Swipe right for your favorite new music on The Best Song

By Chris Leo Palermino July 21, 2015

Did you ever used to listen to iTunes’ 30-second song preview before deciding whether to click ‘buy’? The Best Song, a new iOS and Android app, thinks that 30 seconds really is long enough to decide whether you’re listening to your new favorite song, so it serves up a stream of the shortened song previews with a Tinder-like interface to make music discovery as simple as a swipe right or left.

The Best Song allows you to listen through a selected playlist and quickly choose to ‘like’ or ‘dislike’ the track by pressing the buttons (or swiping left or right). When you like a song, it is added to your personal playlist. The interface also allows you to share the song with a friend through Facebook or email. Once you have a list of new favorite songs, the app allows you to export the playlist to Spotify or Deezer.

The app gives you three different types of playlists to listen through: a curated top playlist (like ‘Pitchfork Best Songs,’ ‘Best Songs of June,’ ‘Best Songs to Sing in Your Car), a selection of genres, or the random ‘Music Maestro’ option.

While curated playlists have become ubiquitous on music services, The Best Song allows you to quickly curate your own customized playlist. Rather than listening to entire songs from one of Spotify’s curated playlists (like ‘Afternoon Groove,’ or ‘Beach Vibes’) and choosing your favorite tracks, TBS gives you short snippets of songs from which you can create your own personal playlist.

The service caters primarily to the curious music consumer who wants to discover new tracks but might not have the time to devote to perusing blogs or full-length playlists from curators. It’s a new take on music discovery and it may expose you to some hot new tracks, but it’s not going to overtake music discovery through Spotify or Pandora anytime soon.

The French company, which just raised a $300,000 funding round, is still in its infancy: just 20,000 monthly active users according to TechCrunch.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics

Chris Leo Palermino

Former Digital Trends Contributor

Chris Leo Palermino is a music, tech, business, and culture journalist based between New York and Boston. He also contributes…

Music

The best free music-making software

headphones on a Mac

Music-making software doesn't usually come cheap. In fact, for serious musicians and producers, it may well be worth it to pay for a subscription or a steep one-time fee for audio editing and music creation software. After all, the premium versions tend to have more advanced features. If you're just starting out in music production or just feel like you'd rather avoid the hefty price tags altogether, there are free options for music-making software worth considering.

In this guide, we'll take a look at five of those options. Whether you're a Windows or MacOS user, a musician, or an aspiring DJ, you're sure to find a software option that fits your music creation needs on our list of the best free music-making software.
Avid Pro Tools First (Windows 10 and MacOS)
Experienced creators and musicians already know that Avid Pro Tools leads the industry in music production software. This premium music editing and creation software can come with a hefty price. If you're a beginner or just a musician on a budget, you may wonder if Avid Pro Tools is even an option for you. The answer is: Yes. There is a free version (albeit limited in features) that Avid offers. It's called Avid Pro Tools First. Pro Tools First comes with features such as four maximum inputs, 16 MIDI tracks, 16 instrument tracks, and a maximum supported sample rate of 32-bit, 96 kHz. The free version of Pro Tools also includes nondestructive editing, elastic audio, retrospective MIDI recording, and a MIDI editor. It does not have many of the premium features that the paid versions of Pro Tools have, including Dolby Atmos Music mixing or loop record track comping.

Music

New A.I. can identify the song you’re listening to by reading your brain waves

song identifying ai

From Journey’s “Don't Stop Believin’” to Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” to Kylie Minogue’s “Can't Get You Out Of My Head,” there are some songs that manage to successfully worm their way down our ear canals and take up residence in our brains. What if it was possible to read the brain’s signals, and to use these to accurately guess which song a person is listening to at any given moment?

That’s what researchers from the Human-Centered Design department at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands and the Cognitive Science department at the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar have been working on. In a recent experiment, they demonstrated that it is eminently possible -- and the implications could be more significant than you might think.

Music

iPod hack puts 50 million Spotify songs in your pocket

ipod hack puts 50 million spotify songs in your pocket streaming device

When the iPod music player launched in 2001, Apple went with the slogan, “1,000 songs in your pocket.”

Skip forward 20 years and a brilliant bit of work by Massachusetts resident Guy Dupont puts 50 million songs in your pocket, streamable via Spotify.