Popular mixtape download site DatPiff gets an app overhaul.

As connections get steadily faster, and data costs tumble, streaming, mobile music services are gradually becoming more and more popular. iTunes is great, but having access to millions of albums instead of a hundred or so is pretty tough to ignore, especially when the price is so reasonable. Sadly, there’s a big hole in the streaming catalogue – apps such as Spotify and Beats Music do a good job of keeping current, but if you listen to rap you’ve probably noticed that the majority of mixtapes are missing from their massive archive.

It’s fallen to mixtape specialists DatPiff to plug the hole, and while they have attempted to move into the market before, their brand new streaming app is surprisingly efficient. Totally free and remarkably easy to use, you can be streaming Kevin Gates’ excellent album/mixtape By Any Means within seconds, thankfully without having to sign up for a subscription. The catalogue is huge, and any regular followers of our weekly mixtape column should be very pleased that they can now have access to the tunes without having to click through adverts and banners.

The only big negative we’ve found is that the app seems to be missing solid playback functions – that is, if you’re listening to a tape and keep browsing through the catalogue, it’s hard to get back to the tape you were listening to without searching for it and finding it again. That said it’s a small issue, the DatPiff app is free, after all, and the advert bar – confined to a small portion of the bottom of the screen – is surprisingly unobtrusive.

You can download the app for various mobile devices here.