Soundwave Offers Social Music Discovery & Auto-Scrobbling On iOS & Android
Like the recently covered #nwplyng, most scrobbling apps force users to manually keep track of the songs they listen to, or scrobble only the songs played within the app. This might be fine for those who don’t rely on multiple song sources but for everyone else, sharing that way isn’t likely to reflect their true taste in music. Soundwave is a new app that solves this problem by tapping into multiple sources and automatically scrobbling all the tracks played on your device. Another big advantage of Soundwave is that the app is available on both Android and iOS, increasing the potential user base. Soundwave can even be used as a proper social network, since it has an elaborate follow system of its own. You won’t have to rely solely on the shares from people you follow for music discovery, as the app is capable of combining data from various sources to come up with interesting song suggestions.
For a totally social experience, you can sign up for a Soundwave account using Facebook. Though if you are a bit privacy-conscious and don’t want to risk all of your friends knowing how much you admire One Direction, simply use your email address to create a new account.
During initial configuration, Soundwave offers suggestions regarding people you should follow. The awesome Steve Wozniak is among the people you can follow on Soundwave, and an endorsement from him appears on the app’s download page as well. If some of your friends are already using Soundwave, you can find and follow them too.
The main ‘Activity Feed’ in Soundwave displays posts from everyone you follow. These posts can be songs your contacts have listened to in the recent past, or recommendations from other users that you can re-share after listening. If your feed gets too cluttered, simply hit the icon located in the top-right corner and apply some of the filters that show up. Users can silence shares, posts regarding ratings of tracks and scrobbled songs. To listen to a preview of a song that appears in your feeds, hit the blue play icon on its entry. If the track is available on YouTube or SoundCloud, you can stream its complete version as well. The option to purchase songs is also available in Soundwave.
Soundwave runs in the background and automatically posts to your feed whenever you listen to a song on Rdio, Spotify or the stock music player on your device. Using the ‘Guilty Pleasure’ option, users can disable this automatic scrobbling for one hour at a time.
Other than the Activity Feed, Soundwave offers some pretty great ways of discovering music. The ‘Explore’ section shows the lists of songs that are most played, most liked and most disliked by the Soundwave community. Another fun way of finding interesting songs is to venture through the Soundwave ‘Music Map’. To see the trends from a particular region, simply use the draw tool to make a circle around it. Soundwave then displays location-based music charts from the selected area.
You can download Soundwave without spending a penny, as it is available as a free app on both platforms. So, try it if you want a taste of some real multi-source scrobbling.
Download Soundwave for Android
