There are times when you’ve heard every song in your phone’s library twice and are desperate for new music. Or you have a song stuck in your head but you can’t listen to it just because you forgot to save it to your phone. Well, fret no more. Now you can just pick up one of these apps and get the music you want.
SoundCloud
SoundCloud is a social sound platform, where artists — both established and up-coming ones — upload hours of new music. With the app, you can take all the music you want with you on the go; it live-streams tracks or playlists over your WiFi or data connection and lets you follow music and podcast creators (you can even search for audiobooks or their excerpts). My favourite feature is the lockscreen playback — it lets you play, pause or skip tracks without having to unlock your screen. Not just that, you can also record and share your own music through your smart phone . So bring your singing out of the shower.
Grooveshark
This app lets you play songs or even entire albums. You can make and save playlists and access them from anywhere — your phone or computer as it’s synced over the cloud. Grooveshark makes radio stations based on the music you already like, so you can discover new tunes and chances are, you’ll love them. My favourite feature is the Listen Offline — you can ‘offline’ your favourite songs and listen to them even when your data coverage falters.
SoundHound
You love that song playing in the restaurant, but you don’t know which one it is. Well, our friend SoundHound here can sniff it out for you. The app recognises the music playing around you and let’s you tap the SoundHound button to instantly identify the song and see its lyrics, share, or buy it. You can even search for it by singing or humming into the mic. But, if you can’t carry a tune, ouch!
Raaga
Remember the time when a lot of mothers learnt how to navigate the Internet and spent all their time and bandwidth on raaga.com? Well, now that they’re learning how to handle their smartphones, raaga.com is ready with its official app. It offers songs in over 20 Indian languages including Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Punjabi, Malayalam and Bhojpuri. The app even offers Carnatic and Hindustani music and also claims to have the largest archive of devotional content. Not just that, it lets you access your saved playlists and also search for and discover new music.
Poweramp
Poweramp is a music player that claims to have been the number one paid music player in the Google Play Store for three years running. Yup, that’s the catch, it’s a paid app. However, it offers a 15-day free trial, and I have to say, after that period, one is rather tempted to buy it. Poweramp plays mp3, mp4/m4a (incl. alac), ogg, wma, flac, wav, ape, wv, tta, mpc and aiff files. It has a 10-band optimised graphical equaliser for all supported formats, presets, custom presets; separate Bass and Treble adjustment; and stereo eXpansion, mono mixing and balance. It also supports lyrics, including lyrics search via a musiXmatch plugin, has OpenGL based cover art animation and even downloads missing album art. So next time you’re asked to DJ a party, just create your playlist and play on.
