Tech blog: Intergalactic sounds with the Planetary iPad app

Planetary is a new app for the iPad which takes your music collection where no one has boldly gone before...

This innovative little app visualises your iTunes music collection as a 3D galaxy in space.

Navigating the app is straightforward: you can choose your music from an alphabetical list or view your collection as a self-contained musical universe in which artists are stars, albums are planets and individual tracks are orbiting moons.

Visuals are nothing short of breathtaking, as you’d expect with Apple. Wonderfully rendered artists become flaring stars surrounded by fizzing plumes of space dust. Albums appear as huge rotating planets, their surfaces textured by warping the original cover art to the planet-scape.

Animation is rich, visually stunning and beautifully designed. Imagine looking at the night sky; your music collection has never been more mesmerising.

Planetary isn’t a iTunes replacement, it’s a visualisation tool. In a digital world, data overload can be a common headache. As your collection expands so too does the level of complexity required to keep track of it. By moving around your musical universe, it somehow seems much easier and more interactive.

Once upon a time we could flip through a box of records and play what we wanted. Watching the ever-decreasing grooves made it easy to see how much of the track remained. Planetary does all this and more; viewing track length in the app is a simple case of looking at the trailing tail of the orbiting moon travelling around a planet. The moons also expand in size - the more you play them the bigger they get,

Like the iPad, Planetary has opened up a gateway to a new world. In a nutshell, there’s no other music visualiser so captivatingly cool or as much fun. Best of all, it’s free.

The Planetary iPad app on iTunes