So, what are the other options? Well, as Apple rightly advertise: ‘There’s an App for That’ although in this case there are 3 that do the job and are currently available in the UK AppStore. In alphabetical order we have: ‘Album Mixer – Shuffle by Album‘, ‘iAlbum Player‘ and ‘Quick Music‘.

Here follows a brief rundown of the pros and cons of each app.

iAlbumPlayer

I didn’t get off to a good start with this app. On first run it told me I had no music on my iPhone and that I should change some auto-skip settings. I couldn’t even FIND any settings but later realised it is one of those annoying apps that require you to close it to change any settings. Once closed you go to the main iPhone settings and scroll down to find the app. Here you can turn on/off ‘autoplay at launch’ and ‘auto-skip’. Auto-skip has two further settings to choose a minimum rating and a mysterious ‘track lacking’ (which I THINK is the minimum number of tracks in an album). Both these have an option of ‘never’ implying the app should play the album regardless of rating or number of tracks. However, even after setting both to ‘never’ the app still told me to change the auto-skip settings and that there were no music albums on my iPhone. Occasionally it would play an album and the screen did look nice and clear but by this point I’d given up with iAlbumPlayer. In theory I should be able to press the stack of CDs on the main screen and it plays me a random album but it’s too buggy for me to even bother. I’m impatient, and this app has now felt my wrath! A shame really, as this seems to have the nicest looking display once it decides to actually play something!

Album Mixer: Shuffle by Album

On launch you are faced with a big ‘shuffle albums’ button along with ‘filter’, ‘settings’ and some play controls. Good, the settings are easy to get to! Within the settings you can select how many albums you want the app to shuffle, set the app to shuffle on launch and also choose shake to shuffle. As I mainly use my iPhone in the car I always turn off shake to shuffle features as pot holes and speed bumps usually give undesired results…! For the purpose of this review I turned it on, shook my phone and, yes, it worked! In use it is as simple as pressing the big ‘shuffle albums’ button and a playlist of random albums is generated. It shows the album art on screen and, as the playlist is already generated, closing the app or putting your iPod/iPhone into standby means you can still listen to the albums in order. Back in the app you can shuffle the albums at any time, skip between tracks and also skip between albums.  You also have a ‘filter’ button that puts all your music genres and playlists into a single list. Selecting multiple items from this list will filter which albums will be chosen when you next shuffle. I like this app; it does what it was designed for with enough settings to fine tune your playlist too. The only downside, in my opinion, is the track names are illegible at the bottom and the artist and album title are quite small too.

Quick Music

This app isn’t specifically an album shuffler but it does have it as one of it’s advertised features.The main purpose of the app is to select music quickly. You can shuffle all your tracks; define your favourite artist and play only their tracks; define and play your favourite album; play tracks by a single random artist; and, the important one, play a random album. The settings are accessible from within the app and give you the option to start any of the play modes at startup (eg play favourite album at startup). You can also set your favourite artist and album here. Looking solely at the shuffle album feature here, it is slightly lacking. Yes, it will play a random album but as it only chooses a single album it means once the album finishes you need to open the app again to choose the next one. On a short journey this would be fine but on a long trip where you would normally listen to 4 or 5 albums it would get slightly frustrating having to continuously restart the app and/or press the ‘Play a random album’ button. When an album is playing the bulk of the screen is taken up by the play options and the artwork and track title seems squeezed in at the top. You can, however, put the iPhone into standby and view the full album artwork by viewing the lock screen though.

The purpose of reviewing these apps was to find a way to reinstate the Shuffle by Album feature that Apple disabled. As such, the clear winner is AlbumMixer: Shuffle by Album although the text size used in the app is miniscule, the actual album shuffle feature is very well implemented. Second place, and only because it isn’t actually specifically an album, shuffler, is Quick Music. Third place goes to iAlbumPlayer as it is too buggy to use.

There are actually quite a few tuners in the AppStore (mostly aimed at guitars) but Clearview caught my eye mainly because of the many features is offers and the fact it can tune “acoustic or electric guitar, bass, bowed strings, woodwinds, brass, piano and any other instrument that can sustain a tone”. It also has support for custom temperaments (as well as pre-set temperaments), transposition, digital pitch pipes and a handful of other features. Now, I don’t play violin or piano but an app that can tune such a range of instruments must have something going for it, especially at £2.39.

The main screen layout from top to bottom shows the current temperament (default is Equal Temperament), the ± 25cent fine tuning display, the tuner or pitch-pipes buttons, the tuning wheel and the settings (‘i’). The default settings are the ‘standard’ for guitars (and presumably other instruments) of a middle A at 440.0Hz, a transposition of C and equal temperament. If you’re not familiar with temperaments they are very slightly different tunings to give a subtle (or not so subtle) change of sound to the instrument – Cleartune comes with 23 pre-set temperaments as well as the ability to add your own custom ones.

Cleartune is simple to use; to tune your instrument make sure the tuning fork is green and the power button in the middle is also green and then simply play your note. The tuning wheel will give you a quick indication of the current note and then you use the top bar to fine-tune it. As the app detects the sound the yellow triangular marker on the tuning wheel becomes more opaque and then turns green as it reaches the correct tuning. You can also press the padlock at the centre of the tuning wheel and then rotate the wheel to choose a specific note if you wish.

I’ve not used pitch pipes for years, personally I hate them but I presume by the inclusion of digital pitch pipes in Cleartune that they are still used for tuning certain instruments. You are given a range of 10 octaves from 27.5Hz right up to 14,080.0Hz. The iPhone’s internal speaker does seem to struggle though on the ridiculously high and low ends of this scale using the Sine wave however there are other options for Triangle, Sawtooth and Square that make the waveform more audible. Realistically though you would never need such high or low notes although 12,500Hz seemed to send my cat scatty! In pitch pipes mode the lock on the tuning wheel forces the note to a full tone (e.g. E, F#, G) but unlocked it allows any point in between in 0.1Hz intervals.

The other features not already mentioned are the ability to calibrate the Middle A (A4) in 0.1Hz intervals (standard is 440.0Hz), various different (and custom) notations for the tuning wheel (A, Bb, B / A, A#, B / Do, Re, Me etc), transposition (e.g. for Bb instruments), temperaments (already mentioned) and needle dampening (basically adjusts the sensitivity).

One feature I liked that I did not see mentioned on either the website or in the AppStore was the very simple use of the iPhones accelerometers. Turn the iPhone upside down and the display turns around for you – this is particularly handy when you are using an amplifier as the iPhone’s microphone is then at the top in just the right position to pick up the sound from the speaker. As a side note, you will need an external microphone if using Cleartune on a 2G iPod Touch.

Cleartune is packed full of advanced features but is suitable for both basic users as well as more advanced users. For a mere £2.39 you get far more than you ever could from your basic ‘stomp-box tuner’ at around ten times the price and probably from many rack-mounted tuners at one hundred times the price. Tuning my guitar using Cleartune and then playing it back through my other tuners confirms that the tunings are accurate. It would be interesting to tune a guitar using Cleartune and then see how it compares to a pro rack-mount but that, perhaps, is one for another day!