NAKANO 4+

I am struggling to use

This app is incredibly impressive for me to use but there’s one small situation on the iPad I’m currently on it only shows the playlist option can you please fix it so it shows all forms of music from albums to tracks the actual songs really good please fix thanks

Developer Response ,

Thank you very much for your rating and the nice review.
And, we can see everything from songs to playlists on our test devices. We use a standard picker to browse songs so maybe your songs are DRM-protected or on iCloud or has no meta-data like song name, artist, style etc.
Also, if you will find a time to contact the support with your device type and iOS version here: https://synthexyze.com/contact.php
we'll be happy to help. Thank you.

Expensive useless toy

The app is brilliantly designed, features like unboxing are cute and well executed and beautiful. However, the app itself turns out to be pretty useless because of some serious flaws.
1. The app does not have phone mode. One would expect the ability to zoom onto cassette (to a scale at least somewhat realistic to true size of the compact cassette, given different phone sizes) and so turning phone into a walkman. But it is not possible. Even more frustrating is that in the end you have a a very much squeezed full deck with tiny buttons and tiny cassettes that on the phone screen look really ridiculous. It does look great on iPad, but this isn’t iPad exclusive app.
2. The interaction with music library is very limited. For example, play counts are not added to your library, effectively turning a lot of smart playlist useless. All of those ‘recently played’ or ‘most played’ immediately loose sense and ’music library’ becomes just a bag of audio files. I can understand that some of those who still remember cassettes probably aren’t having somewhat organized music libraries, but I’m certain not all of them are. Many use smart playlists, organize their vinyls and cassettes with help of things like discogs and are otherwise keeping up with the times and use modern features. This app does not integrate into your library - be careful.
Hopefully these flaws can be fixed and the app would be an all-round great, not just beautifully designed.

Analog Worldview

I spent the better part of my morning exploring NAKANO. I think it's worth the money, and obviously, it's not meant to be convenient or easy. It’s designed expressly for nostalgia, everything from the unboxing to tape transport.

There's one glaring omission in the otherwise fastidiously accurate cassette experience. YOU CAN’T SEE THE CASSETTE LABEL AND SONG LIST WHILE LISTENING, so you can’t skip around and find cuts. Wasn’t that part of the cassette ritual? Integration with iTunes album artwork would be nice too.

There are other niggles like the cassette creation process that involve too much repetition. You have to be sure the cassette is the right length, otherwise it won’t hold all the tracks you transfer from iTunes. But overall, once I figured out how obsessive the designer was with the subtle controls and analog world view, I was able to do what I wanted.