
Show HN: iOS music player, like a virtual record collection - deepdesai
1 minute screencast: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;AmDL2QtkoJ4" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;AmDL2QtkoJ4</a><p>If you&#x27;d like play with it, please send a note with your name and email to betatesting@musicologyapp.com and I will send you an invite (via TestFlight).<p>If you&#x27;re the kind of person who listens to albums cover to cover, or would like to manually arrange your records instead of going through a boring alphabetized list, or are just really annoyed with the iOS Music app (like I am), you should check this out!
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vortico
I don't use iOS (just mpv on my laptop), but this is the sort of well-thought
out design that modern software needs. A clear vision followed out through
development into a product without sacrificing major features.

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deepdesai
Thank you, kind stranger on the internet! :) I actually only recently started
learning how to code, this is my first project.

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ballenf
I came here to say the same. I'd love to see Apple implement this style in
more of their os and apps.

I can only imagine how much better a calculator, for a start, you could make
than Apple's!

Seriously, nice work.

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kelnage
I don’t suppose you’d be able to support Google Music on iOS? I am a big album
person, and the number of hoops I have to jump through to find an album to
listen to always frustrates me - so this looks great. The problem is most of
my music is either ripped to FLAC or on Google Music these days.

~~~
deepdesai
If there's enough interest in this, and I have the time to do it, I'd be happy
to support it! Apple Music and Spotify would probably be first though. TBH I'd
rather build in FLAC support, iPhones have plenty of storage these days.

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cr1895
I like this! I'm not sure what's involved in your beta testing nor do I have
any idea what TestFlight is, but I'd like to give it a try.

My purchased music that's actually on my iPhone is somewhat limited (maybe a
dozen albums) but I'm always using Spotify and increasingly Apple Music; maybe
I'm not quite the user you're targeting at this point.

But I'm very much someone who appreciates albums in whole form and care very
much about seeing the artwork/info/etc well, as much as is possible in an
app...my main jam is vinyl.

edit: I'd potentially find this even more useful in iPad form, where I could
pair it to my stereo and have nice, large graphics.

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deepdesai
Apple Music support is absolutely on the roadmap, and so is iPad support! If
you haven't already, do send me an email. TestFlight is Apple's platform for
doing beta testing, it's super straightforward.

~~~
techdragon
Glad you answered the this point, I'm pretty keen to try any alternative to
the white + bold/slab San serif wasteland that is the Apple Music app. The
moment they went from one touch on the home screen, to several taps into a sub
menu in order to "love" a track i knew the UX team went off the rails. So I'm
keen to try new apps that support Apple music, but the majority are just
shovelware or borderline malware.

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mcgarnagle
I too am annoyed with the ios music app. And this is a beautiful app you have
made here. However, for me I prefer practicality.

I miss the days when the apple music app for ios would display everything in
plain text, just like the old ipods.

It made finding music faster, and gave me more retail space on my screen. I
dread apps that don't give me this option, and force me to scroll through
heavy animations of artwork to find my artist by name.

I don't want to sort and find things by colors.

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ansgri
Maybe a wrong place to ask, but can somebody recommend an _opposite_ of this?
I don't care for album covers (at least while listening) and prefer
alphabetized lists and a text-only playlist for a main view. With good queue
management (like in old Winamp and iOS 10 Music; in 11 they screwed it up).

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4ad
I'm looking for same thing but for macOS. People usually recommend Vox, but
Vox is absolutely awful. Tiny ass window, that always, _ALWAYS_ , drags songs
when I try to scroll.

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nklas
Try Swinsian: [http://swinsian.com](http://swinsian.com). Basically iTunes
without any bloat.

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dharma1
That photek 12" is tight.

Would be nice to have curated collections in this app by people whose taste
you trust, and to be able to quickly skim through them, like back in the day
when you were checking out a stack of vinyl the shop owner would pick out for
you.

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ideophobia
I like the look and style, and I think you really nailed the vinyl aesthetic.
Unfortunately, I've abandoned music on my iPhone in favor of Spotify+Amazon.
But, I would love to see this for non-iOS devices. If you could get it to run
on a touch screen powered by a Raspberry Pi, I would totally use it for a home
jukebox-stlye device. I think the album art elements and other mechanics would
be awesome in that regard.

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Confiks
I'm completely ignorant about any iOS music player, having only every
seriously used Android, but didn't the first iPhone have such a feature
already? Such as showcased in the famous reveal video:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vN4U5FqrOdQ&t=1084](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vN4U5FqrOdQ&t=1084)

Did it get removed?

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dan1234
Cover Flow, as it was named, was removed during the great Skeuomorphic purge
of 2013.

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tachion
There's an issue with that concept, where the iOS for like 2 or 3 major
versions now doesn't show properly artists and album art correctly for a lot
of people, including myself. Without that fixed, the workflow and user
experience is going to be horrible.

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sgt
Speaking of TestFlight. Sometimes it's extremely frustrating to send
TestFlight invitations to people, and they simply never receive it, or there
is a problem with the invitation in some other way. Has anyone else
experienced this lately?

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anderscarling
I had some issues with this a few months back, and was in contact with apple
dev support about it. They investigated the issue and since then it has worked
for me.

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throwanem
Not really something I see myself using, sad to say - I have way too much
music to ever fit on my phone, which limits my options in practice to those
with solid self-hosted streaming support. But I really like the style!

~~~
deepdesai
Apple Music support is on the roadmap!

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dimillian
Did you used SceneKit, or UIKit dynamics, or is the physical effects are
homemade/keyframe animations?

Very well done!

Edit: On a second thought I would see myself doing it as UICollectionView with
a custom layout.

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JustSomeNobody
This is definitely a pretty app. I can see from the quick video that you put a
lot of effort into. However, it looks just too fiddly for my taste[0].

[0] As in, too many touches required.

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deepdesai
Don't mean to be a pushy-car-salesman-types, but I think you should take it
for a test drive – your experience might surprise you. One of my explicit
goals in designing the app was to get you OUT of the app ASAP, since I don't
give a damn about "engagement". Today, the stock iOS music app seems too
fiddly to me...

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motdiem
This looks really nice. Am I correct in that it'd work only with apple music
currently? Would've loved to test it, but most of my stuff is in spotify...

~~~
deepdesai
Actually it only works with local files (as in synced via iTunes) at the
moment. Apple Music is on the roadmap, and so is Spotify!

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tbodt
IMHO it's not 100% intuitive that you press the settings button to search.
Maybe a separate search button in the top left?

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deepdesai
I've considered it! But:

\- I really like the idea of one button for "everything else"

\- Once you start using the app, I've found that you don't tend to search
often, because you just intuitively where things are placed

\- It's more fun to browse through your collection and find something you'd
forgotten about instead of searching for whatever is "top of mind" at the
moment

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hashmal
I like that for once, the records displayed in a music app are tasteful
independent productions and not national top charts.

~~~
deepdesai
TBH I didn't even realize what I was showing when I recorded the screencast,
but I find it painful to listen to mass-manufactured crap :)

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tn_
"This is different from genres because genres don't really mean anything
today." uhh.

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wiredearp
For folks like the OP who would categorize Tropical Drums Of Deutschland as
"morning music", and respect for that, genres stopped making sense about two
decades ago. The release is officially classified as both Jazz, Folk, World
and Country but it is really none of the above [1].

[1] [https://www.discogs.com/Jan-Schulte-Tropical-Drums-Of-
Deutsc...](https://www.discogs.com/Jan-Schulte-Tropical-Drums-Of-
Deutschland/release/9970910)

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johndoe489
/side rant

Do you truly mean "iOs" or did you mean "iPhone"? I couldn't care less if an
app is an "iOS" app when it doesn't work on my iOS device (iPad AIR 2 with iOS
11).

ps: i'd love to see something like that on iPad. I don't like the builtin
player. I used the "track 8" app for a while sadly not updated to iOS 11.

~~~
tinus_hn
I also hate it when I get a Windows program and it doesn't work on my 386.
After all, it's running Windows 3.11!

~~~
johndoe489
Your analogy barely applies to the iPhone / iPad situation. You're talking
about APIs accross many generations of an OS, while I'm talking about apps for
the same , current OS not supporting different layouts.

edit: rewording my previous comment, yes I am using iOS 11 ... and the AIR 2
is not that much behind anyway.

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michaelmcdonald
Don't have the time to be a proper beta tester, but would totally pay to have
this app!

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deepdesai
If you just wanna get your hands on it, it's already quite stable! And you can
totally be an IMproper beta tester :)

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chrisper
Reminds me of the landscape mode of the old iTunes(?) app on the iPhone 3gs.

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gtm1260
This is horrible.Its just coverflow except portrait. Nothing 'Beautiful' about
it.

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zkim
This is unduly harsh. And with the organization tools and turntable
visualization calling this 'just coverflow' is also incorrect.

I'm assuming you don't find the interface particularly appealing, but do you
think that others might? From the comments in this post, it sure seems like
it.

The OP was able to articulate an interesting insight into why other music apps
were lacking for him (genres aren't a useful grouping mechanism), and build a
(beta!) solution. That's beautiful.

From the demo one thing was clear to me: that thought and care went into
making this, and that should be respected.

Good work, OP. Keep going.

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dzhiurgis
At which release Apple will just stop supporting playing your own mp3? iOS
14-15?

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vermooten
Do people still listen to 'albums'?

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anderscarling
Some people, me included, very much do. :)

Edited to add some background:

I feel it gives the tracks more context, especially as for many artists an
album isn't just an unordered set of independent tracks but a carefully
designed listing experience.

That said, I still like my playlists as well. ;)

