Jammbox's Discovr iPad App Finds New Music
January 17, 2011
Everyone has their favorite musical artists. But, it can be difficult to find other artists who match our individual tastes. Until now.
Created by Australian-based Jammbox, the Discovr iPad app makes it easier to uncover artists, who we’d almost certainly enjoy, but might know nothing about.
Think of Discovr as “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” for music. Typing in an artist’s name will show similar groups; click on one of these new artists and others will also be shown. Imagine an ever growing spiderweb, and you will get the idea.
From here, the app really shows off its strengths.
Double-clicking on an artist brings up a console of sorts, which shows links to the group’s songs, videos, and bios. Plus, you’ll see what others are saying on MySpace, Last.fm, iTunes, and Amazon.
The videos come from YouTube, which is good or bad depending on your opinion of the video sharing service. You will find plenty of videos, but some might not be of the best quality. Still, I cannot think of a better service today that could serve this purpose. Luckily, each video plays within its own screen in the app. They don’t load separately in the YouTube app, which would get old pretty quickly.
The app is not without its faults. For one, Jammbox hasn’t published its algorithm. The artist connections seem sound, but are there other relationships that are missing? It's hard to tell.
Plus, while you can manually assign artists as “your favorites,” there is no integration with your iTunes library. This would be a great add-on for a future release.
Overall, Discovr is a pretty nice 1.0 app. It is available for $2.99 in the App Store.
