In:play Review

In:play is a quite glorious looking, minimalist music player. It's very simple to use, thanks to its gesture driven interface and does pretty much exactly what anyone could wish of it. Even better, it looks a darn sight better than the default music player.

Slightly awkwardly, given that In:play is very easy to use, an opening tutorial offers up quite a lot of reading for an app that is quite intuitive. Skip through that, though, and it takes seconds to understand how to manipulate music. A simple looking screen emerges, when playing music, telling the user exactly what they need to know: the track title, artist and length of the piece of music. Swiping left or right switches between tracks, while swipes up or down open up more options.

Menus become available in which users can browse their tracks according to the artist, genre, album and playlist. It's an idea known as Deep Context, which sounds a little pretentious, but does the job well, making it simple to browse through a large music collection. Throughout, everything is well presented, with everything clear to see and far from muddled.

In:play dispenses with much else to its interface. There's no means in which to share what the user is listening to, no complex playlist creation (although, users can add things to their in-app playlist with a couple of taps of their fingers) or anything else excessive like that. In the same turn, however, there's no fiddly buttons to master, or controls that don't make clear sense. In:play is very straight forward right down to its circular gauge to adjust the volume, something which proves to be a particular delight.

This all comes together to form a simple yet effective app. Some users might miss the presence of album art, but as someone who much prefers seeing what's playing clearly, In:play does the job admirably.