Ecoute iPhone app review

Do you need a new music player app for your iPhone? You might think so once you've tried this one.

Ecoute for iPhone
Ecoute is a new audio player for iPhone and iPod touch.

Ecoute
PixiApps
£1.99

There is a perfectly good music player on the iPhone and it's called the iPod app. So why would you want another one? Particularly one that costs £1.99?

The main reason is that Ecoute has a much more pleasant and user-friendly design than Apple's iPod app. It's more visual than the iPod app, making good use of album art to help make it easier to find what you are looking for. That's especially helpful if you have a large library.

The team behind Ecoute have also put a lot of effort into gesture-based controls. While on the 'now playing' screen, for example, you can swipe left and right to skip tracks. And how do you see the 'now playing' screen? Simply slide a finger up from the bottom of the app. The gestures are all very nicely integrated, if a little hard to discover at first.

Another feature that isn't obvious at first glance is the ability to change which items appear in the top menu. Simply hold down one of the icons and you'll get the option to change. If you don't need 'Genius' in your top menu, for example, then you can swap it for 'Playlists'.

Talking of playlists, that's one area where the app's layout does let it down. Tapping on a playlist works the same as on albums - a stylish box slides onto the screen showing the songs it contains. On most albums, that works fine because all the songs are by the same artist. On a playlist or a compilation, it leaves you with the track titles but not the names of the artist that performs them. That makes scrolling through a playlist you haven't used in a while a little less informative than it could be.

Last.fm support is integrated with Ecoute - vital for me, as a Last.fm addict - and so is the option to send your current track to Twitter with a #nowplaying hashtag. Ecoute automatically scrobbles your songs to Last.fm in the background every two hours. That's a significant improvement on the iPod app, which can scrobble only when the phone syncs.

Plenty of people will be perfectly happy with the iPod app but for those who spend a lot of time listening to music on their iPhone or iPod touch and want something with a little more panache, £1.99 is a small price to pay.