Every one who regularly runs or works out to music has probably thought about this. Wouldn’t it be cool to have the music change according to your training tempo? Well, Synchstep makes it possible. If you have an iPhone/iPod. It’s fairly cheap, it works with all your music and it works as advertized.
Synchstep uses the motion sensor inside your iPod to calculate the moves you make per minute. This is averaged and used as a base BPM to find music that matches. This, I feel, is the most brittle part of the entire application. The default setting is to change the music after 10 seconds if your BPM changes. Either my tempo isn’t steady enough or the beat detection is a little too sensitive, but this didn’t work for me.
I changed this setting to only re-synchronize the BPM after the entire song is played. It isn’t exactly what I would like, but at least it didn’t drive me nuts by constantly changing the song.
Apart from this, I really like Synchstep. Although it’s clear this is still a fairly experimental application it is already very useful.
It starts by indexing the playlists you like. Synchstep gets its BPM data from the net and if it doesn’t find it, you can download a desktop application to calculate the BPM. And if you’re still not happy, you can override the automatic detection and enter the correct BPM.
The interface is minimal but very functional. A start button to start measuring and playing music and a BPM scale so you can override the tempo. It would be nice if this was immediately accessible. Right now it first needs to detect your beat. But I felt it could be nice to just enter the BPM and match your run to the music instead of the other way around.
Is Synchstep worth $4.99. It depends. If you expect a fully fleshed out product that never crashes, no, you’re not going to get what you want. But really, what do you expect for $4.99 anyway? Synchstep is an experimental, yet usable and very promising application. So yes, I would go for it if you’re interested in using your music library in a different way.