App Name: Mono
Developer: Oscillate
Cost: Free / year subscription after 7 day trial
Market: Google Play
Mono is a new music app on the Google market that makes it easy to listen to your music and to discover new music. I am not a big music person, but I found the app very straight forward and easy to install. Since I do not do a lot with music, I decided to reach out to the developer and get some more information on Mono. Here is our interview.
Q. Tell us a little about your company
A. Oscillate is a New York based startup, and this is its first app. Currently there are just two people.
Q. What does your app Mono do?
A. Mono was created to simplify listening to (and watching) music. There are many different sources of media out there – your files, Spotify, Rdio, 7Digital, Google Music, and of course images, events, bios, similar artists, etc. We aimed to bring this all together in one app. The user should have access to easily navigable information about all published music, and then have choices as to where to play it from.
Q. How and why did you come up with the idea?
A. We realized that YouTube had an enormous amount of unstructured music, and if we established a structured reference database of all music then accessing videos would be cool. Layering on audio only sources was a natural extension. Then layering on playlists and easy video selection completed the picture. Also storing playlists in the cloud made them publicly available, if the user wishes, and available on multiple devices for the same user.
Q.Who would you recommend this app for?
A. Really anyone, young or old. See the demo video to see The Red Hot Chili Peppers to Elvis to Beethoven.
Q. How much does the subscribe cost?
A. 7 day free trial, then $0.99/yr with a further 7 days free.
Q. What future plans do you have for the app?
A. The only streamer released right now is Google Music. We have Rdio and Spotify in but have not released due to their licensing terms. We are working through that.
We also want to intelligently create discussion forums for Artists, Albums, Songs and Events. Rather than build yet another forum we are working on mapping the subjects to persistent Google Plus posts, easily reachable from the app.
Q. What requirements are needed for the app?
A. Android ICS and above.
Q. Is there anything else you think we need to know about Mono?
A. We don’t think there’s another app like this out there. PVSTAR+ plays YouTube videos only, and is just put together very differently. No reference database of music, no events, lyrics, discographies, top tracks, images, bios or similar artists. It’s really just an alternative YouTube player. All the other music apps either play local files only, or are tied to a specific online service. For $0.99/yr you get a lot of functionality and no ads.
I want to thank Phil for taking the time to let us know about Mono and what the future holds for this new music app.
