Review: Discovr - A Visual Pandora?
January 23, 2011
Overview
The music revolution of the last decade or so has enabled more individuals and bands to self-produce albums and then make them accessible to the entire world (mostly thanks to iTunes). Although this has vastly increased the number of songs that would make an audiophile cringe, it has also expanded legit music libraries and deepened every genre.
This means that for every mainstream band that you love, there are a hundred others that sound very similar or even better. The difficulty music fans face is very comparable to that of app lovers: how do I find the music/apps I love when there are so many to choose from? For the app problem, App Advice is clearly available to save the day. For the music problem, websites and applications like Pandora are available to help you find more music and bands to love.
But as much as Pandora’s advertisers would like to deny it, when we are using it, we aren’t usually watching the screen and writing down the new bands we find. Maybe sometimes, but usually Pandora, Last FM and other music aggregators are used as finely tuned radio stations to be played in the background.
Discovr for the iPad isn’t a Pandora or Last FM clone, but it is similar in purpose. Instead of linking bands and songs together through radio stations, it enables users to visually (and much more quickly) find bands similar to those that you already love.
Features
The best way to describe how Discovr works is to compare it to that brainstorming technique most of us learned in grade school; bubble mapping. Write a topic (let’s choose Apple) and circle it then draw lines to other circles with similar topics (iPhone, Macs, iTunes, iPod, app store…). Then from each of those circles you link it to others, and so on.
And thus are the basic workings of Discovr. Choose an artist or band and it will link it to about six similar artists/bands. Tap any of these six, and it will branch out with another six or so. You can continue this process infinitum, and any bands that are similar will link together. Do this enough and you will get a web of bands related to the first band by varying degrees.
If you want to learn more about any given band, just double tap it and a screen will pop up with a biography, blog links, links to purchase the music (Amazon, iTunes…) and embedded YouTube videos of the band’s music. These videos is where you will quickly find if you are further interested in the band or not. If you are, you can share it via Twitter, Facebook or email, or you can add it as a favorite. The favorites congregate at the bottom of the main screen for easy access in the future.
The Good
Discovr works surprisingly well at finding new music. In minutes you will likely have at least a few bands you have never heard of in your favorites bar. Even if nothing else in this application worked, this baseline feature will tickle the fancy of anyone looking to add more variety to their playlists. There is also great depth in the amount of music available to search. In no time flat, you can go from mainstream to extremely obscure and find something to your liking anywhere in between. Even the most professed music expert will find many artists they have never heard of (I'm betting).
The bubble system is also fun and dynamic. At any time you can drag them around and the links will follow likewise. If your web gets bigger than the screen, you can pan around by dragging. There is almost zero learning curve to this navigation system.
There are some simple additions that aren’t expected but are very much appreciated. One of them is the ‘shake to clear’ feature that enables you to shake your ‘web’ at any time and it will bring you back to the search bar. Another is the fact that if you start listening to a song from the YouTube videos, you can go back to your ‘web’ and the music will continue playing as you search for other artists. This was my personal favorite feature.
Discovr seems innovative and I like that about it. It may not be the first of it's kind, but it is the first that I am aware of. Sound off in the comments if you know of similar apps.
The Bad
The first edition was quite unstable and would frequently crash. Fortunately, this review spanned until version 1.1 which greatly improved this problem. I still did experience one crash afterwards, but it seemed to be a rare occurrence with the new version which feels much more stable.
The system isn't perfect. Since they only link a limited amount of bands, some fans will feel that ________ should have been linked to _______ and be disappointed when they aren't. Some artists are also duplicated under similar names (for example there is a 'Black Sabbath' and 'Dio- Black Sabbath' even though they are the same band).
I also felt myself wishing that pinch to zoom were enabled when using the web.
