The four best apps for music lovers on Windows 8 and Windows Phone

Do you like music? Don't worry because both Windows 8 and Windows Phone are becoming two fascinating places for you. New multimedia applications emerge almost every week that allow you to explore this hobby in different ways.

Today we review four of the best possible applications for different types of music lovers: the one who likes to learn music theory, the one who is always willing to discover new things, the one who wants to be up to date with all the news and the one who prefers a new twist to traditional radio.

Monk: the must-have app for those who want to learn music

Monk goes beyond what is usual for a multimedia application and seeks the user to understand the music, rather than just listen to it. For those who want to learn harmony and all kinds of ways to form and link the chords that bring songs to life, Monk becomes the essential tool. It has a huge library of scales and chords that can be freely explored and even allows you to search by chord which will find all scales that contain it.

Monk allows you to transpose, change scales, play with chord inversions, on a screen that simulates a piano and from which we can filter searches for notes and scales. Once found, of course, we can listen to them and touch them. As they themselves state, with Monk "the secrets of music ran out"

Monk, whose name refers to the mythical pianist Thelonious S. Monk, has been designed by Roberto Huertas from Barcelona and comes in two versions, one paid for 2.59 euros and another trial, with these limitations:

• Only seven scales
• Reverse chord and scale lookups are limited to two notes
• Piano chord modes and inversions cannot be used

Monk can be used on both Windows Phone and Windows 8 and is a must for anyone interested in or interested in playing music and understanding it better.

Audiocloud: all Soundcloud at your fingertips

Soundcloud has become, for a couple of years, one of the websites preferred by record companies and groups to present their news In addition, the possibility that the users themselves are the ones to upload songs and sounds has given rise to numerous podcasts, mixes and groups to be discovered living in what is a mix between a multimedia service, a music social network and a repository of songs on streaming.

Precisely for this reason, Having an application like Audiocloud is welcome Thanks to it, we can explore the entire Soundcloud audio community, listen to songs and podcasts on our Windows Phone and delve much further with our Soundcloud user account.

For example, we can:

• Download songs from Soundcloud to our music library to play them offline (as long as they are supported by Soundcloud).
• Create ringtones from songs and sounds we find on the service.
• Repost, comment and share any song on Soundcloud in the same way that the web service allows.
• Adapt the app to our home screen to our liking: create a pin with sounds, artists, sets or users; use the appropriate Live Tile to our liking or notifications for the phone's lock screen.

Audiocloud is a free application, the best possible Soundcloud client for Windows Phone.

TuneIn: radio stations from anywhere in the world

For a long time, listening to the radio was also being tied to the limitations of the place where you were. Not only did it imply that you had to change frequencies every time you went on a trip, but there were also some stations or programs that were not available because you did not have a broadcast license in your area.

With TuneIn Radio, the picture is totally different: from our Windows Phone or our Windows 8 device we can access more than 70,000 stations from all over the world , with more than two million programs to choose our favourite.

In addition to finding the stations, we can organize them on our home screen individually, to have quick and separate access to each one that is essential for us. And, of course, TuneIn also allows us to explore the unknown: listen to trending stations at the moment, search for new programs by specific theme... Be careful of the search filters that it allows you to use, which are very useful and are very well thought out and designed so that all users can find what they need.

TuneIn Radio is available on both Windows 8 and Windows Phone for free

Songza: the music you need... even if you don't know it

Part of the best music is not listening to what we like, but in the moment you discover a song you've never heard and suddenly becomes your favourite. That feeling of discovery never ends and is part of the essential experience of all music lovers, as well as their memories. Songza is a service designed precisely to make music discovery easier: you just need to tell it what your current status is and it will look for the songs it creates that will fit like a ring on your finger.

And what does Songza mean by “your status”? Well, it is not satisfied with little, and it does not simply refer to state of mind. This app goes beyond a "play me sad music", "play me romantic music".Songza tells you what day and time it is and she gives you optionsfor different things you might be doing right now.

On a Thursday morning, for example, it will create a list for you to wake up energized or to continue working without discomfort. On a Friday night, it will give you the choice of music to go to sleep or steamy songs with which to celebrate an intimate party. And just like that, many more options.

To download Songza on both Windows 8 and Windows Phone we will have to access the US store, since it is not available for other countries. However, thethe service does work on your device once downloaded and is well worth it if you're always up for new musical adventures.

Image | Eric Prunier

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