For those music lovers out there, the MediaSpeak tweak which has just landed on the Cydia store could be something you have been looking for. If you are a regular iOS device music listener who always has their headphones on, then this little package could add a little bit of extra depth to your listening experience, as well as actually providing a very good little audible service to users. MediaSpeak is essentially a very lightweight installation that hooks into the Music app on your jailbroken device and listens to when a new song begins playing back.
When that new track is triggered, the tweak uses that lovely male computer voice we all know and love to announce the currently playing track, taking the format of ‘Now Playing: song_title by artist_name’. At first glance, I didn’t think that MediaSpeak would be something that I would require on my device, but after thinking about it for a while, I have often found myself in the situation when a new song starts playing on my iPhone at the gym and I have to listen to it for a while before workout to see which one it is and whether I want to skip it or not. With the help of MediaSpeak; I can immediately hit the next track button if required, so in that sense it is actually a very handy installation that seems to have been born out of a developer encountered problem.
After installation, MediaSpeak does have its own preferences panel which simply has an on/off toggle like all good MobileSubstrate tweaks should have, as well as some developer information and a little bit of advertising for his other packages. I was wondering; for this tweak to function correctly, it would require the tags of the songs in a user’s library to be entered correctly so that it can pull the necessary information out that it needs. My testing was against a music library stored with iTunes Match, and the tweak worked perfectly every time with ten songs.
MediaSpeak is a free of charge installation from the BigBoss repository, with no mention of iOS version compatibility mentioned.
Of course, you will need to jailbreak your device to install this tweak. For jailbreaking the latest iOS 5.1 (tethered), follow the instructions posted here to jailbreak using Redsn0w, or here for Sn0wbreeze. For jailbreaking iPhone 4S and iPad 2, you can simply follow our step by step tutorial posted here to jailbreak iOS 5.0.1 using Absinthe on Windows or Mac. Those of you with an iPhone 4, 3GS, iPad 1, and iPod touches can use Redsn0w or Sn0wbreeze to untether jailbreak on iOS 5.0.1.
Be sure to check out our iPhone Apps Gallery and iPad Apps Gallery to explore more apps for your iPhone, iPad and iPod touch.
You can follow us on Twitter, add us to your circle on Google+ or like our Facebook page to keep yourself updated on all the latest from Microsoft, Google, Apple and the web.
