As your iTunes library grows ever-larger, it becomes increasingly difficult to remember all those old tracks you haven’t played in months. Unless you listen to music all day, every day, certain albums are bound to fall by the wayside and be forgotten about.

Attic is an application developed with the sole purpose of rediscovering those albums. In this review we’ll be looking at how well it does the job, and another way of achieving a similar result.

Getting Started

When opening Attic for the first time, you’ll be presented with a series of “Instructions” panels, outlining how the app works. In the background, your music is being analysed for tracks that haven’t been played for a while.

Instructions

Take time to read through this information as it’s the best way to gain a handle on how Attic works. The whole concept is very visual, involving album artwork, and tapping and dragging album covers around.

You may find, when launching for the first time, that Attic states you don’t have enough music for analysis to work. One of the solutions to this problem is simply to open and close the iPod application. It worked for me!

Browsing Your Music

When the instructions fade away, you should be presented with a selection of 15 dusty album covers you haven’t seen in several months. Scroll up and down to see the full array on offer, and tap a disc to see a few useful statistics about it.

Browsing

If you’re in a hurry, tap the magic wand in the top right for Attic to automatically select a collection of songs and start playing immediately. The icon in the top left will alternative between normal or randomised playback after selecting your own tracks.

Playing Songs

Attic works as a type of Jukebox. To play a song from a particular album tap and hold on the album cover, and drag the record down into the “slot” at the bottom of the screen. This will automatically start playing a song from the album.

Playback

You can do this for multiple albums, turn on shuffle, and enjoy a diverse selection of old classics. The basic controls at the bottom work exactly as you’d expect.

Ejecting a Disc

If you’ve had enough of one album in particular, hit the “Eject” button. This visually shows which albums are currently loaded into the play queue, and tapping one will pop the disc out of the slot and back into the case.

Ejecting a Disc

As you play albums, Attic will automatically update the selection on offer with new ones – so you have a constantly updating set of music to choose from.

The Alternative

If you would prefer not to fork over the dollar for Attic (or would rather your music playback remained within the iPod application), it’s very simple to create a smart playlist that achieves the same thing.

Open iTunes, click File > New Smart Playlist, and use settings similar to the following:

Creating a Smart Playlist

These criteria will randomly select 25 songs that you haven’t played in the past 6 months. It isn’t as elegant and fun as Attic, but it may suit your needs better. You can also customise this playlist further if you’d like, limiting it to specific genres, or altering the date range.

Conclusion

I really like Attic. It doesn’t provide any ground breaking functionality that you couldn’t create yourself, but the interface is great fun to use. I often find myself sat on a train, wondering what music to listen to and falling into the same choice as usual. Flipping open Attic and picking out a few old albums would certainly be something I’d enjoy doing.

If you regularly use your iPhone for music, Attic is $1 well spent.