Price: $1.99 Score: 8.5/10 Category: Music
Audious, developed by Lukas Burgstaller, is a smartly designed iPhone app that aims to help you rediscover music tracks you might have forgotten about on your phone, while presenting your albums in an slick, attractive package.
This universal app for iOS is gesture-based, and feels very current and forward-thinking. It displays large cover-art for all your albums and presents you with songs from your iPod library you haven’t listened to in a while, enabling you to “rediscover” deep cuts and frequently skipped tracks to get you out of a musical rut.
One of the nicest things about Audious is the silky smooth control system. Slide your finger down to reveal your queue, swipe left to listen to the next song, swipe up to control the volume. Single taps are used to play, while tapping and holding leads you to the menu. Finally, slide up from the bottom to open the music browser.
Another feature I really dug was the way you can build a queue of music to play. You can choose the next song without stopping the one that’s currently playing, which is great for building playlists on the go. But even if you don’t build a queue, the music won’t stop: Audious keeps the music playing by filling the queue with random titles.
Ultimately, its a matter of personal preference as to whether you’ll want to spring $1.99 for this iPhone app. While you can get random tracks playing in iTunes or any other number of music apps from third party developers, there is a lot to be said for the wonderful, sensitive controls and intuitive interface of this music-lovers app. There just aren’t enough apps out there that are this thoughtfully composed.
Audious is compatible with iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, iPod touch (3rd generation), iPod touch (4th generation) and iPad. Requires iOS 5.0 or later.