousands of artists, yet Youtube manages to keep an impressive archive of unofficial, yet high quality, footage from millions of bands. That 1994 Oasis concert at New York? Go find it on iTunes if you can. Sometimes the quality isn’t exactly record-like, but the average user (and fan) doesn’t care.
That’s where an app like Grappler for Mac by The Little App Factory comes in handy: it’s a beautiful and simple utility that helps you save music and videos from the web, especially Youtube.com. It’s deeply integrated with iTunes, so you can have the best of both worlds with an organized library that relies upon a huge web archive. Read more
What would you expect from a rapper and his crew freestyling with 10 iPads and 20 music apps? A Youtube video that’s making the rounds of the Internet, you’re right. Featuring hip hop vocalist Tinchy Stryder and his crew using apps such as djay or the popular ReBirth and I Am T-Pain, the result is cool, although we would have loved to see more. Perhaps we’ll just have to wait until the next rap.
Check out the video below, and full list of apps after the break. [9to5mac via iPadevice]
Short version: The Smiths are now on iTunes, as reported by TUAW. Long version: no, the popular band from Manchester didn’t get the same kind of attention granted to another English band we’ve heard a certain CEO is a big fan of.
Apple’s promotion aside, yeah – you can check out The Smiths on the iTunes Store here. Seven albums are available, a bunch of music videos and before you ask: The Queen Is Dead, Meat Is Murder and The Smiths are all available for purchase. At least the band got a nice profile page.
Perhaps the Smiths’ arrival on iTunes won’t be regarded as a day we’ll never forget by Apple, but Morrissey and Marr are in there, guys. Morrissey and Marr’s band.
I’m off to download now.
Welcome to MacStories’ 2010 Roundup! In this new series, we collect the best apps released in 2010 for the Mac, iPhone and iPad – apps we have probably already featured here on MacStories. Only the best apps, both free and paid. Apps you shouldn’t miss.
Apple’s iPod app for the iPhone and iPad is simple, effective and pretty to look at, but sometimes I want more from my music. I want up-to-date information about the artists I’m listening to, I want to discover new songs without having to search Google – I want something different than a list of music synced from my hard drive. If music’s an experience, than I want a digital music experience on iOS.
In this post, first of the MacStories 2010 Roundup series, we have collected the top 5 apps to listen to music released this year. We think they are great apps you should go install right now. We could have included more, but we wanted to bring the best of the best to your attention, not just the “pretty good” ones.
So jump after the break, and check our Top 5 list of music apps for iOS. We heard it’s also possible to listen to The Beatles with them. Read more
Remember when Damon Albarn announced the upcoming Gorillaz album had been entirely recorded and produced on his iPad? Well, he wasn’t joking. Not at all. The Blur & “The Good, the Bad & the Queen” frontman, cartoon band Gorillaz all-star and, you guessed it, producer and songwriter told the Courier Mail that the album is real, it’s coming out for free on Christmas, and a music video will be released on Christmas Eve.
Seems like Gorillaz fans are going to have a great time come Christmas this year: Albarn wanted to make sure that people knew the album was entirely recorded on the tablet, with no studio equipment being used to realize it. We do wonder, though, how mixing and mastering was done on the iPad.
I wanted to make sure that it came out at the end of the tour because I don’t want anyone to think I’d tampered with it.
We believe you, Damon. We’ll be waiting for the album to show up on our MacBooks under the Christmas tree. And if the results will be poor and not as great as Plastic Beach, hey – you still have a Country House to spend your retirement days hiding from the angry fans. [via]
Adam Lisagor nails it.
Here we are again, featuring a band that doesn’t make music with actual instruments, but decided to go the iOS way instead. The “iBand” from the North Point Community Church (website), indeed, played 3 Christmas songs (Carol of the Bells, Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree and Feliz Navidad) using only iPhone and iPad apps.
The result, as you can see in the video embedded below, is fantastic. The songs turned out great when played through the apps, and the members of the iBand actually had fun when performing on stage all together. Crowd was cheering, the video is going viral on Youtube – all thanks to the power of quality music making apps released in the App Store these past two years.
Reid Greven from North Point writes on his personal blog:
Jared arranged “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” and “Feliz Navidad” using the apps, and creating a demo by multitracking them in Apple’s Logic software (though any Digital Audio Workstation would do the trick).
Jared, Eddie Kirkland and I arranged the first song, “Carol of the Bells“. It’s amazing what you come up with when you sit in a room, hook 3 iPhones up to some speakers, and get adventurous!
The apps used in the performance include SoundGrid, Guitarist, iGog, Pianist and Percussions. Back in October we featured New York-based band Atomic Tom, performing a song using only iPhone apps.
Once again, I’m amazed by the results some people can accomplish by solely relying on modern Apple devices and applications. Check out the video below, then tweet it. It has to go viral.
I specialize in a very specific type of coverage. iOS apps coverage.
In all seriousness, I think Inception is the best movie of 2010. I watched it four times already, my friends love it – we all love it. There’s no need to keep saying that Inception is a great movie. But the iPhone app released today and developed by Remote Control Productions, the film music company run by Hans Zimmer? It’s completely awesome. And kind of surreal. An experience that it’s not easy to describe in words. Read more
