Remember Tempus, the Cydia tweak that turns the iOS lock screen into a fully featured music player? Tweaks of this kind might appeal to some users, but others might label them pointless since you are losing the basic purpose of lock screen by adding too many controls to it. On the other hand, you have options like LSMusicGestures, which doesn’t add any visible buttons the lock screen, but lets you control playback using gestures. Pluck is a new tweak that is even simpler than LSMusicGestures, and it addresses an issue that we are sure most iOS users have faced at one time or another. Pluck adds a small button to the lock screen playback controls that can be used to access the songs and playlists present in the device’s music library. This means you can start listening to the song of your choice without even unlocking the screen.
The Pluck menu (located in the stock Settings app) has just two configurable options. You can enable or disable the tweak using the toggle located at the top of the screen, or tinker with the position at which the Pluck button appears on the lock screen. By default, the new icon is added to the bottom-left corner of the playback control bar. To relocate it to the right, use the second toggle offered in the Pluck menu. These are the only two positions supported by the tweak at present.
Pluck requires a respring to correctly apply its settings to the lock screen. You can easily respring the device using the ‘Apply’ button available in the top-right corner of the tweak’s configuration menu. To see if everything has been set up properly, double-tap the Home button while in lock screen, and tap the small ‘+’ icon that you can now see below the playback controls. The Music app isn’t actually launched by Pluck, but you can access every part of your music collection from it. Albums, songs, artists and playlists are all available under their own tabs. There is a catch though: even if you select a song from the middle of a playlist, Pluck stops playback as soon as the chosen track ends, and you can’t use the ‘previous’ and ‘next’ buttons to navigate between the tracks for any session that begins with choosing a song via Pluck.
Pluck is a free tweak, and when (if?) the developer adds support for playlists, it will be just perfect. Give Pluck a shot by heading to the ModMyi repo of the Cydia store if you are running iOS 6.
