If you’re a part of the internet generation, chances are, you only use SoundCloud or YouTube when it comes to music. And if that’s the case, you find yourself making a lot of compromises when it comes to listening to music on your iPhone. You probably use the YouTube app that takes a lot of bandwidth while streaming videos, not to mention eats up the battery life.

But now there’s a better way for doing all your music streaming – easily – without even involving a paid subscription service Like Apple Music, Spotify, or the need to download and transferred songs. Just use VOX. Although the app is paid ($3.99), you’ll usually find it for free every now and then (that’s how I got it).

What is VOX?

Mac users might recognize that VOX on Mac is a well-known alternative to iTunes with it comes to playing music. The iOS counterpart follows a similar design language and has the same features. You can add a SoundCloud account, access a feature rich EQ, or use VOX’s own, $9.99/month, unlimited streaming service that lets you upload your own songs to their cloud storage and also supports high-quality formats like FLAC.

But that doesn’t concern us. You can keep using VOX for free, for streaming songs from YouTube and SoundCloud. And for that, VOX is the best app. And yes, it will stream songs in the background as well.

But of course, offline downloads are not supported.

The UI

VOX is beautiful but it’s not your typical app. Instead of using tabs, and the back button, like every other Music app out there, VOX uses vertical swipe gestures.

That’s right. So to even go to the Library or to search, you need to swipe down.

Just remember this, if you want to go up or get out, swipe down. If you want to go deeper, swipe up.

Adding Songs To Library Using VOX

VOX’s home screen is “The Library”. This is where any song you add from YouTube or SoundCloud will show up. Along with the music, you have stored locally.

To search for any song, tap the “Down arrow” button in the top-left and tap the “Search” area. Enter the term and when you find a song, swipe left on it to reveal options. Here, tap “Add to Library.

Now the song will show up in either the “SoundCloud” or “YouTube” section of the Library, depending on where the song is from.

Creating Collections In VOX

If you’re going to be using VOX a lot, it makes sense to create playlists. In VOX, they’re called Collections.

You can add songs to a collection either by swiping left on a list item and tapping the “More” button and selecting “Add to collection”.

While a song is playing, you can do the same by tapping the “+” button.

Stick To It

At first glance, VOX looks like a weird app, and based on the design, it kind of is. But the app is stable, the streaming quality is nice and the organization will start making sense once you get used to it. So all I’ll say is stick to it.

Download:

• VOX for iPhone, iPad, iPod touch – Download link
• VOX for Mac – Download link