Following a significant reboot late last year, cloud-music player AudioBox has released a new app for iPhone that lets users stream their cloud-stored music collections on Apple’s device. It supports most of the features found in the startup’s desktop HTML5-based offering, including the ability to access music stored on a home PC or via an array of 3rd party cloud storage services, such as DropBox, Google Drive, SkyDrive, and Box.com, in addition to support for SoundCloud and YouTube streaming — an approach we’ve previously described as ‘bringing everything but the kitchen sink’ to the cloud-music market.
As well as being broadly agnostic to where a user’s music files are stored, thanks to that multiple cloud storage service support, the AudioBox iPhone app enables the creation of what it dubs ‘smart’ playlists, which can be made up of tracks stored across different cloud services or on a user’s private cloud via the AudioBox Desktop app running on their own PC. Playlists also support caching for offline playback so that users can play their music collections without being connected to the Internet, which is a must-have feature of any mobile music streaming app.
Other neat features include being AirPlay-ready for streaming to AirPlay compatible devices, background streaming with automatic pause/restart during calls, album cover art and track info display when the iPhone is locked, and lyrics integration courtesy of musiXmatch.
Finally, the iPhone app has the same social sharing functionality as its desktop cousin, whereby “Now Playing” notifications are sharable on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Twitch.tv. In addition, the app pulls in artist information from Last.fm, related videos from YouTube, and concert listings from SongKick.