Best mobile phone music players - listening to tracks on the go
Marc Posted on
Saturday, January 28, 2012 at 12:25PM The way we listen to music has changed so quickly it’s hard to keep up with the latest services and how they differ.
Actually buying albums and tracks remains popular, but it’s more about shopping for digital files than a physical CD. More recently, new streaming options are getting in on the act – and for the next generations of teenagers this will be the way they discover new music.
In the UK, there are several ways of putting music on your mobile phone or tablet. And lately these have also included social elements – ways to share music tastes and music discovery with friends via Twitter or Facebook.
Tom Waits CDs. Do we still buy physical music?
iTunes - Apple’s iTunes is the most well known way to listen to music on your mobile phone. You make a collection in iTunes and choose which of those to appear on your iPhone (or iPad). The most recent OS update (5.0) allows users to do this without having to physically connect their iDevice to a desktop or laptop.
Apple has also just released iTunes Match. This costs £21.99 per year. It does two things: 1) It holds all your music in iCloud so you can listen to a track anywhere by streaming it where there is a wifi connection, which means that you no longer have to download all your tracks and use up all the memory.
2) Apple will allow you to upload music to your iCloud from any source – CD, Amazon MP3 songs, even tracks you may have acquired illegally in your misspent youth, ahem, and it will ‘match’ it with a higher quality version, no questions asked.
The downside to iTunes is that it will only play on Apple-made devices. Or, so people think.
But you can get tracks from your iTunes collection onto your Android phone, too. Download an app from the Market called Double Twist. You sync the app with the computer which holds all your iTunes music, and it will copy and download them to your Android mobile.
The iTunes poorly executed social function, called Ping, hasn’t taken off. It’s restricted to your iTunes social sphere – there is no integration with Facebook and syncing it to Twitter is messy – so it’s not really very social at all. Most users switch if off pretty quickly.
Spotify - The popular streaming service, you can listen to your songs over wifi on your iPhone/Android/Blackberry – and download up to 3,333 of them for offline listening on your mobile – for £9.99 a month. Unlike the free version of Spotify, paying this also means you don’t have to listen to ads, and you are not restricted to set number of plays per track.
Syncing is really fast. Downloading 3,333 tracks can take an age – all night almost – but once it’s done it’s easy to chop and change this list, meaning you can add/remove albums or individual tracks you wish to save to your mobile for offline listening.
(If you have both iTunes and Spotify on an iPhone or iPod Touch, you may have trouble listening to Spotify songs when your device is connected to a car stereo. I’ve tried to many times, and after playing for approx three seconds, the Spotify track fades out, and a random iTunes song plays instead. Then again, that could just be me...)
Oh, and if you find some music in Spotify that you really, really love, you can buy it from iTunes via your Spotify account.
Spotify also has the best social sharing. Lots of users will post what they’re listening to on their Facebook wall – which can be annoying. The best social feature, however, is the ability to create a playlist and share it. A Spotify user looking for, say, a great 80s music collection, can ask for users’ playlists via Twitter and, once found, can simply copy it. Great.
Last FM - A slightly different offering, Last FM’s best trick is to play you music which is similar to artists you already know and love. Like Tom Waits? Last FM will play you songs from other artists is classes as similar to Waits. This is excellent for music discovery.
Soundcloud – an emerging service which combines AudioBoo-style short recordings from users, of anything from their baby’s first words to waves crashing on a beach. It has been picked up by musicians and DJs as a way of releasing new music. Soundcloud has great social functions, and any track you upload is easily embeddable into your own website.
Android phones come with a range of music players. Here’s a link to the music category in the Android Market. None are as straightforward as iTunes. Android phones work best with either Google Music or Amazon Cloud Player - both allow users to store music in the cloud and stream on mobile phones. Neither, however, are yet available in the UK.
Google Music – not yet in UK, but launched in US last autumn. Google Music has an iTunes-like feature whereby users can upload their entire collection onto Google’s servers, and sync their favourites to their Android phones and MP3 players.
Amazon Cloud Player store – not yet in UK. Amazon last year created a ‘locker’ for users to store all their purchases of content in the cloud. This includes any music bought from Amazon.
It’s very popular in the US – many users buy their music from Amazon and then add it to their iTunes collection.
Other music streaming services popular in the US and other countries, but not available in the UK are Pandora and Rdio. This is due to the tricky business of negotiating prices and revenue share with music labels country-by-country. But, they will get here eventually, probably.
The UK does have internet radio. TuneIn Radio has stations and genres from around the world. Perfect for a rainy Sunday afternoon, for trawling obscure radio stations and hearing some bizarre music. TuneIn Radio comes as an app for both iPhone and Android phones.
See also: Logitech Z515 - nifty bluetooth speakers so you can play wirelessly from your mobile phone





