App Review – Flast.FM (Online social music networking)

By now you have already heard of last.fm. It's a free music social networking site, it allows you to listen to and discover new music. I find that this service can’t be beaten.

Anyway, this is about the iPod touch/iPhone app for it.

Price
Since the Application is free there is no need to give it a negative rating, at the end of the day having the application for free is a lot better than paying for it.

Usability
The Application was not designed for socialising on the site, it is more music orientated than it’s PC/Mac counterpart. All you’ll be able to access is the music radios, and search engine. the application does the same as it’s PC/Mac counter part, you can search for artists and start a new station with music by similar artists.

The search engine (as displayed above) works how you would expect it to work. It’s also quite fast, so that’s a plus.

When you have found an artist(s) you can then activate the radio screen, however this is where it starts to slip believe it or not. Crash issues and slow downs are quite common while listening to the radio stations even on a full wireless signal which leads me to believe it is the application itself that is at fault here. This is what might put you off the application in the first place. However, if you can manage to work around the issues with the radio player it’s self then it works great, but take into account that the slow down’s and crash issues will also affect the entire application it’s self.

After selecting an artist the station will be saved to the main home screen, so when you open the application up you can chose the artist station you want to listen to without having to search for the artist(s) again.

 

Overall

Bad points

• Suffers from crashes and slowdowns too often
• No offline mode
• No way of buying/downloading tracks
• No social networking of any kind
• Eventually runs out of music to play on a station
• Lack of ability to comment on an artist

Good Points

• Works exactly the same as the artist radio stations on the PC/Mac Counterparts
• Search engine is easy to use
• Recent stations are automatically saved to main menu
• Whole application is easy to use
• Can save separate songs to a play list.

App score – 6/10
The crash issues and slow downs need to be solved.