by There’s something about music that brings us together. From drum circles to the original Napster, our favorite songs somehow sound better when we share them with other people. Even when we’re rocking out to our iPods, we want our friends to know what we’re listening to, endlessly tweeting and posting updates to our Twitter followers and Facebook friends. Nwplyng looks to clean up our social feeds with a whole new way to share. Despite its name (Now Playing minus the vowels), it isn’t another digital jukebox. Instead, Nwplyng wants to be your favorite app for sharing and discovering new songs by turning the process into something of a competition.
Launching the app prompts you to link with your social networks of choice, but Nwplyng only uses it as a frame of reference, allowing you to find anyone in your circle who might be using the service. It works basically the same as Path or Flickr or any other specialized network; each post your followers see contains a song you’ve selected, with a short, playable snippet and a link to buy the track in iTunes. It uses the same 140 character limit as Twitter, and hashtags are strongly encouraged.
Since Nwplyng isn’t actually a music player, it doesn’t sync with your music library, so you’ll have to find songs manually, either by searching or using its integrated Shazam-style audio identifier. The sharing screen is one of the best we’ve seen, with a clean, neat interface that presents an array of options, including Twitter, Facebook, and Foursquare cross-posting, embedded videos, and photo uploading. As you share, you’ll unlock “records” of your achievements and advance through Nwplyng’s levels as you compete against your friends to become the ultimate fan.
Nwplyng is a great way to discover new music, but unfortunately, it has to be sold in the iTunes Store in order to be shared – a limitation that left giant gaps in our library. Also, since we can see ourselves spending a lot of time using Nwplyng, we kind of wish we could actually use it to play music. We would have liked to purchase songs without being forced to visit the iTunes Store, as well.
The bottom line. Nwplyng does a great job sharing your music, but only if it’s sold by Apple.
Review Synopsis
Product:
