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Music

Byte The App: Must See Apps Of The Week 8/25

The app stores are teeming with new releases, but who has time to go through them all? We do. Bringing you a selection of the most interesting, creative, and innovative apps each week.

The app stores are teeming with new releases, but who has time to go through them all? We do. Bringing you a selection of the most interesting, creative, and innovative apps each week. Submit your suggestions for next week in the comments below.

Pixl [iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad]

This experimental app lets you play around with your photos to create new abstract artworks. By changing various settings, which include size of the pixels, the color, and the contrast, then selecting a preset pattern, a new composition of your photo is generated, allowing you to create an endless series of reconfigured artworks. If abstract art isn’t your thing, you can use it to create a more pictorial image, giving you the chance to breath new life into those lackluster snaps cluttering up your photo library.

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Buildings [Android]
Featuring plenty more than just your standard tourist information leaflet, this app has over 40,000 buildings in its database. Using GPS it notifies you of interesting buildings in your vicinity and provides commentary from people who know what they’re talking about. So you can impress whoever you’re roaming about with with your expert knowledge. Or annoy the hell out of them by being a pretentious know-it-all. The information, images and videos have all been crowd-sourced from architects across the globe, so it’s constantly getting updated.

Pure Flow [iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad]
This is an interesting app that harnesses the silent noise constantly around us, the imperceptible hum emitted from the ubiquitous technology of GPS satellites, 3G networks and Wifi hotspots. It turns this ever-present static into something tangible, creating audiovisual patterns of “fluctuating white noise” that reacts and responds in real-time to the immediacy of the devices in your environment. The user can touch the live data and the pattern also “evolves when idle.”

DJ Shadow [Android]
The man who kickstarted the genre of brooding, sampled, instrumental hip-hop with his album Endtroducing (a must-have in any 1990s music collection) has now made the leap from iPhone to Android with this app. So, if you’re pining for a time when hip-hop was all about haunting piano notes and disconnected vocals sourced from vinyl, then this is the app for you. It has all the usual features you’d expect: a Twitter feed, news updates, videos, images, plus you can also listen to Shadow Radio, which showcases music that should appeal to fans.

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Donut [iPad]

This is a mind-blowing electroacoustic music app from the always innovative

The Strange Agency

, inspired by an ancient

IBM

tape loop machine. Just watching and listening to the video is enough to weird you out, but it looks beautiful and involves stacks of loops, which themselves are wrapped into a loop to create a 2D time loop, allowing you to record loops in two dimensions. It’s complicated, but thankfully there’s a detailed explanation of how it all works over on

their site

.