Strophes, the beautiful lyrics reader app for Mac that launched back in June last year, has now arrived on the iPhone. For the uninitiated, Strophes is a beautiful app designed by Gordon Irving & developed by Alfredo Delli Bovi that reads what music you’re currently listening to, automatically pulls lyrics for that song from the web and displays it in a neatly designed interface.
Strophes has been available on the Mac App Store for a while now, but it was released for iPhone only yesterday. Similar to the Mac app, the iPhone version is very beautifully designed and works just as well. Simply play a track on your iPhone (or iPod touch) and launch Strophes — the app automatically fetches the lyrics for the song you’re currently playing. To make this experience a notch better, Strophes automatically syncs the lyrics with the track, so the lyrics are highlighted and scroll along with the track. And it works brilliantly.
Strophes for iPhone also features a music controller within the app, so you can change tracks without leaving the app. The controller has a button to pull up an in-app sheet that displays your music library, letting you choose any track from there with just a few taps. There’s an ‘Artist Bio’ button at the top right that pulls the artist’s information from Last.fm. If you’re the social kind, you can share these lyrics with your friends via Email, Message, Twitter or Facebook.
The interface is lovely and uses stiched leather UI for the navbar. Interactions are fluid and well implemented. There’s a gorgeous Album Art displayed at the top of the lyrics. There are 3 “themes” to choose from, but I prefer keeping it to the default one. The font, on the other hand, I change to Helvetica Neue from the default Noteworthy.
Overall, Strophes is a very beautiful lyrics reader app for iPhone that just works. It’s available on the App Store as a Free & Ad Supported app, and an upgrade to disable the ads costs $4.99.
EDIT: We’d previously erroneously mentioned that Strophes supports apps like Rdio and Spotify, but it doesn’t. Since we’re not in a country that’s supported by these services, we couldn’t test it ourself. Thanks, Otavio.