More music
I love listening to music, especially while working. I am quite particular about what I listen to. I struggle for example to listen to anything with lyrics while working as I find that too distracting. I also do not like playlists, even those from my own huge collection, as they soon become familiar and boring. Then it also is a huge admin hassle to construct and maintain playlists and trying to create a really fresh playlist yourself is like playing chess against yourself - it is difficult to be surprised.
Radio
I grew up with radio and, you know what, radio still does it for me. I can listen to radio all day long. It does not get repetitive, I can trust somebody with good taste with the music selection and quickly flip channels depending on my mood or if something gets too boring or too distractive.
Laut.fm
One of my favourite radio sites is Laut.fm. It has a huge variety of stations as well as a nice and polished interface.
Disclaimer
I have no affiliation with Laut whatsoever.
Apple watch
Recently my wife gave me an apple watch. One of the first things I wanted to do with it was listen to music, preferably from Laut.fm, but I was surprised to learn that this was not possible out of the box. In stead I was once again confined to my own music … and so my journey began … za-Laut was born.
za-Laut
za-Laut has one simple aim - to stream Laut.fm from an Apple Watch.
It works exactly the way I want it to, making it easy to browse genres and identify favourites. It is also easy to cycle through favourites or recents if a particular song or station becomes annoying. The workflow is to quickly browse Laut’s vast collection, build up a selection of recents and favourites, and then to play from these lists and also easily flip between the stations in a list.
Now playing - its a feature, not a bug
For this I make use of the watch’s built-in and in-your-face now-playing feature - not to cycle between songs in a playlists, but to flip through stations in my favourites or recents list, or even in a selected genre.
Likewise now-playing’s shuffling does not shuffle songs in a playlist but stations in a genre for example. So you could open a station from the genre browser and use the now-playing interface to cycle through stations in the genre list until you find what you like.
If you start playing a station from your favourites then you can cycle through the other stations in your favourites and likewise for recents. The now-playing interface’s bookmark feature will add the playing station to your favourites.
The image above shows the watch’s now playing display when playing station Eurovision from the list Ballads. Here, if you skip forwards or backwards you will go to the next or previous station in Ballads. This list is a Genre list.
Less politics
In case you did not know, everything Laut.fm is German. I do not speak German, but I wanted the app to be at least available in German in honour of its source. Since the app has a limited number of phrases it was relatively easy to translate into German and then I just kept going. Eventually I added some RTL languages as well, such as Arabic and Hebrew.
In the spirit of za-Laut I tried to be representative but mostly also tried to honour the music styles I like. Who can ignore K-Pop for example, and so za-Laut has a Korean translation. Looking at Ukraine, albeit from as far away as South Africa and through the glasses of the Internet, it seems there is something of a musical revolution taking place and so Ukrainian is also in the list of supported languages. French singers have always been top class, Russia’s brutal style is difficult to ignore, China has an incredible quality heritage and Japan has guitars covered in cat skin! All these countries' languages absolutely have to be in za-Laut and I also plan to keep going and add more to the collection.
I do not speak these languages, however, and the translation was done by machine. I just hope to the heavens there is nothing offensive in there - if you pick up anything please let me know ASAP. This is 2020 after all. If you can let me know in English I’ll appreciate it even more za-laut@ferrasolutions.com.
What’s in a name
I tried to build a quality app. It is simple yet comprehensive and I tried to cover all the bases and cover them well. A big part of the audience is, after all, German.
Since I hail from South Africa I wanted to have a za somewhere in the title. The music comes from Laut and I also wanted to have that in the title, and after a bit of toying around with this the title became za-Laut.
That may seem simple enough, but earlier I tried in vain to add a wa for watch as well. Despite the heaps of hilarity it caused, I’ll rather not mention all the discarded walaza’s and zalawa’s here.
The pronunciation is simply and its sounds almost like the French Salut!
I trust you will also enjoy this app.
Artists
The first iteration of the app only streamed music, but I reworked it to also give credit to the artists themselves. They are, after all, the not-so-silent heroes of this story. When listening to Laut I often find myself searching for the lyrics or artist of a song and so this is also mirrored in the app to some extent.
This it how it happens. Whenever you select a station you will be presented with a list containing the currently playing and most recently played songs. If you then select any one of these songs you will get details about the artist, album, year published and so on. There will even be a bit of cover art if available.
The Germans are coming
I was surprised to find that oldies are extremely popular on Laut. Another genre that is popular is the German Schlager music.
When I started work on za-Laut I thought Schlager referred to beer festival type oompah bands and avoided it like the plague. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that it in fact translates as hits and refers more or less to adult contemporary music, often exactly what I was looking for. One misconception out the way.
Laut.fm also taught me that we, the peoples of the world, have a lot more in common than we may think. Music is the language of emotional experience and it is the same everywhere as our emotional experiences are the same. Politics often divide us but things like sport brings us together again. Music has the same power. Music entertains, music unites, music expresses and music stirs up emotions.
This is why I really appreciate Laut.fm’s unashamed wide coverage. I hope you will too.
With Laut in your pocket you can listen to Norwegian death metal or gospel revival music without the Laut server catching on fire. It seems for Laut it is also about the music and not the politics.
This is why some earth-shatteringly good German school choir music playing from some gospel channel was able to move me to tears down here in Africa. Thank you Laut!
For a long time I have resisted the more aggressive and explicit genres but through Laut I found I actually quite like Eminem! Please note this is the instrumental versions of his songs, but again, thank you Laut!
Heck, Laut is the only place I know of that will actually and willingly still play some of Sir Cliff Richard’s music!
Video
The video below illustrates how to use za-Laut.
coming soon
Support
If you have any queries or requests please contact me za-laut@ferrasolutions.com.
Privacy policy
Ferra Solutions (Pty) Ltd does not collect your private information.
za-Laut is sold via Apple’s app store and Apple takes care of all financial issues.
Application support can be requested by eMail in which case your eMail will be known to Ferra Solutions (Pty) Ltd.
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