Today’s hit tunes aren’t all that bad, it’s just their words that are a problem. And that’s particularly true if you have kids and want to play something other than the Frozen soundtrack in the car (for the 400th time). Well, there’s an app for that, as the old saying goes.
A new free app called “musicBleeper” (available for iPhones, iPods and iPads) searches through your music library and makes sure you and your kids don’t have to deal with crude and offensive lyrics when it’s playback time. In fact, the program comes right out and calls itself a “user-defined censorship app.” And as all parents know, “censorship” can be a very, very good thing if you don’t want your little kids sounding like, well, members of a rock band or celebrities on TV.
So, how does this little freebie work?
Well, you download it, register with a tiny bit of personal info, tell it what words you don’t want popping up, and set it loose in your library. It takes maybe a half-hour or so for the program to search through your songs and then you’re good to go. According to the app makers, if there’s a tune in your collection that they don’t have in their database, they’ll add it and scrub it within 24 hrs.
Now, it won’t do anything about suggestive context or seemingly innocent-sounding double entendres. You’re on your own for those. But it zaps offensive words like nobody’s business. When the app is turned on, its bleep-sensor searches out a potential total of 91 words that fall into a pair of “PG-13” and “R-rated” lists. The PG-13 category includes a collection of words that range from things I can print such as “hoe,” “horny,” “sexy” and “stupid,” to words I can’t print, including crudities for a variety of male and female body parts and racist slang. The R-rated exceptions cover just about everything else you might hear in, say, something from Robin Thicke. (You pick and choose what words you want to avoid.) There’s even a small group of “religious” words (“Jesus,” “Christ,” “hell” and “Lord”) that you can have excised, too. Of course, that might make your praise and worship albums sound a bit odd.
Oh, and speaking of the sound, I should mention that even though this is called a music bleeper, the app doesn’t actually add any bleep noises when those objectionable words come around. It simply “skips” that part of the song, if you so choose, or goes “silent” for a second. The only problem there is that any song that’s particularly foul will come off sounding like a tune from a badly scratched skipping vinyl album.
Which, of course, will force Daddy to explain to the little ones in the backseat why he has such a skippy song in his library. And that might motivate him to start being more discerning in his music choices to begin with. And if daddies and mommies everywhere stopped buying those skippy tunes altogether, well, it could reshape the whole music industry …
See there? A little “user-defined censorship” can make a big difference.
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