Music Apps

The Omni Group has finally delivered on their promise to bring their iPad app OmniOutliner 2 to the iPhone. The company announced today that version 2.3 of the app with iPhone support has landed on the App Store. The update also adds a ton of new features including a redesigned outline view, additional templates and other improvements. You can see the complete release notes here.

For those who are not familiar with OmniOutliner, it is a feature-rich word processor that promises to be good enough to write a novel. The app features the ability to sync your documents between your iPad, Mac and now your iPhone or iPod touch. It also includes a custom rich-text editor, attachment support, audio recording and much, much more.

Paul McCartney has released five of his albums as iPad apps. The albums include: Band on the Run, RAM, Wings over America, McCartney and McCartney II. Each app is $7.99 and includes all the tracks remastered from the original albums, video clips, artwork and rare photographs. The apps are actually cheaper than buying the full album from iTunes. For example, McCartney II (Deluxe Version) is $12.99 to download, and you do not get any of the bonuses,such as rehearsal footage for "Coming Up".

McCartney is not the first musician to release an album as an interactive app. Bjork did it in 2011 with Biophilia and Lady Gaga released ARTPOP as a universal app in 2013. Bjork's iOS album included extras like music scores with karaoke playback. Gaga's app is described as "a musical and visual engineering system that combines art, fashion, and technology".

Today Beats Music tweeted a teaser image with the caption "THIS JUST IN: Your favorite Music App is feeling ready to grow in size...literally..."

In January, music mogul Jimmy Lovine and Dr. Dre took a gamble by launching a music subscription service without a free ad-supported option. The service offers on-demand access to around 20 million songs and it features specific channels curated by music experts such as famous DJs and music journalists. The app also includes a recommendation engine entitle "The Sentence" where users can get song suggestions based on their current activity, mood and location.

Pandora has released version 5.2 of its iOS app which brings improvements to both the iPad and iPhone. iPad users can now utilize the Sleep Timer previously only found on the iPhone and iPod. The new feature can be found in the settings of any station on the Pandora Radio app. From here users can set up a countdown time so Pandora will shutdown after 15, 30 or 60 minutes. The update also adds personalized Push Notifications, updates on new music added to stations, and the ability follow friends and comment on their profile.

Absinthe co-creator pod2g has announced his first iOS app called podDJ. The new app turns your iPad into a virtual turntable for mixing and scratching any music in your iTunes library. Pod2g promises this is the "most realistic virtual turntable" in the App store.

PodDJ features an easy to use UI, a sound output latency of just 5 milliseconds, transform buttons, BPM detection, turntable emulation, monitor output, and support for an external mixer. Pod2g claims podDJ is the fastest scratching application available.