Entertainment

Sit back, put your feet up, and enjoy a whole new world of sound and vision

Cesium $1.99 Platform iPhone

Apple’s Music app has somewhat sidelined personal collections, instead heavily focusing on the Apple Music streaming service. Cesium is designed to help you focus on your own library. It marries oldschool functionality with modern iOS design, using tabs to quickly switch between artists, albums, songs, or playlists. If you want a music player for your iPhone that’s tasteful, smart, full-featured and free of gimmicks, get this.

NPR One Free Platform iPhone Overcast 3 Free Platform iPhone, iPad

Podcast management is a perennial problem for serious listeners, and if you’re finding that Apple’s own Podcasts app isn’t cutting it you may wish to invest in something more substantial: Overcast is definitely it. This third major release offers an almost complete redesign of the already excellent interface, with a card metaphor applied throughout, a useful slideup player, quick and easy access to show notes and other interactive elements, and awesome effects. If you’ve always wanted to speed up a podcast by intelligently cutting out silences, you’re in luck. Apple Music and other services sometimes provide full, exclusive access to select albums before launch, but they tend to focus on big names. If your tastes are a little away from the pinnacle of pop, download this NPR app and search for “First Listen” to soak up some different sounds. Of course, NPR One is also a means to tune in to public radio’s wide range of current affairs and cultural programming.

However, it’s those First Listens that really catch our attention, as they often showcase albums ahead of their full release on newer, supposedly more cutting-edge services. We like to think of First Listens as curation with a different outlook to the likes of iTunes and Beats 1.

Infuse Pro 5 $12.99 Platform iPhone, iPad

The idea behind Infuse is to stream your video content from a local network drive or cloud storage to your iPhone or iPad. When necessary, the app converts video on the fly to make it compatible with iOS. Got a load of MKV files? Infuse will make short work of them. It also excels in presentation; with files appropriately named, it fetches cover art and subtitles automatically. If you use it across multiple devices – the purchase includes the Apple TV, iPhone and iPad versions – your progress through videos is kept in sync between them by way of iCloud. On iPads that support Split View and Picture in Picture, the app works with those, too.

Pay attention that there’s a free version of Infuse on the App Store, which offers an optional, annual subscription ($6.49) to Infuse Pro, including updates even to major new versions. However, you can buy Infuse Pro 5 outright for $12.99 and only get updates for its current major version.

Air Video HD $7.99 Platform iPhone, iPad

Where Infuse is about streaming from network or cloud storage, Air Video HD does a similar job for videos that are stored on a Mac or PC that’s running its free companion server app. All content is liveencoded as necessary, ensuring it will play on your device, and there’s full support for offline viewing, soft subtitles, and AirPlay to an Apple TV. Perhaps the best bit about the software is how usable it is. The app’s simple to set up and has a streamlined interface. A single tap downloads a file for local storage. You don’t even need to be on the same network as your server either – Air Video HD lets you access your content over the internet. Just watch your data downloads if you’re on a limited cellular plan!