More Friday Fun: Missing Vinyl Records? Try this on your iPad!
Fri, October 8, 2010 at 2:11 PM
iPad Creative in Cover, Friday Fun, Fun, Games, Multiplayer, Music, Phil, art, gaming, iPad, music

The problem with digital music is that there is nothing physical to connect with, apart from the device you are playing it on.

If you go back as far as tapes or even Vinyl records you will no doubt remember reading the liner notes and staring at the artwork held in your hands, whilst listening to your new album and making the neural connections between them.

That is the philosopy behind ReVinyl a new app for the iPad (and iPhone) from DJ and vinyl collector Christian Faber.  It sounds like rather a grandiose premise for a music quiz, but here is what Christian says about his reasons for developing ReVinyl:

...I sometimes miss the meditative ritual of putting on some wax, studying the cover and diving into the music. Taking the time out to just listen when your vinyl hunt is over and the prey is brought back to the collection.

The convenience of buying digital music makes it almost too easy. Trawling through thousands and thousands of records in innumerable record stores taught me the magic of discovering new and old music in a random and chaotic way. The record cover visuals seduce and have a symbiotic relationship with the sound of the music, and vice versa. Revinyl aims to reconnect this bond between the album cover and the music inside. Discovering new music should be fun and what better way to have fun than using and expanding your music knowledge.

Playing the Game

The game itself is quite fun to play in single player mode, this is where you see the albums represented by the cover art, thrown on top of each other on a desk, and you can pick them up, move them around and select the one you are hearing.  

This is the 're-discovery' mode of the game and relies on you knowing the song and the cover art for that album (sometimes you get more than one album from the same artist). You hear a few seconds snippet of the song at a random point in the track and the faster you answer the more points you get with the bonus question adding to your score.

The game is best when played as a multiplayer, which on the iPhone is a bit fiddly, but the larger iPad screen should allow four players comfortably.

In 'PartyMode' each player has a different coloured section of the screen and you hit your section as soon as you know the song. First one to hit their button gets a stab at answering the question. You get to choose how many questions and which level (1-5) you want to play at.

You can turn off certain Categories in the settings before a PartyMode game, so your audio books and Children's music doesn't appear in the game, but our iTunes libraries are not that organised so it didn't work for some tracks. Mary Poppins still made an appearance next to Guns N' Roses in our quizzes.

We think it would be better if you could base the quiz on certain playlists as well, which are easier to set up in iTunes to exclude albums or artists as well as genres.

We liked the graphical elements, which are minimalistic, clean and modern looking, making the game easily accessible.

Shows Potential

It is the future developments which are most interesting about this app though.  Here is what is planned for future versions:

We are not sure Apple will allow some of this, especially access to the iTunes previews, but if he can deliver on that promise Christian will definitely have a winner on his hands. We just hope it doesn't take too long to update the app with these features as they will greatly enhance the value of this app.

If you are curious, there is a video of the iPhone version of the game running at the site if you want to check it out first. ReVinyl is available now for just $0.99 (59p) in the app store and it is definitely worth that price for multiplayer fun on the iPad.

Article originally appeared on iPad Creative (http://www.ipadcreative.com/).
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