Fresh Apps - iPhone Apps & iPod Touch Apps.

Listening to music on your iPhone or iPod Touch is probably something that 90% of device owners love to do, and Apple’s iPod application is a fairly well-designed way to access all of your music and playlists quickly and easily. Groove, by developer Zikera, is better. It combines a huge list of features that you didn’t even realize were missing from your iPod in a well-designed package that gives you one-tap access to incredible playlists.

Features

On the surface you could call Groove a Pandora app for your internal iTunes music library. It builds playlists with a single touch from songs or artists that you love, or you can tap “Surprise Me” and let Groove build a playlist out of the music that you love. You can definitely build smart playlists like this in iTunes and transfer them over, but Groove does this all on the fly and with a single tap for most playlists, so that you can listen to your music in a fresh way.

Groove also has some nice playlists options on the startup page that give you new ways to experience your music: ”Three of a Kind” plays three songs at a time by the same artist, ”Artist Duos” creates playlists from two artists that go well together, and ”Favorites” just plays your favorite songs.

Groove also has a few nifty features that set it apart, like the ability to change songs and volume with a swipe on the screen (left/right for song change, up/down for volume). It will download artist images and missing artwork if it has a data connection. Groove can even keep playing the music in the background while you use other apps since it’s actually just a playlist front-end for your local iTunes library.

Pros

Cons

Wrap-Up

Groove is like the Genius button and Pandora had a love-child. It creates much more interesting and creative playlists than any custom-made or smart playlists in iTunes, with far less effort, even on a song library as small as my own. It’s free, so if you have any music at all on your device just go get it.