For most of us, music is an essential part of everyday life. It helps us to process complex emotions more effectively and often ranks highly as a relaxation tool – right next to yoga and meditation. The effect of music against stress has been established both practically and theoretically. This means you have a higher chance of having a good day when jamming to your favorite tunes on your headphones or speakers at work. Smartphones have become the main tools for delivering music in a world where iPods and portable digital players are becoming obsolete. As such, there are hundreds of music apps on various app stores designed to deliver the perfect musical experience.

These apps can be used to do everything from simple streaming to creating new music and making music mixes with your favorite tunes. Regardless of their different functions, all these apps have one common objective: to make everyday life more musical. Here is a sample of how these Apps can help improve your day and enjoy music to the fullest.

1. Discover New Music

If you hardly listen to radio stations or go to clubs or parties for one reason or another, it might be hard for you to discover new music. The only time you are probably likely to get wind of a new tune is when someone at the workplace or at home sings along to a new hit or listens to a song you might like.

Thankfully, there are tons of apps that can help you discover music without listening to the radio. SoundCloud is one of the most popular music discovery apps that integrates with your social media accounts to find out what your friends are listening to and also makes impressive suggestions for you. The Hive is also another newer app that lets you discover apps from a list of 30-second snippets.

Other awesome apps for music discovery you should check out include 8tracks, Soundwave, Mixcloud, Shazam Encore (paid app), Spotify, and iHeartRadio.

2. Get Lyrics to a Song you Love

Do you often find yourself mumbling incoherently when singing along to parts of your favorite tune? Welcome to 99% of the population. Most of us – even seasoned music artists – are pros at singing choruses but often find it hard to memorize the lyrics to the song’s verses.

This is where apps such as Musixmatch, Shazam, Lyricmania, Lyrics A-Z, Lyrically, Tunewiki, and other lyrics apps come in handy. Most of these apps display the lyrics to a song during playback, which enables you to sing along like a pro. Some like Musixmatch have an impressive collection of lyrics and even maintain an offline collection of lyrics to help you sing along even without an internet connection.

3. Create Music on Your Smartphone

Most of your favorite tunes are created in a recording studio with a wide variety of equipment that help turn the artiste’s sound into a hit. However, you can still make a decent song without expensive equipment or singing ability, thanks to a handful of nifty apps that turn your smartphone into a recording studio.

Figure is one of the most popular music creation apps freely available for the iOS platform. It combines bass, drums, and preloaded melodies to create decent loops for producers at heart. GarageBand is a paid iOS app that allows you to create tracks using a guitar, bass, piano, and drums. This is suitable for all kinds of users, ranging from recording artists to novices testing out their musical skills (or lack thereof).

Other cool music creation apps for both android and iOS platforms include Magic Piano, Scape, Loopimal, Ninja Jamm, and DM1 – The Drum Machine.

4. Mix your Favorite Tunes like a Pro DJ

What’s more fun than creating new music? Definitely creating your own music mix and becoming your own DJ. A couple of years ago, the likes of Virtual DJ helped both professional and novice DJs to create professional mixes right from their computers without expensive turntables and related equipment.

Now, thanks to faster and more capable smartphones, you can create professional DJ mixes on-the-go from your Windows, iOS, and android smartphone. Edjing is one such app that lets you cue and transition between two song tracks using the song libraries on your iOS, android, and Windows smartphone. Djay is also another feature-filled app for your iOS device that lets you play with a wide variety of tools on a professional, clutter-free virtual turntable.

You can also check out Traktor DJ (iOS), PocketDJ Vintage (Android), and Cross DJ (iOS and Android) for more DJ-ing action on your mobile device.

5. Find a Song That is Stuck in Your Head

“What is the name of this song?” If you’ve ever caught yourself repeating this phrase a couple of times over, then you must know how frustrating it can be to have a portion of a song you don’t know stuck in your head for days, weeks, or even months. It becomes even more frustrating when you try singing or humming portions of the song to your friends who only stare blankly back at you with no help forthcoming.

Enter life-saving music discovery apps. These apps let you sing or hum the tune to a song or type in partial lyrics to find a song. Shazam is one of the most popular discovery apps in the market today that lets you discover music by playing back part of the track. SoundHound is also another app that lets you discover songs by humming or singing the song into your phone.

The Takeaway

If you don’t have any kind of music app on your phone or tablet apart from native music players, you are missing out on a huge world of musical opportunity. Third-party music apps let you get the most out of your device and take your musical skills to another level – or have fun while trying. They can also help you pass time when you are stuck in traffic or a long queue, which enables you to manage stress and kill time.

So, even if you aren’t a recording artist or a professional composer or instrumentalist, you can still use your smartphone or tablet to do some incredible things on your device. Simply download one of the apps and become the next Grammy winner – virtually at least.