I find Apple's music app on iOS terribly hard to use. It didn't used to be this way. I struggle to do basic things, like just playing the songs in order on an album! Sounds silly, but there are so many buttons that sweep away to different screens, and it's not at all clear what you are doing.
Now I just use GoodReader to store and play back all offline albums, since it's just a file directory and I can just play the tracks in the order they are stored.
When you're looking at an album in Music, there's a play button right above the song list that will play it in order and should disable any previously enabled shuffle mode. It just goes off of whatever iTunes metadata is setup, so if that is correct, it'll play in order.
I didn't realise you could have standalone music files in the Music any more! I thought it was all streaming Apple Music now. I wouldn't even know where to get standalone music files from.
Just drag the music files from your library to your plugged-in iDevice in iFumes on the Mac. You can also buy and download them on-device with the iTunes Store app.
I thought you were implying that the only way to get music files (after disregarding CDs as you don't have a drive) these days was to download them from unofficial sources. Not streaming music files was the standard for a long time so I was a bit surprised about the question.
That's usually a point that comes up for products like Plex etc.
I personally download actual mp3 files from Amazon (not amazon "music" but just purchase actual tracks). In fact, I continue to be pleasantly surprised that in 2018 one of the big providers is doing something as simple and friendly as this: selling me unprotected, plain old mp3 files.
However, they are compressed mp3 files and not suitable for future transformation so if there is an album that I want, I will still purchase the actual CD and rip it to the full WAV/PCM.
My system is a mac pro (2009) which still has an optical drive. I use the (excellent) 'abcde'[1] tool to rip the CDs. I particularly like the fact that it pops up a 'vi' session with the gracenote/cddb/metadata so I can quickly "fix" the usually braindead cddb entry right in the workflow.
The files you get from iTunes are also unprotected. Artists can choose to offer lossless format, in which case iTunes will give you the files in their proprietary format ALAC, but there is still no DRM and you can easily convert to FLAC/WAV.
Still, as a non-iPhone user I actually expect Apple hardware to only work properly with Apple software, I was never able to use airplay on any other software than iTunes (in Windows), it always broke after some time when I did find something that worked on Linux. So perhaps it's not so bad to mention it.
+1 - I have a couple Chromecast Audios that I use as a poor-man's Sonos and it works pretty well, but the Spotify iOS app's Chromecast streaming is pretty half-assed. It can only adjust volume when the app is in the forground, and sometimes not even then, sometimes forgets it's streaming and loses sync.
Does "Import your music and playlists" means it will use my synced iTunes library? I would love this. But I tried to click to find out more, only to find that almost nothing on that landing page is a link.
I'm genuinely curious why you say to get a lawyer for all music apps as I can't really see why this one would necessarily need a lawyer. Are you talking in terms of music licensing issues or patent violations, or other?
Licensing rights, because if you develop an app that makes money out of playing music it is gonna make some people uncomfortable, even if it the music of the owner of the app. There's gonna be C&D letters even if the app proves to be licit.
This makes no sense, there are no licensing rights involved because no music is being provided. It just plays files provided by the user. Are people sending C&D letters to Sandisk for selling MP3 players, or the hundreds of music player apps for Android?
There are already a huge number of apps out there doing the exact same thing, as far as I am aware zero have been sued/threatened out of existence over this.
How does Doppler compare with Cesium? I've been using Cesium for the past couple of years and have been pretty happy, though like with any app improvements can be made. I agree with you the iTunes app is not good for simply playing music.
On the WCML, you have to pay ££ for WIFI unless you're in first class and even then it's patchy because the train doesn't always have a clear view for the satellite data.
> or you can just use 4G.
Down the WCML, you're lucky to get even 3G thanks to the combination of poor coverage from cell towers (not much call for them in rural landscapes, really) and the metallised glass they use on the trains.
(They did try per-carriage femtocells but they didn't help.)
If all the music you want to listen to is available via streaming services than great, but I have a bunch of MP3s that aren't (things ripped from old CDs, music from my friends, music from anti-streaming artists).
With that needlessly arrogant attitude you might be surprised to learn that there's lots of music, new and particularly old, rare material, that has never been available via streaming. Or might disappear one day due to ending licensing deals. I'd estimate that about 20-30% of my collection isn't available via streaming and that includes pieces I do not want to miss.
I understand that this isn't as important to everyone, but as a music enthusiast I refuse to rent my music collection, which I intend to build and maintain for decades to come.
Any chance of supporting BS2B (Bauer stereophonic-to-binaural), which VOX player supports?
Do you plan to add, if at all possible, Spotify or VOX Music Cloud as providers?
Do you plan to support 3D Touch? I found the use of Peek on songs (+slide and release on menu options) very useful in Apple Music, and I definitely miss that in Spotify.
I think the offline claim should be explained a bit better. Like does that mean I can get my old MP3 files to the app without stupid iTunes sync? Does it support "File sharing" so the app is shown in iTunes and I can drag and drop my MP3 files to its storage?
> I can get my old MP3 files to the app without stupid iTunes sync? Does it support "File sharing" so the app is shown in iTunes and I can drag and drop my MP3 files to its storage?
That’s what I want to know too. My biggest problem is having iTunes in the middle.
This looks great. I actually wood prefer a third party app though because using the stock apps means that audio auto plays when connecting to some Bluetooth devices. It drives me insane that every time I get in my car some audiobook I was listening to starts auto playing.
Actually, that's why I bought an Android device. I got enough of this iTunes bs and searching for 3rd party apps to do something as simple as copying an MP3 file or e-book from my computer. And still, I have to buy and install some software as Apple want to make it as difficult as possible not to have them as the intermediary.
So now I carry two: iPhone for general use and Android for listening to music, reading e-books and many other things.
Doppler only supports importing from Music.app which is synced with iTunes at the moment. Importing from other sources is coming soon (within the next couple of months)!
I’ve used iMazing and FileApp Pro on iOS for years and years - I had ripped hundreds of CDs at a reasonably high bitrate with EAC not long after that first became possible on Windows - wanted to bring them over just as they were - once that’s all set up, it’s just drag and done - bonus, same folders dragged to a tiny flash drive on my keychain and I can plug it into hotel TVs, many rental cars, friends’ audio systems, etc.
I have a large mp3 library and have used Marvis for over a year. Marvis is great and extremely customizable, but it has a few bugs and the developer has abandoned the app. I won't use any music app that doesn't allow shuffling by album. It sucks that Apple bastardized the main music app to promote Apple music; I think that app was at it's best around iOS 7.
The Apple Music parts can be disabled in Settings. It's not quite as nice as it was back in the day, but I've found that doing that helps to make it closer to how it was.
You should check out Cesium. I've been using it for the past couple of years. It accesses your music library, so all your music and playlists are there. You can play by album (and shuffle the music) or even play by artist (and shuffle all songs by the artist). You can even play by genre if you so desire. Of course it provides all the typical music queue management facilities as well, but I don't tend to use those too much. I like it's extreme simplicity.
Would be great if one could skip using iTunes alltogether....like being able to just import Mp3, Flac and m4a files from cloud storage into the app. Is/will this (be) possible with doppler?
That keeps track of play counts on both devices, lets me make smart playlists and playlist folders, and syncs music, contacts, and calendars all over USB without any cloud services prying into my personal data.
Apple went from being a leader in the music-listening industry with excellent UX to trying to compete with Spotify and YouTube, who are frankly not even that great (e.g. trying to keep playing a song in the background).
Flash memory was small when the iPhone came out in 2007, so everything moved to streaming. Now the capacities are finally big enough again (e.g. 128GB iPhone SE), Apple's broken their sync services.
I like having play counts, ratings, and playlists, and I like that I've continually built up my music library since the days of Soundjam MP for the Rio 600.
Doppler is trying to put a new theme on Finder's MP3 playing feature, but it's not the syncing library manager that I need.
I have a standalone MP3 player the size of a matchbox. (Anybody remember matchboxes?)
The battery is good for 15 hours of play, it takes a 128GB microSD card, and it can play FLAC as well as MP3. The buttons are real and tactile and oriented so that you don't have to look at it to figure them out. It appears as a USB mass storage device with a FAT32 filesystem, so every computer I've used in the last 20 years can put music on it. If you put music in directories, it will navigate the directory structure. If you build m3u playlists, it will use those. You can ask for a random shuffle of all tracks or inside a directory.
It doesn't have play counts or ratings. If you have a USB3 microSD reader, that's faster than updating directly through the USB2 interface.
Also, it's running an open-source alternative firmware called Rockbox.
Please, I have been looking for a descent music player for a while (since my Creative Zen had a hard drive failure). Did you get yours new or used (if so, which brand? how much money? where from?), did you hack it together your self (if so how)?
Probably a Sansa Clip or similar (not too familiar with their current model lineup but it roughly mirrors my experience with them back when I used one).
I use whatever the latest version of iTunes is and sync to an iPhone X over my personal Wi-Fi connection. For whatever reason their default sync is very bad. If you instead put all your iTunes music in a playlist and choose the option to sync only that playlist it works nearly perfectly. I've been using this method since the iPhone 4s came out and have only had issues syncing maybe once or twice a year. I sync a few times per month.
> That keeps track of play counts on both devices, lets me make smart playlists and playlist folders, and syncs music, contacts, and calendars all over USB without any cloud services prying into my personal data.
I use the latest version of iTunes and an iPhone with the latest iOS on it, and still use them in exactly the same way you describe. Like you, I prefer to have complete control over my own data, without passing it through third-party cloud services. So far, Apple has not taken away the ability to do this, despite their heavy marketing push for iCloud. (I literally have never used iCloud at all for anything, ever.)
>Apple went from being a leader in the music-listening industry with excellent UX to trying to compete with Spotify and YouTube, who are frankly not even that great
They might "not even be that great", but they are where all the listeners and the money are.
Ripping, listening to non-streaming music, etc, is becoming rapidly a hobbyist thing for older generations and a minority of hipsters. The whole rise in music industry profits in the last years was in the streaming area, purchases and digital downloads are down.
So anybody touting some specialized device, that takes ripped or bought mp3s, etc, is mostly living in the past as far as the market is concerned.
>They might "not even be that great", but they are where all the listeners and the money are.
Thats true I think. Or maybe people just stopped buying music and Apple had to figure out another way to make money. It wouldn't make sense for them to invest in features that made non-streaming easier or more appealing to consumers. I noticed this very recently on a road trip where somebody mentioned it was going to be boring without music since they were out of data. I was confused for a second because I guess I'm the older/hipster dude, I've always thought of streaming as a doubly wasteful model where you lose battery life along with data.
You should consider opening the 'Now Playing' drawer with an actual, direct gesture instead of a trigger on a detected swipe. The way it is now feels weird for iOS.
I really missed the album artwork color extraction from iTunes and seeing album covers in a reasonable size, so thank you for that.
123 comments
[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 205 ms ] threadNow I just use GoodReader to store and play back all offline albums, since it's just a file directory and I can just play the tracks in the order they are stored.
[0] Pocketcasts solves that problem, though.
That I didn't know about any of those services? I thought everything was streaming these days. What are you trying to imply that I'm trying to imply?
That's usually a point that comes up for products like Plex etc.
I personally download actual mp3 files from Amazon (not amazon "music" but just purchase actual tracks). In fact, I continue to be pleasantly surprised that in 2018 one of the big providers is doing something as simple and friendly as this: selling me unprotected, plain old mp3 files.
However, they are compressed mp3 files and not suitable for future transformation so if there is an album that I want, I will still purchase the actual CD and rip it to the full WAV/PCM.
My system is a mac pro (2009) which still has an optical drive. I use the (excellent) 'abcde'[1] tool to rip the CDs. I particularly like the fact that it pops up a 'vi' session with the gracenote/cddb/metadata so I can quickly "fix" the usually braindead cddb entry right in the workflow.
[1] http://www.andrews-corner.org/linux/abcde/index.html
Manually choosing songs to load onto my phone is a significant chore and my phone can only fit a subset of my collection.
Still, as a non-iPhone user I actually expect Apple hardware to only work properly with Apple software, I was never able to use airplay on any other software than iTunes (in Windows), it always broke after some time when I did find something that worked on Linux. So perhaps it's not so bad to mention it.
It looks pretty awesome by the way, any plans for android?
A few jobs ago I was working on a video player for an embedded device and the UX team mimicked the CoverFlow interface gimmick.
We had a C&D from Apple within a few months of showing it in public.
I would assume there are other patents. For example, sampling the cover art to decide on the background color. Was that an Apple thing? I don't know.
I never ttavel by plane but I assume they offer wifi too nowadays.
On the WCML, you have to pay ££ for WIFI unless you're in first class and even then it's patchy because the train doesn't always have a clear view for the satellite data.
> or you can just use 4G.
Down the WCML, you're lucky to get even 3G thanks to the combination of poor coverage from cell towers (not much call for them in rural landscapes, really) and the metallised glass they use on the trains.
(They did try per-carriage femtocells but they didn't help.)
I understand that this isn't as important to everyone, but as a music enthusiast I refuse to rent my music collection, which I intend to build and maintain for decades to come.
Now, questions:
Any chance of supporting BS2B (Bauer stereophonic-to-binaural), which VOX player supports?
Do you plan to add, if at all possible, Spotify or VOX Music Cloud as providers?
Do you plan to support 3D Touch? I found the use of Peek on songs (+slide and release on menu options) very useful in Apple Music, and I definitely miss that in Spotify.
That’s what I want to know too. My biggest problem is having iTunes in the middle.
It’s perfect at what it does.
Honestly, I'll continue using that unless "better" is substantial.
That keeps track of play counts on both devices, lets me make smart playlists and playlist folders, and syncs music, contacts, and calendars all over USB without any cloud services prying into my personal data.
Apple went from being a leader in the music-listening industry with excellent UX to trying to compete with Spotify and YouTube, who are frankly not even that great (e.g. trying to keep playing a song in the background).
Flash memory was small when the iPhone came out in 2007, so everything moved to streaming. Now the capacities are finally big enough again (e.g. 128GB iPhone SE), Apple's broken their sync services.
I like having play counts, ratings, and playlists, and I like that I've continually built up my music library since the days of Soundjam MP for the Rio 600.
Doppler is trying to put a new theme on Finder's MP3 playing feature, but it's not the syncing library manager that I need.
The battery is good for 15 hours of play, it takes a 128GB microSD card, and it can play FLAC as well as MP3. The buttons are real and tactile and oriented so that you don't have to look at it to figure them out. It appears as a USB mass storage device with a FAT32 filesystem, so every computer I've used in the last 20 years can put music on it. If you put music in directories, it will navigate the directory structure. If you build m3u playlists, it will use those. You can ask for a random shuffle of all tracks or inside a directory.
It doesn't have play counts or ratings. If you have a USB3 microSD reader, that's faster than updating directly through the USB2 interface.
Also, it's running an open-source alternative firmware called Rockbox.
> That keeps track of play counts on both devices, lets me make smart playlists and playlist folders, and syncs music, contacts, and calendars all over USB without any cloud services prying into my personal data.
I use the latest version of iTunes and an iPhone with the latest iOS on it, and still use them in exactly the same way you describe. Like you, I prefer to have complete control over my own data, without passing it through third-party cloud services. So far, Apple has not taken away the ability to do this, despite their heavy marketing push for iCloud. (I literally have never used iCloud at all for anything, ever.)
They might "not even be that great", but they are where all the listeners and the money are.
Ripping, listening to non-streaming music, etc, is becoming rapidly a hobbyist thing for older generations and a minority of hipsters. The whole rise in music industry profits in the last years was in the streaming area, purchases and digital downloads are down.
So anybody touting some specialized device, that takes ripped or bought mp3s, etc, is mostly living in the past as far as the market is concerned.
Thats true I think. Or maybe people just stopped buying music and Apple had to figure out another way to make money. It wouldn't make sense for them to invest in features that made non-streaming easier or more appealing to consumers. I noticed this very recently on a road trip where somebody mentioned it was going to be boring without music since they were out of data. I was confused for a second because I guess I'm the older/hipster dude, I've always thought of streaming as a doubly wasteful model where you lose battery life along with data.
Exactly! I was a streamer too, but then I switched to flip phone. So now I think I'm even hipstery than you.
Basically, no music for me except good old fashioned radio. And London Grammar on YouTube.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/foobar2000/id1072807669?mt=8
Your "support page" is an email address, and doesn't actually contain any information on the app.
If you're going to show us something and ask us to buy your app, then put a little more care into your launch.
I really missed the album artwork color extraction from iTunes and seeing album covers in a reasonable size, so thank you for that.