Spotify for iPad impressions

Spotify has been my favorite music service since it launched last year. After launch I immediately cancelled my subscription to Rhapsody. Spotify by far has the largest and diverse music library available to all of their users, and is an overall stand up service. The one shortcoming, and it’s a big one, with Spotify is their mobile apps.

Whether it’s for iPhone or Android they are just clunky, clumsy and anything but polished. Navigation isn’t the best. It still relies primarily on playlists instead of streaming albums. At last much of that has changed with the release of the iPad app. It’s not perfect but it is certainly worth the wait. I’m going to go over some features for you and Jon is going to be giving you the hands on experience. So let us begin.

For starters the app is already scaled up for the retina display, with the amount of time it took them to release it I was worried it wouldn’t be retina compatible until a future update. So the app really is quite pretty. A cool feature is navigation when a song is already playing. You can just swipe up or down on the awesomely large album artwork to go to the next song on the playlist.

The now playing bar follows you through the whole app on any screen. You no longer have to click on “now playing” to see what song is on and to change it. That’s a huge upgrade from the iPhone and Android versions. I often find it a pain in the ass to change songs or find exactly what I am looking for.

Stacked navigation is a crucially awesome new feature, once again this makes navigation a breeze. It works just like the Amazon or Twitter apps for iPad allowing you multiple layers of open windows which are easy to quickly swipe from one to another. So if you are in the store you can quickly shuffle back to your now playing or album artwork etc. I imagine this will be one of the favorite features for many. Airplay is also built right into the app so you can easily stream you music to many compatible devices. 

Hands-on impressions--Jon Ortiz

We've already discussed how great Spotify is as a service, and Chris has expressed his disdain for Spotify's current mobile apps (they leave a lot to be desired. Like tons), but I'm going to give a brief overview of my impressions of the new app.

Spotify on the iPad does take some of the good visual cues from it's iPhone counterpart, such as the ability to slide through new albums, much the same you can on your on your iTunes library in shuffle mode. It's nothing new, but on the new iPad's retina display you will quickly become mesmerized by it. You will come to appreciate just how attractive the app looks with the retina display, and Spotify does include several nifty features that take clear advantage of the iPad hardware.

For example, say you have a dubstep playlist (don't judge me) and you've compiled your favorite songs and artists for a playlist you plan to use for a house party . Just dock your iPad, shuffle the songs, set it for gapless playback, and woo your house guests with fullscreen mode. They will be treated to a massive cover of the artist and album playing, but wait THERE's MORE. They don't like the song? What ever shall you do? Simply swipe up, down, left, or right and it will play the next song.

Fullscreen mode is one of the best features in the app.It allows for easy shuffling of playlist's.

It's a very simple feature, however there is something elegant about how simple it is. It not only looks good when displayed, it also make shuffling through your playlist that much easier. It's clear that Spotify wanted to create an app that was appealing, but what about functionality? It's not as cumbersome to navigate as the iPhone version, which has a good amount to do with the iPads larger screen. It also has to do with some good design choices.

The screen isn't cluttered with tabs or other pointless bells and whistles. Spotify once again decided to go the simple route with only five tabs on the side, and since Spotify doesn't really care about albums, the front page is also devoid of the ADD overload you would get from other music services. Lastly, the decision to keep the now playing bar active on all pages was a no-brainer, and a welcome addition. These decisions are ultimately what make Spotify a joy to use on the iPad. It almost feels like this was the way the service was intended to be used.

It's good to see that Spotify addressed everything that was wrong from a functional standpoint, however, I still take issue with their insistence on sticking with the playlists. Sometimes I just want to sift through albums, and not just new ones either. Sure I can search for an artist, but what if I just want to go through genres and discover some things. I suppose that's what the playlists are for, and Spotify is still the best service for sharing music with friends. It should be interesting to see what they do in future updates, but for now, the best music subscription service just got a lot better.

Check the screens below to get an idea of what the app looks like.