Ghostly Discovery: Music Based on Your Mood
If there is one thing that the iPod touch and the iPhone are definitely built for, it’s enjoying music. There’s a plethora of dedicated apps to listen to internet radio stations, artists albums or even to mix your own music. Despite all the competition among them all, Ghostly Discovery has found a sweet spot.
By offering a super-simple interface, quality content, streaming over Wi-Fi or 3G, and no advertising, you may find yourself tapping into it’s sound vault more often than you initially expected.
Getting Started
The guys at Ghostly really nailed a simple process to get you up and running smoothly while learning the basics of the app. No need to enter any personal details or figure out any passwords: just read through the simple four-step guide:
Setting Up
Optionally, if you wish to favorite songs along the way and share your playlists on the web, all you need to do is provide your email and you’re ready to go:
Signing Up
How it Works
Ghostly Discovery departs from classic recommendation systems like Last.fm oriTunes Genius, which create playlists based on a certain song, artist, genre or overall listening habits. Instead, Ghostly Discovery tries to tailor each playlist to your currentmood. Check out the interface and let’s go through the different controls:
The Main Interface
Mood Colors
Now let’s tweak the beats. The couple of vertical controls to the right let you fine tune the style and tempo of the songs you’d like to listen to. The first one lets you choose between more synthetic, electronic sounds (to the top), and more organic, analog sounds (to the bottom). The second control allows for fine-grain tuning of the overall tempo throughout the playlist. Drawing the control to the top will result in uptempo songs, and bringing it down to the bottom will give you more ambient, chill-out rhythms.
If you rushed your way through the introduction, you can always click the familiar little “i” button on the bottom left corner of the screen to get back to color theory, as well as editing your email address and submitting a bug.
Once you’re happy with your settings, let’s see what the Ghostly crew has in store for us by clicking the “Discover” button.
Listening to Music
Ghostly Discovery will take a few seconds to build a custom, 20-song playlist tailored to your mood. Once it’s ready, it’ll start streaming the music together with beautiful cover artwork:
Listening to Music
On top of the complete info from the current song playing, you’ll find the familiar playback controls. Notice, however, the presence of the “previous” button. If you’ve used radio streaming apps, you’ll know going back is not a common option. With Ghostly Discovery, you can always pause and resume the music, move back and forward through the playlist and listen to it as many times in a row as you feel like it.
Sharing
The little star below the album artwork will favorite the song. This information is stored in your profile, and Ghostly will create a page for you on their website where all your favorited tracks are collected and shown, together with a nice player to listen to them online. You’ll need to email your favorites to yourself to get started:
Emailing Favorites
Once set up, you can share that page by simply copying and pasting its url, or using the usual Facebook and Twitter widgets found in the top right corner.
However, the whole sharing process appears to be in a beta-ish state. There seems to be no way to share anything on Twitter or Facebook directly from within the app, or to edit anything shown on the page created on their website, so go with it only if you’re feeling experimental.
Additional Features
Clicking on the “Menu” button will disclose some additional actions. The most prominent one is “Purchase”, which will offer to launch the iTunes Store.
Turning on or off the “Dimming” option will switch between keeping the screen lit continuously or not. “Artist Bio” will download a nicely formatted biography of the artist together with a picture.
Viewing an Artist's Bio
Final Thoughts
Ghostly Discovery feels a bit rough around the edges, like a beta app in some ways. I’ve been receiving a couple of recurring harmless errors regarding audio (when another system sound overlapped, like receiving a call) and network connectivity even when staying on Wi-Fi. In practical terms, none of them really meant much as the app continued to work as expected anyway.
Miscellaneous Errors
Sharing options are really limited, and I think this is something they should definitely work on expanding, both in-app and on the website.
I’ve also found myself missing a portrait mode quite frequently. Actually, I can’t see why the default landscape mode fits the user experience better, as it’s clearly uncomfortable to tweak the settings with one hand.
Also, be sure to check out Mood Agent if you like the approach but would like to use your own tracks instead, or Rockola.fm for a similar mood-based online radio.
In any case, Ghostly Discovery is an overall nice app which brings a breath of fresh air to the streaming music App Store category. If you are into Ghostly’s catalogue and label style, you should definitely give it a try.
Recommend App:
YouTube Downloader for iOS. Click on link below:
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