If you like your holiday to be set to your own soundtrack, here are 5 essential music apps and accessories to pack or download before you go.
Relaxing at Constance Tsarabanjina
1. For the love of music
Spotify – At home or abroad this music-streaming app is a must-have for music lovers. Not only does it supply free music on demand streamed direct to your mobile device from its vast catalogue (for a small fee you can download music to play offline) but it also manages your existing library, syncing it with its own. The perfect way to access a huge range of music.
2. For the impromptu party
Beats Pill – So you’ve got all this music on your mobile device but what happens when you want to share it with friends?
You simply plug in your Beats Pill, a compact Bluetooth speaker from the inimitable Dr Dre. With four separate speaker drivers fitted inside its compact design the sound on this speaker is crystal clear. As always with Beats by Dre products this one is slick and comes in an choice of three colours.
3. For the music geek
Traktor DJ – For those who aren’t happy just listening to music but want to mix and and make their own, there’s the Traktor DJ for the iPad and iPhone. Mix tracks from your own iTunes library and add effects to produce a cool sound of seriously high quality. This app is sophisticated enough for professionals but simple enough to use for enthusiastic beginners – it even includes tips and teaching techniques and can suggest tunes from your library to pair up to improve your mixes.
Constance Lémuria, Seychelles
4. For discovering new music
Shazam – You’re sitting in a bar on a foreign shore and the DJ plays the perfect song, capturing the mood of sunshine and good times.
With Shazam you can capture the moment and the song, simply press the button and the app will tell you the song title and band name, it will even connect you to iTunes so you can buy it. Other features include song tagging and a new map so you can see what music is trending around the world.
5. Best for kids
Bloom HD – From ambient musicians Brian Eno and Peter Chilvers comes this beautiful and creative app for kids combining making music and visual art.
Available for the iPad and iPhone the user simply touches the screen to create a musical sound and a corresponding circle of colour appears, they can then mix this with other sounds and other colours. As you would expect from Eno the sound is calm and chilled, there’s even a sleep mode so kids can fall asleep to their own chill out tracks.
- For a rundown of the best of the rest, see Laptop Mag’s very best music apps
- For all the best technology to take abroad follow Traveller Geek