SoundShare 3
Simple and clever music sharing
From the homemade compilation tapes of the ’80s to today’s shared links from Apple Music and Spotify, one of the great joys of music is sharing your discoveries or favorites with others. SoundShare was designed to do just that, and to do so in a way that made sharing as easy as possible — it doesn’t matter if you’re on Apple Music and your friend is on Spotify or Deezer; SoundShare finds the right song in the appropriate service.
Version 3 has two key improvements. First, it uses MusicKit, the iOS 11 framework that enables deeper integration with Apple Music. This means apps such as SoundShare can access personalized playlists and recommendations in much the same way the Apple Music app does. Second, and even more fun, it has a Party Mode.
With Party Mode you can invite friends to collaborate on a playlist. It’s best for — you guessed it — parties, where a single iOS device can handle everybody’s requests and send to a wired or wireless speaker system. No more pairing multiple devices, swapping cables, or worse, giving others your passcode. It works really well, although the ability to let others interrupt playback with their own choices could be a problem if any of your friends are impolite and have terrible taste in tunes. In a nice touch, SoundShare can even stream Party Mode videos to Apple TV by finding them on YouTube.
There are a couple of caveats. Spotify sharing doesn’t work with the free version of Spotify; you need to have a Spotify Premium account. SoundShare can work only with what’s available, so differences between streaming services’ catalogs may prevent you from sharing the odd track between two different music services. You can’t share with anybody who doesn’t have the SoundShare app, so Android owners are not able to take part in Party Mode. And we encountered the odd bug, such as when the Invite option trapped us in a Contacts page. But overall SoundShare 3 is a clever and effective way to share music with friends.
The bottom line.
SoundShare 3 makes music more social, and Party Mode is good fun. Gary Marshall