Melodies for Google Music Pro App Review

The Good

• Listen to your Google Music on your iPhone
• Load and plays music quickly

The Bad

• Unappealing retro interface elements
• Occasionally choppy playback

The Price
US$0.99

Purchase at iTunes

Even though Apple’s Music and iTunes Store apps come pre-installed on every iPhone and iPod touch, they’re not the only way to get music for your Apple device. Thanks to apps like Melodies, you can also access your web-based Google Music library from a native iPhone app. While Melodies isn’t perfect, it’s a very good, very fast way to listen to your Google Music.

Using Melodies is about as simple as you might expect: fire up the app, log into your Google Music account, and the contents of your library will be downloaded to the app. How long this takes will depend on the size of your library, of course, but my testing library of 7 songs from 7 different artists and albums loaded basically instantaneously.

Of course, the strength of your network connection will also determine how quickly your music appears. Even more impressive than how quickly the library loaded, though, was how quickly music started playing. I was testing the app on a sometimes-spotty 3G network on my commute into the office, but despite those less-than-ideal conditions, the first song I selected started playing with a less than 3 second delay. Pretty impressive, and better than gMusic was able to offer when I tested it in the same environment.

Like the iOS Music app, Melodies organizes your music by playlist, artist, album, and song. When you’re playing music, you can loop songs or shuffle them within each category.

The app also supports listening to music even when you’re not connected to the web. To do this, you need to create a playlist and then enable that playlist for offline access. This process isn’t obvious—I had to check the app’s FAQ in order to find out that this was possible. It would be nice, too, if you could enable offline listening on a song or album level, but it’s good feature to have either way.

As always, you have to watch out for streaming apps since they can eat up your monthly data package if you use them too much.

As noted, the app offers very fast playback over 3G, so I’d wager that it’s even better over a higher-capacity Wi-Fi signal. Despite this generally positive experience, I did run into two instances where playback was somewhat choppy.

First, even though the app will run in the background and allow you to listen to music while you’re doing other things, if those things involve additional downloads, you may run into some rough playback. That happened to me when starting to play a new song while accessing the Internet in another app. The rough patch was relatively short, and not entirely unexpected given the intermittent 3G connection, but it’s worth knowing about.

The second time it happened was when I was both listening to a song and downloading a playlist for offline listening. In that case, the song stopped playing about halfway through, rather than sounding choppy.

Overall, my experience with Melodies was very good, but one thing about the app that really bothered me—probably out of proportion with its importance—is its interface. It takes the cover art for each album and, instead of treating it like a standalone image, puts it onto the front of a CD jewel case. This seems really, really odd.

Melodies works with Google Music, a web-based music service designed to sidestep a lot of the problems that plagued CDs--most obviously, it allows you to have all your music with you anywhere you have an Internet connection, rather than having to lug dozens or hundreds of CDs with you.

The whole point of a web-based music service is that it’s not a CD, it’s not physical media. So why go out of your way to present that service as if it is the older, less advanced, frankly less useful, technology? There’s no retro charm to CDs. Let’s leave them behind and move on to better things. Like I said, this is something that I’m giving more importance to than it probably merits, but it bothered me.

If you’ve got a Google Music library that you want to be able to listen to on your iOS device, Melodies is an excellent option. With its fast performance, you’ll rarely be left waiting for your music to play—and that’s a pretty important factor with this kind of app.

What You’ll Need
An iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad running iOS 4.0 or higher.

Purchase at iTunes

Feb. 10, 2012

Disclosure: A review copy was provided by the publisher. For more information, please see our Ethics Policy.