Here at iMore, we love listening to music. From classic rock to techno, we enjoy it all, but we can't possibly know every song on the radio. That's when we use a music identification service to get that info. In that market, SoundHound and Shazam are the two most well-known music id'ing apps. But which one is better?

While SoundHound and Shazam both do the same basic thing, there are also strengths and weaknesses to both. We'll go into further detail below.

Let's break it down

On the surface, SoundHound and Shazam have one big feature in common: they'll identify songs for you, giving you detail like who sings it and what the song is called. Both of them do that pretty fast, too. So, why would you pick one over the other? It's simple: one is more robust with features, and the other is more simple to use.

Chances are you've heard of Shazam even before reading this article. It's definitely not surprising, as it's been around for a long time, is more publicly advertised, and it's even built into iOS with Siri integration. It's simple to use, and the Auto Shazam feature is super useful, since it stays on even in the background. It will identify any songs that it hears for you without requiring your input.

You can get some exclusive content that can only be obtained by scanning a special Shazam code with your camera. Also, it's good for social music discovery with the Snapchat-like cards that are sure to appeal to the younger crowd, and you have the option to browse by charts as well. You can check out your full Shazam history too, and Shazam even generates playlists of similar songs that you can listen to within the app.

However, we still prefer to use SoundHound for song identification for several reasons. The biggest reason is the fact that you could hum or sing into SoundHound and (hopefully) get some results, while Shazam must hear the actual song that you want to identify. SoundHound's implementation is especially useful when you have a song that's just stuck in your head (and it won't leave, no matter how hard you try) and you want to know more about it. Granted, it is still hit or miss though, since I got a lot of misses (I'm assuming because I'm a terrible singer). Still, I find it better to have that option available to you at least, which is strangely absent from Shazam.

Another reason to go with SoundHound is all of the other cool features it has. Once it identifies a song that you're listening to, you'll get the result immediately, and it also comes with Live Lyrics if it's a song with lyrics. This is cool because you can see what point you are at in the song, and hey, feel free to start singing along! The lyrics will be right in front of your face, so you can pretend to know what you're singing.

SoundHound is also great for music discovery. It highlights Charts nicely, so they aren't hidden behind some Snapchat stories-like nonsense. You can see the hottest and most popular tags right now, even by genre. And while you can browse your entire tagged song history, SoundHound allows you to bookmark your favorites so you can reference them quickly at a later time. There's even offline support, so you can save a search for later, or even try it again if you couldn't get a match the first time.

Since you can integrate Apple Music or Spotify with SoundHound (and Shazam as well), SoundHound can automatically add your identified songs into a playlist in your streaming music app of choice. This is useful if you want to listen to all of those tagged songs later, or even ask SoundHound to play some music you want to listen to. Shazam doesn't seem to have the ability to add music to your Apple Music or Spotify playlists, but it does use your streaming music account to play back songs within the app.

Like we said earlier, there are definitely strengths and weaknesses to both services. However, we prefer SoundHound due to the number of robust features that it has, which we think make our music life a little bit better. While I keep both around, I turn to SoundHound first, especially if there's a song that's stuck in my head that I want to know more about.

There are so many options when it comes to recording software and some of them come with outrageously high price tags. FL studio is perfect for someone looking for an entry to mid-range recording suite at a decent price. Whether you want to record and mix a podcast or multi-track a chart smashing pop hit, FL Studio can get you there without breaking the bank. It can do pretty much anything one might need to do when it comes to starting in audio recording. It can handle VST and various other plug-ins no problem and comes out of the box with a whole host of effects that can be applied to your audio.

If you want a program that can handle midi instrumentation as well as live instruments or voice, FL Studio is up to the task. It works on both Windows and MacOS systems, plays well with other audio programs, and comes with a lifetime of free updates.

It's entirely possible that you are not ready to invest any amount of money into recording software and that's OK too. If you want something that's simple and has the lowest cost imaginable, there is another option. When it comes to free audio software, Audacity has long been the reigning champ. It can fulfill your most basic recording needs at a price that doesn't get any lower.

Unfortunately, it doesn't offer a whole lot of bells and whistles with that free price tag. It's a relatively stripped-down recording program. It's not the best at handling midi files and doesn't really play too well with other audio programs. It's also incapable of simultaneous multitracking and can do nothing in the way of sequencing and looping. All that being said, if all you need to do is record a single track of audio at a time through your Blue Yeti, Audacity will get you where you need to go.

If you have any need to record an audio track on your Mac — from the web, from your microphone, from some streaming source, from a connected musical instrument — Audio Hijack is the perfect program for getting the best recording with the least amount of effort. Audio Hijack is a recording program that is designed to capture anything that plays from your Mac or a connected input device like a microphone or mixer. What makes it stand out in the crowd is just how easy it is to use.

What do you mean any audio?

I mean any audio. You can record audio streaming from websites or dedicated apps, from a DVD, from a record player that's connected to your Mac, VoIP calls, your personal podcast audio, and even all audio that is coming out of your Mac, system-wide. If sound comes from or goes into your Mac, you can record it. It's very easy to set up and use without needing any real instructions.

There are, however, additional features that make Audio Hijack a must-have addition to your Mac if you take a few minutes to learn about them. For example, you can schedule a recording. So, if a special announcement is going to air at a specific time, but you won't be around to listen to it, you can set up Audio Hijack to record a session, even if you're not around to press record.

You can also adjust audio settings with EQ and balance tools, pause and rewind live audio while it's recording, and a whole lot more.

Audio Hijack can create all major audio files it records, including MP3, AAC, AIFF, WAV, ALAC, and FLAC.

How do I use Audio Hijack to record audio from the web?

If you're ready to go, here's how to record audio from the web, edit tracks after your recording session is over, and export them to another application on your Mac or share with others.

• Step 1: Set up a new session
• Step 2: Post production
• Step 3: Exporting tracks
• Tips for recording audio from the Web

Step 1: Set up a new session

First, you'll need Audio Hijack 3. It costs $59 (or $25 if you're upgrading from an older version). You can also download a trial version if you'd like to test the waters before deciding to buy. But I'm pretty sure you'll want to own this program after you've tried it.

See at Audio Hijack

After downloading and opening the app, you'll be prompted to start your first session. Click New Session in the bottom left corner of the program window to get started.

Then, select the audio source you want to record. For this guide, I'm going to select Web Audio. Click Choose when you've selected the source for your recording session.

The recording template will set up automatically. For a web recording, the application, recording file type, and output device will display in the session window. You can manually change these options or add new tools to the recording before beginning the recording.

Click on one of the tools, the Recorder, for example, to make changes to the current options.

In the Recorder, you can change the file type and also add some useful tools, like creating a new file if there is more than a few seconds of silence. I love this feature for creating tracks for albums.

If you decide not to use the web to record audio, you can click on Application to select a different audio source, like Skype, VLC, or Spotify. You can even choose from any application on your Mac if you want to record audio from, say, Plex, GarageBand, or even Steam.

Depending on what you're trying to do, you can add built-in effects, like a 10-band EQ for fine-tuning your audio or a balance adjuster for making sure the audio gets picked up in both the left and right stereo channels. To add a tool, simply drag it from the menu on the right side into the session field.

To remove a tool, press Command+Delete on your keyboard.

You can also designate where the recorded tracks will end up. If you do nothing, they'll be listed under Recordings in the Audio Hijack window where you can then export them to your desired listening application in post-production

Once you've got your tools set up, it's time to record. Here's the easy part. Just press Record.

Step 2: Post production

After your recording session is done, you can do a little tweaking to get everything just right before exporting the tracks to whatever your preferred listening application is (iTunes, for example).

Select Recordings from your Audio Hijack window to find the tracks you just recorded. Here, you'll be able to edit and delete tracks before exporting them

If you set Audio Hijack to create new tracks for each audio stream in a playlist, there's a chance you'll have some unwanted extra tracks in there, depending on where you recorded from (advertisements, for example). You can delete any tracks that you don't want by selecting them and clicking on Delete Recording. You can playback any track in the Recordings tab to find out what they are.

You may not want to delete an entire track but might want to clip out unwanted audio from the beginning or the end. Select the track you want to edit and click Open in Editor from the list of options that appear. You can then select the program you want to edit the file in. You can use any audio track editor you like. I have used it with Audacity, but prefer Rogue Amoeba's $29 Fission 2 editing software simply because it works seamlessly with Audio Hijack.

After all of your tracks sound the way you want, you can name them individually if each track has a specific name. You can also add information, like Artist, Album, year, track, and genre. Drop some artwork in to personalize your recording session.

Step 3: Exporting tracks

Now its time to export your session. If you just want to keep it on your Mac, you can add it to iTunes, or move it to your desired location from Finder. If you're going to share the recording outside of your Mac, you can send it through typical sharing options, like Messages, email, the Notes app, or Dropbox. Just select the tracks you want to export and click on the Actions button at the bottom right of the Recordings window. Then select with which method you want to send the files.

Tips for recording audio from the Web

If you're recording a playlist from the web, I've got a few tips to make it easier to get most of the work done during the recording process so you only have to do some minor post-production work.

• Download and install the Instant On plug-in (It comes with Audio Hijack but has to be installed separately). Once you have a recording session set up, you can simply click the Play button on whatever audio you're streaming and the recording session will start automatically.
• Set your silence threshold for recording a new track to one second. This is especially helpful if you're recording a playlist that has advertisements. It will create a separate track for those advertisements, which you can delete at any time (including while you're in the process of recording, if you want).
• Give the entire session an album name before you export it. This makes it easier to find tracks if you've sent them to an application like iTunes.
• If you're exporting multiple tracks, put a number in front of each track name so that they will end up listed in the order you want them in their new location.

Any questions?

Do you have any questions about how to use Audio Hijack to record audio from the web? Put them in the comments and I'll help you out.

Links:

• @wooji on Twitter
• @jsnell on Twitter
• Ferrite
• Six Colors
• Editing podcasts on iOS with Ferrite

Sponsors:

• Mint Mobile: Voice, data, and text for less. Get free first-class shipping with code VTFREESHIP.
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Transcript

[background music]

Rene Ritchie: I'm Rene Ritchie, and this is "Vector." Vector is brought to you today by Mint Mobile. Mint Mobile is like one of those big bulk discount warehouses, but instead of giant packages of paper towels, you get US wireless service at low, low prices.

Right now, if you buy three months, you get three months for free. You'd also get free first-class shipping on any Mint Mobile purchase by going to MintSIM.com and using promo code VTfreeship. That's V-T, as in Vector, freeship. Thank you, Mint Mobile.

Joining me today, I have Canis. I have to admit, it's Wooji Juice on Twitter, and I'm not sure how all the branding works together. [laughs] Just tell us a little bit about yourself, just a brief intro.

Canis: Hi, I'm Canis, and Wooji Juice is the name of my company. It's just @wooji, which is occasionally confusing because that seems to be the name of a Korean pop star. I occasionally get very, very confused people contacting me. I make iOS apps and have been doing so for nearly a decade now.

Many of them are audio apps, and the one I'm here to talk about today, I guess, is Ferrite, which is a podcast editing app.

Rene: Also joining us, Jason Snell, who should need no introduction, Jason. I'm going to ask you for a brief one in case we are introducing the world to you for the first time.

Jason Snell: I have written about Apple stuff for a long time, and I'm now at SixColors.com. I was the editor of "Macworld" for a while and still write a column there. I am also a podcaster with a lot of my time at TheIncomparable.com and RelayFM. I am an avid user of Canis' software.

Rene: Is there truth to the rumor that you podcast so much, you have occasionally podcasted while podcasting?

Jason: I have posted podcasts while still talking to the people who made the podcast with me.

[laughter]

Jason: That's the closest I think I've come.

Canis: We heard you liked podcasting, so we put a podcast inside your podcast so that you could podcast while you're podcasting.

Jason: That's right.

Rene: [laughs] It's podcasts all the way down.

Jason: It's the best. Podception.

[laughter]

Rene: Canis, how did you get into making audio apps in general and Ferrite in specific?

Canis: [laughs] That's an odd one, actually, because what happened was my background is actually in video games. I worked in the games industry for about a decade as well. I struck out on my own to make iOS video games, was the original plan, but I never quite got into the whole free-to-play, exploiting people mercilessly angle, so I drifted out of video games.

While I was still working on a video game for iOS, I was working with an artist and a musician. The musician's studio flooded. He had an iPad, so I had the bright idea that we could look into using his iPad as a quick workaround for producing audio for use in the game.

In the grand tradition of programmers spending a lot of time doing things that are supposed to save time, and backtracking across a dependency tree as you work backwards, "In order to make this, we need to make that, and in order to make that, we need to make this."

Gradually you work backwards until you're trying to explain to someone why you are shaving a yak. I ended up making a bunch of audio apps. I made a synthesizer called Sylo Synth, which ended up being used by Gorillaz and The Flaming Lips. I made a couple of other synthesizers.

I also made an audio editor called Hokusai, which is a more traditional wave editor. It's not really designed for podcasting. It was originally designed for editing the sound effects for games. It was very detailed editing of very short amounts of audio.

That's how I ended up doing Ferrite, was that a lot of people downloaded it and tried to use it for doing things like podcasting and audio books, where they were throwing vast amounts of audio at it, far more than it was designed for. I would apologetically explain that that's not really within its scope, but I got enough of these that I thought, "There's really something here."

I was wanting to make an audio production package and looking for a way to keep the scope manageable, so that instead of doing a full music production package, which is a huge, huge scope problem. Effectively, you need most of the stuff from Ferrite, then a complete library of instruments, a MIDI editor, and half a dozen other things.

It was a way to pick out a corner of the problem that was manageable and useful to stop myself from going completely insane trying to make all of Logic Pro in...

Rene: By yourself.

[laughter]

Canis: By myself, yes.

Rene: Jason, I know you and mutual friend and colleague Serenity Caldwell have been trying to podcast on iOS since there was an iOS. How did that go for you? What led you to Ferrite?

Jason: I increasingly wanted to travel with just my iPad, and I found that that wasn't really possible. Because I was doing all these podcasts, I needed to bring a laptop along. I kept thinking, "Well, wouldn't it be nice if I could do some aspect of this without the laptop?"

I'm going to reference one of the things that always sticks with me is Federico Viticci talks a lot about why he uses iPads so much. It comes, especially, from when he was being treated for cancer. He's going to a lot of doctors. He's in a lot of waiting rooms. He's in a lot of cars waiting for his appointments or waiting for his girlfriend, who's doing something.

He was getting work done in cars, and waiting rooms, and things. He felt like in the car, especially, the iPad was so much more efficient than a laptop in situations like that. I thought about that same thing. Producing a podcast, not necessarily recording it, although that's the dream, but also editing it. To be able to do that, a lot of times I was bringing a laptop specifically because I had projects to edit.

I had an episode of something that needed to post next week, and I was on a plane for four hours. I'll tell you, editing podcasts on planes is great, because there's nothing else to do. It's sensory deprivation. I always thought wouldn't it be great if iOS started to be able to pick up this mantle, especially as we got to the iPad Pro.

Actually, the story is when I found Ferrite and started using it, I thought, "Oh my god, this is exactly what I wanted, and I can do my whole process of editing." I sent Canis an email saying, "This is amazing. This software's amazing," at which point he reminded me that months before he had sent me an email asking me about an article I had written about how to edit podcasts.

It turns out that I had forgotten that, and that one of the reasons why it fits so well into my workflow is that the developer of the software had asked me about my workflow months before.

[laughter]

Jason: I had completely forgotten about that. That allowed me to go visit my mom in Arizona and take my iPad. Go on weekend trips to family. I've got some family who lives about three hours away from here, and we would go visit them on a long weekend. I would have a podcast to produce, because "The Incomparable" comes out over the weekend. I would bring the iPad Pro.

I was able to do that entire part of the workflow with Ferrite. That was a big deal, because then I'm bringing one device, and it's the one I want to bring, and not a second device that's obligatory. In the summer I was sitting out under a canopy, out in the backyard, with flowers and hummingbirds flying around, editing a podcast. It was pretty awesome.

Rene: I'm staring out at the blizzard right now, super jealous of you, Jason.

Jason: Sorry, think of summer, Rene. Think of summer.

Rene: [laughs] I'll think of [inaudible 8:25] rugs and warm things. Canis, how big of a challenge was doing this? Because on their best day Apple, it's great that they have things like Core Audio and Foundation, but as far as I can recall they've been problematic for years.

Any time there's a new iOS beta it seems like either Core Audio or Foundation falls down for the entire beta process. Even AirPlay 2 is proving a struggle for them to release. You're depending on this technology for your entire app.

Canis: That's actually another one of the reasons why I didn't want to do a music app on this scale, is because, as well as reducing the size of the app, it reduces the size of the interfaces to other apps that I have to deal with, because that's often where problems crop up.

I don't have to deal with three different MIDI standards, two different ways of sending audio backwards and forwards between different apps, and all of these kinds of things. Core Audio has a lot of advantages in that it is very low latency and has quite a lot of useful what they call audio units built in, but it is quite a dark and dank corner of the API that doesn't really feel like the rest of the APIs.

It feels like another group of people were imported into Apple wholesale, set up a little fort, and built Core Audio inside that fort. It brings with it a lot of demands, some of which are for very sound technical reason. For example, the way audio works, without getting too technical, is that a separate thread is spun up that's very high priority.

It keeps coming back to the app hundreds of times a second, and says, "Have you got more audio for me? Have you got more audio for me?" You have to be able to answer yes immediately. You've got almost no time at all to respond.

The code that runs on that thread cannot do anything that can take a long time. That doesn't just mean that it has to be very fast and efficient. It also means that you can't risk doing things that are mostly fast enough, but maybe one time in a thousand, take too long because that would mean that that one time in a thousand, you get a horrible click in your audio.

You can't have that, particularly not if you're producing something professionally. That puts a whole bunch of restrictions on what the thread can do. A big chunk of what goes into something like Ferrite is coming up with an audio engine that is able to deliver the audio on demand, and quickly.

Not just in terms of as soon as the thread asks for it, but also in terms of if you adjust the volume, you want to be able to hear the results right away, so that you're not into that situation of adjusting the temperature of a shower, where you turn it up a bit, and it takes 10 seconds to adjust. You're like, "No, no, no, that's too far."

It's pretty tricky. There's a lot of infrastructure. Luckily, some of it, I'd already developed for the synthesizers. They have those same demands in terms of being...In fact, they're even more demanding in terms of responsiveness, because as soon as you hit a note on a piano keyboard, you want to hear that note.

I already had the audio engine in place, but I had to develop a whole system to be able to cope with the fact that the podcast is potentially hours long, and needs to be able to bring in multiple tracks. I've had projects that Jason has sent me that are almost 16 hours of audio, because there's so many people.

Rene: [laughs] That was Siracusa, right?

[laughter]

Jason: It was an incomparable panel, where it was probably about a two-hour panel, but with six guests, or seven guests, or something. Then all of a sudden, yeah, you've got 14 hours of audio.

Canis: It has to be able to just pick out pieces of that as it's being edited. There's a whole system there. There was another big system to set up, was what I call the document model, which is basically...Rather than boring everyone with the technical details, the upshot of it is that you never have to save your work in Ferrite. It's always saved.

Even after you close a document and reopen it, you can still undo your changes, which is very important on any kind of iOS app. If you, say, get a phone call, and get switched away, the app might get quit in the background.

The Mac OS standard of undo sticks around until you save and exit isn't acceptable, because you could find yourself accidentally pressed into changes that you didn't actually want to keep. As a side effect, it also means that you can go back much later, and still be able to undo changes.

All of that was a significant series of research projects. It was actually getting the editing gestures and interface right so that it felt natural to the iPad, as opposed to feeling like a desktop app that had been awkwardly ported across, or something like that.

Rene: Jason, what was your basic workflow for editing on Mac OS? How much did that have to change when you went to iOS?

Jason: I like what Canis said about how taking the expansiveness of something like Logic and putting it on the iPad, that's a lot. As a podcast editor, especially, I know for a fact, like my 20-year-long relationship with Photoshop, that I don't use 90 percent of the features. I know that, and it's not made for me.

I am somebody who is carving out another use for a product that is not really what was intended, but I can make it work. It turns out what I need is basically a subset of what Logic provides. What Ferrite is, is that it is a subset. It is a carefully chosen subset of that, anything that a multi-track editor can do for simple, vocal, and sometimes not so simple, performance and conversations.

My workflow is very similar. The big difference on iOS is that I do a lot of pre-processing of audio on the Mac, because that's where the heavy denoising plugins and stuff live, like iZotope, which I use. I have a lot of panelists who have really bad background noise, echoes, and things like that.

You can spend several hundred dollars on iZotope RX 6, and it does an amazing job sometimes of removing...

[crosstalk]

Rene: Actually, you introduced me to that, and it's literally saved dozens of shows for me since that.

Jason: If you only talk to people with really great audio, it's not a problem. I was talking to Mike Hurley about this the other day, that most of Mike's shows are with people who have great podcast setups, and it's not a problem.

I've got a lot of people with 60 hertz broadband hums behind them. I know my panelists by the noises their houses make at this point. There's some broadband noise filtering now as a plugin on iOS, but that part of the workflow has largely stayed on Mac for me.

When I go off on a trip with Ferrite, I will usually just load it up with audio files that I've already processed on my Mac, and then I do all the editing. Then beyond that, I'm laying in every person and syncing up their audio.

I use the strip silence feature which has been put into Ferrite, which I always used in Logic, which breaks up hours-long audio files into only the chunks where there's noise, which is so great in terms of being able to see the noise, see the stuff you need to cut out.

See when people are talking over each other, and move all of that stuff out of the way, which is basically what I'm doing when I'm cleaning up, which is most of what my edit process is.

Rene: You introduced me to that, too, and it was hilarious, me trying to [inaudible 16:35] English with that for a long time.

Canis: I think he introduced me to it, too.

[laughter]

Jason: It's a great feature.

Canis: It was seeing a video that you posted six colors that had that feature in it. I was looking at that and thinking, "I'm already analyzing these audio files. My analysis includes where all the silent regions are. I can already do this feature. I just have to surface it in the user interface." Having seen that video, I suddenly realized how useful that would be, so yes. [laughs]

Jason: A lot of pros would say it's basically just a noise gate. The difference is that it gets the UI of having to break up the bits and move them around, or see where they are. Sometimes, the wave forms can be really subtle, and it's hard to see them.

It just makes it super obvious. I only ever need to deal with the noise, not the silence. The silence is irrelevant. By using that feature, the UI is only showing me noise. There are other ways you could probably do that in terms of interface that would make sense, like color-coding or something else, but this way works fine.

Then the other point I wanted to make is something Canis said about making it feel like an iOS app. That's actually one of the things that I really love about editing on Ferrite, is that once you get into it and you understand it, and over the course of its development, Canis has added more gestures and things.

That has been amazing because now I'm going to do a new video at some point here. I realize I need to shoot my hands on the glass because part of using Ferrite is gestures, and that is a very iOS feeling. The fact that not only can you slide a finger down to split a clip but a double tap selects all forward tracks of one track and triple taps selects all of them forward which on my Mac is shift F.

I don't have a keyboard usually when I'm editing on my iPad so I use a gesture. Play pause is a toggle with two fingers just tapping on the screen which wasn't there originally. That was a feature request of mine. It changes everything because instead of having to find the play button down in the bottom corner and move my hand away from where I'm actively editing the little blocks of audio, the two finger tap does the toggle.

Once you start doing that and you get those gestures internalized, I can really begin to fly with it. Then I feel like I'm actually using my hands to edit my audio which is actually a great feeling. It's much more fulfilling than editing in Logic even though I wouldn't say I'm faster with it. I'm probably slightly slower than on Logic.

Then I know other people like Mike Hurley who is entirely keyboard-oriented and wants more keyboard shortcuts in Ferrite because for him, it's a keyboard-driven experience. For me, it's all about touch.

[crosstalk]

Rene: It's like finger painting with sound.

Jason: It's how you want to use the device. iOS can be either. You have to address both of those user types.

[music]

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[music]

Rene: Did it take a while, Canis, for iOS to give you the tools you needed to do this? Was this an app that could have existed years ago or did you need things like the audio units, extensions and other bits added to the software to get here?

Canis: I think that it might have been possible quite early on because Hokusai was a very early app. It came out I think on iOS 3. But it was like carving it out of stone. There's so much that's been added to iOS since then that I can just use now that I had to create for myself when I was writing Hokusai right down to stuff like back then we didn't have automatic retain counting and things like that.

Every little bit of memory management was just manual. There was no accelerate framework which is Apple's suite of tools that provide building blocks for processing audio signals and other kinds of data very quickly where they have fine-tuned the implementation for each of the different devices so that you can just say, "OK, what's the fastest way to combine two audio tracks together?"

It will do that the right way for an iPad Pro or for an iPhone 4S. It knows the different chips in each of those things so that it can do that as quickly as possible for that device.

There's been many other stuff like grand central dispatch which means that it's a lot, lot easier to do tasks in the background now. All of these things were possible before, but it added so much weight and took so much development time just to make something possible. There wasn't as much time left over to actually make the app the best possible app.

With Ferrite which was written from the ground up in Swift and using all of these latest technologies, it meant that a lot more of my time was available to spend on actual features, polish and iterating on things that improve the user experience.

Rene: We were having a conversation on a previous episode, I was talking to Jim Messendorf who edits this show and a lot of shows, and reminiscing about the Levelator. Then we were chatting with Jason on Twitter about it. You said you'd actually built in something similar to Ferrite a while ago.

Canis: Yeah, that's right. The auto-leveling tool was essentially because people kept asking me is, "Can you use the Levelator in this?"

[laughter]

Canis: I'm like, "The Levelator belongs to somebody else. I can't put the Levelator in it. But I can have a think about how to do the same tool my own way," so I did. I think I sent a test version as a very crude Mac app to Jason to have a look at early on.

Jason: Yes.

Canis: It turns out, yeah, you can do that. You can do it fast enough on iOS. It's slightly tucked away. There's a final mix menu. You just open that up. There's an auto-leveling option. It's pretty much just a switch. It's got three positions, off, regular, and strong. I recommend the regular setting if you're going to use.

It just goes through and smooths out the final result when you actually render the audio. You won't hear it while you're editing, but as you export it, it will export the entire podcast as an uncompressed, full quality work file so that it can analyze it. Then it perform all those tasks like compression and...Sorry, the term's just blanked.

Rene: It's doing compression. It's doing some volume control. What else? Gain I guess would they say. I don't know.

Canis: There's gating and peak something.

Rene: Oh, peak limiter.

Canis: Peak limiter, that's the word I'm looking for.

Rene: It's all these fancy audio terms. It does that. You just say, "Make it sound better." You also have what Overcast users would think of as smart speed which is an auto-silence detection and removal feature that happens in the project which is pretty amazing so that everything just tightens up.

Canis: It's a useful tool at the editing side of things rather than the final output side because of course then if it gets a bit overzealous and you actually need a space in there, you can just put that right back in. It tries to be smart as well about how it removes audio so that it looks at all of the tracks that you have selected rather than just a single track at a time so that you don't get audio out of order.

Rene: Jason, when you said before you're starting on your Mac sometimes just to use plug-ins like Isotope, how are you getting into and out of Ferrite? Is it Dropbox, iCloud Drive or something similar?

Jason: Keep in mind that these are audio files that are, with my podcast are usually pretty long.

Rene: It's what I figured and big.

Jason: Which means they're large because they're going to be WAV. They're going to be uncompressed audio and usually many. Generally, what I end up doing is doing it by wire. Occasionally I will drop something in iCloud Drive or Dropbox. Especially with iOS 11 now, it's much easier to get those files in.

I did a few podcasts since iOS 11 has been out in Ferrite where I've actually been editing audio that never touched my Mac because I was traveling. I had people put things in a Dropbox somewhere. I would just basically drag them out of files and into Ferrite. It totally worked. It was amazing.

But for the stuff that I've prepped, I will attach my iPad to my iMac and drag the files in using, which you still have to do in iTunes. I don't know why that hasn't been moved to the Finder.

[laughter]

Jason: That would be nice, but it is still there in iTunes. It's a fairly simple interface. In the applications setting in audio device when it's selected in iTunes, you can just drag files into Ferrite. It just drops them into the space that Ferrite can see all of those files. That's generally what I do. But I have done the other where I've used the files app now. It's pretty amazing. That was a real fun moment.

I was in Vancouver for a conference. I had two people send me their files for a podcast they had done. I was going to put it together. That happened entirely over iOS with files being sent to Dropbox. It worked great. In fact, the only hitch I've had there now is a lot of people used Call Recorder which generates a two track Quicktime file which is sometimes a challenge to deal with on iOS.

Believe or not, iOS is not that smart about Quicktime. Occasionally I've actually used an app like Screens to go back to my Mac, find that file in Dropbox and just drag and drop it on the Call Recorder track splitting utility. Then I use those files.

Sometimes the Mac sneaks back in, but I'm getting closer and closer to having the files, they can just come to me on my iOS device. I don't even need to be on a Mac to receive them.

Canis: I don't know what the issue specifically is with Call Recorder files because I haven't looked at them myself.

Jason: It's probably something that you could address. I hesitate to request a feature on a podcast. But I asked the Call Recorder guys. They're response was, "Yeah, iOS, I don't know." It is the case where you will get a Call Recorder file. Your audio will be on track one and everybody else's audio is on track two. With my workflow, I almost never need track two, I only need track one.

It can be a bit of a crapshoot about what gets imported with that MOV file. Sometimes it's a flattened version of the whole conversation with both sides. Sometimes it's one side or the other. But usually you don't get to pick. It just picks one for you. Then you have to hope that's the one that you want.

It's funny to think about that something that we take for granted so much on the Mac which is Quicktime and everything surrounding it. In iOS, it's all hidden. On I Mac, I have utilities I can use made by Apple that can do things with Quicktime. On iOS, not really. There's no Quicktime app for iOS, it's just you tap on a file and hope it does the right thing.

Rene: Is Audio Hijack the same? Because you often have a Skype on one channel and you on the other channel regardless of the format you choose.

Canis: I was going to say that if you do end up with a stereo file in Ferrite and you do have the recording you want on one channel and recording you don't want on the other channel, Ferrite does have channel splitting.

Jason: It's funny how a lot of things that are in other apps on the Mac for various reasons including just that it's easier to have it in one app that Ferrite has the ability to do some of these things, which is nice because otherwise you end up casting about.

Look, before the MP3 patents expired, I would bother Canis a lot about exporting an MP3. He's like, "Ah, the patents, the patents." I had found a workaround where there was another app that apparently didn't care about the patents.

[laughter]

Jason: I don't know, and they would do it. Or you could go through a third-party web service where you would upload your file, but that took a while. Then it would do the encoding and uploading. That's all solved now where it's just much more of a one stop shop for doing all of this stuff inside Ferrite that I don't have to go very far.

To answer your question, Rene, I generally don't like to record both sides of a conversation in one file. I find that really makes me worry because it's really easy to get that wrong. Then you don't have an isolated file. Little known maybe fact about Audio Hijack is Audio Hijack will record two separate files, as many of them as you want. I record my microphone to one file and what I'm hearing to another file.

In fact, if you've got a mixer with multiple tracks, you can record all of those tracks to separate files, then mix them together, and record that to a different file. Audio Hijack will let you do all of that, which is great. That's what I do.

Rene: I'm underutilizing Audio Hijack. Jason, I appreciate that.

Jason: I do a thing called the bootleg, which is for members of The Incomparable, people who pay to subscribe, and they get some extras. One of them, basically it's a recording of all of our conversations live. We record it live and post it immediately. We stream it live, too, but if they can't listen.

It means that sometimes weeks in advance you can hear the episodes that we're going to do. That's all on Audio Hijack block, where it's recording my audio and the call audio. Then it's piping them together, compressing them, and recording that as an MP3. Then, when we're done, I press stop and I upload the MP3. I don't have to do anything, because Audio Hijack does it all. I love Audio Hijack. It's great.

Rene: What I'm hearing is subscribe now to the bootleg.

Jason: Yes, if you want the bootlegs of The Incomparable, subscribe now.

Rene: That's great. Sorry, Canis. You were saying about the separate files?

Canis: We caught up on that.

Jason: We got it.

Rene: Are you hitting any limits at all, Canis, with iOS, where there's things you want to do or features you want to do where whatever limitations exist on this system are preventing you, or is it now a matter of you choosing which features and what direction you want to go?

Canis: Definitely the former. There's quite a lot of stuff that I want to add, but quite a bit of it is restricted by the limitations of the platform.

The most obvious one that lots of people want that isn't possible at the moment is being able to record a Skype call or something like that into Ferrite. The sandboxing model means that Ferrite has no visibility into the audio of another app like that, for good privacy and security reasons. The fact that there's no way to authorize "No, this is a valid use," that's a bit of a problem.

Rene: It almost feels like an audio extension could be crated that would allow Skype, or some program, at least, to present you with the audio, the way they do extensibility for video recording for live streaming for video games, like ReplayKit. It would be nice if they had LiveAudioKit, or something. [laughs]

Canis: They do have something like that, but it requires Skype to build it in, and Skype seemingly has no interest in doing so.

Jason: That's the question. I've heard from other people that lots of people tried to position themselves as potential Skype replacements. It turns out that as much as podcasters hate on Skype, Skype has a massive, complicated infrastructure behind it that makes it as good sounding and reliable as it is.

Try to use a web-based conferencing system to talk to 10 people, and you'll see it doesn't work, because they don't have the infrastructure. They're relying on everybody's individual browsers, and it tends to break down.

My hope is that some solution will happen here. It would be great if it was an OS solution that just came from Apple that enabled Audio Hijack for iOS, or something like that. My gut feeling is it's going to instead be either WebRTC in the browser, which will allow you to record audio from Safari, or it's going to be somebody who invests enough in features.

It may not be Skype, but somebody who invests enough in features has apps on all the relevant platforms and bothers with a recording option, which I hear that you can actually do with Zoom now. I haven't tried it yet. Zoom apparently now offers local recording on iOS. If that's true, then that might be an option.

Like Canis said, there are good reasons to wall that off, but it would be really nice if apps could request an entitlement to record system audio or app audio throughout. It hasn't happened yet.

Rene: Skype... it's the old joke about democracy, it's the worst thing ever, except for everything else. They have the KaZaA infrastructure, and they have Microsoft-level funding now.

Almost everybody has it, so when you have a guest on, it's not, "Oh, go download this weird app." We've tried on different networks. We've tried different solutions. "Or go onto this web thing and try to figure out how to use it while everyone's waiting to record." It has ubiquity and reliability going for it. It just doesn't present these iOS features that we want.

Is there anything else that you're hitting up against in terms of limitations of the platform, Canis? I'm also curious, when you do add features, like you mentioned before you looked at Jason's workflow as one of the inspirations, are there trade-offs you're making, like things that maybe would move you in a different direction or features that you've added and are reluctant to remove in order to grow in a different direction?

Canis: It's quite a broad question. I'm not quite how to answer it. [laughs]

Rene: Design is compromise, right? You have limited hours in the day. If you're working on feature A, you can't also be working on feature B at the same time. There's a lot of choices that you've got to make.

Canis: There's a lot of stuff that I've resisted adding because people have asked for it, but it is much more music focused, and that's not really what Ferrite is designed for. That often is stuff like time signatures, for example, or simultaneous...Let me start that again.

Being able to record, say, a drum track, then lay down vocals over the top of it, and then lay down guitar over the top of that is something that podcasters, journalists, and audio book narrators have no need for, and requires quite a lot of messing around with the workflow of the way that Ferrite works. There's other stuff that's much more iOS limitations.

Something I've been looking at is in iOS 10 Apple made an API to give developers access to Siri's speech-to-text engine. There's all sorts of interesting things that you could potentially do in terms of editing podcasts with that, except it's very, very limited access. It's less than a minute at a time and there's rate limits on how often you can submit those one minutes.

You can't simply submit an hour in one-minute chunks, it would just refuse. If that ever relaxes, then there is some interesting potential there.

In terms of maintaining the scope of the app, a lot of it is about keeping the app maintainable, because I want to be able to keep updating Ferrite and improving it for quite a long time to come. I don't want to have it groaning under the weight of thousands of obscure little features that are all fighting for attention, and each of which has its own weird little special case.

Where possible I try to focus on features that will solve problems for as many people as possible. Also, stuff that doesn't touch too many other parts of the code is always a nice thing to work on. Sorry, I don't know quite where I'm going with this sentence. But hopefully that provides some insight...

[crosstalk]

Rene: That makes perfect sense. Again, you don't have the resources of the Logic Pro team or the GarageBand team, but you also don't have the baggage of supporting everything that those apps have to support. You have to support Jason, basically.

[laughter]

Canis: Not just Jason.

Rene: Jason, are you hitting against other limits, besides the Skype thing? I know you mentioned before the plugins, and things like that. Can you envision the day where you move to a complete iOS workflow? Is that something you're interested in?

Jason: Yeah, especially when I'm traveling. When I'm here at my desk I'm on my iMac, and it's fine. There are times when I actually have thought, "I want to edit on iOS. I don't want to edit this on my Mac," especially for things that are a little simpler, a little faster, a little shorter, where I could take it out in the backyard.

I was sick in bed one day and I edited an entire episode and posted it of "Free Agents," the podcast I do with David Sparks. I was literally sick in bed. I had been very sick. I finally felt I had enough energy to do this thing and post this podcast that was due that day. I reached for my iPad, which was right net to me, and got the files. I did the whole thing. I was able to do it.

With the Files app, that makes it a lot easier to do a lot of stuff. Having the noise processing, having the MP3 export. Canis added chapter marker support, so that when you export that MP3 it has the chapter markers built into it now. A lot of stuff that I used to have to post-process somewhere else, I don't have to do, which leaves it to, yes, recording is an issue, although there are workarounds.

I really hope that at some point there are some professional noise reduction tools on iOS, because that's still kind of shaky. An iPad is never going to have the power that a multi-core...

Rene: [laughs] An iMac Pro.

Jason: ...an iMac Pro is going to have, but at the same time people are editing and processing audio on MacBooks. A MacBook and an iPad Pro are pretty comparable in terms of power, so you could do it. In terms of the app itself, I've got to say, it's nice to talk to the developer of this app that I love and use, because it's great. I feel like it does everything that I want it to do.

Canis knows when I go on vacation because I end up doing podcasts on vacation, and then coming back and saying, "OK, I noticed something." That's when I end up sending the emails to him about it. It's come a long way. That's one of the great things about it, is in the last couple of years, as the OS has improved, and as features have been added to Ferrite, it's a great app.

I talk about it to people all the time. I tell them, "Quite honestly, this is the thing for me." If somebody says me, "I have very limited budget and I need to buy a multi-track audio editor. Should I buy Logic?" Because Logic's really expensive. I say, "Do you have an iPad Pro, because if you do, you should buy Ferrite, because Ferrite costs a lot less than Logic." Is it $20 all-in, Canis?

Canis: That's right.

Jason: Maybe it should be higher, I don't know, because it is that quality of a tool for podcast editing. It is the best value in multi-track audio editors today, but you have to have an iPad. Although, you can do it on the iPhone, and, actually, if I was a radio journalist, or something, I would.

I'm sure that's part of the audience for it, is that it actually does work on the iPhone and is completely functional on the iPhone, which has got the power. It just has a smaller screen to do all the work in.

Canis: You probably wouldn't want to edit The Incomparable on an iPhone.

Jason: It seems like a bad idea, but I could. For Free Agents, where it's two of us talking, I could totally do that on my iPhone X without even breaking a sweat.

Canis: There are quite a lot of radio journalists that I hear from, because you can get quite good quality microphones that plug straight into the Lightning port, the little bobble sticks out at the bottom of the phone.

They can pop that on, go out, and record person-on-the-street interviews straight into the phone. Then pop into a coffee shop, do the edit, and upload it to the studio, all on the phone. It really helps them deliver news packages in a timely fashion.

Jason: That's the dream.

Rene: One thing I was going to ask you earlier and it slipped my mind is when Apple does add new features, for example Files.app, or Drag and Drop was the big one last year, how do you weigh those things? It almost seems you have to add them instantly? Do you think about how they fit into the model of your app? Do you wait and see what your customers want? What's that sort of process like?

Canis: There's a school of thought that says that you should add all of these things immediately, right away, so that Apple will feature you. That's never really worked out for me, so I try and figure what's actually going to be useful.

With Drag and Drop it seemed like it would be hugely useful, so I made sure to get that in very quickly. I find it useful for myself when I'm testing things out, because I added it to both Ferrite and Hokusai, so I can throw stuff backwards and forwards between them very quickly, as well as being able to put a bunch of test files in a folder in Files.app, whatever.

Being able to drop those straight in is so useful, because while you've always been able to use file pickers to pick files, [laughs] as the name suggests, you've only ever been able to pick one at once until now, whereas with Drag and Drop you can pick up a whole bunch and throw them in. That's very, very useful.

Also, because there's a little bit of context that comes with. For example, if you Drag and Drop a link from Safari into the timeline in Ferrite, it will add a chapter marker, where the title is taken is taken from the title of the link, and the URL is taken from the destination of the link.

It knows the time of the chapter because of where you dropped it on the timeline, so in a single gesture you've actually filled three pieces of information in. That can be very useful in terms of speeding up setting up your chapters.

Rene: There's such a beautiful efficiency from direct manipulation.

Canis: There's this argument about how for a long time people were saying, "Oh, the iPad is just for content consumption." A lot of that came from the fact that a lot of people writing about it were writers. When you write for a living, most of what you're doing is typing, and typing on a screen isn't as nice as typing on a hardware keyboard.

When you're editing other kinds of media, then the screen actually becomes a better input method, because it is direct. For non-typing the iPad can actually be a better content creation device in a lot of ways just because of that direct manipulation. It's almost like sculpting with your fingers. You can get your fingers onto the screen and start moving stuff around.

Jason: It's a real thing. Ferrite, I feel like, is the one that I experience the most in this, where I'm using two tools that are very similar in so many ways, Logic and Ferrite, and yet one of them is a keyboard and Trackpad experience for me, and the other is my hands.

It's true. It's a real thing that when I am editing in Ferrite with my two hands on the glass it is a little bit like sculpting. I feel like I'm directly manipulating. It's like I'm making a handmade podcast, basically. [laughs] It is a different feeling.

Again, if I tried to edit the same podcast on both platforms, I would probably be faster on Logic, but I'm not sure I would have had as good a time doing it, if that makes any sense. It's a much more fulfilling thing in some ways to have that direct interaction and be in that tactile interface.

Rene: I look at you as a podcast Obi-Wan, Jason, because you come up with such good advice so often.

[laughter]

Rene: If someone was an aspiring podcaster or beginning podcaster and they were asking you, you sort of answered this earlier, but I want to stick a pin in it. If they were asking you should, if they get started, should they start investing in learning GarageBand or learning Ferrite on an iPad, and they had both things available, which way would you steer them?

Jason: It depends on what they've got. GarageBand is free and it's on every Mac. If they've got a Mac, it's a great place to start. I've definitely said to people if they love the iPad that they should get Ferrite. One of the nice things about Ferrite is that its pricing structure lets you get started for fairly little, and then you can go up to the $20, which is not going to break your bank. Then you've got the full-feature product.

It really has to do with how you feel about the platforms. That's fundamentally it. If somebody's really into the iPad and wants to do it on the iPad, you can. There are challenges for recording. Moving files around is not as easy as it should be, but if you're comfortable with it you can do a whole lot more in Ferrite than you can in GarageBand.

The step up from GarageBand to Audition or Logic is a large one with a lot of money involved and a lot of complexity that isn't in Ferrite. I feel like I'm using 90 percent of the features in Ferrite and I'm using 10 percent of the features in Logic, but it's the right percent for me.

Rene: I feel like Audition has really, really good noise canceling, but the interface is so opaque you've got to really want it to invest the time in making it work for you.

Jason: I know people who swear by it. I don't think that I could switch to it and be any more efficient than I am now in Logic. I don't see the point, because it wouldn't gain me anything, but I do know people who swear by it. It does have built-in noise stuff that Logic for some reason has decided not to bother with, which is infuriating, but that's another story. [laughs]

Rene: Canis, are there any stories, tips, or tricks that your other users have shared with your that either surprised you, delighted you, or you thought were really smart uses of your software?

Canis: In general, it's good to hear from people using it who actually do work out in the real world, and occasionally a little scary.

[laughter]

Canis: I mentioned radio journalists earlier. I've had radio journalists send me emails saying "Oh, yeah, I was in such-and-such a dangerous country all last week doing reports with Ferrite," and then I see the reports.

What they will generally do is use Ferrite for recorded stuff and then another app for live phoning into the studio on the spot kind of stuff. I see some of their stuff, there's gunfire going on in the background, and then that makes me nervous.

[laughter]

Canis: I start to go through my code for making sure that recordings are safe. [laughs] Also, the people using it for really excellent stuff, like recording audio books for students have vision difficulties, and things like that. It's always good to hear from people who are actually using Ferrite and putting stuff out into the world with it.

At some point soon I want to make a little catalog on the website of all the podcasts and stuff that are actually using it. In terms of hints and tips, let me think. One thing I would say is we talked a lot about using gestures, hands on glass, and stuff, but there is a lot of keyboard shortcuts.

The app has a full browser built in that shows you what all the keyboard shortcuts are. You can search in it. It will hide all the ones that don't match your search. You can look through and see what they are. If you do use a smart keyboard, you might find that worth a look.

I'm not sure how many iOS apps support this, but you can actually reset alternative key bindings or create your own. There's even a few commands that are tucked away in there that aren't bound to anything, because there's only so many keys on a keyboard. If it doesn't work quite the way you want it to work, if you look in there you might be able to make it work the way you want to.

[laughter]

Canis: That's worth a look. If you select a project audio file and tap the share button, there's actually a few other non-sharing commands tucked away in there, because there was nowhere else to put them, including the splitting stereo files into two mono ones that we mentioned earlier.

Jason: That's brilliant.

Canis: I think that's about it. The auto-leveling I mentioned earlier, depending on how bad the audio that you've been sent is, you can auto-level early if you find that useful. There's a blog post on the website about it that we can link to in the show notes or something.

That would mean that rather than auto-leveling a finished podcast, if you have a recording that someone sent you and you're finding it difficult to actually edit because of how varied the audio levels are, there's a trick to apply the auto-leveling and then edit that version of the file.

Rene: I want to start playing with that stuff right now, but we haven't finished recording yet, so I'm going to soldier on. One thing that just occurred to me, Jason, is I don't think they would...I don't know, you can't say never, but it would be nice if FaceTime would do FaceTime conference calls and then let you record those calls into separate tracks.

I don't know if everybody has FaceTime, but you would at least have an alternate.

Jason: The challenge with FaceTime is that it's Apple only, and it's only two people. For limited use, it's great. Ecamm actually makes Call Recorder on Mac, that it works with FaceTime [laughs] that does that. It can be done, but there's challenges everywhere depending on what you're using.

Rene: Let's say you were sitting in Craig Federighi's office, and he was busy scoping out iOS 12. You can make requests to ease your podcast workflow. What would be top of mind for you?

Jason: I would make two requests. One request would be what we've talked about, which is the ability for an app or the system to record audio on the system. A side to that would be better control of audio input and the ability to have multiple apps use a microphone at once, for example.

I could run a recording app in the background that would record my microphone to that app while I was also in a VoIP app using my microphone to talk to somebody. That's not something you can do right now. It's a one-input device, and the only one app at a time can have it. That leads to a lot of trouble, but more generally, the ability to say, "I want to record system audio or app audio would be even better."

My other request to them, it is related to this, believe it or not, which is USB mass storage support. The idea that via the Lightning USB adapter, I plug in an SD card or my Zoom recorder that I use for a lot of live show stuff, I would like the files app to say, "Oh, you attached a USB mass storage device. Here are the files on it," and let me copy those to my iPad and move them to apps like Ferrite.

Unfortunately, that's not possible now. If you want to get files off an SD card in the field, you have to use a third-party hardware device and a third-party app that will talk to the hardware device and move the files over that way, which is silly. Those would be my two requests to Craig to help iOS podcasting along the way.

Rene: File those radars and include them in the show notes and the transcript, just so that they get a little bit attention. Canis, the last question to you. No spoilers, but where do you want to go from here with Ferrite? Is it just embracing more and better, or do you have any specific plans in mind?

Canis: I've mentioned some of the things I'd like to do but currently can't. In terms of stuff that I'm looking to move forward with next year, I want to look into streamlining the workflow around repetitive tasks. Stuff like, when you work on a podcast or if you podcast and you're producing a lot of episodes for a particular podcast, there's probably stuff that can be sped up by reusing pieces in more efficient ways.

Maybe that comes in via having full project templates. Maybe it's via auto-fill. Maybe it's via having reusable components. Maybe it's via being able to script it with workflow. I haven't quite decided the right angle to take on it. The general idea is that I'd like it if somebody who sits down to make episode two of a podcast that they've made episode one in, more of that work would have been done for them.

At this point, yeah, I haven't made any final decisions about how or if that's going to happen. [laughs]

Rene: I just leapt for joy a little bit.

Jason: In Logic, I have zip files with projects in them that are generic that have the theme song and stuff, in vaguely the right place and the right number of tracks with the right presets. Then, I zip those project files down and then, unzip a copy every time I start a new project. It's basically a template.

Logic also has template files, but they're a little bit different. This seemed like a more expedient way of doing it. Something like that would be a great feature.

Rene: Canis, if people are interested in following you on Twitter, I know you mentioned at the beginning, but if they're ready to do it now or if they want to see more about Ferrite and your apps, where can they go?

Canis: I'm @wooji, that's W-O-O-J-I, on Twitter, and Wooji-Juice.com.

Rene: Is there a story behind that name?

Canis: That's juice as in fruit juice. Yeah, it dates back to when I was working video games, and I was at a company called Muckyfoot Productions. I was hanging around with some of the developers there, and the term "Wooji" would get thrown around as meaning, things like magic, but not specifically like "Harry Potter" magic or anything.

It could be something like very advanced technology. It was just a general thing to say, "We're not going to get, uh, bogged down in the details of what this is, but it's just magic stuff." [laughs] For some reason, that word stuck in my head.

Rene: Very nice. Jason, where can people find you on the Internet?

Jason: You can find me at SixColors.com. I'm @jsnell on Twitter, and my podcasts are at TheIncomparable.com and relay.fm.

Rene: Upgrade and download and the eponymous Incomparable and all the good shows.

Jason: All the good shows, yes.

Rene: You can listen to Jason for your pop culture and for your technology. It's a one-stop podcast shop.

Jason: If you like, and try to detect which ones are edited by hand on iPad. I bet you can't.

Rene: [laughs] Awesome. Thank you both so much. This has been terrific. I appreciate it.

Canis: Thank you, Rene.

Jason: Thanks, Rene.

Rene: Great. You can find me @reneritchie on Twitter and Instagram. You can contact me, rene@imore.com with your thoughts on the show. I'd love to hear them. I want to thank you so much for listening. If you haven't already, you can subscribe. The links are in the show notes below.

Please, if you go to iTunes or Apple Podcast and leave a review and leave a rating, it helps them learn that people love the show. Maybe they'll promote it a little bit more, and we'll get a few more people to love it as much as [laughs] I love making it. Thank you all so much. Have a great day. We are out.

[music]

The original djay Pro gave master mixers access to the full power of the modern Mac. djay Pro 2 adds even more power but also makes mixing more accessible to everyone.

Every time I talk about music apps, I make sure to mention that I have zero musical talent. Zlich. Nadda. And that means, before today, my use of djay was limited to fancy music playing and really, really bad scratching.

No longer.

With Automix AI, djay Pro 2 has been trained using machine learning to identify rhythm patterns, and then to pick the best way to outro and intro each and every song. Since I'm music dumb, here's how they describe it:

All I know is that I can pick two songs and they fade from one to the other like I actually have a clue what I'm doing. Which I don't. And that's amazing.

It doesn't make you an actual, virtual pro djay, of course, but it allows you to play what you like and makes it sound as dope as possible.

There's also a new PhotoBeat feature that essentially lets you make your own slide shows, timed perfectly with the music. If you imagine a club where the big screen is showing photos while the songs are spinning, then this is that. But again, made super easy and accessible to everyone.

There are other new features as well, including advanced media library management, a keyboard shortcuts editor, and Apple Design Award-winning accessibility. Also:

• Cue Points and Loop saving: save and name up to 8 cue points and loops per song
• Cue Loops: assign loop triggers to cue points
• Split library: view iTunes, Spotify, Finder, and custom playlists side by side
• Single Deck mode: preparation view with a bigger library, ideal for preparing sets
• Smart Filters: instantly filter your playlists by BPM, key, date, genre and other metadata
• New audio engine: high-res waveforms, post-fader FX, high-quality filters, extensible master output effects via Audio Unit plug-ins

I can't wait to use all of this at a party.

djay Pro 2 is $49 but currently on sale for $39. You can get a free trial or buy it now on the Mac App Store.

Microsoft announced it has rebranded it's game streaming platform Beam to 'Mixer' as it sets to take on on Amazon's Twitch.tv. With a host of new features and some new mobile apps coming soon, Mixer hopes it be the next big thing when it comes to game streaming services.

Mixer Launch Party

According to Windows Central, today marks the beginning of a massive marketing push for Mixer. Microsoft is aiming to make Mixer the ultimate place to view E3 2017 coverage, with exclusive reveals and interviews, huge giveaways, and more. Mixer will also have its own booth at E3 in Los Angeles next month for the first time, introducing itself to the world as a standalone entity, rather than a simple Xbox Live feature.

Mixer is going to stream for six hours to celebrate the relaunch of the service starting at 11 am PT (2 pm EST/7 pm BST) and culminating in a special interactive firework display at around 9.30 pm PT (12.30 am EST/ 5:30 am BST).

Mixer App

• Free - Download Now

The Mixer app is where you can go to watch streamers, follow your favorite streamers, and even interactive with them via chat and special interactive features like emotes. Plus, you can even support the streamers you like by tipping them or donating to their linked accounts if they have that set up. To use any of the interactive features, you'll need to log in to your account or create a new one throught Twitter or by using your Microsoft account.

Mixer Create App

Mixer Create is the service's take on live feed streaming. Users will be able to stream their camera directly to Mixer, similar to Twitter's Periscope or Facebook Live, broadcasting live across Xbox, the respective Mixer apps, and the Mixer website. Plus, Microsoft has promised that a big part of Mixer Create will be the ability to live stream your phone's screen, meaning you could show the entire world how well your hunt for a Dragonite in Pokémon GO is going.

No exact word on when the screen recording. streaming feature will launch, Microsoft has only said it's coming soon. Mixer Create is currently rolling out on iOS and Android today, and we will update the article with the download link as soon as it is available.

Microsoft's offcial launch video

If you're interested in the offcial annoucment from Microsoft, you can watch the short video below.

What more coverage?

If you want to know even more about Mixer, and the furte it holds for Xbox and Microsoft, our friends at Windows Central have all the analysis you'll need!

Are you excited for Mixer and Mixer Create?

Let me know in the comments below!

SoundHound is a music identification app that can tell you all about a song, whether it listens to music playing near you or you're humming a tune you just can't get out of your head. It also comes with a built-in virtual assistant called Hound, which can make identifying and playing music in the app even easier.

Here's everything you need to know about SoundHound.

What's new with SoundHound?

In its most recent update, version 7.5, SoundHound added more integration with Apple Music. Though it was one of the first third-party apps to work with Apple's music streaming service back in 2015, SoundHound 7.5 takes it to the next level with support for automatic Apple Music playlist creation based on your SoundHound history.

Additionally, you can now play items from Apple Music hands-free in SoundHound using the built-in virtual assistant, Hound. You can also now stream full songs while taking advantage of LiveLyrics, which let you jump to different points in a song by double-tapping a section of the lyrics.

What is SoundHound?

SoundHound focuses on music discovery and can listen to music around you and identify it. But SoundHound goes a step further than the likes of Shazam with its identification. In addition to recorded music, you can also sing and hum into SoundHound yourself in order to get answers about that unshakable tune in your head.

What else does SoundHound do to help me find new music?

You can search for artists, songs, and lyrics, scroll down on the app's main screen to see top music videos, and check out top charts, and view your history to see what songs you've searched for or identified. You can also find weekly featured songs, videos, artists, and albums, and, in a unique discovery spin, artists born on that particular day.

SoundHound also offers a different take on social music discovery, showing what people near you are listening to at any given time with the Music Map.

How does SoundHound work with music services like Apple Music?

You can connect SoundHound to your Apple Music account. Subscribers can have the app automatically build a playlist based on their SoundHound history, to be continually updated the more you discover. Spotify and Pandora users can also connect to the app to listen to songs and playlists from those services.

You can also allow SoundHound to access your iPhone or iPad's music library and play songs directly from your playlists.

If you'd still rather buy your music, SoundHound also lets you purchase songs and albums from iTunes

You mentioned LiveLyrics before. What are they?

LiveLyrics show up with each song you play in SoundHound, and make listening and following along with lyrics a bit more of an interactive experience. LiveLyrics move in real time as the song plays, highlighting the relevant words.

You can expand LiveLyrics to take up the whole screen to make reading them easier (for instance, if you want to sing along). You can also tap around the LiveLyrics to jump to different points in the song without needing to scrub through the playback bar.

And what was that about a virtual assistant? Like Siri?

Back in 2015, SoundHound launched Hound, a Siri-like, voice-controlled virtual assistant. While initially available as a standalone app, Hound is now also a part of the SoundHound apps. You can use Hound to play a song from Apple Music, access SoundHound's playlists, or perform a search. And of course, you can also use Hound to tell the app to start listening to the music around you.

All you need to do to start Hound is say "Ok Hound". The company has put a lot of work into Hound's responsiveness, and the assistant activates right away.

Does SoundHound cost anything?

SoundHound actually comes in two versions; both are universal apps for the iPhone and iPad. The first is available for free, though an in-app purchase of $6.99 removes the app's ads and offers extra features.

The SoundHound Premium app is fully-featured and offers no in-app purchase; Instead, the app is available on the App Store for $6.99.

Both apps are kept up-to-date, and version 7.5 launched for both on the same day.

• Free (SoundHound) - Download Now
• $6.99 (SoundHound Premium) - Download Now

Questions?

Be sure to let us know in the comments if you have any other questions about SoundHound.

* record scratch * * freeze frame * Yup, this is the latest update to djay Pro and let me tell you, folks, Algoriddim is really doubling down on the Pro moniker with this one. And I'm not kidding about that "pro" thing. You're forgiven if some of the upgrades go over your head — some certainly went over mine.

Wait, first tell me more about djay Pro!

The Apple Design Award winning DJ software is sort of like a virtual DJ booth. You can open the app, connect to Spotify or iTunes, and start mixing music almost immediately. With beat-matching, key-matching, loads of pre-bundled sound effects, sampling, loops, cue points, visualizers, four decks for mixing, drum pads — the list goes on — it's an incredibly powerful tool for performing DJs.

OK, so what's going on in this update?

Buckle up, there's a lot!

• djay Pro now supports Pioneer DJ's latest, greatest DJ hardware. The app works flawlessly with Pioneer DJ's newest CDJs, the TOUR1 and 2000NXS2.
• The app supports single-cable connectivity for up to four (four!) CDJs connected to a DJM via LAN cables.
• The app now features improved Touch Bar integration. A DJ can manipulate two decks simultaneously, navigate the music library, and more.
• The app touts deeper Spotify integration. DJs can now navigate Spotify's Browse section, which features loads of new music, playlists, and curated content.
• With Adaptive Sync Mode, djay Pro can sync up tracks with both straight and dynamic tempos.

Cool, uh, so … a lot of that went over my head

Same, pal. The nitty gritty is this: djay Pro's latest update adds some powerful integrations for DJs using the latest hardware from Pioneer DJ. It also works better with Spotify, adds new controls for the Touch Bar on the latest MacBook Pro, and it's even better at syncing up tracks.

I'm a djay Pro user — how much is this update going to cost me?

It's free! That said, when you inevitably upgrade to the latest Pioneer DJ hardware you might choose to place the blame on djay Pro for encouraging you to splurge.

I'm not a djay Pro user but I sure would like to be!

If you'd like to check out djay Pro before you buy it, you can snag a free trial from Algoriddim's website. If you'd rather just jump right in, you can purchase it on djay Pro's website or in the Mac App Store.

djay Pro - $49.99 - Download Now

Learn more

You can read more about the changes (and even take some DJ classes) over on Algoriddim's website.

Did I mention djay Pro is listed among the best music editing apps for Mac? Check out the article:

• Best Music Apps for Mac

SoundHound has launched a important new capability with its latest update, and now allows you to use your voice to control the app. By saying "Ok, Hound," you can ask the app to identify songs, get the latest song by your favorite artist, or even play a particular track in Apple Music or Spotify.

Here's what you can do with SoundHound's new voice controls:

You can get the latest update for SoundCloud on the App Store now.

• Free - Download Now

This simple, yet challenging game takes the basic snake game you probably remember best from your 90s Nokia phone and turns it into a free-roaming online multiplayer experience that you simply have to check out for yourself.

Slither.io is a free download in both the App Store and Google Play Store.

• Free - Download now for iOS
• Free - Download now for Android

Get down with the basics

Slither.io takes some getting used to, in terms of both controls and strategy. Here are some quick tips if you're new to the game.

There are two ways to control your snake's direction: with one finger or two.

To control your snake with one finger, simply tap and hold somewhere around your snake and it will head in that direction. Drag your finger around the perimeter of the screen to smoothly control your snake's direction. Alternatively, tap anywhere on the screen and your snake will promptly turn and head in that direction. This works just as well — if not better — with a stylus (paging Samsung Galaxy Note users).

To control your snake with two fingers, hold the phone in both hands and tap back and forth with your thumbs to control your snake in an appropriately snake-like fashion. Tap above your snake to go up and tap below your snake to move down. The benefits of two finger control is the ability to make quick turns to attack or counter against other snakes. It also helps you collect more orbs when you're smaller and traveling through an orb-rich area.

Either way you choose to play it, you use boost the same way: double-tap and hold in the direction you want to boost. Just keep in mind that boosting spends orb energy and in turn makes your snake shorter, so use it sparingly.

When you use boost, you lay out a path of orbs behind you. Following orb trails is a good idea for a number of reasons. For starters, it's a fairly quick way to find a steady stream of orbs when you're just starting out, and it can help you find other snakes. Following the tail-end of a giant snake? It's only a matter of time before they start spewing out orbs, plus you're in a prime position if they go down.

Whether you've personally taken down a big snake or simply stumbled across a goldmine of orbs, you shouldn't just glide straight through it all, since that leaves you vulnerable to being cut off from someone coming the other way.

Your best strategy is to use your snake's body to create a barrier around the orbs as fast as you can, then loop back and collect the orbs. While you probably won't get as many orbs as you would if you just boosted right through, this is a safer strategy that might also lure foolhardy boosters right into you, which just means more orbs for you.

Chase the floaties!

As you become familiar with slither.io, you'll notice that some of the glowing orbs got some moves. They'll do their best to run away from you, so you'll need to use your boost to catch them. The benefit is that they're worth much more than the average orb, so if you're just starting out, you'll receive noticeable growth when you snag one.

However, by the same logic, if you see one coming right at you, it's possible that there's a snake chasing it your way. You might be in a prime position to ambush an unsuspecting player.

Be opportunistic around big snakes

When you're a small snake (say under 1,000) and you stumble across a massive snake plugging way, you might want to stick around it for a while — for a couple of reasons, actually.

If you stumble across a huge snake but are nowhere near its head (that you know of… we'll talk about the scale of this game later), just travel in the same direction as the big guy. Big snakes attract a lot of attention and are typically good at taking out other snakes. That's where you rush in and gobble up as many orbs as you can.

Also, if the big guy gets taken down while you're tracking farther back, you'll want to jump in and gobble up as many of their orbs as you can — but head towards the tail first. Since all snakes get cut off at the head, you know there's definitely one or more snakes trying to get all the orbs, so you're bound to run into them (hopefully not literally) if you go towards the head. Meanwhile, the rest of the snake might be prime for the picking. Take the safe route first, then double-back to investigate.

Use the coil trap

So if you've been playing for a while, you'll have seen snakes get totally surrounded by another bigger snake (very reminiscent of how white cells track down bacteria). Now common wisdom is, if you're significantly smaller than another snake that's near you, you shouldn't bunch yourself up so as to make it easy to be surrounded.

However, knowing this, an advanced move that you could attempt is to coil yourself up when you see a big snake surrounding another helpless victim. The goal here is to get the bigger worm's attention. Once you do and you can tell they're coming your way — even better if they're boosting your way thinking they've got the jump on you — you suddenly boost and cut them off.

This move is all about anticipation and timing, but if you get it right you'll be free to reap the rewards.

Get big, then get lost

Once you become a giant snake — and especially if you reach the top 10 — you're going to have a big target on your back. Everyone is going to be gunning for you.

Another tricky aspect of getting big is the change in perspective. When you're just starting out, you'll only see a small portion of a giant snake passing by. When you become the giant snake, you'll have an almost god-like ability to see way more of the arena than the smaller snakes. This is good for setting up ambushes and enveloping other snakes, but you'll find the game really starts to lag if there are too many snakes on your screen at one time.

So, depending where you are in the map (Pro-tip: That small circle in the bottom-right corner is the map, with the dot showing where you are in the arena) it's a good idea to try and head for an open, preferably sparsely populated area. Now, there's no way of knowing where those areas are, but typically the edge of the arena is a safe bet. It can be a good place to hang out and regroup while picking off the occasional straggler.

Once you've reached the top ten, you're basically in survival mode. You don't need to play aggressively and should really only use your boost for defensive situations or when you're sure you can trap someone safely.

What's your slither.io strategy?

With these tips and strategies, you'll be well on your way to the top ten! Got any other tips for overtaking your snake opponents? Drop us a line in the comments below!

Moog has launched the Model 15 app, which brings a full-fledged Model 15 synthesizer — which used to retail for $10,000 — to your iPad. The [$30 app](is a digital recreation of the legendary synthesizer, featuring rows and rows of knobs, switches, and buttons; along with oscillators, low/high pass filters, looping recorder, ping-pong delay module, MIDI input, and patch cables, all designed to give you the ability to create stellar beats.

There's also a "1150 ribbon controller, 8-step sequencing arpeggiator and the award-winning Animoog keyboard with 22 built-in scales and polyphonic modulation capabilities." Here's what's on offer with the Model 15 app:

• Ships with over 160 unique presets
• Recreates the sound of a hardware Moog Model 15 modular synthesizer
• Intuitive patching and cable coloring
• Support for landscape and portrait modes
• Voltage-controlled stereo ping-pong delay
• Expressive sequencing arpeggiator
• Moog 1150 Ribbon controller
• Real-time looping recorder with overdub and immediate sharing

The Model 15 app is built using Apple's Metal low-level API, and as such it works on 64-bit iOS devices, including the iPhone 5s or newer, as well as the iPad Air or newer. Given the feature-set on offer though, it makes sense to use the app on an iPad or the iPad Pro.

• $29.99 -Download Now

TuneIn has some exciting news for sports fans, with the streaming service announcing that it will provide live streaming audio coverage of upcoming MLB, PGA and NCAA events. It all kicks off on Saturday, April 2, with the final games in the NCAA basketball championship tournament.

Provided by Westwood One, the NCAA championship stream will include the Final Four games, along with the actual championship game itself. You'll be able to stream the games through TuneIn's March Madness station.

If you check in with the MLB Radio station on April 3, you can get live Opening Day coverage of your favorite Major League Baseball teams. The coverage is provided by MLB Network International Talk and others, and includes the official MLB podcasts.

Finally, golf fans will be able to listen in on the PGA's 2016 Masters Tournament. The stream will once again be provided through Westwood One, and will located in the Masters Radio station starting April 7.

All three of these streams will be provided for free through TuneIn's mobile apps and website. You can grab the app from the App Store now.

• Free - Download Now

Squirrels, the developer behind Mac utilities Reflector and AirParrot, has released AirParrot Remote for iPhone and iPad. AirParrot for Mac allows you to wirelessly send content from your Mac to other devices, much like AirPlay, and now AirParrot Remote allows you to control the Mac app, including what media you send, and where you send it. Not only can you send music and videos to other devices, you can use AirParrot Remote to mirror your Mac's display right on your iPhone or iPad.

Here is what you can do with AirParrot Remote:

• Build Playlists: Find media files on your computer and add them to a playlist for continuous streaming.
• Control Your Computer: Once paired, AirParrot Remote can control the keyboard and mouse on your system.
• Control AirParrot 2: AirParrot Remote was designed to allow you to use AirParrot 2 without touching your computer. Initiate connections, select new destinations, mirror your display, extend your desktop and more.
• Preview Screens: View your selected display before you begin mirroring to make sure the content you've selected is what you want sent to your destination.
• Secure Pairing: Pairing AirParrot Remote to AirParrot 2 is easy and secure. The apps are paired directly together with no in-between connections. Use a Quick Connect Code (TM) or automatic discovery over a network to begin.

AirParrot Remote requires AirParrot 2 in order to work. You can grab AirParrot Remote from the App Store now.

• $6.99 - Download Now

TuneIn has announced a deal with the National Basketball Association that will allow the streaming service to livestream all of the games in the pro basketball league, starting in the 2016-2017 season for subscribers to TuneIn Premium.

TuneIn stated:

TuneIn already has agreements to livestream games from Major League Baseball, the National Football League and the National Hockey League.

Clickarus is a new metronome app from the musical group Airplane Mode. You can use Clickarus to set up multiple metronome tracks, picking different clicking and tapping sounds. You can name your metronome tracks for your songs, and set the tempos accordingly. It's a universal app for iPhone and iPad, and syncs your new tracks and changes you've made over iCloud.

Here are the headline featuers of Clickarus:

• Choose between five different click sounds.
• Sync between all your iOS devices via iCloud.
• Jump to the next or previous song with a connected bluetooth device, such as the AirTurn, or a Bluetooth keyboard.
• Adjust tempos quickly by dragging the counter up and down, or just tap to the beat and let Clickarus figure it out.
• Original tempo is saved, so you can revert if needed.
• Share your song list with bandmates via email, iMessage, et cetera.
• Easily rearrange songs in the set for different performances.
• Universal app, with excellent iPad Pro support.

You can get Clickarus for free from the App Store now. If you like the app, you can choose to tip Airplane Mode for $0.99, $2.99, or $4.99.

• Free - Download Now

Rogue Amoeba, which develops a number of audio-focused apps for the mac, has updated its audio recording app, Piezo, to version 1.5. This update adds support for the Instant On extra, which allows Piezo to record audio from appliations that are already running. The company also announced that it will be removing Piezo from the Mac App Store, relying instead solely on direct purchases.

Customers who purchased Piezo from the Mac App Store will need to migrate over to the direct version to receive updates, including the update to version 1.5. The process is free, and only needs to be done once. When you download Piezo 1.5 directly from Rogue Amoeba and open the app, you'll be shown a note on the change if you're a Mac App Store customer. Follow the on-screen directions to obtain your free license key, enter it into the app, and you're set.

Rogue Amoeba also provided some insight as to what prompted this change:

Rogue Amoeba isn't the first high-profile Mac developer to pull an app from the Mac App Store. Late last year, Bohemian Coding did the same with Sketch, its graphic design application.

You can grab Piezo 1.5 from Rogue Amoeba right now.

• $19 - Download Now

Combining gorgeous design with ridiculously great functionality, it turned Apple devices into legitimate tools for professional DJs and approachable apps for aspiring mixers alike. Now djay Pro once again flips the turn-tables and redefines expectations on iPad Pro.

• $19.99 on sale - Download now

I have zero musical ability, which breaks my heart every time a new version of djay comes out. The impressive thing is, though, that while I remain terrible, djay is still ludicrously fun. On the iPad Pro, that translates into four decks, tons of keyboard shortcuts, and—get this!—4K video support for visual scratching.

It also multitasks like a monster. Apple's own music app doesn't even do that yet. So, you can start something playing, go do something else, then quickly slide djay back over and change or tweak what you're listening to. You can also go full-on split view if you want to keep djay live while looking up info on the web or taking notes or... doing anything at all.

One look at competing tablets and you can see that, no matter the software, absent amazing tablet-specific apps, their value is incredibly limited. djay Pro is one of those apps that helps make a platform. It's impossible not to look at it and see how powerful and how creative the iPad Pro not only will be, but already is.

The team at Algoriddim never disappoints, but they've really outdone themselves this time. I'm eager to hear what the mixers out there, pro and casual alike, think of it. I can gawk at the design and engineering, and I can enjoy what I listen to, but when you try it out, let me know how it feels!

djay Pro is available now, and at 30% off for its introductory sale. Act fast!

• $19.99 on sale - Download now

Desktop­Class DJ & VJ Application Designed Exclusively for iPad Pro

(MUNICH, Germany)​– December 09, 2015 ­ Algoriddim, creators of the the world's best selling DJ app with over 20 million downloads, today released djay Pro. The first professional grade app to fully leverage the advanced audio and video capabilities of the new iPad Pro, djay Pro includes a suite of sophisticated desktop­class features including 4 Decks, HD Waveforms, and Video Mixing.

Building upon the rock­solid foundation of the Apple Design Award winning app djay, the sheer performance of iPad Pro enables a host of new features that were previously impossible. djay Pro stretches the limits of audio visual performance on a mobile device, including mixing of up to 4 audio tracks, plus two simultaneous 4K video streams, all rendered in pristine sound quality and with brilliant video output in full HD, at 60 frames per second. Moreover, djay Pro for iPad works with the Smart Keyboard offering over 70 keyboard shortcuts for cue points, looping, library navigation, search, and more. This takes the best of both worlds, desktop and iPad, and melds them together for an unparalleled experience.

djay Pro's advanced iOS 9 Multitasking capabilities let the user quickly open another app and interact with it without leaving djay Pro. This improves the preparation and performance workflow by allowing DJs to take notes about a tracklist or write down song requests on­the­fly. With Split View, users can go a step further and have djay Pro plus another app open and active at the same time.

"iPad Pro sets a whole new standard for music and video creativity on a mobile device," said Karim Morsy, CEO of Algoriddim. "Every element, from the A9X chip plus the graphics processor to the Smart Keyboard, has enabled us to introduce unprecedented pro level features that combine the best of touch with tactile control. djay Pro gives performing DJs and visual artists endless flexibility to take their sets to new heights."

At the heart of djay Pro is an innovative, modern user interface that provides flexible layers of functionality alongside a powerful music library. It features advanced performance modes including horizontal and vertical colored waveforms, live sampler and drum pads, FX racks, as well as a powerful four deck view that allows DJs to play, mix, slice, and synchronize up to four tracks simultaneously.  The all­new video mode in djay Pro allows users to apply visualizers to their music and mix videos in real­time, all with stunning transitions, visual FX, plus title and image overlays. It also comes with extensive pre­bundled video content so users can get creative right away. Additionally, users can quickly record video on­the­fly using the iPad's built­in camera and combine it with their music for a personalized music video creation. The 1080p video output can be saved as a high quality movie recording in real­time, displayed on an external monitor through HDMI, or streamed wirelessly via AirPlay.

The innovative music library in djay Pro enables DJs to seamlessly combine the Spotify catalog with their local music and video tracks, as well as files stored in iCloud Drive or Dropbox, into a single library. This provides unprecedented flexibility for song selection to DJs and VJs no matter where the user's content is located. Furthermore, djay Pro's music library includes an advanced song recommendation engine powered by The Echo Nest which suggests tracks that go well with what the DJ is currently playing based on danceability, BPM, key, music style, and how well the song mixes with the currently playing track. Over 30 state­of­the­art audio effects by Sugar Bytes are available via In­App Purchase. DJs can beat­synchronize and chain multiple effect units on up to four decks simultaneously allowing for unprecedented creative expression. A host of new audio analysis and editing features powered by audEERING allow users to view and edit beat grids with sample accurate precision. djay Pro integrates seamlessly with professional DJ hardware supporting select controllers by Pioneer DJ, Numark, Reloop, and other manufacturers right out of the box.

Even better, Cue Points, beat grid edits, metadata, and FX purchases from iOS and Mac versions of djay will automatically sync over iCloud to djay Pro bridging the experience between consumer and pro. DJs can now prepare for their DJ sets no matter where they are and no matter which device they are using.

Over the past 10 years, Algoriddim established itself as a leading innovator of DJ software winning the Apple Design Award, App of the Year, and more than 8 Editors' Choice awards from the App Store and Google Play across 5 different platforms. Working with top tier hardware brands, Algoriddim has made DJing accessible to millions of users around the globe. djay Pro for iPad opens a new chapter for

professional DJs and VJs as the first solution to truly leverage the capabilities of iPad Pro.

FEATURES OVERVIEW

Built for iPad Pro

• Smart Keyboard integration (over 70 keyboard shortcuts)
• Advanced iOS 9 Multitasking integration (Slide Over, Split view, and Portrait modes) - Full HD video capture and rendering (1080p)
• Support for 4K videos
• AirPlay Integration
• iPad camera integration
• 60 frames per second graphics rendering
• iCloud integration: syncs cue points, grid edits, and metadata with iOS and Mac versions of djay

Video Integration

• Video mixing and scratching
• Camera integration to record custom clips on the fly - Transitions
• Music Visualizers
• Visual FX
• Title & image overlays
• A/V recording
• Support for external displays and AirPlay
• Video library with pre­bundled content

Spotify Integration

• Instant access to over 20 million songs
• Playlists, Songs, Charts, Browse
• Match: cloud­based song recommendations powered by The Echo Nest
• Instant access to BPM and Key information through the cloud
• Advanced audio streaming technology: ultra­low latency, advanced effects, on­the­fly analysis
• Supports streams of up to 320 kbps bitrate

Hardware Integration

• Native support for DJ controllers including Reloop Beatpad, Reloop Beatpad 2, Pioneer DDJ­WeGO, Numark Mixdeck Quad, Numark iDJ Pro, and others
• Support for multi­channel USB audio interfaces

Earlier this year, the TuneIn streaming audio service announced a new subscription tier, TuneIn Premium, offering more content for $7.99 a month. Now TuneIn Premium will add coverage of the National Football League in a multi-year agreement that will offer listeners access to live play-by-play feeds for all 32 NFL teams.

Here's a look at what subscribers can access with their new NFL content:

• Access to play-by-play feeds for all 32 NFL teams, including both the home and away feeds, AFC/NFC championship games, the Super Bowl and select Spanish broadcasts.
• NFL on TuneIn Channel – All TuneIn users will have access to an NFL channel featuring audio from select NFL Media programming, including popular NFL Network shows such as NFL Total Access, Around the NFL, and NFL HQ, as well as official NFL Media podcasts including Move the Sticks and the Dave Dameshek Football Program. NFL on TuneIn will be complemented by original NFL programming produced by TuneIn.
• TuneIn Live Look-In Show– Starting in November, TuneIn Premium subscribers will have access to a seven-hour-long Sunday broadcast that will feature live analysis, stats, and drop-ins of local radio coverage for all Sunday games airing in-progress. This show will be live Sundays from 1pm ET – 8pm ET.

• Free - Download now

Popular song identifying app Shazam is getting tighter integration with streaming services Rdio and Spotify, bringing the ability to easily add songs they Shazam to playlists on either service without a premium subscription. The feature has been available to Rdio and Spotify's premium subscribers for a while now, but it is now rolling out to everyone that has their account linked to Shazam.

Shazam also announced that Rdio users who sign up through the Shazam app will now be able to take advantage of a 48-hour free trial of Rdio Unlimited. Once the free trial runs out, users will of course still be able to add songs to a playlist directly from Shazam.

Press Release:

Shazam Makes Music Discovery Even Easier with Rdio and Spotify

New Rdio Users Can Enjoy Free Trial of Rdio Unlimited and Listen to Full Tracks in Shazam

Users with Free Rdio and Spotify Accounts Can Now Add Shazamed Tracks to Playlists

New York, August 5, 2015 – Music fans asked, and Shazam listened. Today, Shazam announced upgraded features for both Rdio and Spotify users that will create new, seamless paths to discovery.

New Rdio users who sign up through Shazam will now get the perk of a 48-hour free trial of Rdio Unlimited, giving them full-track playback in Shazam, so that they can listen uninterrupted to playlists and top charts without ever having to leave the app. Once the trial is over, free Rdio users can still listen to previews of any track or playlist in Shazam and add songs to any of their Rdio playlists.

Free Rdio or Spotify users will now be able to add any song they Shazam to their playlists with just a few taps, making it easy to listen to new tracks later. Users can either automatically add their Shazams to a "My Shazam Tracks" playlist or choose a specific playlist. Rdio Unlimited and Spotify Premium users already enjoy this feature, as well as the ability to listen to full tracks, curated playlists and top charts right in Shazam.

"By working with our streaming partners, Shazam is making it simple for fans to do what they love most when they discover a new song or artist – sit back and listen," said Daniel Danker, Chief Product Officer, Shazam. "It's also never been easier to add tracks you discover to a playlist — just connect to Rdio or Spotify, and anytime you Shazam, we'll make sure those tracks are waiting for you on a playlist the next time you look."

The expanded features are available today for iOS and Android users.

About Shazam:

Shazam is one of the world's most popular apps, used by more than 100 million people each month to magically connect to the world around them. Building on its pioneering leadership in music identification, Shazam now helps people discover, interact with, and share video, audio, or printed content on TV, radio, movie screens, magazines, newspapers, packaged goods, and retail stores — and now Shazam lets music fans follow their favorite artists to see their Shazams and share in the thrill of discovery. The app has exceeded 20 billion total Shazams since its launch, and users Shazam over 20 million times each day. For more information, visit www.shazam.com or follow us on Twitter @shazam

Apple Music doesn't (yet?) integrate lyrics, but if that's something you care about, there's a workaround you can use right now: a widget called Musixmatch. Federico Viticci noticed the functionality and wrote about it on MacStories:

You can get Musixmatch on the App Store, and you can read more about how else Ticci uses it on MacStories.

• Free - Download now

FuzzMeasure, a tool for audio professionals that allows them to produce detailed graphs of audio and acoustic measurements, has been updated to version 4 today with a new graphing system, new publishing features, and new licensing options.

FuzzMeasure has picked up a ton of new features in version 4, but one of the big highlights is that the application will now let users combine graphs:

In addition to the ability to combine graphs, the look and feel of FuzzMeasure 4 has been updated for OS X Yosemite, while the program has picked up more than 50 new features, including all new graphs, autosave and document versioning support, new image exporting options, and much, much more. Perhaps one of the coolest parts about this update is that a lot of the new features were developed by FuzzMeasure's single developer with Apple's year-old programming language, Swift.

Finally, FuzzMeasure now has two licensing options. For personal use, you can pick the program up for $100, while a commercial license will run you $500. If you're interested in FuzzMeasure 4, you can check it out, along with full rundown of the crazy number of new features, from the source links below.

• $100 (personal), $500 (commercial) - Buy Now

Sources: FuzzMeasure (1, 2)

When using UltraTuner's Stage mode, the Apple Watch app can be used without needing to pull out your iPhone. As you tune, UltraTuner will light up, telling you whether you're sharp, flat, or in tune.

You can see the full list of changes in UltraTuner 1.1.1 right here:

• Added compatibility with Apple Watch (Stage mode only)
• Now compatible with Audiobus on iOS8
• General reliability improvements

UltraTuner 1.1.1 is available for download on the App Store right now.

• $4.99 - Download Now

Tying your Rdio or Spotify account to Shazam not only creates that playlist for you, it lets you to listen to entire songs right inside the Shazam app as well! You have to have a paid subscription to either Spotify or Rdio in order for this to work. You won't be able to play full songs or listen on-demand if you don't. If you aren't sure about a subscription to either service, both offer free trials you can take advantage of first.

How to turn Shazam tags into Rdio and Spotify playlists instantly

1. Download Shazam or Shazam Encore if you don't have them already — Encore is a paid version but ad free.
2. Launch the Shazam app.
3. Tap on the My Shazam tab in the bottom navigation.
4. Tap on the Settings icon on the top right corner.
5. Tap on either Connect to Rdio or Connect to Spotify.
6. Tap on Play Full Tracks.
7. Sign into either Rdio or Spotify on the next screen.
8. You'll receive a confirmation at the top of the screen that a Shazam playlist has been added to either Spotify or Rdio.
9. You'll find the playlist in the Playlists section of either the Rdio or Spotify app.

I listen to a fair amount of "live" audio on my Mac in the form of Beats Music, streaming radio, or roller derby play-by-plays. It's easy enough to replay a song if I've missed it on Beats, but not so much when it comes to actual live audio. So I was thrilled to discover Audio Hijack 3's new "Time Shift" feature, which lets you pause, rewind, and fast forward through live audio.

I've been a fan of Audio Hijack for a long time, as it's a hugely useful podcast-recording tool, and its developer, Rogue Amoeba, also happens to be based here in Boston (well, as "based" as a remote company can be). The latest update to the $50 app is awesome for a variety of reasons, but Time Shift is particularly useful for my purposes. (It's based off technology from an older Rogue Amoeba app, Intermission, that pauses and rewinds live audio, but lacks Audio Hijack's ability to also record it outright.)

I'm most excited, to be honest, to use it for transcription purposes — like today's Apple financial call, for instance. (After all, it's a lot faster to transcribe an audio call or live stream if you don't have to wait until it's over, and you have a recording, to play and pause.)

How to use Audio Hijack 3 to rewind, fast forward, and pause live audio

Setting up Time Shift is remarkably simple using Audio Hijack's Session Templates.

1. Open Audio Hijack and select "Application Audio" from the Session Template menu.
   

2. Double-click on the Application block to choose an app to record from. (By default, iTunes is selected.)
   

3. Scroll down on the sidebar to Built-In Effects and drag the Time Shift option from the menu into your session builder.
   

4. Press the Record button in the lower-left corner of the window to begin your session.
   

5. Use the built-in rewind, fast-forward, pause, or skip-to-live controls on the Time Shift block to control audio.
   

6. When you're finished, press the stop button, and click the Recordings button to listen to your recorded audio in full.
   

If you just want to use Time Shift for its rewind capabilities and don't want to record a final product, just right-click the Recorder block to delete or disable it for your Session.

Pretty neat, right? If you don't own Audio Hijack 3 and want to give this a go, you can download a free trial from Rogue Amoeba's website; you can record or listen to ten minutes of audio without a license key.

If you're in a business — as I am — where you occasionally conduct interviews over the phone, or want to remember brainstorming sessions with a friend, you may wish to record your calls. In the past, this was a bit of a pain with iPhone calls, since iOS apps can't hijack your audio signal. You usually had to record using an external device, either by putting your iPhone on speaker or wiring it up in some way.

No longer.

Thanks to the folks at Ecamm, you can use any Continuity-enabled Mac running OS X Yosemite to record your iPhone calls with Call Recorder for FaceTime ($30, free trial available).

As the name might suggest, the Call Recorder for FaceTime is primarily designed to record your FaceTime conversations, but it can also record telephone conversations that have arrived on your Mac via Handoff.

Before we go through this how-to, though, remember: Telephone recording laws vary from state to state, and it's usually considered polite behavior (if not legally required) to inform the person on the other end that you'd like to record the call.

How to record iPhone calls on your Mac

1. Download Call Recorder for FaceTime from Ecamm's website. You can either download a 7-day free trial to test it out, or pay $30 for the full app.
2. Run the Call Recorder installer. Once it finishes, open FaceTime.
   

3. If you're asked to configure Call Recorder's settings, you can do so, and chose whether to record calls automatically, create separate audio tracks for each person, and where to save your recordings.
4. Make a FaceTime audio or phone call from your Mac (or receive a FaceTime Audio or phone call on your Mac).
   

5. Press the red button in the Call Recorder window to begin recording. (If you've configured automatic recording, you can skip this step.)
   

6. When you're done recording, you can either press the Stop button to finish or end the call.
   

By default, your recordings will be stored in your Documents folder under Saved Calls, though you can change that by opening Call Recorder's settings screen.

A few years ago, at Macworld Expo, my former colleagues and I stumbled upon a neat little Mac utility called Boom. The premise was simple: Your laptop's speakers don't always have the oomph you need when playing back music or video; Boom artificially boosts the sound levels to make everything sound just right.

Boom 2, released Wednesday, improves upon that initial concept while keeping the heart and soul of the utility intact. Boom's volume boost has now been tailored to each Mac in Apple's lineup, which means your louder audio is also clearer, crisper, and designed to best utilize the speakers in your computer. You can also select from several other equalizer settings (including your own custom equalizer profile) and individually boost the volume of a single song.

Mac as Boom box

Boom has been an essential utility for me since I first discovered it in 2011 — as a pretty regular MacBook Air user, I loved it for boosting volume when playing a video clip for friends or sharing a song outside the confines of an AirPlay-wired room. Boom 2 is just as useful as its predecessor, but its equalization tools make it a worthy successor.

The app's Mac-specific equalizer is surprisingly good at adjusting frequencies to compensate for a laptop's tinny speakers, while the 16 equalizer style presets offer a variety of tweaks to better boost a movie's sound, vocal track, or electronic beat. You can even customize the equalizer by dragging various sliders around for a more specifically-boosted song.

It's a small feature to improve upon, but Global Delight implements it very well. You can also set up keyboard shortcuts to toggle equalizer presets, letting you quickly switch between presets for different styles of music.

Imprinting the Boom effect on music

New to Boom in version 2 is the ability to imprint its volume boost onto a video file. (You could previously boost audio files only.) You can add a flat volume boost to just about any audiovisual file type now, including mp3, m4a, aiff, caf, wav, mov, mp4, m4v, 3gp, 3g2, or dv, though you might not be able to load a file with any sort of DRM or copy-protection.

In practice, the volume boost works very well, though it's a flat increase — no equalization tools here. It's simply a quick way to improve the volume on a file before sending it to a friend or putting it on a music player. I know I'll probably use it as a quick sound-balance for certain videos; I'm sure folks can think of other quick uses, as well.

Music to my ears

Overall, Boom remains a must-have utility for me on my Mac laptop, and its improvements make it all the better. You can download a free trial of Boom 2 on the company's website or purchase it outright for $15; if you purchased an original copy of Boom, you can get the new version for just $7.49.

Every day dozens and dozens of new and updated apps and games hit the iOS and Mac App Stores. It's impossible to keep up with them all, but it's not impossible to pick out the very best. Here they are! Today we've got loads of new and updated games, music apps and other great apps!

New and updated iOS apps

• Angry Birds Star Wars II 1.6.0: 15 new Bird Side levels, 15 new Pork Side levels, and now free. Free - Download now
• Capo Touch: Learn to play music from your iTunes library by slowing it down. Can automatically detect chords, key changes and more. $4.99 - Download now
• SnapMatch Soccer: A tile matching game with a twist. Successfully matching groups of tiles helps your team win on the pitch. Free - Download now
• Urban Trial Freestyle: Use a freestyle motorbike to pull off spectacular tricks. Customize your bike and rider. Master Time Attack, Stunt Mode and Challenges. $1.99 - Download now
• Hellraid: The Escape: Action adventure game featuring challenging puzzles. You're in a magic prison guarded by demonic creatures with no memory of who you are or why you're there. $2.99 - Download now
• SongSheet: Chord charts, set list and gig assistant for musicians. Works with bluetooth foot pedal, supports auto scroll, print to AirPrint printers and more. $6.99 - Download now
• Minecraft Pocket Edition 0.9.0: Place blocks, go on adventures. The mobile version of the enormously popular game. Billed as "biggest update ever." Adds infinite worlds, caves, new blocks and items, wolves, new flowers, new biomes and more. $6.99 - Download now
• Sonic Jump Fever 1.0.0: Vertical jumping with Sonic the Hedgehog and friends in a race against the clock. More responsive controls, new Premium Booster added, Stun power up improved, bug fixes and other enhancements. Free - Download now
• The Wolf Among Us Episode 5: A graphical adventure from the makers of the Walking Dead game, featuring characters from fable brought to our world. A gritty and violent thriller. The fifth and final episode, Cry Wolf, is finally available. $4.99 - Download now
• Smash Hit 1.3.0: Move in harmony with music and sound but smash everything in your path. Now includes Mayhem Mode, Training Mode and Zen Mode. Free - Download now

New and updated Mac apps

• DropZone 3: Drag files, folders or text into a customizable grid of actions. Adds Drop Bar to stash files you know you'll need later. $4.99 - Download now
• Capo 3.1: The (original) Mac version of the music app that lets you slow down your iTunes library, recognize chords and key changes and more. Now sports new chord detection technology and can save projects in iCloud, which can be shared with Capo Touch. $14.99 - Download now

More apps and updates?

If you try any of the apps or updates, let me know how they work for you. If you got any new or updated apps today that you loved, but don't see here, let us know about them!

Capo, the renowned song-learning app for Mac, is now available on the iPhone and iPad. Called Capo touch, all the power of the original, the ability to "reverse engineer rock and roll" as they put it, now fits into the palm of your hand. Whether you're a working guitarist or strings player on your way to a last minute gig, a songwriter needing to quickly note down a new song or riff, or an aspiring musician who just wants to learn more, faster, Capo touch provides a remarkably powerful toolset for doing all that, and more.

Made by Apple Design Award (ADA) winner Chris Liscio of SuperMegaUltraGroovy, Capo touch for iPhone and iPad is a distillation of Capo for Mac. It takes the same great engine, the same great beat detection, the same great looping, and puts it behind a cleverly layered interface ideal for mobile. That means it's simple, clean, and approachable on the surface, but just as functional and capable as you dive deeper into it.

Now, I'm not a musician. Whatever the opposite of talent is, that's what I have when it comes to music. But on a purely technical, purely design level, it's hard not to be impressed by what Capo touch does.

The idea here is that you want to learn a new song "by ear". To do so you launch Capo touch and load the song in from your iTunes library. Then the fun begins. Capo's chord intelligence engine automatically detects and renders out for you the chords, and then lets you change them up if you want to. There's also automatic beat detection with bar/beat display, metronome count-off, and impressively, an incredibly easy, intuitive way to loop regions you really want to focus on.

There are also independent speed and pitch controls, so you can slow a song down and play along at exactly your own pace. (Capo calls it a "mastering-quality time stretching engine" which needs to be used in a Doctor Who episode, and soon.)

So let's say you're a guitarist and you get a call to fill in for a few shows or part of a tour, you can grab Capo touch and learn all the new songs you'll need. Let's say you're on a bus in-between gigs when suddenly you want or need to change up a song for the next show, you can pull your iPhone or iPad out and get right on it. Let's say you're a songwriter who has finished a great new piece but now has to note it all down for recording and legal reasons, you can let Capo touch do a lot of the heavy lifting for you. Let's say you've learned how to play the basics but really want to expand your repertoire of songs, Capo touch can get you well on your way.

Here's a quote MegaUltraGroovy provided from Billy Morrison, guitarist for Billy Idol and Royal Machines:

And from Kenny Wright, bassist for John Legend, Pharrell, Wiz Khalifa, and more:

If you run Capo on multiple iOS devices, or on both iOS and Mac, iCloud Sync will make sure the song you're working on is everywhere you want to work on it.

Beyond music, it's great to see more powerful, sophisticated software making the jump from Mac to iPhone and iPad. As with any translation, it helps the developer really come to terms with the core of what makes their app useful, and the provides that to us, the consumers, in what often amounts to a new and delightful way.

Such is the case with Capo touch. There are elements of it that may arguably be better on iPhone and iPad, but inarguably Capo touch's existence makes iPhone and iPad better. More like this, please.

Capo touch is available now, on sale for a limited time at just $4.99. It'd be an absolute steal at twice that. Capo 3.1 for Mac is also available now as a free update for existing customers, and also on sale for a limited time at just $14.99 for new customers.

• $4.99 - Capo touch - Download now
• $14.99 - Capo for Mac - Download now

Every day dozens and dozens of new and updated apps and games hit the iOS and Mac App Stores. It's impossible to keep up with them all, but it's not impossible to pick out the very best. Here they are! Today we've got music apps, games, note taking tools and more!

New and updated iOS apps

• Djay 2.5.2: The popular DJ app for the iPhone makes it easier to switch between iTunes and Spotify libraries, improves key display in the library Match tab and ands the Record button immediately when switching back to your local iTunes library. Free - Download now
• Beats Music 2.1.0: The music service that Apple just acquired as part of a $3 billion deal. The trial period has been extended from 7 to 14 days, the annual subscription price dropped from $119.88 to $99.99, and a whole bunch of bug fixes. Free - Download now
• Write 2.5: The note taking and text editor for iPhone with Markdown support and more adds dozens of new features and makes some bug fixes too. $1.99 - Download now
• Trainz Simulator 2: N3V's realistic train simulation game is now available for download. Compared to the original this new game has new routes and sessions, multiplayer support, online chat and much more. $7.99 - Download now
• Surgeon Simulator 1.0.5: The riotous game that puts the life of patients that need surgery in your hands now sports an alien autopsy mode! $5.99 - Download now
• PDF Expert 5.1: PDF Expert lets you read, annotate, and edit your PDFS and is now a universal app for both iPhone and iPad. Version 5.1 brings with it a much speedier experience, continuous scroll, and more! $9.99 - Download Now
• Inky Mail 0.98: A new alternative mail app for iPhone and iPad. Inky Mail, which is already available for Mac, now makes an appearance on iOS bringing with it smart gestures, one click unsubscribe, and more powerful features than what the native Mail.app can offer. Free - Download Now
• Real Racing 3 2.3.0: The amazingly realistic auto racing game adds next-gen Le Mans prototypes, "an Epic Le Mans Campaign," Circuit de 24 Heures du Mans, party play (Bluetooth controller and split-screen multiplayer support), Porsche Time Trial Competition, and improvements to multiplayer. Free - Download now
• Total Conquest 1.5.1: Battle online to control the Roman Empire. A new resource: Ambrosia. Summon Mars and Bellona to your province, new Centaur unit, new potions and other changes. Free - Download now

New and updated Mac apps

• Write 1.0.1: The Mac companion app to the iOS app listed above. A full-featured note-taking app with Multimarkdown 4 support, customizable theme and export CSS, drag and drop image URL support and more. $6.99 - Download now
• Reeder 2.0: The popular RSS newsreading app is back, with support for Feedbin, Feedly, Feed Wranger, Fever and Readability, as well as local/standalone RSS. $9.99 - Download now
• Pocket 5.5: Popular read-it-later service for iOS. This version brings a Pocket premium option that gives you permanent libraries, better search, suggested tags, and more. Free - Download Now

More apps and updates?

If you try any of the apps or updates, let me know how they work for you. If you got any new or updated apps today that you loved, but don't see here, let us know about them!

djay, the Apple Design Award-winning music mixing app for iPhone and iPad, has just been updated to version 2.5 and the game-changing news is this — they've partnered with streaming music service Spotify and their 20 million track library and, what's more, created technology that lets you quickly, perfectly mix and match all of it. Imagine an old school DJ crate filled with vinyl. Now image it's bottomless. Now imagine a selection of perfectly matched songs is always on the very top just waiting for you to grab and spin. That's djay 2.5.

Karim Morsy and Michael Simmons gave me a short demo of the djay + Spotify integration — a good thing because I have absolutely no musical talent whatsoever, and Spotify is not yet available here in Canada — and what they showed was mind blowing. djay has a long history of making very physical, very complicated music mixing methods and concepts incredibly digital and incredibly elegant and that's exactly what they've done with Spotify in djay. You do need a premium Spotify account to access the 20 million tracks, but that's not only an incredible bargain for the material, its an incredible resource for anyone who wants to mix music. Your Spotify account is then instantly available to you, on the virtual turntables, at your fingertips, and works just like local music.

• Hear Karim talk about all about djay on the Iterate podcast

Thanks to the echonest and Intelligent Song Selection, even if there's a track you've never heard before and down't know how to mix, djay can suggest other track that match it perfectly so your flow never gets interrupted. If, like me, you can't mix to save your life, djay can even do the mixing for you with Automix Radio.

Spotify integration also allows for an entirely new, cloud-based way to share your personal mixes. All another person needs is a Spotify account of their own and, once you share your mixes, they get all the music along with it. No need to hunt down and buy all the individual tracks. It's just there.

There are also additional effects and, of course, all the great stuff that was in djay 2.0.

djay is incredibly thoughtful, incredibly smart software. It's so good, terrible as I am, when I play with it I can close my eyes and see myself in a club, lights flashing, speakers pounding, people dancing... And for a brief moment I can imagine what it must be like to create something as beautiful as what real DJs do everyday. That's the power of the iPhone and iPad, and software like djay.

And now it's in the cloud so anyone with an account can not only have the same dream but live it. Amazing.

djay 2.5 is available for iPhone and iPad now. The iPad version is currently on sale for $4.99 and the iPhone version is on sale for the unprecedented price of free. Sprint, don't walk to the App Store.

• djay for iPhone - free on sale - Download now
• djay for iPad - $4.99 on sale - Download now

Every day dozens and dozens of new and updated apps and games hit the App Store for both iOS and Mac. It's impossible to keep up with them all, but it's not impossible to pick out the very best. Here they are! Today we've got some brand new levels for Candy Crush fans, some performance fixes for Mailbox users, and more!

New and updated iOS apps

• Mailbox: Popular email alternative app for both iPhone and iPad. This update includes bug fixes for an issue where iPad users weren't seeing reply buttons when reading emails. There is also integration with App Links now. Free - Download Now
• Candy Crush Saga: Candy Crush is an addictive match three puzzle game available for both iPhone and iPad. This update includes lots of new levels in both regular game play mode and in dreamworld. Free - Download Now
• Zipcar: A companion app for the popular car rental service, Zipcar, which is available in many metropolitan areas. This update to the Zipcar app includes enhancements that make the reservation process smoother. Free - Download Now
• Despicable Me: Minion Rush: Popular endless runner game for iPhone and iPad that features all your favorite characters from the Despicable Me movies. This update features bug fixes to general game play. Free - Download Now
• Screens: Screens is a popular screen sharing and remote desktop app for iPhone, iPad, and Mac. This version brings stability improvements and connection fixes for both iPhone and iPad. $19.99 - Download Now
• TuneIn Radio: A popular radio streaming service for both iPhone and iPad. The new update brings one-click play options for your favorite stations, the return of the time remaining feature, and more. Free - Download Now, $3.99, Pro version - Download Now
• Google Drive: Google's cloud storage app gets bug fixes and improvements, along with tighter integration with the new Google Docs and Google Sheets applications. Free - Download Now
• Google Docs: Google's app for creating and editing documents gets performance enhancements and bug fixes in version 1.0.1. Free - Download Now
• Google Sheets: The spreadsheet creation and editing app hits version 1.0.1 with bug fixes and performance improvements. Free - Download Now
• inGroove: This is a new app that ties into Google Analytics to give you predictions on all of your important website performance metrics in a simple, easy to use interface. Free - Download Now
• Vima GPS Run Tracker: Vima is a new GPS run tracker for iPhone that focuses on staying simple but allowing runners to track the data that's important. With color coded routes, social integration, and support for the Pebble, there's a lot to like with Vima. Free - Download Now
• Marco Polo: Marco Polo is an interesting twist on keeping track of your iPhone. Let it run in the background and if you ever misplace your iPhone, just yell Marco and wait for your iPhone to respond. Now if only it could help me find my keys... $0.99 - Download Now

New and updated Mac apps

• Cloud: Companion Mac app for the CloudApp link shortening and file sharing service. This update includes many fixes and enhancements including the ability to correctly upload to folders at the same time. You can also retain file names when uploading Photoshop files now. Free - Download Now

More apps and updates?

If you try any of the apps or updates, let me know how they work for you. If you got any new or updated apps today that you loved, but don't see here, let us know about them!

When I did my initial Beats Music review back in January, I found the service to be so good I was almost certain I'd switch from Rdio and leave it behind. I did just that and for almost three months, I only used Beats Music on my iPhone, the web, and through Sonos. Unfortunately, small issues turned into much bigger ones that, ultimately, have led me to cancel my subscription. Here's why...

I'll start by saying that I stand by the points I made in my initial review of Beats Music. It does an amazing job at curation and playlists. The listening possibilities are endless and they're adding new music all the time. That's the part of Beats Music I love and that I'm really sad to let go.

My issues with Beats Music started with their app. It caused excessive battery drain. Beats was aware of the problem and pushed out an update fairly quickly. Unfortunately there were and are many other, sporadic issues that remain. Playback and streaming problems are something I experienced on a rather regular basis. The most peculiar part about it was that it happened even when a song was supposedly downloaded to my iPhone. That means there should be zero buffer time and the song should instantly play locally.

For the most part I overlooked the playback issue since quitting the app from multitasking and restarting Beats typically fixed it. At least at first. Slowly the problem got less sporadic and more frequent. Several updates later and it was still a problem. At this point I'd have to reboot my iPhone or toggle Airplane mode on and off. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't. This issue was particularly annoying when I got to the gym and wanted to play a workout mix I had created. Beats Music would get stuck at certain songs and I've have to stop what I was doing in order to remedy the problem. Eventually I just closed the app and opened iTunes Radio to finish my workout.

Around the beginning of April I re-downloaded Rdio to my iPhone and iPad and fired it up. I renewed by subscription and all my stuff was still there. I decided to try and use Beats Music and Rdio for 30 days. Then I would make a decision on which one to keep. Over the first week, I found that I still preferred Beats Music for curation but I just couldn't rely on it. I listen to music through my headphones at the gym and while at Starbucks or somewhere else working. When I'm at home in my home office, I alway have Sonos going throughout our entire condo for background noise. When using Beats Music, I continually experienced long buffer times or gaps in playback. When using Rdio, I never once had to interrupt my workflow to launch the Sonos app in order to see what the problem was, because there was never a problem.

I thought about keeping both Rdio and Beats Music since there were bits and pieces of both I was reluctant to let go of. At least until I flew across the country to San Francisco. As usual, the plane's wifi was not working properly. The first thing I did was fire up Beats Music and put my headphones in. I turned on Offline mode and selected an album I had saved for offline playback. Instead I got the buffer wheel that just circled and circled and did nothing. I rolled my eyes and tried another album. The same thing happened. I only found 3 songs out of several hundreds that would actually play. The worst part? Those hundreds of songs were definitely eating up my iPhone's storage, yet none of them would play.

On a whim I launched Rdio. I didn't expect to have any music because I hadn't synced anything for offline playback since I had re-subscribed. However, Rdio had brought back down everything that I had previously synced to my iPhone before canceling my subscription. All of my songs and playlists were right there and available to play offline.

That's when I held my finger down on the Beats Music icon and tapped the x to delete it. Then I set a reminder in Fantastical to cancel my subscription as soon as I got home. To supplement music discovery and radio functionality — something I've never found Rdio to be great at — I'm using a combination of Songza, Pandora, and iTunes Radio. When I find something I really like, I add it to my collection in Rdio. Is it the most elegant solution? No. But it's one I know I can rely on. I'd really like to give Beats Music another go at some point, but I think I'll give the service some time to mature first.

What about you? If you're using Beats Music, have you experienced any of the same issues I've struggled with? And if you don't use Beats, what streaming services do you use and why? Let me know in the comments!

Radio streaming services take the heavy lifting out of finding music to listen to. They differentiate themselves from on-demand streaming music services by taking the work out of curating your own content and playlists. Remember the days where we had favorite radio stations and just tuned into them and listened? That's the experience Pandora, Songza, iTunes Radio, Last.fm, and TuneIn Radio want to put in your pocket. So if you aren't interested in offline downloads and just want to hit play, follow along to figure out which one is right for you.

Quick comparison

Above is a quick comparison of each service and what they have to offer. Keep in mind that this comparison is only looking at radio streaming services and not on-demand ones. If those are what interests you, check out that comparison separately via the following link:

• Spotify vs Beats Music vs Slacker vs Rdio vs Google Play Music: On-demand streaming music service showdown!

Design

iTunes Radio is built into the Music app so love it or hate it, you're stuck with it if you want to use iTunes Radio. It lives in one singular tab which doesn't leave a ton of room for additional functionality. You've got featured stations at the top and your custom built stations at the bottom. Now playing screens only differ by adding like and dislike options. Next up we have Pandora whose design hasn't changed drastically in a long time. That's not a bad thing though if you like minimalistic. It's easy enough to figure out and navigate with very few frills.

TuneIn Radio Pro is simple enough to navigate and uses sideways scrolling featured sections to recommend stations it thinks you'd enjoy. The exploration section of TuneIn Radio is one of the best I've seen. Categories are descriptive and actually contain what they say they do. While the design isn't anything over the top, it doesn't hurt your eyes and makes sense in each menu. This is something Last.fm's Scrobbler app struggles to do. Fonts and icons are overdone and too large creating a lot of wasted space. It's functional, but not pretty to look at.

That brings us to Songza, which is the best designed app of the bunch. From the concierge service to searching for carefully curated playlists, the app is well done. If you're running iOS 7 it also supports swipe gestures which make an already beautiful app even more enjoyable to use.

When it comes to design, Songza wins hands down.

Curation

If you want radio, curation is the most important aspect of getting songs you actually want to hear. Theoretically Last.fm should be best at this since it literally looks at all the things you already own in your iTunes library, pulls them in, and plays things based on what you already listen to. While it does a decent job, it isn't the best of the bunch. Pandora does a decent job but in my experience, I hear a lot of duplicates in more obscure genres. A lot of this could be due to their smaller catalog size.

TuneIn Radio does a great job of separating out categories and genres and serves up a great mix but since it's based on live radio for the most part, you're at the mercy of the station. One bonus of TuneIn that a lot of others don't have is the ability to record live radio for playback later. It isn't on-demand by any means but it's a nice option to have. It does however require the Pro version of the app.

Songza's main focus is curation and it shows. The playlists are hand picked and regardless what you listen to, you'll find something. iTunes Radio does a decent job as well but just like Pandora, after a certain amount of time I start hearing the same tracks over and over again. I think the problem here is less a curation one and more a playlist one. If I tweak the playlist slightly or change setting, it changes up the selection. In my mind that sounds more like an issue or bug than a lack of music to play.

Regardless, the only service I can press play on and walk away from for hours is Songza. It really is that damned good at curation.

Specialty stations

If listening to things like comedy shows and sporting events is important to you, TuneIn Radio Pro is a must have. None of the other options give you the live stations and local options that TuneIn does. At its core it really is the traditional radio experience we've all grown up with in your pocket. That means anything you could flip your dial to will most likely be available in TuneIn.

For live events and live radio stations from all over the globe, there's none that can top TuneIn Radio.

Catalog size and selection

TuneIn Radio is different from the others since it's based on live radio and not an actual catalog. On the plus side, that means the TuneIn database is constantly changing. For people that don't like listening to the same thing consistently, it's like a breath of fresh air all the time. Not a bad thing in my opinion. As long as you stay away from local stations that is, which we all know play the same thing over and over. And over again.

Pandora has the smallest catalog size but that doesn't mean it isn't well suited for some people. Most tracks in Pandora are mainstream so if that's your thing, you probably won't notice the small size. Now if you listen to more obscure music, you'll notice fairly quickly. Last.fm comes in next with around 12 million tracks in their catalog. I hear a lot less repeats than I do with Pandora but they're still noticeable after spending a good amount of time with the service.

iTunes Radio pulls from iTunes which has a massive collection of over 25 million tracks. I'm not sure if all of those are up for grabs on iTunes Radio or not but for the most part, iTunes Radio plays things you want to hear. Even though Apple killed Ping a while back, I'm sure they pulled a lot of valuable data about listening habits from it. And I'm almost positive that data has a home in iTunes Radio. My only issue is that after listening to the same playlist a few times I start hearing duplicates rather quickly. It can't be due to a lack of selection and I hope it's something Apple addresses in the near future. For now, tweaking the playlist slightly seems to solve the problem.

Songza has a library of around 20 million tracks which is on-par with what on-demand streaming services such as Rdio, Spotify, and Beats Music offer. No matter what genres you listen to or how obscure they are, you'll find playlists in Songza's catalog that suit your tastes.

Songza slides in for the win just ahead of TuneIn Radio.

Availability

Radio streaming services are a little harder to peg for availability than on-demand streaming services are. From what I could find, there are workarounds for some of them but official availability is pretty limited and varies greatly depending on country.

TuneIn Radio is available in the most countries so that puts it on top. Just be aware that what stations are available will heavily depend on where you are in the world.

Pricing

All five services offer ad supported streaming for free. You're limited to the amount of skips under free plans though. Last.fm limits some other features like profile views and access on mobile apps as well unless you're a premium subscriber. iTunes Radio is the cheapest subscription based option coming in at $25 a year for ad free listening. TuneIn Radio makes both a free and a pro app. If you buy the pro version you get the ability to record live streaming but it's still ad supported, and there's no way to remove them since there's no monthly subscription to be had.

If you're looking at price, iTunes Radio is the cheapest where subscriptions are concerned but TuneIn Radio Pro is the cheapest overall to unlock all features, but you'll still be served up ads from each station.

Which one is best for you?

Regardless what your tastes are, radio streaming services are not created equal. Pandora and Last.fm are lacking enough that I can't recommend either of them. From there the decision gets a little more difficult.

iTunes Radio is a great service that offers a great value but still has a few issues like duplicates, which I don't quite understand given the size of the iTunes catalog.

That leaves us with TuneIn Radio and Songza.

If you need live stations that cover all the bases, including comedy and sports, get TuneIn Radio. If music is your concern, you need Songza. It's the best music curation service currently available and I seriously can't think of any reason to recommend any other service if music is your number one priority.

• Songza - Free - Download Now
• Pandora - Free - Download Now
• iTunes Radio - built into the iOS Music app
• TuneIn Radio Pro - $3.99 - Download Now
• Last.fm Scrobbler - Free - Download Now

What service did you pick?

If you prefer streaming radio over on-demand streaming, which service do use and why? Does any of the above information have you contemplating switching services? Let us know in the comments!

On-demand music streaming services are made for the hardcore music lovers and audiophiles. Not only should they get to know our tastes and preferences over time, on-demand services are also tasked with letting us have more control over what we listen to, when we listen to it. Streaming radio may be fine for some but if you want to listen to an entire album all the way through or be able to play music offline, you want on-demand streaming.

Spotify, Rdio, Beats Music, Google Play All Access, and Slacker are the best on-demand services currently available with full iPhone support. Now the question becomes, which one is the best if any? And more importantly, which one is right for you?

I'm going to preface this by saying that I only looked at true on-demand streaming services for this comparison. That means services like iTunes Radio, Pandora, and Songza can't be compared since they don't support offline playback of any kind. I'll take a look at those services in another comparison.

Quick comparison

The above chart isn't meant to cover all points but it gives you a fairly good idea of what you can expect with each service at a quick glance. I only compared what you get as a paying subscriber. Free offerings vary from time to time and from service to service so I saw little value in comparing them. If you want on-demand streaming, you're most likely going to pay for it.

Design

When it comes to design, none of them are created equal. I'll start off with the two apps I take issue with. First is Slacker. The layout is confusing at times and the tiles used to represent stations are cheesy. If you can get past that, the actual song information screens aren't terrible. It's just getting there that makes your eyes bleed. Second is Spotify. I've just never been okay with making lime green a themed color. Buttons are also overly large and create a lot of wasted space. The layout has gotten better over time but the design is still not very appealing. Play Music will be familiar to anyone who has used any other Google app for iOS. And if you like that style, you'll like Play Music. If you don't, you won't.

That leaves Beats Music and Rdio. Beats Music is easy on the eyes and makes good use of darker colors. This makes it rather enjoyable to use in the dark even if your screen brightness isn't all the way down. Navigation also makes sense and it easy for anyone to just pick up and use. Rdio is designed equally as well but very different. It exuded iOS 7 before iOS 7 even existed. They may have taken a little longer than I would have liked to update basic design elements like the keyboard, but I dealt with it mainly becasue the design was already so great.

Rdio does design better than the rest with a gorgeous yet simple design that has controls that are smart and intuitive. What more could you ask for?

Offline listening

All five services feature offline listening options. Where they differ is how they restrict those options. All are on an even playing field in regards to price as you'll need the highest offerings to have access to it. Slacker's $3.99 plan lets you store playlists but not specific albums and tracks. For that, you need the $9.99 version.

When it comes to limitations, all services but Spotify give you unlimited offline downloads. As long as you've got the storage space, you can keep downloading albums and tracks as long as you're a paying subscriber. Spotify however taps you at 10,000 songs per account. If you have the max of 3 devices on your plan, that's 3,333 songs each. That doesn't sound like a bad deal if you're only mobile, but what about on your Mac or PC? That may become an issue if you want to build a solid collection.

Play Music pulls ahead as on top of unlimited downloads, you can also upload up to 20,000 songs (300MB limit each) to your own storage locker at no additional cost. That means you save device storage space and can either stream that music or download what you want on demand. It's very similar to how iTunes Match works.

When it comes to offline listening, Play Music All Access wins.

Curation

If you like to listen to playlists created for you in radio style, curation is super important. You don't want New Kids on the Block randomly thrown into a playlist based on Black Sabbath. In my time with all four services, I've found that Slacker doesn't have a ton to choose from, especially when you get into more obscure genres. I also didn't find that disliking tracks kept them completely away. Unfortunately I had some of the same results with Spotify when it came to preferences. They had a much better selection of stations but there were songs thrown in that I felt were out of place. I also didn't feel like they were particularly catered to my tastes even though I'd given the service an ample amount of data to go off.

Rdio does a decent job with curation but it took a while to get there. Since Rdio has been one of my personal choices for a long time, I've spent the most time with it. It took a good month or so before I felt as if Rdio really started to cater to my tastes and even then, it still mixed up dance and electronic music regularly. For that I just gave up and started curating my own playlists. Play Music never wants to give me good recommendations. It took me adding several things to my library before it would even suggest anything. That to me was a turnoff.

Last but definitely not least is Beats Music. Given how new the service is, I've been blown away by how good the curation is. In less than 2 weeks, Beats Music gets me. Every time I launch it I can't wait to see what playlists it has picked out just for me.

Beats Music wins the curation war, hands down.

Specialty stations

Comedy and sports is the one thing Slacker does exceptionally well. None of the others hold a candle to it. Honestly, it's what Slacker does best. Spotify supposedly has a service called Comedify but I couldn't find much on it. I'll give it a point for that but I couldn't find any radio offerings, which is what most people want. Play Music has a comedy genre but again, Slacker does better.

If you want comedy or sports, there's only Slacker.

Catalog size and selection

None of the services in this comparison give exact numbers but some do give roundabout figures. Some of this probably has to do with licensing in different countries. Each service as of this writing claims the follow when it comes to the size of their song library:

• Spotify - 20 million
• Beats Music - 20 million
• Rdio - 20 million
• Play Music - 18 million
• Slacker - 13 million

One other thing you have to consider is whether or not a service has the music you actually listen to. I have a hard time finding a reason to use Spotify while our own Richard Devine swears by it due to the music he prefers. For example, Spotify has Metallica, Rdio and other services do not.

Even though you should check into catalog selection before you make a final decision, it's a pretty close war between Beats Music, Spotify, and Rdio. Spotify gets the win by a slight margin due to some of their exclusive deals.

Availability

In terms of availability, Rdio and Spotify are available in the largest amount of countries. Rdio comes in just under Spotify but by a very narrow margin. You can hit the links below to see complete lists of countries on each respective site. Slacker and Beats Music both have very limited audiences. While Beats may expand that over time, Slacker probably won't at this point. Beats Music is US only and Slacker is only available in the US and Canada. Play Music does a lot better at over 20 countries, but still doesn't touch Rdio and Spotify.

Tie between Rdio and Spotify.

• Rdio availability
• Spotify availability
• Play Music availability

Pricing

If we're talking true on-demand, pricing is a wash since all three services offer the same exact thing. $9.99 per month. That includes offline listening and complete control over what you listen to and when you listen to it. All services offer free web streaming and some content via their mobile apps without paying, but if you've read this far, you already know that's not what you're after. You can however get away with $3.99 through Slacker if you're okay with just on demand playlists and not whole albums and specific songs.

Slacker gets the win for having a cheaper scaled down version of on-demand. But if you want no compromises, you'll pay the same across all five services.

Which one deserves your cash?

Unfortunately, no one service is the clear winner. They each kick ass in some ways and frustrate in others. So, which is best for you will depend on what's most important to you. Here's the breakdown:

• Slacker: The best options for sports and comedy, poor sound quality isn't great.
• Rdio: Best experience, international availability, okay sound quality isn't great.
• Spotify: International availability, exclusive rights with certain artists, and good sound quality,
• Google Play Music: Combines music locker storage and all the Google things in one place and good sound quality,
• Beats Music: Best for playlist and music discovery, good sound quality,

Figure out what's most important to you, what frustrations you can live with, and then you'll know which is the best streaming music service for you.

• Spotify - Free - Download Now
• Rdio - Free - Download Now
• Beats Music - Free - Download Now
• Google Play Music - Free - Download Now
• Slacker Radio - Free - Download Now

What service did you pick?

Now that we've given you some data to think about, be sure to hop in the comments and let us know what service, if any, you went with. What ultimately brought you to that decision? And does any of the above information have you contemplating switching streaming music services? Be sure to let us know that too!

Sound Siphon is a new app for the Mac that can turn the audio output of an application into an audio input device. Normally, when making a recording on your make, using Quicktime, for instance, you'll use a microphone for audio input. What Sound Siphon allows you to do is designate your Mac, or specific applications like iTunes and Safari, as audio input devices, then record the audio from those apps with your chosen recording app.

To do all of of this, open Sound Siphon and create a new audio custom audio input and give it a name. Then, select the one or more applications that you want to include. Open your audio recording app of choice, like Quicktime, and start a new audio recording. When choosing your audio input device, the name of your custom audio input should appear in the list of available inputs. Select it, and begin recording.

When recording, there are several things you can do. You can independently adjust the levels. You can record application audio mixed as stereo, or capture each application's audio as its own channel. You can also mute applications while recording.

Sound Siphon requires OS X 10.9, and can be downloaded from developer Static Z Software as a free demo, while the full version can be purchased for $29.99.

• $29.99 - Download Now

This is the opening weekend for The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, the second movie in The Hunger Games series, based on the popular trilogy of books written by Suzanne Collins. If you haven't seen the first movie or it's been a while, now's a great time to catch up.

Hunger Games Trilogy iBooks

The Hunger Games trilogy was originally a book series found in the Young Adult section of the bookstore. It's a thriller set in a dystopian future, where a new totalitarian government called Panem dominates the North American continent. An annual event called The Hunger Games gathers two dozen children who must fight each other to the death.

Each of the three books in is available for separate purchase, of course, but if you want a crash course in Suzanne Collins' dystopian YA thriller, you can buy them together as The Hunger Games Trilogy. This includes the original Hunger Games, the sequel, Catching Fire, and the conclusion, Mockingjay.

• $17.99 - Buy now

The Hunger Games:

• $4.99 Buy now

Catching Fire:

• $6.99 Buy now

Mockingjay:

• $6.99 Buy now

Hunger Games Audiobooks

Prefer to have books read to you, or looking for a way to pass the time on the commute to and from work? You can buy the trilogy as audiobooks if you prefer. All of them are unabridged, and narrated by actress Carolyn McCormick.

The Hunger Games:

• $24.95 Buy now

Catching Fire:

• $24.95 Buy now

Mockingjay:

• $17.95 Buy now

Hunger Games movie

Don't feel like reading? No worries. The Hunger Games movie is available from iTunes. This 2012 action film starred Jennifer Lawrence in the role of Katniss Everdeen, the heroine of the series.

• $9.99 - Download now

Hunger Games games

That's not all. There are also official Hunger Games game tie-ins available for download for your iOS device from the App Store.

Hunger Games: Girl on Fire

A free "teaser game" developed as a promotion for the original movie. Developed by the creator of the popular indie title Canabalt, it's a side-scrolling action game in which you play as Katniss, taking to the forest to defeat Tracker Jackers with your bow and arrow.

• Free - Download now

The Hunger Games Adventures

Billed as the official game of the new movie, Catching Fire. This free to play game incorporates in-app purchases. You explore the world of Panem in an isometric (three-quarter view) adventure game that sports more than 1,000 official story-based quests. The game requires an internet connection to play.

• Free - Download now

Hunger Games: Catching Fire - Panem Run

Another free-to-play option. This is an endless runner (think, Temple Run with Katniss), where you have to shoot at targets in your way using your bow and arrow, then jump, dodge and smash through obstacles.

• Free - Download now

Hunger Games wallpapers

Want to make your iPhone or iPad get into the spirit too? Stop by our Wallpapers & Ringtones forum, where you'll find plenty of goodies optimized for Retina display-equipped devices!

Are you a Hunger Games fan? Planning to see Catching Fire this weekend? Or is this movie and book series just catching your eye now? Let me know what you think in the comments.

If you're a budding DJ, Pioneer's latest entry-level offering may be of interest, particularly the news that it will connect to your iPhone 5 and iPad 4 with the bundled Lightning cable. The DDJ-WeGO2 Compact DJ Controller also comes with a handle that doubles as a stand for your device, and it will hook into Algoriddim's fantastic djay 2 app for iOS for truly mobile mixing.

Of course, it isn't limited to your iOS devices, the WeGO2 comes bundled with Pioneers own Virtual DJ LE software for Mac and Windows, or you can download and use djay LE also from Algoriddim on your Mac. Hardware wise the WeGO2 is pretty compact, is powered by USB either through your computer or from an external battery pack, and has onboard audio for that all important monitoring experience. There's also a bunch of visual prompts from the onboard LEDs to help out beginners, and much more besides.

I'm no DJ, not in any way, but this looks like a pretty nice product from Pioneer. Availability is slated for this October, and retail price is $429 in either red, black or white. If you know more about this type of equipment, take a look, and drop us your thoughts in the comments below!

Source: Pioneer

I have no musical talent. I feel like we know each other well enough by now that I can confide this to you. I'm tone deaf and incapable of keeping a beat. So, I will not be reviewing djay 2. I can't. It's beyond me. What I can do, however, is relate how I've seen it used by those with actual talent, and how easy it was for me to use despite having none at all. And it turns out, when it comes to djay 2, that's a lot.

From the same team at Algoriddim that brought you the original, Apple Design Award (ADA) winning djay, djay 2 takes everything great and makes it greater. All the same super-approachable user interface elements from the first are back and not only easier to use for novices, but more informative to use even for seasoned professionals.

The turn tables, perfectly skeuomorphic as ever, now contain accurate groove representations for the albums. So, not only do they look more realistic, but trained eyes can pick out the patterns the same as on vinyl, and position the virtual needles with the same accuracy they could previously position the real life version.

The wave form representations, digital as ever, are now color coded so not only can you see the shape of the music, but you can see its composition better than ever, and that makes it easier than ever to pick just the section or instrument you want.

You get two turn tables (but no microphone, not where it's at) in landscape mode, and a single turn table view in portrait. That lets you easily choose between quantity and size, even on smaller devices like the iPad mini or iPhone. If you're just having fun, two turn tables is great even in the back of a car, on a road trip, killing time. If you're a pro, and want a multitouch screen in your setup, one big turn table on a full-sized iPad in portrait might suit you far better.

Automagic PerfectSync makes lining up two songs and keeping them lined up ridiculously easy. It just works, and with music, that's no small achievement. Slice mode divides the waveforms up by beat, and almost turns those synced waves into buttons. You can DJ like it's a keyboard. Unbelievable.

Again, I suck at music, but from an interface perspective there's just so much to love about djay2. There's a ton of functionality but djay 2 does a great job layering it so the simplest, most common stuff is up front, and the more granular, more specialized stuff is just a tap beneath, but only a tap or two away.

I had a chance to watch the Algoriddim team demo djay 2 for me a couple of weeks ago, and to speak with them about what was new and why. I came away considerably impressed. This isn't some intimidating, inaccessible pro audio tool. This is an inviting, intuitive pro audio tool that beginners can just as easily embrace and get something out of.

Hell, I've been using djay 2 for the last week or so as a music player. Watching those turn tables is a great experience. And being able to scratch like I'm in Breakin or Beat Street - only badly - is pure joy.

Pro DJs use djay, but I can't help but imagine people who dream of being DJs, or being musicians in general, will get even more out of djay 2, because they won't be afraid to play. They'll mold music like digital clay. They'll finger paint with it. Before iOS, and before apps like DJ, owning turn tables and large collections of vinyl was incredibly expensive. Learning to DJ was as much about opportunity as it was desire.

Now the first barrier has been lowered almost out of existence, and only the second remains. If you want to own the turn tables, all you have to do is reach out and touch them.

Usual disclaimer: djay 2 is a new app. Apple doesn't provide developers with a way to do paid upgrades, discounted or otherwise, on the App Store, so in order to be fairly and appropriately compensated for all their hard work and effort, they have no choice but to create a new app and charge for it again. Like many others, djay has chosen to offer a discounted sale price to everyone at launch, which is the only way Apple allows sale prices to be offered. The sale is so cheap, your next burger and fries will likely cost more, and djay would still be cheap at double or even quadruple the price.

• $0.99 - iPhone - Download now
• $4.99 - iPad - Download now

Logic Pro X is the latest in a line of re-imagined software from Apple, something they started doing years ago with their video apps, iMovie and later, Final Cut Pro X. This new, more mainstream-friendly direction hasn't been without controversy, especially among professionals. So what does it means for Logic Pro users - and potential Logic Pro users - in general, and for podcasting in particular?

When you visit the main page for Logic Pro X on Apple’s web site, there’s a slogan that reads “Music production. Cranked up to X.” That’s how Apple is promoting the update to their flagship audio product—as a music production tool.

I’m a podcaster, but I’ve also been a saxophonist for more than 25 years. I’ve played more polkas and scuffled through more choruses of John Coltrane’s ‘Giant Steps’ than I can count. I just don’t use Logic that often for music production. However, I’ve been using Logic for podcast production since 2010.

At $199 on the Mac App Store, the bang for the buck is amazing. Yes, it is loaded with tons of loops, virtual instruments and MIDI sequencing features us podcasters may never use. Well, at least until we decide to compose our own theme songs! But at its core, Logic is a full-featured audio recording, editing, and mixing environment that meets or exceeds the capabilities of similar DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) programs.

To put Logic Pro X in its proper context for podcasters, however, we need to also talk about some other options...

Logic Pro X vs. Pro Tools

Pro Tools 11 is a killer product, but it’s $700. To be honest, Pro Tools will always be my first love when it comes to audio software. I teach it every day at the collegiate level. (Full disclosure: I worked for Avid, the maker of Pro Tools, for seven years.)

I switched to Logic from Pro Tools because it offers faster than real-time "bounce". That means I can export a show in mere minutes. Prior to Pro Tools 11, exports were real-time. That meant a 60 minute podcast would take 60 minutes to export. That’s an eternity in deadline situations!

The playing field has been leveled with regard to export times in Pro Tools 11, but the price difference remains. I don’t think your shows will sound $500 better, nor will you get them done $500 more efficiently with Pro Tools compared to Logic Pro X.

Logic Pro X vs. Adobe Audition

Audition CC seems like a logical choice for podcast production. After all, it’s an audio-only tool. There’s not a single tick of MIDI data, and no vintage synth emulators to be found. In fact, it’s the editing tool of choice for countless radio stations around the world thanks in large part to its origins as a Windows-based application called Cool Edit Pro. It is renown for editing speed and dependability, even on now-ancient PCs.

Chris Breen of Macworld wrote an excellent review of Audition CC. In it he pointed out some terrific restoration and corrective tools in Audition that are very beneficial to podcasters. He also pointed out a potentially deal-breaking caveat - Audition CC is available only through a subscription plan—you can’t purchase it outright. If you stop paying, it stops working.

With Logic Pro X, you own it for $199. Granted, there will eventually be a new version that requires you to fork over more coins from the couch. But the version you buy today will continue working on your existing hardware/OS setup pretty much indefinitely.

Logic Pro X and podcasting

So, is Logic Pro X overkill for podcasting? In a way, yes, but so was Logic Pro 9. An even better and potentially more controversial question would be: Is GarageBand underkill for podcasting? I think so.

It’s time for some real talk. I get asked about GarageBand all the time. A lot of people use GarageBand for podcasting and it seems to work fine for them. I’m normally a gentle person, but it drives me into giant-Hulk-like-green-rage-monster fury. Personally, I like to have more control over what I’m doing, and I encourage others to strive for the same.

For podcasters already using Logic Pro as well as those thinking about taking the plunge, I really like what Apple has done with the new version. The user interface of Logic Pro X is not drastically different in functionality from its predecessor, but it does have a fresh, clean new look with a darker color palette that looks especially good on my MacBook Pro with Retina display.

The various tools and options are better organized. I had no problem getting to work right away in the new version. I edited the most recent episode of the Grizzly Bear Egg Café without a hitch. Project files from versions as old as Logic 5 can be opened in Logic Pro X. Backward compatibility is a huge plus.

Every editing and mixing tool I rely on was either in the same/similar location or easier to get to. For example, the controls for using processing inserts have been improved. It’s easier than before to toggle plug-ins on/off, change parameters, or switch to a different type of process. Also, the default keyboard shortcut mapping puts more editing functions under your fingertips without having to program your own keystrokes or click on icons.

Another option is the ability to disable unneeded functions of the program. A preference window allows you to hide things like MIDI tools, Surround mixing options, destructive audio editing or the music notation editor. This is a nice feature for new users as well as experienced podcasters who want to unclutter the UI even further.

If you’re coming from GarageBand, you’ll be more at home than you would have been in Logic Pro 9. As Jim Dalrymple from The Loop puts it in his review (http://www.loopinsight.com/2013/07/16/review-logic-pro-x/), Apple has made the software more “approachable” to new users. I couldn’t agree more, and I’d also add that it’s easier to use for experienced professionals. It’s familiar, but new in an exciting way.

To echo another point Jim Dalrymple makes: This is not “GarageBand Pro”. Apple has not dumbed down Logic or stripped away significant features the way they did for the introduction of Final Cut X. It remains a complex and serious professional tool for those who choose to dig in deep. Logic has had a notoriously steep learning curve. I think the discoverability of features has improved. It’s not magically easy to use now, but it has gotten noticeably better in that regard.

The bottom line

If you're already using Logic Pro 9, the upgrading to Logic Pro X isn't something you need to rush out and do right away. The improvements in usability are not major, but they certainly are welcome. That said, I think anyone on version 9 will want to upgrade eventually. At some point, compatibility with Logic Pro 9 is bound to be broken by an OS update or inability to run on newer hardware. If you’re on a MacBook Pro with Retina display, however, you’ll probably want to upgrade sooner rather than later so you can start enjoying the updated graphics of the UI.

If you’ve never purchased Logic, now is the perfect time to jump on board. It looks great and it’s easier to use than before. I used it for real work on day one without incident. I’m certain there will be some bugs and subsequent patches that crop up. But in my experience, this release is solid.

There is a lot of great audio production software on the market. I think we’re spoiled by how many options exist. Not only is Logic Pro X a great choice for the money—it is great, period.

• $199 - Download now

Chordion is a music creation app for iPad that makes it easy for non-musicians to make music, yet includes advanced settings and modes for experienced musicians to get even more out of Chordion.

Chordion is setup with a keyboard on the right and big chord buttons on the left. Holding down a chord will either play through the notes set up in the arpeggiator or strum a chord, depending on the settings (arpeggiator is default). The keyboard is also setup so that only notes that are associated with the chord and key you're playing in for will be available. This means that anything you play will sound good. Hitting the play button will play a drum beat for you to play your music with.

Right out of the box, Chordion is ready for music creation, but the main screen is completely customizable. These settings include which key and scale to play from, how many chords are displayed (7, 12, 14, or 24), and the range of the keyboard. You can also create custom beats with the drum machine using kick, snare, closed hi-hat, cowbell, clap, and cymbal as well as customize the arpeggiator. For even more control, you can adjust the reverb, envelope, timbre, tremolo, wah, vibrato, and delay.

Chordion also allows you to record you music and supports MIDI which lets you play other instruments using Chordion's interface.

The good

• Simple enough for anyone to make music, yet advanced enough for an experienced musician to enjoy
• Play chords with left hand and melody with right hand
• Keyboard notes changed based on what chord you're playing
• Record your creations

The bad

• No local storage. Must save recordings to iTunes, Dropbox, or SoundCloud.

The bottom line

I grew up playing piano and a little guitar and consider myself an intermediate-level musician. Chordion is a great music app that lets anyone, even young children, pick up and immediately create music that sounds good. And those who have more knowledge of chords, scales, and beats, can make custom adjustments and use a more complicated setup for even more control.

• $4.99 - Download now

Every week, the editors and writers at iMore carefully select some of our favorite, most useful, most extraordinary apps, accessories, gadgets, and websites. This week's selections include an app that tracks your sleep, an app that displays updates from your social networks, a few games, an app for History geeks, a fun photo apps, and a music streaming service.

Sleep Cycle alarm clock - Chris Oldroyd

Sleep is the most important thing you can give your body and it is also one of the most popular areas that people have trouble a with. Having knowledge of how well you are sleeping can be invaluable so you can see what effect alcohol has on your sleeping and much more.

To get this information, I use an app called Sleep Cycle alarm clock, its main purpose is to monitor your sleep so it can wake you up during light sleep so you awake relaxed and in a good mood. I don’t use the alarm part of the app but instead solely use it to monitor my nights sleep.

All you need to do is put your iPhone under your sheet next to your pillow and it will sense your movements during the night and tell you how long you were asleep for and how deep that sleep was too. The app needs at least 5 consecutive days of data to be able to tell you how good your sleep is and then you can also start comparing different sleep patterns on different nights. Because of this app, I can see how drinking alcohol severely reduces the quality of my sleep and the length too. Little things like this can help you make good life choices.

I you want to use it as an alarm, you pick a a 30 minute period when you want to wake up. The app monitors your sleep patterns during that 30 minutes and wakes you gently when it thinks you are ready to wake. Quite clever but not something that I want to use.

• $0.99 – [Download Now](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/sleep-time?at=10l3Vy&ct=UUimUdUnU17772 -alarm-clock-sleep/id498360026?mt=8&at=10l3Vy&ct=d_im)

Screenfeeder - Joseph Keller

Sometimes I don’t want to keep opening apps in order to stay current with my social networks. Staying up to date requires jumping between apps several times per day. To make sure I keep on top of everything without constantly moving between apps, I use Screenfeeder. Screenfeeder puts all of your social feeds in one place and shows you new items as they come in, one at a time. While Screenfeeder limits you primarily to reading your feed, you can interact a little with different items. For instance, you can retweet and mark tweets as favorites or like posts from Facebook and Instagram. Screenfeeder keeps your screen on while in the app so it’s best to use it while your device is plugged in.

Screenfeeder is universal, offered for free, and allows you follow one of your feeds for free, with an option to buy access to each successive service for $0.99 each, or all services for $3.99.

• Free - Download Now

Wacky Rapids - Chris Parsons

I have to admit, although I've been playing this game for quite some time now I initially discovered it on BlackBerry. Not that that's a bad thing by any means, just rather interesting all things considered. Wacky Rapids comes to us via Paw Print Games with the goal of course being fairly simple. Get your racer down the river as fast as you can to both come in first place and score the largest amount of points. That may sound easy but given the obstacles and different levels you'll face its gets harder as the game goes on. Wacky Rapids is an accelerometer based game so there will be plenty of twisting and turning your device in order to keep your racer on the right track. Overall, it's a pretty fun game that's enjoyable for all ages plus, it's available as a free download. With over 120 missions to complete, it'll keep you busy.

• Free - Download now

## PWN - Simon Sage

When I was a kid, my dad assumed that because I spent all of my time playing video games, I could have a future in programming. If I was more industrious and less insolent, that might have panned out, but at least now I can pretend I'm a bad-ass hacker in this new competitive puzzle game called PWN. Players battle over nodes, which are computers embodied by little cubes connected in a network which is visible as a 3D mesh. Players can only hack into one node at a time, and it takes a few seconds to capture it. You can only capture nodes connected to ones you already control, and if nodes ever become separated from the rest of your network, they become vulnerable to attack. Players use a variety of special defensive and offensive abilities to control the whole network, and pick hacker characters that have certain bonuses when using those abilities. Every character has their own single-player campaign, or you can go up against a buddy in a multiplayer match over Bluetooth. If you've got a soft spot for the mid-90s movie Hackers, definitely check this one out.

• $1.99 - Download Now

History Here - Ally Kazmucha

I am a huge History Channel nerd and if I'm not watching my regular shows, I've always got a learning channel or home improvement channel on. When I came across the History Here app, I was slightly intrigued. It basically shows you all the historical areas and attractions in your vicinity. I was past intrigued when I realized there are lots of things in my immediate area that I never even knew about.

History Here will use your current location to find things around you that are of historical importance. Some of these are attractions or museums while others are parks or geographical locations. Whether you're into history or not, it's worth taking a look. Never hurts to learn something new!

• Free - Download Now

Photolettering - Rene Ritchie

John Gruber of Daring Fireball linked to Photolettering yesterday and I've been playing around with it ever since. The gist is this: take or open photos, neaten them up the way you like, then add House Industries fonts and Photo-Lettering alphabets to take them to the next level, and share away.

There's an art to layering finely crafted lettering onto eye popping photography that makes the end result far more than the sum of its parts. It's something high end posters, postcards, and book covers have done for years. And now, thanks to Photolettering, you can do it simply and easily right on your iPhone.

Photolettering is free with a few fonts, additional fonts are available via in-app purchase. They're $0.99 each or $9.99 for all of them. Check it out and let me know if you have as much fun with it as I'm having.

• Free - Download now

Slacker Radio - Leanna Lofte

This week, I started working out at a gym today and since I don't have a single song stored on my iPhone and must have music to work out, I turned to Slacker Radio. I've had a membership with Slacker for a long time now and the interface on the iPhone (and web) recently received a nice makeover. There are other similar services out there, but I've always been happy with Slacker.

• Free - Download now

Your choice?

Now that we've chosen our favorites for the week, we want to hear yours! Did you pick up a killer app, accessory, or game this week? Let us know in the comments below!

If you've ever wanted to surreptitiously record audio with your iPhone, L'il Sneaky will help you do it with greater ninjary than ever before. Stealthily crafted by the crew at WhereCloud, Martin Dufort, Fred Brunel, Seb Morel, and Christine Zoltok -- you may remember them from the remarkable Twitter client, Reportage -- L'il Sneaky is an iPhone recording app made for Nick Fury, James Bond, Sarah Walker, and Sydney Bristow.

To start recording, you simply, slyly, turn your iPhone 90 degrees sideways. To stop recording, you turn it back. You can even pull down a pure black cloaking screen for the ultimate in secret recording.

I've been testing it for a couple of weeks -- legally and morally, I swear! -- and it works really well. And, of course, you don't have to be Natasha Romanov or Jason Bourne to use it. Any time the built-in iOS voice memo app would be too noisy, or require too many taps to start, stop, and otherwise use, L'il Sneaky gets the job done quietly and quickly.

The free version lets you make and store up to 10 recordings of unlimited length. For just $0.99 you can go pro and enjoy unlimited recordings and share them with anyone in your spy cell... er, social circle.

• Free - Download now

The popular music and video machine for iPad, vjay by algoriddim, has made it's way to the iPhone bringing all the same great features to the smaller device. With vjay, you can mix and scratch your favorite music videos from iTunes or combine songs from your music library with personal videos into a killer audio visual experience. You can then share your creations to a Facebook and YouTube.

vjay lets you use all the media stored on your iPhone, including videos, music, and footage from your Camera Roll. It also comes pre-loaded with a few few music videos and high-quality footage. Additionally, vjay features stunning audio and visual effects including looping tools, visual transitions, and real-time video scratch.

In addition to using media stored on your iPhone, vjay also lets you use the built-in camera of the Phone to record video and add them to your mixes on the fly.

With the touch of a button, vjay lets you save your mashups to the iPhone in real-time and share with friends. You can also plug your iPad into a TV or stream your videos wirelessly to an Apple TV. You can also browse for music videos on the iTunes store from directly within the app.

In celebration of vjay's release on the iPhone, both the iPhone and iPad versions are on sale. If you pick this one up, we would love to see the awesome videos you create, so please share them with us in the iMore videography forum!

Billed as "the first mobile mixer for iPad, iPhone, iPod touch, for DJ-ing anytime, everywhere" the iRig MIX is fixing to make music mixing more mobile than ever.

If you're a pro DJ, the iRig MIX claims to have everything you need. That includes a full on EQ adjuster, a crossfader, a headphone cue and a mic input. It works with either one or two iOS devices, and with popular DJ apps so you can record your performances, share them with friends and family, or distribute them to the world.

It's also got an X-Sync feature that lets you mix any form of audio, everything from traditional audio gear to MP3, CD, and more. All with auto tempo matching and beat syncing.

Powerful enough for the pro, accessible enough the for enthusiast, if you're into iPhone, iPod touch and iPad, and you want to get your mixing on, check out the iRig MIX. Complete press release and video below.

Source: iRigMix.com

May 2012 – IK Multimedia is proud to announce that iRig™ MIX, the first ultra-compact DJ and audio mixer for the iPad, iPhone, and the iPod touch is now shipping. When used with an iPad, iPhone or iPod touch, IK’s included* DJ Rig FREE app and other DJ apps, it is a complete, highly portable DJ system for practicing, rehearsing, performing and recording.

With its unique miniaturized form factor and exclusive features, designed to be used with the entire range of portable iOS devices, iRig MIX brings a new meaning to the concept of mobile DJ-ing.

iRig MIX has everything a pro DJ needs, including full EQ adjustment, crossfader, headphone cue and a mic input. Using DJ Rig or other popular DJ apps, users can record their performance and share with friends, publish or distribute at the event. DJs can choose either a traditional setup with two devices (one plugged into each of the independent channels) OR a single iOS device.

This flexibility, combined with iRig MIX’s portability gives aspiring and pro DJs a compact system that can be used everywhere… anytime. House parties or in the yard, after-parties, and impromptu dances are perfect environments for the iRig MIX. Planes, trains and automobiles used to mean that your DJ gear was inaccessible and unusable. Now, no matter where you are or where you are going, you can mix and rehearse sets.

Plus - for the first time on any mixer - iRig MIX can be used for mixing any type of audio source (coming from mp3 players, CD players, etc.) with an iOS device using automatic tempo matching and beat syncing. This is accomplished with X-Sync, a feature that works in combination with the DJ Rig FREE app from IK Multimedia that is included* with iRig MIX.

With its slim, lightweight form factor iRig MIX is considerably smaller than traditional DJ mixers and can be carried anywhere you take your iPhone or iPad, is easy to stow and perfect for performers on the go. The iRig MIX also has minimal power requirements allowing it to be powered not only by the included power supply but also by a suitable USB battery pack or a laptop USB port for maximum mobility to mix anywhere.

iRig MIX is also versatile enough to provide the perfect mixing solution for solo musicians or small ensembles that use one or more iOS devices to play live. It features an extra guitar/microphone input that can be processed with other IK popular apps like AmpliTube® and VocaLive™ or any other app that offers real-time audio processing. Its standard RCA output connectors provide easy, direct connection to PA systems or powered speakers.

iRig MIX includes* 4 free apps: DJ Rig™, the new professional DJ mixing app from IK, AmpliTube, the most popular iOS guitar amp and effects app, VocaLive the processing app for singers and vocalists, and GrooveMaker®, the loop-based beat and groove making app.

• 2 stereo inputs with gain, bass, treble and volume controls, independent cue on each channel with LED indication and channel crossfader
• Instrument/microphone extra input, with volume control, can be processed by iOS real-time effects apps (such as AmpliTube, VocaLive)
• Stereo output with RCA connectors, master level and LED meters
• High quality, pristine sound
• Quality headphone output for master or cue monitoring with independent volume control
• Input switch splits Input 1 into dual-mono for use with DJ mixing apps on a single iOS device
• “X-Sync” mode allows auto-sync with any audio source using the included DJ Rig free app
• Can be powered with the included AC adapter, battery pack and laptop USB ports
• Includes 4 free apps: DJ Rig, AmpliTube, VocaLive, GrooveMaker

iRig MIX costs $99.99/€74.99 (excluding taxes) and is available from electronic and music retailers around the world.

While iTunes is the undisputed king of digital music, it doesn't offer streaming or subscription services, leaving the field wide open for a wide variety of contenders, including Pandora, Slacker, and Spotify. That's important because not everyone wants to buy their music. Some iPhone users want more variety and a better way to discover new music, or simply re-discover old favorites. That's because music is personal. It has to suit both our general tastes and our mood at the moment. A good streaming music app needs to reflect this. It needs to have music available that we like, when we like, and the better it does that job, the better it is.

Pandora, Slacker, and Spotify each have their own unique take on streaming music, but which one does it best?

Pandora vs. Slacker. vs. Spotify: User interface and experience

When it comes to streaming music, users want to find what they want to listen to easily and start listening quickly. If you have to dig through tons of menus or spend lots of time figuring out how to find music, you're just as soon switch to something else. It needs to be accessible and even better -- customizable.

Pandora's layout is relatively straight forward and simple. The first tab will aggregate all the stations you've listened to and a "quick mix" that will play a mix of your stations. You can tap the edit button and easily remove anything you don't want. The next tab allows you to add new stations. You can search by either artist or genre. Tapping on a station or artist will instantly start streaming that content. It will also add that station to your playlist tab.

The bookmarks tab does exactly what you'd expect -- it allows you to bookmark tracks and artists. This feature is handy if you want to keep lists of tracks for future purchase (you can jump straight into iTunes from Pandora to buy content). While Pandora doesn't allow you to go back and stream that exact track, you can create a station based on that artist or track. This is great for fine tuning the Pandora app to play content you like. Make sure when listening to tracks that you use the thumbs up and thumbs down feature to filter in content you're more likely to enjoy and filter out things you don't like.

Upon launching Slacker you get a home page that allows you to browse some pre-defined stations or create your own custom stations. Premium users will also have the option of creating custom playlists (that's a feature Pandora does not offer in their iPhone app).

After choosing a station or creating a custom station, you can like or dislike songs or artists just as you can with Pandora. When disliking a track, you can either dislike just a specific song or the artist in general. So if you detest Rihanna in all forms, just block her from ever showing up for you in Slacker again.

Slacker also gives you the ability to check out what artists and tracks are featured on a station. Tapping into a station allows you to view info on the station, check out the artists, and check out the song list. Tapping the play button next to the station name will instantly start streaming that station. Overall, the entire layout of Slacker flows nicely. There aren't tons of menus to navigate and all of your presets and content are accessible via the main page.

Spotify for iPhone is quite a bit different when it comes to overall design and the manner in which you interact with your content. The main homepage shows you a slider of top tracks and new releases with news underneath. The first tab shows any playlists you've created as well as your inbox, starred, and local tracks (we will get more into these later). The next tab allows you to search for artists, tracks, and albums. Once you find what you're looking for you can either stream it, add it to a playlist, or star it to play it later.

Spotify also integrates Facebook to allow you to view what your friends are listening to under the Friends tab. You can, of course, disable this feature (if, like some of the iMore staff, you don't want your friends to know you secretly listen to the Spice Girls...)

I actually prefer Spotify's layout and interface to the others but there's one big downside -- you can't browse genres. If you don't know what you're looking for or find things in "what's new" or "what's hot", there's pretty much no other way to find music from the iPhone app. This doesn't make for a great experience.

Between the three, Pandora is somewhat plain and Spotify lacks the ability to find music productively. Slacker is a nice middle ground. It doesn't overwhelm you. It might look a bit busy at first but after using it, everything just flows nicely together.

When it comes to user interface and experience, Slacker takes the prize.

Pandora vs. Slacker. vs. Spotify: Content

Pandora, Slacker, and Spotify all focus on music, yet present content in very different ways. If you want a random selection and don't care for playlists, Pandora provides that. But if you want to customize your listening experience right from the start, Spotify and Slacker are the best bets.

Pandora at its core is an online radio streaming service. You can choose the types of music you like as well as like and dislike individual songs or artists. If you come across and artist or song you really like, you can listen to a mix based on that song. What Pandora doesn't do is give you the option to add individual songs to playlists and make your own. It attempts to learn what you like by the ratings you give content. Sometimes those ratings aren't so accurate.

If you want a more radio-like experience and don't want to put too much work into finding and playing content, Pandora is great. Beyond that, it's lacking features even for premium users.

Slacker is simliar to Pandora from the standpoint that you browse through stations and like or dislike artists and songs. From there, Slacker will show you custom content based on your own tastes. You can like and favorite songs which will show up under your favorites section off of the main menu. If you are a premium subscriber, you'll be able to listen to songs on demand.

Slacker allows offline streaming of up to 25 stations at a time (as long as you have room on your iPhone to store the content). You'll need to be a plus or premium member, but you'll be able to listen to your favorite stations without using up your data plan. To access stations you've saved for offline playing, just select the cached content section on the main menu and you're good to go.

Spotify concentrates on a more tailored experience. When it comes to the iPhone app, you can either search for content to play one song or album at a time, or build playlists. There are no stations to weed through or genres to choose from. This may be a deal-breaker for users who want the ability to browse music instead of having to find something specific. There are many times I just want to start playing music and don't really know exactly what I want to listen to. I just know what type of music I want to listen to.

If you'll only be using your iPhone to stream, Slacker will provide you with the best content selection and ways to sort and listen offline. While they don't have custom playlists, you can favorite songs you hear that you like and listen to and access them under your favorites tab on the main menu.

When it comes to content, Slacker wins.

Pandora vs. Slacker. vs. Spotify: Cross-platform syncing & streaming

If you plan on listening not only on your iPhone but on your computer or other mobile device, such as an iPad, you may want to consider what each service offers on other platforms, especially if you're contemplating a premium membership.

Pandora has a wide array of mobile apps available for iPhone, BlackBerry, and Android. You can also listen online. When you sign into your account all your information and saved content will be there.

Pandora One is Pandora's premium subscription model. It gives you access to the desktop application for Mac or Windows. The desktop app really isn't anything to get excited about and s quite dull. There's not much to interact with and it doesn't offer you any particular benefits over using the web-based player.

Slacker also has applications for most platforms and a few more than Pandora offers, namely a native iPad client. They also offer support for Windows Phone 7, Nokia, Palm, BlackBerry, Android, and many more. Slacker will save all your content under your login and it will be there regardless what app or platform you sign in to.

Slacker does not have a Mac or Windows app but you can, of course, stream straight from their website.

Spotify also supports popular platforms such as Windows Phone, Android, BlackBerry, and iPad.

While I have an issue with Spotify's lack of a search feature on the iPhone, it makes up for that with the Mac and Windows app. It's by far the best desktop app of the three (especially considering Slacker doesn't even have one). You can view popular playlists, star tracks, see what's popular in your area, and monitor what your friends are listening to.

My favorite feature of Spotify's desktop app is the ability to wirelessly sync your starred tracks and playlists whenever your iPhone is on the same Wi-Fi network as your desktop computer. I frequently use this feature when I'm listening to music in the office or at home. I'll star music that I particularly like and have my iPhone set up to download starred tracks for offline use. I launch Spotify while on my network, the desktop app recognizes it instantly, downloads any changes, and I get in my car and start listening without having to worry about using my data (offline mode requires premium subscription).

You can also use the Spotify desktop client to sync local tracks from your computer. It'll pull everything in from your music library. While I don't typically use this service, it will be a nice addition for users who don't have to have to manage music in two separate apps. Spotify can handle it all.

When it comes to cross-platform support, Spotify takes the win due to their robust Mac and Windows app. When they launch their anticipated iPad app, it'll just be that much better. The iPad app is available now.

Pandora vs. Slacker. vs. Spotify: Audio quality

One of the most important aspects of listening to music for many is how good it sounds. There's no exception when it comes to streaming content. It's really hard to give a consistent rating considering many things can influence the actual rate at which music stream, such as your internet connection and whether or not a specific track is even available in a higher quality format.

Pandora streams at at average rate of around 64kbps for free listeners on the web, and at 192kbps for premium subscribers. They make no guarantee about mobile listeners, such as iPhone users, considering so many external factors can affect the bit rate.

Slacker doesn't have much information on the exact rate at which they are streaming but they do say that regardless of what platform you are streaming on, you should experience "near-cd quality" audio.

Spotify is a bit better at explaining what they stream. Premium users can get up to 320kbps on the desktop app and within the iPhone app. Of course, actual quality may vary given internet connection and other variables. They say the typical average and free users usually get around 160kbps.

Spotify wins when it comes to audio quality.

Pandora vs. Slacker. vs. Spotify: Pricing & features

While content is super important, so is the price you have to pay for it. While Pandora, Slacker, and Spotify all have a free ad-supported version, they also all offer premium subscriptions.

Pandora's premium service, Pandora One, weighs in at $36 a year or $3.99 per month. So if you can buy yearly, you'll get a bit of a discount. Pandora One will get you the following additions over the free version:

• Higher quality streaming - 192K bits per second
• Removal of ads
• Unlimited skips per day (but you'll still be limited to 6 skips per hour due to licensing issues)
• Access to the desktop player
• Extended timeout (listen up to 5 hours while not by your computer or iPhone)
• Custom skins

Slacker has 2 subcription models to choose from. The $3.99/month plus subscription will get you the following over the free version:

• No ads
• Unlimited song skips
• Mobile station caching (offline playing)
• ABC news
• ESPN radio

The $9.99/month premium subscription will get you everything listed above as well as the following:

• Songs on demand
• Albums on demand
• Single artist stations
• Caching of albums and playlists
• Create custom playlists

Spotify also has two subscription models outside of their freemium model but we're only going to cover the $9.99/month version because, sadly, that's the only version that will even allow you to stream to your iPhone. There is a 48 hour free trial if you'd like to check it out first. Just download the app to activate your trial.

• Manage your local MP3s
• Take your music abroad
• Artist radio
• No ads
• Play local files on your mobile device
• Offline mode on your desktop & mobile
• Enhanced sound quality & content

Pandora, Slacker, and Spotify all provide access to play content through your home or office systems such as Sonos. They're all widely accepted and you shouldn't run into issues with any of them when it comes to a lot of the popular music systems.

When it comes to price, Slacker offers the most for only $4/month but Spotify offers much more in their $9.99/month package. You'll just have to weigh out what you need and what services you'll really use. Go with the one that has a better value for you personally.

When it comes to cost, it's a tie between Slacker and Spotify.

Pandora vs. Slacker. vs. Spotify: Conclusion

Pandora, Slacker, and Spotify all offer streaming experiences in very different ways. I can't help but feel that Pandora is lacking when it comes to functionality and customization. I know many users just want to listen and go, but access to previously listened to songs and stations would be a welcome addition.

Slacker provides a nice streaming service for free with an easy to maneuver through interface. You can even get offline caching for only $4/month. That's a very sought after feature for many users who want to be more conservative with their carrier data. You won't get it cheaper than you do with Slacker.

Spotify is the new kid on the block but packs a punch. While I think they have the best desktop experience of all three, we're talking iPhone app here. And sadly, that's lacking. There is no way to browse for and discover music. That's a deal-breaker for me. So is having to pay $9.99/month just to use the iPhone app. If Spotify could fix these two issues by beefing up the iPhone app and giving iPhone users access either for free (ad-based) or at a cheaper rate, they'd be the best choice, hands down.

Only one of these apps seems to be a happy medium between discovering and customizing the streaming experience, and that's Slacker. It'll suit most users needs and offers the flexibility most users need.

Slacker is the best streaming app for iPhone.

If you just bought a new iPad and have searched in vain for the built-in Apple Voice Memos app, here’s some bad news — there isn’t one. Apple chose not to include it on the iPad. Luckily for us, however, App Store developers are here to fill that void. In fact, the developers of Audio Memos for iPhone and iPad know exactly how to do it right.

There are three different version of Audio Memos, a free version that offers not much more than the ability to record a basic memo, a $0.99 version that give a couple more features and the ability to buy extensions as in-app purchases, and a Pro, $9.99 version that includes all the available extensions.

This chart compares the features of the three versions available and also lists the price of each extension.

Notice that if you choose to purchase all the extensions of the $0.99 version, you get all the features of the Pro version, but ultimately pay $1 more for it. So think carefully about whether or not you're going to want all the extensions or not before making a purchase.

With that said, the $0.99 version does allow you to try all the extensions for free for 15 days. So if you're not sure if you want them all, you can think of it as a $1 trial.

Since a lot of the commonly desired extensions are only $0.99 (like trimming and markers), grabbing a few of them still keeps the price of the app at an acceptable amount. It can potentially get rather expensive, though.

The Pro version of Audio Memos and the $0.99 Voice Activation extension gives you have three different options for recording your audio. You can do it by simply pressing a button to start and end your recording (the option that comes free), set a threshold, that when reached, will start your recording, or set a timer for when you want the recording to begin and end.

There are three different quality levels to choose from: 11025 Hz, 22050 Hz and 44100 Hz. You can also adjust the volume of the audio, but be careful with this as it can easily sound very distorted. In my experience, as long as you're near your iPad or using a headset, you shouldn't have a problem with the audio level.

If you want to use a bluetooth mic for your recordings, there's an option that lets you do so.

Available in the Pro version or as a $0.99 extension, you can trim the beginning and end of your recordings. Doing so is very easy to do and is similar to trimming videos with the Camera and Photos apps. Simply drag the handles at the ends of the clip to the desired location. As you do, the time location will pop up. You can also slide the whole clip around which is great for those times you need a clip that is an exact length.

You can also lower the quality of the clip to reduce the files size and choose to save a .wav or .aac. The saving can be done as a new file or as a replacement for the clip you've edited.

The ability to insert and navigate between markers is available in the Pro version or as a $0.99 extension. It provides four additional buttons to jump between markers, add a new marker, and select a marker from a list. Markers can be added either during the recording or after and a description can be associated with each one. For another $0.99 you can insert photos as well. (The pictures extension is available as a standalone that works like a marker without a description, but the markers extension is required to easy navigate between markers).

The Good

• Free version available that does the basics
• Great UI
• Good quality
• Potential of being fully feature-packed
• Having extensions available as in-app purchases can potentially save you money if you only want a few of them
• Universal for iPhone and iPad

The Bad

• Doesn't support the new iPad's Retina display. Yet.
• A bit pricey once you start adding up all the extensions.
• "All extensions" in-app purchase should not be $9.99. It should be $8.99 so that the total cost of the app and extension is the same as if you purchased the pro version.
• Should have more features included in each extension. For example, the markers and photos extensions should be grouped as one extension. Multiple selection and Voice activation shouldn't even be extensions - they should be included in the $0.99 version.
• Doesn't support the new iPad's Retina display, yet

The bottom line

Although I'm rather annoyed with how many of the features of Audio Memos come at an additional cost, I cant deny how well the app is made. If you're looking for a powerful voice recorder for your iPad, Audio Memos will not disappoint -- often times great software comes at a price.

Free - Download Now

$1.99 - Download Now

$9.99 - Download Now

I'm not the most spontaneous person in the world – my wife and kids would say that is a huge understatement. I am a bit programmed and disciplined and really work on "trying new things."

So, in my disciplined way, I decided that at 48 years of age, it was time for a mid-life crisis. Since I'm not terribly spontaneous, I have an amazing, beautiful wife and six great kids, my mid-life crisis needed to be something out of the norm.

I thought about getting a motorcycle, but my family seems to think I lack the proper coordination and that it might end very badly for me if I tried that. Then it dawned on me – what I wanted to learn how to do was play the guitar. I have been playing the piano since I was about six, I knew music theory and I played in bands in high school; but what I really wanted to do was learn the guitar.

I found my goal, and set upon my journey with iPad 2 in hand to start my adventure. The first thing I needed to do was buy a guitar. I fired up my eBay app to see if I could get a good used one. When nothing jumped out at me, I launched the PriceGrabber app and looked for a guitar that got a great write up in Guitarist Magazine that I had just read using iOS 5's Newsstand.

I ordered my new guitar and started looking for apps to teach me how to use it. I was very surprised that when I did a search for "Guitar" in the App Store, I found over 800 iPad apps and close to 2000 iPhone apps. Where to start? I narrowed my search to "Beginner Guitar" to narrow the field a bit. Pay dirt!

I found Beginner Guitar Songs from GuitarJamz.com. Marty Schwartz, who is an amazing guitar teacher, showed me how to hold the guitar, how to hold the pick, basic strumming patterns and then introduced easy chords to learn. I quickly progressed through the Beginner Lesson Series and advanced to Important Guitar Chords. After an afternoon, I could play an E minor, A major, D major, G major, E major, A minor and C major chords –not bad for the first day.

The next morning of my first weekend with a guitar, I fired up the Beginner Guitar app again and went through the Strumming Patterns and tried to learn some songs from the Easy Guitar Songs section. This was so much fun and I could really see some progress.

One thing that Marty did mention in the lessons was keeping your guitar in tune. I had forgotten about that. I touched base with some musician friends and read up on line. It seems that the "purists" like to use a tuning fork, the "realists" like to use an analog chromatic tuner and the "techies" like the digital chromatic tuner. I just couldn't see dropping close to a hundred bucks on a tuner when I knew there must be "…an app for that." Back to the App Store – this time searching for Guitar Tuner. I came across many options, but I settled on Cleartune Chromatic Tuner. For $3.99, I figured it would be worth a shot and it is great. Play a note on the guitar and the "analog looking" dial shows you how far off from the actual note you are. I just tuned my strings and kept plucking and tuning until the guitar was in perfect tune.

Now I was ready to learn more chords – I had about seven under my belt and I wanted more. I found the Howcast Guitar Lessons app and found over 140 video lessons – mostly chords and progressions. I spend the better part of the day learning more chords. I continued each day; adding a new chord and then reviewing the ones I had learned. By the end of the first week I had about 10 chords I was comfortable with. By the end of the second week, I had about fifteen I could remember and play. The Howcast app also taught me how to play scales and I learned the Pentatonic scales and the Blues scale and felt like I was ready to dive into some music.

I so enjoyed the GuitarJamz app that I looked for more stuff from Marty Schwartz and found Blues Licks, Solo Guitar and 100 Lessons and I downloaded all those apps. I then saw that in addition to the apps and the website, Marty had hundreds of lessons for free on his YouTube channel. I watched, learned and experimented to see what I could do. I had to remember, I was only a little over two weeks into my new hobby.

What I learned was that some of my favorite classic rock songs were pretty easy. America's "Horse With No Name" – two chords. The Beatles' "Let it Be" – four chords. Cat Stevens' "Peace Train" – four chords. I could do this.

Over the next few weeks – and now after about four months – I have been watching YouTube videos, using the Chromatic Tuner app and downloading guitar sheet music via the Songsterr Plus app. The guitar learning apps showed me how to read guitar tablature and chord diagrams – so I can do that as well.

As I write this, I have just learned the guitar solo to Pink Floyd's "Wish You Were Here" – something I never envisioned I would be doing four months into learning how to play the guitar. Now, I still need lots of work and I'm sure my technique needs improving. Thanks to a Valentine's present for my first "in-person" guitar lesson, I hope to work on those things and more. However, the reality is that I really did learn how to play the guitar using my iPad.

Have you learned how to do something new using your iPad? Let us know by posting a comment below or joining this discussion thread in our forums.

Progression is a guitar tab editor for your iPad that gives you the convenience of an easy-to-use guitar tab creation tool right at your fingertips. It is loaded with features and functions such as vibrato, slides, string bending, hammer-ons, pull-offs, whammy-bar, bass slap, effects, mutes, and harmonics.

• Enter, edit, and playback tab, notation, or both
• Acoustic Guitar, Electric Guitar, and Bass Guitar samples included (add additional instruments such as Classical Guitar, Acoustic Fingerstyle Guitar, Mandolin, and Banjo)
• Search for tabs online
• Open NOTION files
• Open Guitar Pro files (versions 3-5)
• Clean and intuitive user interface
• Interactive 24-fret guitar fretboard for fast entry
• Quick and simple selection palette
• Distortion and reverb effects
• Full audio mixer
• Convenient file sharing
• Full-range of guitar functions and articulations including: bends, vibrato, slides, hammer on, pull off, mutes, whammy bar techniques, bass slap, harmonics, and more…
• Drag and drop cursor option
• Insert text
• Quick “Undo” and “Redo” functions
• Chord and melody modes
• Easy delete and erase capabilities
• Help Files
• Enter and edit title and composer information
• In-App Purchases to add more instruments and gear
• Free scales and exercises included

If you pick this one up, let us know what you think! Check out the screenshots after the break.

[$4.99, with in-app purchases - iTunes link]

Have an app you'd love to see featured on TiPb? Email us at iosapps@tipb.com, tell us about your app (include an iTunes link), and we'll take a look.

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