By Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla
Let's face it, radio isn't what it used to be for discovering new music and musicians. There's always MySpace but it can be a lot of of work shifting through artist pages and tracks. Enter Aweditorium, a one-stop iPad app that brings the sights and sounds of an eclectic mix of artists. Spend a little time with this free app and you might find your next favourite band, we did.
When you first launch Aweditorium, you are faced with a bunch of opaque tiles which represent musicians and individual songs. Touch one of these tiles and it takes over the screen and music begins to play. Information about the artist is shown, you get lyrics floating below the photo and you also get hotlinks to iTunes (to buy the single if you like it), to share the discovery on Twitter or Facebook (not Ping, curiously) and you can also launch YouTube videos of the artist if they are available.
If the tile/artist/song you accessed isn't to your liking you can go back to the grid or get creative and swipe up, down, left, or right on the iPad's screen to go to surrounding musicians. As this happens, the music you are listening to fades out while the new song slowly fades in. The best thing about this is, with iPad iOS 4.2, you can leave the music playing while you go surf, read or answer email.
As with most things, slick presentation and cool little features don't amount to much without good content and Aweditorium has oodles of amazing bits of music from around the world. We were quickly turned on to some Canadian bands that we thought were brilliant (such as Reverie Sound Revue and Said The Whale), bands that we wouldn't have had a chance to experience had we not used Aweditorium.
We love apps that really make use of the iPad's sensorial capabilities. Great audio, video and touch navigation plus quick access to the Internet are all iPad features that work extremely well with Aweditorium and users who love discovering new music will really appreciate what the app has to offer.
There are a few features we'd love to see in future Aweditorium updates such as the ability to make playlists or at least bookmark and export the artists you like. A tie-in with services like Evernote or Dropbox where you could export a list of what you liked would be amazing.
Aweditorium is the kind of app that adds incredible value to the iPad and we hope it succeeds in getting the musicians the right kind of exposure they need. This is the future right here.
Rating 4.5 out of 5