The process of listening to music has undergone many transitions in the last decade of so - we’ve had CDs, Walkmans, Mini-Disks, MP3 players, mobile phone MP3 players, iTunes, iPods, and Spotify. Needless to say, there’s quite an extensive amount of listening mediums open to music lovers in our modern technological age - you might even say, they’ve never had it so good...

Simplify Music 2 is the newest version of Simplify Music, the application that allows you to stream music from your PC directly to you iPhone, which is such a good idea, that when we heard about it, we couldn’t actually believe it didn’t exist before!

The really good thing about Simplify Music 2 is that it’s as good as it sounds. After only a few hours of using it we were converted, after a week, well, we’d probably join their cult if they set one up. Basically, Simplify Music 2 streams your music flawlessly, we literally experienced little or no problems when streaming music from our PC to our iPhone. In this sense, Simplify Music 2 is magical in its seamlessness, so much so that it’s a little disconcerting at first - things aren’t supposed to work this well, are they?

If you’ve used the original Simplify Music app, you’ll feel straight at home on Simplify Music 2, as the interface has only been tweaked ever so slightly. Once you have the app open you can skim through your entire iTunes collection, your favourites, and all your podcasts. One new addition is the tool bar at the bottom of the main screen that provides you with options for viewing your favourites, searching for tracks, and quick access to the setting menu.

Additionally, the implementation of the plus icon lets you compile lists of your favourite tracks on the move, which is quite a nice feature and is certainly useful if you use certain music for certain things. Unfortunately, you still can’t play DRM-protected tracks from the iTunes store, which is certainly annoying - but seeing as most people download there music illegally, it’s probably not worth losing any sleep over.

Another interesting addition to Simplify Music 2 is the search function, which is located in the top left of the screen. By typing in search criteria, such as artist, song, or album names you instantly access all your connected libraries. However, if you want to listen to songs from separate libraries you will have to move them into your favourites list, as the application doesn’t like accessing two separate libraries at once. Nevertheless, in the general scheme of things, this is hardly an issue - well, it wasn’t for us at least anyway.

In terms of sound quality, the playback over both Wi-Fi and 3G is extremely good. Obviously, it’s not as clear as listening to it directly from the source, and it can get a little murky at times, but when you consider that it’s being transferred through cyber-space purely for your listening pleasure, it’s kind of difficult to be too harsh about it.

Overall, this is an amazing application, and one that no music lover should be without. It does exactly what it promises to do, will save you 10’s of GBs of space on your iPhone, and is extremely easy to use - literally, what more could you want!?

However, there is one problem: the price. At £3.49 it is quite expensive, and if you’ve already got the original Simplify Music it probably isn’t worth your while upgrading as they’re essentially the same thing, bar a few little quirks here and there.
If you don’t have either though, make sure you get your hands on them asap, we promise you will not be disappointed - you can thank us later.