Recover Long Lost Songs With Reprise
Reprise ($1.99) by Adam Bell is a simple app designed for users to rediscover their music. Utilizing a one-screen display, it allows users to shuffle through their iDevice’s music libraries without repeating the same songs. Reprise keeps you on your toes as it uncovers your long-lost songs.
There are only four controls in the app. Swipe up to start playing music, swipe down to pause. Swipe right to advance songs, swipe left to go back. That’s it, pretty easy. Users can choose between a black or white background and they can also turn off the beep between songs. These settings cannot be customized while using the app; instead users must modify them through their iDevice settings.
Reprise is not intended to be an alternative to the iPod music player; instead it acts as a placeholder. Traditionally, if you have shuffled a playlist, you cannot play a specific song and then return to that shuffled playlist. You can only re-shuffle the original playlist, which will play the same songs in a different order. This will replay some songs before others are heard once. With Reprise, users can shuffle their entire music library, switch over to the iPod music player to hear a specific song, and then switch back without upsetting the shuffled playlist. Thereby preventing the replaying of songs before others are heard.
There are a couple of issues with Reprise. First, there is no way to shuffle songs by categories (i.e. genre, artist, or playlist). The app only shuffles all the songs on your iDevice. Second, the app restarts the shuffled playlist of songs every time it is opened. So it is no better than the iPod player for users whose iDevices do not support multitasking. If your iDevice does have multitasking, be careful not to close the app or your playlist will be restarted.
The idea behind Reprise is good and its simplicity is its strongest point. It could be improved with more customization options for shuffled playlists and settings accessible through the app. If hearing the same songs over and over again bothers you, consider Reprise. But for the majority of us $1.99 is quite steep for this feature.
