Like most people nowadays my computer’s music collection has grown out of all proportion. I have more music on there than I could ever hope to listen to. Gigabytes on top of gigabytes. Luckily there are plenty of great apps out there like iTunes that can manage this and let me search, rate, sort, structure my collection so that I can find and play what I want when I want.
Enter the iPhone. I bought the 16Gb iPhone because there is just never enough space, and I’m sure it will be full and I’ll be struggling again before long. There’s still far too much music on my computer to fit on the phone. The current count is around 70Gb. Where it all came from I have no idea. Therefore I have to select the playlists I’m keen on at the time and switch them in and out as my interest dwindles.
Enter Remote. One of the first iPhone apps I tried, called simply “Remote”, I fell in love with. When I’m at home I can view my whole collection on my iPhone and can monitor the currently playing song. The functionality is very complete. You can navigate the collection in every way that you can within iTunes, via search, playlists, artists, albums, songs, genres. You can rate, pause, scan, adjust the volume. It’s as if you’re sitting at the computer using the iTunes. The limitation? The limitation is the distance between my ears and the computer I’m controlling. You cannot take it on the road with you.
Enter “Simplify Media”. The idea behind this iPhone application is exactly what I was looking for. Remote control of iTunes – remotely. So now when I’m on the bus I can stream music from my iMac at home directly to my iPhone. Perfect! I’ve installed it. It works.
Too simple? Well my first complaint, and I like to complain, is that I cannot search for music. I can scan up and down the list of songs or list of artists, but what about that song that’s got “love me” in the title. Is it “Please love me” or “Just love me”? Using this application I’m really missing the lack of search. The control of song play is also lacking. There’s no scan, or rating (I constantly rate my music), and no album art. For these last two, the reason is that the system as a whole is not specific to iTunes. I know this because it’s also compatible with Linux. And we all know it will be a long while before we see iTunes there. The interface is a little mono-tone for my liking. All the menus use the same basic select-list.
So what redeeming features does Simplify Media have? It cannot be all bad can it? No, actually it is not. The more I played with it, the more I liked it. For one, it grabs lyrics from LyricWiki. This is a great feature. It also gives you a info page about the artist.
When Apple releases the ability to run applications in the background then it would be great to play the music in the background, like you can with the native iPod application on the iPhone.
I’m looking forward to the next update of this iPhone app. Hopefully we’ll get search.