The stock music player on the iPhone hasn’t changed much since its inception. Sure, with the recent iOS 6 update the design became sleeker, but it’s not really what you’d expect from a top of the line smartphone.
And when I say “MEH,” it isn’t directed towards the Kendrick Lamar album (which is awesome). It’s the layout of the application, the lack of gesture control, and the sometimes tedious job of shuffling through certain albums and artists.
If you, too, are feeling unsatisfied with your iPhone’s music app, here are a few great free alternatives you can use instead.
In:Play
The first application is called in:play, and it’s entirely controlled by gestures. The interface has a very sleek, minimal look and is very easy to control. It’s as simple as tapping once on the screen to play the song, swiping to change the song, and double tapping to change to artist, album or song.
Going from playing random Radiohead songs to only playing songs from OK Computer is very quick and takes just a few taps. You can also switch the player to night mode (like the image on the right side). The application, which was formerly $1.99, is now available for free.
TapTunes
TapTunes also relies heavily on gestures and comes with a very sleek and awesome looking scrolling album interface when you first enter the application.
Some of the features look similar to the stock Apple music player, but TapTunes is much quicker when swiping from song to song and is a lot more intuitive to use.
TuneWiki
The final application is called TuneWiki, which looks like an improved version of the stock iPhone music player. What sets this app apart from the rest is that it comes with scrolling lyrics for all of your songs.
Just play a song and the app will automatically find the lyrics for it and play them in real-time.
Bonus: Planetary
Now, I know I said I was only going to mention 3, but this app is just too awesome to pass up. Plus, this one’s iPad only (as of this writing), so it technically doesn’t count, right?
Planetary is an extremely innovative and unique music player that uses the universe to play your music.
All of your artists show up as a string of intergalactic stars, which you can then click on. This takes you to the star,which is the artist, with its revolving planets, which are the albums. Clicking on an album takes you to the planet and its rotating moons, which, as you can probably guess, are the songs.
When you click on a song, it begins to rotate around the planet in accordance to the song length. Awesome, right? Check out the video below to see how it works.
Download Planetary for the iPad
What’s your favorite music player app for iOS? If you know of a great one that isn’t on the list, let us know in the comments.
Just updated your iPhone? You’ll find new emoji, enhanced security, podcast transcripts, Apple Cash virtual numbers, and other useful features. There are even new additions hidden within Safari. Find out what’s new and changed on your iPhone with the iOS 17.4 update.
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