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Ask HN: iOS app for playing MP3 music collection?

6 points by brundolf ↗ HN
I stream most of my music, but I've got a collection of MP3s that I keep around and still listen to sometimes. So far I've been using TuneBox, an iOS app that hooks into your Dropbox and provides a media player interface over it. This is a great premise, and it mostly gets the job done, but it hasn't been updated in several years and has some minor bugs/annoyances.

Surely there's still a decent, maintained iOS app for playing local music files? I'm willing to pay, and I'd even be fine without Dropbox integration; my collection doesn't change very often. I'm just having trouble even finding an app that matches the original iPod app that used to exist on iPhones.

Any recommendations?

10 comments

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digisign
VLC. It has improved quite a bit on iOS, though it still has some way to go.
brundolf
Oh! I didn't realize it had nice artist/album-browsing functionality. I think of VLC as just a minimal "take a file and play it" app. This might actually fit my needs
assttoasstmgr
If you're not against syncing your music via Apple-approved methods, Cesium is a decent replacement for Apple's disastrously unusable Music app.
nonstopdev
I always liked VOX for simple music playing. Even without premium seems actually usable without a ton of ads.
fattybob
Take a look at Doppler, I can play my own mp3 files as well as iTunes on Doppler, there are others, but that’s the neatest solution I’ve found
opless
PlexAmp, but the infrastructure required for it is beneficial only if you have a massive media collection. You need PlexPass, which varies in price, otherwise the app is free. It requires your to move your media into an Artist/Album structure, and happily ignores mistagged MP3s and supports all the major audio formats.

Spotify used to allow you to import your music via iTunes file sharing, not sure if that's possible these days.

iTunes ("Music") might also allow you to import your own music into the default media player. But that's a complete disaster now that it doesn't support daap any more.

dangravell
(Disclaimer: this mentions my commercial service).

I run https://asti.ga/ which is kind of like TuneBox, but Web based. It supports the Subsonic protocol, so any Subsonic client app should work on your phone.