Everyone has differing preferences for their music needs on their iDevices; some people are heavy audiophiles and have nothing but FLACs in their iTunes, others do nothing but stream with Pandora or Spotify, and then there are people who are about in the middle like me. If you don’t need all of the functionality of the Music app then Transcynd is for you! It’s currently $0.99 on the App Store but the developer, Darran Hall told me that he plans on making it free for the next update after he polishes a few features and squashes a bug or two. He’s a great guy and deserves the money so I suggest you go buy it!

Having a beautiful no nonsense card style interface it allows you to easily select a song and start playing it quickly. The control card colorizes itself with the colors of the currently playing song’s album artwork, which makes it visually pleasing to play your music. It reminds me of the Control Center but with a more minimalist interface, when you swipe it up the album art slides down from the top as well as sliding back up out of the way when you slide it back down, the animations are quite nice.

The Artist Card tells a bit of information on the currently playing artist, it pulls the data from last.fm and you can scroll through and read more. It shows just enough information without getting in the way, taking queues from the minimalism throughout the rest of iOS.

The Share Card is equally minimalistic, showing just the right amount of information that is needed to be useful without being cluttered. With a tap it will bring up the share sheet for Twitter or Facebook, allowing a quick blurb to be posted to your favorite social network. Again, just a quick swipe down and it’s out of the way.

I can really appreciate design like this in many different ways — everything from the approach that was taken to the functionality for the end user. It truly “transcynds” any expectations I had with a with a minimal music player, I usually don’t have much music stored locally on my device as I only have 16GBs so there isn’t much room to spare. But that being said, this beautiful app made me put a little more music on my device.

If you’re jailbroken like me, he only asks that you disable some tweaks that will potentially interfere with his UI blurs based on the now playing album artwork. I appreciate when developers support jailbreaking, it’s all too often that we find jailbreakers locked out of their apps and having to resort to using other tweaks to disable the jailbreak check which can potentially cause more problems down the road.

. . . One more thing…

The next update will bring iTunes Radio integration! This will almost certainly make Transcynd replace the regular Music app ninety percent of the time for me.

His use of UI blurs and minimalist design queues have made me fall in love with listening to music again on my iPhone. While there are a few things left to be desired like searching for a song or listing the songs in the album view by album instead of alphabetically, Transcynd fully lives up to it’s name.

Thanks for reading and stay tuned for more review of lesser known apps by awesome developers like Darran. You can find him on Twitter or Reddit.