Carry A Music Festival In Your Pocket With Campout
Campout ($0.99) by Streetline Media is your own “music festival in your pocket.”
First thing’s first – this is not your music app like Pandora, Spotify, Rdio, and all those other apps. No, Campout is strictly a music discovery app for independent artists. If this doesn’t suit your fancy, I’d suggest you stop reading.
Campout is a database of songs from over one hundred thousand independent artists from Bandcamp, which is an online community for indie artists. These songs can be streamed for free using Campout. If you’re okay with this, let’s continue and delve into this fun little app.
When you launch the app, the first thing you see is the “Campout” tab view. Along the bottom is a toolbar with three other options: Trending, Favorites, and Search.
On the main Campout view, you can start your music discovery by tapping “Play me anything,” which will randomly pick something from the database. Underneath this button are the options for Popular Artists and Search (even though this is accessible via Trending and Search on the bottom toolbar). The bottom section of this screen will feature some of the trending artists as well, where you can swipe the art left and right to navigate.
The Trending (or popular) view will show you just that – trending artists. These will (or should) be different as they reflect what is popular at the moment. You’ll be able to see the name of the artist and how many albums they have on Bandcamp, which you’ll be able to stream from the app. Selecting an album allows you to view more information on the album, link you to more from the artist, and stream the entire album or just individual songs.
When you stream songs, you’ll get small album art, time remaining for the track, as well as song and album name. The playback controls include an audio scrubber, skip/previous, pause/play, and Favorite. A button representing two discs will take you back to the albums.
If you tap on the screen, the interface will hide the bars, though it doesn’t take advantage of the full screen since the “Campout” logo and textured background are still there. I hope that the developers can change that so that going in to this “full screen” mode will display larger album art.
If you Favorite a track, it will be displayed under the Favorites tab. Come back here to listen to those gems that you come across. The search function is useful only if you have a slight idea of what you’re looking for. You won’t find any mainstream artists here though, since that would defeat the purpose of this app.
Campout has multitasking support, so you can stream indie music while doing other things on your iPhone, just like the native iPod app. If you use headphones that have an in-line remote, then you can use that to control playback in Campout as well.
I loved the interface of Campout. It’s beautiful and is an overall sleek UI. I definitely appreciate the music discovery, because I already found some new artists that I like from it. Even though these are independent artists, there is plenty of variety to be found among them.
For the price of a dollar, I would highly recommend Campout if you are into finding new music to listen to. If that isn’t your cup of tea (which is understandable), then this can be passed over.
But really, you’re only paying a dollar to find a world of music that you would not have discovered otherwise. Sounds like a good deal to me.
