After Robert Scoble first wrote about Aweditorium there has been a fair amount of buzz surrounding the team behind it. Beautiful design and an intuitive and never seen before way of experiencing and discovering music has made its way to the iPad and has since then found many fans.
A small Austrian development studio has just released an App with a similar, yet in comparison to Aweditorium, a very reduced and simplified approach. Whereas Aweditorium actually allows users to discover music they’ve never heard before, shows HQ photos of the artist and extensive background information with metacontent from multiple sources such as YouTube. With a grand focus on design and user interaction sonarflow’s iPad App called sonarflow (iTunes link) stops where Aweditorium starts. It essentially is a more visual and appealing display of your iTunes music library. Tapping on a bubble play the song and zooming into reveals additional artist information. Furthermore the app also allows to to create playlists depending on your hearing habits (nothing special, right).
New interfaces are nice, but if you really want to change the way music is being indulged then you have to provide more than just a different surface. Aweditorium does a really good job of making more out of your existing music library and, probably even more important, by accessing data that is hidden from the user and that enables one to explore new and alike artists and bands.
With Robert Scoble and a team of Silicon Valley leaders worshipping their product it’s going to be hard for other Startups, such as Sonarflow, to really take the bread out of Aweditorium’s mouth.