Splyce Music Player For iOS Review

First Impressions / Setting up

First things first: Splyce is indeed a beautiful app. It looks fantastic on an iPhone 5 screen, and comes in a variety of colours that you can switch to depending on your preference. More themes are available when you pay for the in-app theme upgrade ($0.99 for the incremental upgrade, $1.99 for all the bells and whistles). Everything is laid out intuitively. You add songs by touching the plus sign on the upper left of the screen. Once you’ve added them to your playlist, you can load them into the player which is reminiscent of minimalist, blocky eight-bit video games of yesteryear.

So far so good! It’s simple, it plays your music, and it looks great.

In Use

When the music starts playing, you can set Splyce to automatically mix your songs based on a number of parameters that you define: Mix mode chooses how you’d like the songs to be mixed using transition options like Vinyl Stop, Brake and Mix. You can also set how long you’d want the song to play before it transitions to the next track (either in full or in increasing 60-second increments).

If you’d like to hear what a long blend between two songs sounds like, you can set Splyce to make a transition for up to 60 seconds, which may or may not work depending on the genres you’re mixing. In any case, it’s nice to have this option onboard to avoid any potential trainwrecks. And this might be what makes the software a bit frustrating: There is no actual crossfader! You can set a mix point between two songs by dragging the diamond markers on the interface (the leftmost one is the song currently playing, the rightmost is the cued track), however it’s not terribly accurate.

It would’ve been nice to be able to zoom in on the track to be able to make a more reliable mix point, however this feature is unavailable.

The minimalist interface also makes for some rather clunky beat jumping, as there aren’t any indicators/waveforms to tell you where exactly you’re dropping the needle. All you get are solid coloured bars: white for the softest passages and dark blue for the loudest.

The transitions work well for EDM and house genres, especially ones that have drops, bars to mix in and out of and intros and outros, however I found the transition algorithm unpredictable when it came to mixing genres with a large difference in BPM.

The Break and Vinyl Stop transition options are great for this, but when the Mix option is enabled, I get awkward key changes in some songs as well as some undesirable clashes. Thankfully, you can select the type of transitions you want should you wish to execute cross-genre mixes or odd mix points such as these.

Splyce comes with lighting effects that take advantage of your iPhone’s built in flash to produce strobes to the beat of the music that’s currently playing. It provides support for Philips Hue external LED lighting, but again you’d have to pay for the upgrade. There are also built in FX, but the only free one that comes with the app is Echo; everything else is an in-app purchase.

Conclusion

To be fair, Splyce isn’t being marketed as serious iOS DJ software. I feel like it’s meant to be a replacement for your iPhone’s built-in music player, and this is where the app excels: It’s fun and easy to use, and you sure could execute some proper mixes with it as long as you aren’t expecting anything too technical.

It makes for a cool mix simulation app, akin to how American football pundits run a game of EA Sports’ Madden to see who’ll win the Superbowl. It’s a nice piece of code that could potentially introduce you to new mix possibilities you didn’t know existed, or you could just leave it playing at your next house party as a twist to your usual Genius playlist.

So while it’s not trying to be a full-blown DJ app, it’s interesting – and anything that gets people messing with their music instead of rigidly playing tracks fade-to-fade has at least some merit in our book.