Android, iPhone, and iPad Mobile Apps for Concert Going

February 23, 2012

For all of the great solutions for managing your personal music collection and discovering new musicians from around the globe, there’s still no way to truly bring the full experience of a live concert into your living room. Sure, recordings are nice, but even the highest quality MP3s can’t re-create the hair-raising, ear-popping experience of seeing your favorite band light up the stage, live. But before you run off to Red Rocks or the House of Blues, arm yourself with our favorite mobile apps for making the most of any concert experience.

To secure your place up against the stage, you’re going to want to know about upcoming concert dates as soon as they’re announced.

For iPad and iPhone users, Songkick Concerts has your calender covered. This app scans your music collection and automatically begins tracking the tour dates of your favorite artists. If, like me, you mostly stream your music these days, you can enter artists manually or scan your Spotify account via Songkick’s built in app for that popular platform. Once it knows what you’re into, it will start building you a custom list of upcoming shows, complete with links for purchase tickets and an option to notify your friends that you’re interested in going.

On Android devices, Gigbeat offers a similar service, allowing you to pull favorite artists from your phone’s storage or from your account on popular music-tracking website Last.fm, as well as from streaming service Rdio and from Songkick’s online concert tracker (which again takes advantage of Spotify, if you use it). Once you’re up and running, both Songkick and Gigbeat can be set to notify you of newly scheduled concerts and performances as soon as they’re announced, so that you never have to worry about sold out shows.

Like the music washing over the crowd, even the best concert experience is fleeting. That doesn’t mean you can’t hold onto the memories, though.

One of the most compelling aspects of a modern smartphone is the increasingly powerful camera packed inside. While the bundled camera app will usually get the job done, iPhone users should consider grabbing Camera+ ($2) from the iTunes store. For a reasonably small investment, Camera+ offers expanded exposure settings, tighter color control, and a burst mode for capturing a rapid-fire series of shots. There’s even a ‘concert mode’ to help alleviate common color problems faced by other amateur concert shooters, plus an image stabilizer to compensate for the overwhelming urge to dance while you snap photos.

Similarly, Android and iOS users can get their hands on Camera360, a favorite camera replacement app of the Google set that features a number of presets for different lighting conditions, stabilization, and greater control of focus and color than the default option. For free, it’s exactly the right price.

Since almost every phone has a camera, you can rest assured that you’re not the only one taking pics from the audience.

The experience isn’t quite over when the encore is finished. Once you’re home with a phone full of photos, it’s tablet-time. On the iPad, Snapseed ($5) is a great option for the casual photo editor. Run your photos through this app’s clever Auto Correct or apply one of their popular pre-fab filters like ‘vintage’ or ‘grunge,’ then manually fine tune the image’s brightness, contrast, saturation, white balance and ambiance in order to make each photo pop. With the iPad’s high-resolution screen and Snapseed’s easy-to-navigate controls, you’ll be able to quickly recognize and understand the benefits of tinkering with each individual setting, just as a seasoned pro would. Once you’re happy, you can even apply borders to your photos and then share them via Facebook, Twitter and Flickr.

For Android tablets, look no further than photo-editing software standard-bearer, Adobe, whose Photoshop Touch ($10) aims to rival their own more substantial desktop software for a teeny-tiny fraction of the price. Photoshop Touch allows users to not only manipulate the typical settings, such as color adjustments, image cropping, and fun filters, but also introduces many of the advance features that creative editors will want to play around with, such as layers and brushes. Thankfully, Adobe has been thoughtful in their layout of this tablet app’s interface, allowing casual users to navigate easily without getting confused or frustrated by the numerous tools and options.

For those about to rock (with their phones in their hands), we salute you! And we hope you use these apps to make the most of your next concert experience.

 

Alexei Bochenek is a lifelong tech nerd & film buff based in Los Angeles. When he’s not playing with his phone, it’s because the movie has started. Shhhhh!