iPhone/iPod touch users - if you could change something about the Music app, what would it be?

I've never been satisfied with the default music player app for iOS. It doesn't suit my way of listening to music, which is by album. It's also not optimized for multiple versions of the same album (e.g. mono & stereo). I've started writing my own app to fix some of these shortcomings:

- Show recently played artists at the top of the artists list so if my favorite artist starts with Z I don't have to scroll all the way to the bottom

- Allow sorting of albums by year (oldest first), year (newest first), or name

- Determine what gets played next when an album is done playing: play next album in list, play previous album in list, play album again, or stop playing. The "previous" option is for people like me who like to order albums by year (newest first) but want to hear the next chronological album once one is finished (think With the Beatles after Please Please Me has played)

- Group multiple versions of the same album together by detecting text in brackets after the title (e.g. Rubber Soul [1965 Stereo], Rubber Soul [1987 Stereo], and Rubber Soul [Mono]). This keeps the same album from showing up multiple times in the album list and would also allow you to switch back and forth between versions while the album's playing. Think how cool this would be to compare different mixes/needledrops!

If all goes well I plan on publishing the app to the App Store. So my question to you is, if you could change something about Apple's Music app, what would it be? I want to incorporate the best ideas into the app.

 

Good luck with your app

 

Support FLAC and Ogg Vorbis.

 

iSub is/was the best iOS music player. But it's now abandonware because the developer was hired by Apple under one of those idiotic non-compete agreements.

 

So that's what happened. The isub ios app was a godsend. It allowed me to stream (as well as play offline) FLAC files on my IPod Touch. There were two disadvantages that I was hoping would have been rectified eventually. First, playlists could not be cached. I would have to download the albums or songs and them create the playlist once I was in offline mode. Second, the app does not show the playlist timing in offline mode. This is something that would have come in handy when creating playlists for when I am walking.

 

Agreed. I would also like to see:

Sort Albums A-Z; the app currently sorts by year of release (at least that's the way the Music app does it on my iPhone 5s)

Shuffle Albums like the feature on the iPod Classic

 

I like CanOpener.

 

The fact that they haven't chosen to support FLAC and Vorbis after all this time seems odd to me. It's free, open-source. Anyone can use it. I guess that's another reason I like my FiiO as opposed to my old iPod Touch. It's not like I can't convert to Apple-friendly formats, but it's a PITA having to have two libraries to do that.

 

Forgot to add... good luck with this project and please keep us updated!

 

Display the year on the 'Now Playing' page! When I shopping for my first iPod, I remember asking the guy at the Apple Store "Where's the setting to show the year?". I was dumbfounded that it couldn't be done. I have always had to prepend the year to the album name. "1969 Abbey Road", etc. Pain in the...

 

Thanks for all the suggestion so far. Mentioning other apps is great, too, as it gives me more ideas for my own app. Keep them coming!

As for supporting other formats, my main goal was to work with the existing music library that's synced with iTunes. Correct me if I'm wrong, but to support other formats I believe I'd have to add the ability to either stream the audio from a server or sideload the songs outside of iTunes.

 

I want to be able to view playlists as a group of albums, not a list of tracks.

 

FLAC support would probably be my number one thing.

- Buck

 

Just curious.....why is the year of the album playing important to you while it is playing?

 

Have you checked out Can Opener? I have used it since it came out and I'm hard pressed to find anything that works as well as it does. I'd love to see some solid competition for them. I also use Howie Weinberg's Mastering App for when I'm bored traveling. I wish they made it for standard PC's so I could tweak a bunch of tunes at home.

CanOpener. No affiliation, just a satisfied customer.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/canopener-for-headphones/id690996855?mt=8

 

Hi-res support. Otherwise, no biggie. Happy to sort by album title.

 

Default sort by album artist. And another for flac support. Oh and i guess if it had to have an eq, make it parametric, not the crap 'descriptive ' one they user.

 

having a queue. And flac support

 

It would be nice to see the iPhone/iPod Touch be able to do line out through the headphone connector as opposed to the dock connector.

 

iSub development was recently announced to be back on !

To the op glad to here another music player option is in the works, as other have noted better sorting would be good, FLAC support. Subsonic server support, anility to turn shuffle off and continue playing album in order of the song playing.
Cheers!

 

Have you tried using smart playlists?

i.e. "Genre" is "R&B" , limit selection to 100 items by album.

 

What I really hate is that when you plug in an iPhone or whatever into a car etc, it always plays the same song by default! Argh, I get so tired of that.

 

Bring back cover flow and make it work by the sort field you are in. I.e. if you are in artists, it should bring up the albums by artists in alphabetical order, if you are in albums they should be in alphabetical order, etc. It pisses me off that when you've already entered a particular artist, you get that ridiculous all cover crap when you rotate the device. If I'm already in, say, Midnight Oil, I don't want to get every other artists material when I rotate the device. Also when you bring up a particular artist, bring up the cover art for all of their albums without the track listing. Songs can be accessed once you enter an album. There's too much scrolling through song titles to get to individual albums. Apple is deliberately going out of their way to dumb down both iTunes and the music app to make it as simple as possible with as little customisation as possible. Trouble is, in doing so they are removing (or have already removed) all of its functionality.

Not odd at all. Apple doesn't want you using your own music. They want to you to either purchase all of your music from them or subscribe to their music services. The more limited they make the formats you can play, the more they hope to be able to "encourage" you to purchase from them. Apple aren't in the business of giving their customers the flexibility to do what they want with their iDevices but rather pulling you into their ecosystem on a tighter and tighter leash. It's not about you, it's about them.

My iPhone 5 is out of contract and I want to look at other devices but all of the big three, Apple, Android and Windows Phone are about reducing your freedom of choice and tightening their vendor lock-in, their collection of telemetric data and pushing advertising and marketing at you. And this is getting worse with every update.

Let me give you an example of how great Apple's music app is on iOS8. I have 16 David Bowie albums on my iPhone and they come up in the following order from top to bottom. Now this is using Apple's own data in iTunes 12 (and what an absolute piece of garbage that software is):

Reality 2003
Heathen 2002
Lodger 1988!!
ChangesBowie (Ryko AU20) 1984
Scary Monsters 1980
Heroes 1977
Low 1977
Station to Station 1976
Best of Bowie 1969-1974 1975
Young Americans 1975
Ziggy Stardust 1975
Diamond Dogs 1974
Aladdin Sane 1973
Pin Ups 1973
The Man Who Sold The World 1972
Hunky Dory 1971

I can see how they arrived at some of those years as the most recently recorded/released/bonus track is being used as the year of release - RIDICULOUS!

 

Mine just picks up where it let off.

 

I want a mod to the iTunes app so that I can access all the metadata, including the Comments field. And I want Apple to support at least a 2500-character limit instead of their current 255-character limit for comments. And I'd like them to support the rest of the ID3 v2.4 tags that have been in existence for more than a decade. It would be trivial for them to simply provide another four or five screens to access just looking at these fields, let alone sorting or searching by them.

Note that in the full iTunes program on Windows and Mac OSX, you can already do most of this.