While Songify is nowhere near being classified as a genuine music creation app, it does let you record your own somewhat original music.  Plus, it's fun and could make for hours of entertainment.

No musical talent?  Not a problem.  All you have to do is record yourself speaking and the app will take care of the rest, using some built-in algorithms that pitch-corrects and builds a melody around your voice recording.    Yep, your spoken word input goes out as a finished song.

To use Songify, you just tap the center circle and begin speaking into your iPhone.  Once you're done, select a music style and the app will take care of arranging your words into a backing track.  Results are mixed.  Some will be fairly listenable gems, while others are just plain bad.   While you aren't likely to come up with radio hits playing around with this thing, you're bound to have fun with what you turn up.

To give you an idea, the "songs" are, basically, your spoken track set to background music, with a few short clips cut off from the speech dropped in here or there.  You don't get any editing control, either, so you can't tweak anything if you come up with a brilliant idea for the ditty.   If you don't like a song, you can use the Re-Songify option which runs it through the algorithm once again.

Songify can be downloaded free, but only comes with three music styles included,  with other style packs available as in-app purchases.

[iTunes]

Much has been said about Android's less-than-desirable stock music player.  While serviceable, the software is cumbersome to manage for large music collection and there's little in the way of extra features to play with.  Fortunately, there's a whole slew of apps ready to fill the role of a fuller-featured alternative.  Here are five of our favorite free music players from the Android Market:

Cubed. Sporting one of the prettiest interfaces we've seen on a music player, it throws up a three-dimensional cube that shows the album art on the face.  You can navigate your collection either by artist or album,  flicking vertically to spin the cube and horizontally to move through your artists in an alphabetical order.  The actual player's features are pretty standard, although they do offer a listing for upcoming shows for currently playing artists, which some folks should find useful.

Winamp. Yep, that same Winamp you probably had on your PC several years ago is available on Android.  It's got all the usual bells and whistles, along with some nifty additions, such as wireless syncing with your Winamp desktop library and built-in Shoutcast radio.

Songbird. I love Songbird on the PC, despite its many shortcomings.  While the desktop version tries to do too much for its own good, the Android version scales down hard, offering a very streamlined player that's notably clean and simple.  Extras include Facebook integration and a Flickr photo stream for the currently playing artists.

Meridian. While a Pro version of the app is available, the free one is advanced enough on its own that I've never bothered upgrading.   An all-around, feature-filled media app, it expands Android's file support, offers plenty of gesture-based actions (e.g. forwarding ten seconds through a song), bring up lyrics and delivers an overall higher usability experience than many similar titles on the Market.

MixZing. If you like iTunes' Genius, then you'll love MixZing, whose recommendation engine sits at the heart of its feature set.  As soon as you start playing a song, it will begin searching for 20 songs to recommend to your queue, which you can add or remove.  In case you'd like it to recommend songs out of your library, it has that, too, with track previews built into the interface for quick decision-making.  Other features include an equalizer, extra information about the artist playing and Last.fm integration.

Looking for an all-in-one app to help polish up your axe skills?  Try the Planet Waves Guitar Tools, which crams an impressive amount of content to aid in your ever-improving fretboard mastery.

Designed to be useful for beginner to intermediate musicians, the app has a library of over 7,000 chords, complete with charts and a listening feature (you can hear the chord by "strumming" the touchscreen).  Searching for a chord is particularly clever, giving you a scrollable fretboard right on the screen.  Place your fingers on any part of the virtual fretboard and the app will automatically bring up the corresponding chord.

Planet Waves also includes thousands of scales, modes and arpeggios, each of which you can choose for your practice sessions.  Pick one and go to work on your progressions using the app's scrolling virtual fretboard -- you don't even need to be on a real guitar to get your practice time in.

There's also a tuner with two modes -- a strobe and a needle, both of which come with dozens of presets.  It uses the iPhone's built-in mic and operates much like your standard low-cost tuner.   Additional features include a metronome and search service for locating  music teachers and stores in your area.

Planet Waves Guitar Tools crams a hefty amount of guitar-playing content.  If you're a beginner or intermediate player, we can't imagine you needing any other resource than this app.  Even more advanced players might actually find it somewhat beneficial. You can get it from the App Store, priced at $8.99.

[Planet Waves]

Microsoft is pushing the Bing brand hard. Here's proof: the Top 100s by Year by Bing, a free download from the App Store that lets you stream up to 6,200 different songs from the last 62 years.

Granted, the app is nothing new. Originally released by Nutsie without the Bing branding, it used to be a $1.99 app. As it turns out, Microsoft's willing to shoulder that cost in exchange for a few ad placements encouraging you to download the app for their new-generation search engine.

How terrible are the ads? Pretty annoying. That's why you might as well just install the damn thing too and get it over with.

In exchange for your troubles, you get a meaty jukebox of an app that lets you listen to the Top 100 songs of each year from 1947 to 2009. That's over six decades of great music right there - certainly a worthy prize for the hassle of allowing Bing into your consciousness.

Oddly enough, the Top 100 from each year doesn't refer to any official list (e.g. Billboard). Instead, it bundles songs that Nutsie believes "have stood the test of time based on their initial and lasting popularity, and on their impact on the overall scope of musical history." Don't worry, the collection is probably better because of that, since there's no way you could have gotten a selection as eclectic as this (for example, picking 1979 nets you numbers from artists as diverse as The Sugarhill Gang, The Specials, ABBA and The Ramones) if they followed radio airplay or record sales as a standard. The only caveat is, the songs have to be played at shuffle mode (it's a legal thing).

Overall, the Top 100s by Year by Bing is a terrific free gift that justifies the extra step of having to download a search app you probably wouldn't use anyway. Thanks, Microsoft.

[iTunes link]

Got song ideas, can't play a lick of instrument? Not a problem with LaDiDa, a new iPhone app that provides instant accompaniment to your acapella renditions.

It works like this: you create a melody (maybe even write some lyrics if you can), sing it into your iPhone and the app will do the rest, creating musical accompaniment to go with your voice. Once it's done, it will output the finished track, combining your voice and backing tracks.

LaDiDa doesn't just pick some random tunes to go with your voice too. Instead, it determines the key you're singing in, matches it with favorable chord progressions from its database, tosses in appropriate effects and even enhances your voice before spitting out the final recording. The magic sauce here is the actual algorithm that recognizes notes based on your singing, as well as identifying chord changes that will fit in with the recorded melody.

The song can be recorded in a variety of styles (piano pop, rhythm synth, dub tone, underground rap, tasty breaks rap and dirty south rap), each of which you can try out before saving. You can share your finished recordings on both Facebook and Twitter too, so your friends can fawn over your newfound musical genius.

Literally putting a recording studio and a crew of session players on your hands, LaDiDa sounds like an app that could usher in a new generation of composers. That, or a whole new world of bad music for everyone to enjoy (or groan over, whichever the case may be). It's available from the App Store for $2.99.

[iTunes]

Aspiring guitar players can now get a new free Gibson app on their iPhone.  No, it won't turn your handset into a Les Paul as other apps are inclined to do.  Instead, it just bundles a number of free tools that six-string instrumentalists of all levels may find of value.

It comes with five different sections - tuner, metronome, chords, lessons and Gibson.com.  The tuner is a chromatic software that can track whatever note you're currently playing (which it receives via your iPhone's mic) and indicates whether you're flat, sharp or in tune.  It starts in "All Notes" mode, but gives options to allow for alternate tunings.  Very useful, especially if you've got a bad ear for sound.

The metronome is just a regular metronome app, which allows you to choose a specific BPM rate.   Tapping the screen three times will adjust the tempo according to your speed.   The chord area, on the other hand, gives you access to 30 chord charts, a great resource if you need help figuring out which finger goes where on the fretboard.

Need guitar lessons?  The app comes with very useful ones, drawn off the award-winning Learn and Master series from Legacy Learning Systems.  It comes with a variety of instructions for new licks, riffs and sequences - a definite value for new and struggling players.  Gibson also promises plenty of updates for this section, with more video lessons slated to come.  Finally, Gibson.com is the app's news area, where they list Gibson-related products and special events.

Overall, the free Gibson app is a definite download if you're at all planning to learn the guitar.  Even intermediate and slightly more advanced players might find it of value, too.

[Gibson App]

Never been a big fan of automated playlists.  Even the Genius function in iTunes 8 sucks.  Moodagent, however, is beginning to make me change my mind. There might be hope for this "smart" playlist thing, after all.

Instead of building a playlist based on seed songs, as is the norm, the app does things a little differently, producing one based on your mood.  That should prove a tad more fitting to the way most people actually listen to music, rather than the pointless criteria (e.g. era, genres, albums) employed by typical playlist creation methods.

Moodagent gives you five sliders (Sensuality, Tenderness, Joy, Aggression and Speed) that let you set your exact mood.  That's a whole range of possible states right there, which allow for a great amount of variety.

What's impressive, though, are the playlists it manages to turn out.  When I'm feeling a little aggro, it piles on the angry punk, hardcore and psychobilly songs in my music inventory.  Surprisingly, it managed to pick out one of the two very angsty country songs in my collection too.  When I was in a festive mood a while ago, it picked out a bunch of really upbeat, poppy numbers.  I'm very stoked.

The playlists it produces are restricted to 25 songs, which is fine (unless you're on an extended listening session).  If you want to adjust it, simply move the sliders and it will replace songs on the fly.   Should you chance upon a killer playlist, you can save it directly in the app.

You'll need an active internet connection to analyze your songs, which Moodagent compares to its 8-million song database (the process could take a while).  Note that it won't work on DRM-protected tracks, so if you've got a lot of those, you might as well pass on this app.

It's available free from the App Store.

[Official Site]

I've always wondered if there was a simpler, no-look way to use the iPhone's music player.  Turns out there is and it's been out for a while now.  FlickTunes is a free App Store download from SoGeeky Software that purports to let you control the music on your handset blindly.

Why would you want to do that?  Personally, I wanted the functionality so I didn't have to take out my iPhone from my belt mount.  FlickTunes' pitch, however, is for easier control of your music while you're driving - which actually makes it sound a heck of a lot more significant.

As a way to control your music while behind the whee;, I can attest to its usefulness.  You swipe left to skip to the next song, swipe right to go back one, swipe up to play and swipe down to pause - all easy-to-memorize movements that does afford you some latitude.  Swiping can be done anywhere on the touch surface.  Other available functions (using two-finger swipes) include advancing and reversing tracks by 30 seconds, and changing the volume.

It also displays track and artist information in large, bold fonts (along with the album cover), so you can immediately see it with a quick glance.  During a stop, you can also tap on the lower right corner to see detailed iTunes information about the song playing.

FlickTunes does the "swipe" control beautifully (after a brief phase of getting used to).  If there's anything I'd like to see added, it's the ability to save playlists - the last thing I want to do is to pick out my on-the-road songs every time I drive to work (which is how they expect you to use the app).  Since it's free, though, I'm not sure if I'm really that justified in complaining.  You know what, screw it, please have that in the next update because it's going to make this good app even better.

[Official Site: Flicktunes]

Can't get enough music-making apps on your iPhone?  Amidio just released their latest creation last week, the TouchDJ, and it's mighty impressive.

Know how the iPhone can only play one track at a time?  TouchDJ manages to transcend that limitation, allowing you to mess with two MP3 files at the same time.  That's simultaneous playback and real-time manipulation - a first for the platform.

Each of the two tracks get a variety of controls, including volume, pitch, equalization and effects (there's a tempobend and a flanger, along with a facility to upload your own samples), together with a crossfader for managing the balance between them.  The waveform display is easy to pick up on and is especially useful for laying down beats.

Looping is done entirely in real-time.  You can mark any point with a cue and loop in either track, fashioning it to repeat to your heart's content.  There's also a capability to create a different cue track for your headphones, just like professional, performance-quality DJ rigs.

The bad news is, you can't use songs directly from your iTunes library (this is a limitation on the iPhone itself).  As such, you'll have to use a separate desktop app (Amidio Sync) when loading files for TouchDJ.   Getting over the single-song limitation comes at a price as well - the app is seriously processor-intensive.  Your iPhone 2G will bleed (though it will run), guaranteed.  In fact, the developer recommends this largely for iPhone 3GS devices.

Amidio claims that the TouchDJ can capably replace $1,000 DJ equipment.  Not sure if that's true, but they're citing it as the reason they're selling the software for $19.99.  Personally, I think it's better than any music-making app I've seen on the platform (yep, including my all-time favorites, BeBot and Star6).  Since I'm no pro, however, and couldn't care less if I  have a functional DJ setup on my handheld (I fiddle for fun, not for fame), the price is just a tad too high for me.

[Official Page]

Android users have been feeling a little neglected lately, what with all the developers flocking to the iPhone before even giving Google's mobile OS a little attention.  The same has been true of Pandora's streaming music service, which has put out releases for a number of platforms already.  Finally, they get around to supplying a version of their mobile software for the Android Market and, while late, the app is very polished and well-executed, making it worth the wait.

The app works much like any Pandora client on any device, allowing you to create free streaming radio stations over an internet connection.  You can give a thumps-up or a thumbs-down to songs that play over your app, which the service will remember as it grows to recognize your musical tastes.  It also integrates the facility to purchase songs and albums that you like directly from Amazon within the service.

You'll be greeted with a log-in screen the first time you use it (new users will need to sign up).  If you've used Pandora before, your account will automatically be synced to your Android phone, allowing you to access all your previously created stations.  From there, you can do what you normally do, searching for artists, songs and composers, letting Pandora build the streams based on that.

The interface is particularly good-looking, with the ability to display cover art, along with various artist, song and album information.  You can rate songs, skip them, pause or simply ask for further information. Menu options allow you to share songs with friends, change audio settings and switch accounts.  It also comes with a widget, which lets you access the current station from your homescreen, and a live folders feature that lets you scroll through your saved listings.

Overall, Pandora for Android is a great first effort.  While there are many features on the desktop version that are absent, it fits in all the necessary niceties with a couple of extras specifically for the platform.  You won't see me complaining about it anytime soon.

Via: Pandora Blog