Ecoute is a beautiful music player app by PixiApps. It's my favorite music app on iOS, and Ecoute 1.2 is a fantastic update.
The biggest feature is one that I have been craving on iOS since I first got my hands on it in iTunes 11: Play Next. Now you can tap and hold on any album, playlist, artist, podcast or song and select "Play Next" to have that song added into the queue directly after the currently playing song is completed. No longer do you have to choose to either interrupt the song that is playing or wait until it finishes and then remember to tap the song you want next.
For those of us who use Launch Center Pro or Drafts, another exciting addition in this update is Ecoute's new URL scheme. You can now play, shuffle, or search for a particular song, artist or album in Ecoute via apps like Launch Center Pro or Drafts. If you have a favorite artist that you listen to often, you can set up a quick action in Launch Center Pro so that with one tap you can be listening to songs by that artist, and can even shuffle them.
I worked up a quick action to demonstrate the feature, to use it yourself just replace "the national" with whatever artist, album, or song that you wish to play:
ecoute://play?terms={{the national}}&shuffle=albums&repeat=all
That URL will launch Ecoute, find all songs by The National, play them in order in their albums, then shuffle to another random album by The National after each album finishes. The "repeat" parameter at the end will cause Ecoute to keep shuffling even after it has played through all albums.
Ecoute also supports shuffling by song rather than album, launching the app into the search bar, and various other useful actions. You can get more info about them on PixiApps' webpage on Ecoute's URL scheme.
The final feature in the 1.2 release is that Ecoute will now use last.fm to automatically download and display any missing album artwork, a good edition since Ecoute's UI is largely based around album artwork.
Ecoute 1.2 makes my favorite music app for iOS a lot better and more convenient, and I highly suggest you try it out.
