![]() This week, AOL debuted PLAY by AOL Music (Free, version 1.0.0), an app for iPhone and iPod touch users without full iPad support, and the implementation is a little smarter than Ping: PLAY leverages your existing Facebook and Twitter accounts to find friends and share what you’re listening to, pushes a bunch of free streaming song and album content to your device in the form of a grid of album covers, and creates a timeline showing what’s been “shared” or commented upon by all of the people you’re following. iLounge Rating: B-.Īpple’s Ping service hasn’t taken off, and probably won’t without major changes, but that hasn’t stopped other companies from trying to hook iOS users on music-centered social networking services. For the time being, this is a nearly recommendable free app when the videos bug is fixed, it’ll be worthy of a general-level recommendation. It will also be interesting to see whether Bongiovi makes per iOS-device adjustments for the subtle generational differences that are often made to their sound chips. In any case, it’ll be worth revisiting this app at some point in the future if and when additional profiles and file compatibility are added. Since the Bongiovi DPS app does actually improve the quality of sound when it’s activated-music played through the iPad 2 and iPhone 4 speakers showed marked treble/mid-treble (and hence apparent clarity) improvements when the B button is being used, as did Apple’s single-driver Earphones and dual-driver In-Ear Headphones, the latter of which have more roundly been criticized for their lack of bass. But as of today, the paid app adds only 13 pairs of earphones, zero additional speakers, and zero additional docks, not exactly a huge variety. If you want more profiles, there’s a currently $1 in-app purchase that removes banner advertising from the app and gives you access to all of the accessory profiles Bongiovi has developed-the company will charge only $1 until it has 100 custom profiles to sell. The free app supports Apple’s free Earphones, the speakers in the iPad/iPad 2 and iPhone 3GS/4, and a set of five Dock Connector settings that Bongiovi calls Annapolis, Las Vegas, New Orleans, Philidelphia (sp) and Toledo, offering different combinations of the 120 “recalibration points” the company says it uses in optimizing audio in real time for various devices. Second, the number of profiles is extremely limited at this point. First, the DPS app isn’t as fully functional as Apple’s iPod, Music, and Videos apps it cannot play DRM-protected pre-iTunes Plus tracks, an issue the app explicitly blames on “Apple limitations,” and the app also locked up on three different devices for reasons unknown when trying to open a list of videos. ![]() There are a couple of hitches to this strategy. Tracks will sound better through Bongiovi DPS, and you won’t have to fidget with anything besides selecting your preferred accessories. You’ll then select the profile for your accessory, and play your music, videos, and podcasts through the Bongiovi DPS app, rather than through Apple’s. Bongiovi’s engineers plan to manually test as many headphone, speaker, and docking accessories as possible, creating optimized audio profiles for each. The idea behind this app is noble: Bongiovi Acoustics knows that users aren’t able to get optimized sound from their headphones, speakers, and in-car accessories, due as much to iOS equalizer limitations as the user’s lack of interest in fiddling with settings, so it’s taking a brute force approach to making things better on its own. We mentioned at the time that one of the iP1’s signature features-a “B” button to deactivate the Bongiovi processing-wasn’t valuable because it was basically a “turn off the good sound” feature now Bongiovi wants to add a B button to your iOS device with its new universal app, Bongiovi DPS (Free). Though it was previously responsible for tuning the performance of in-car audio systems, Bongiovi Acoustics really made a name for itself in the Apple accessories market with the debut of iHome’s iP1, a premium speaker system that leveraged Bongiovi’s audio tuning to improve the sonic quality of its output.
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