Cs Music Pro

I’ve been a long time user of Cs Music Player (or Cesium as it used to be called). I’m not so old but it seems I’m a dinosaur when it comes to the way I like to listen to music since I’m a firm believer in OWNING music, having a music library that somehow reflects my own progressing tastes. Apple used to love music lovers and used to provide some very nice hardware and software to cater to guys and gals like me. Now these times are gone and streaming took over. Anyway. I really would like to like Cs and I lindner do since it allows me to listen to my synced iTunes library in a meaningful way. A huge library needs the right tools to handle it and Cs still does that. So thanks for that. However, I don’t like the direction the app is heading with constantly changing and seemingly erratic UI choices that try to reinvent the wheel. That’s really not necessary because if Cs was just a copy of what Apple’s iTunes app used to be a few years ago, everything would be just fine. But for some unknown reason Mike seems to take pleasure in deconstructing well-proven features which is really a shame since the USP of Cs is really simple: an app that allows you to easily navigate your (huge) music collection and so helps you to enjoy it. Please, Mike, don’t try to improve things that are just fine the way they are. Personal wish: please bring (back) the shuffle by album feature. Thanks.

I’ve been using Cesium for years now at this point, and overall it’s so much better than Apple’s Music app; kudos to the developer. However... I’m not a huge fan of the update. It feels like it’s moving in the direction of Apple’s Music app, in terms of some UX choices, which is the reason I switched to Cesium in the first place. The new UI looks great, but now it forces you to either see all songs in a list or only the albums. You can switch between all songs and albums, but I’d rather have both without needing to go into settings every time I want to listen differently. It also now shows iCloud items that haven’t been downloaded, by default, though there is at least an option to turn it off. Personally, I would rather the default be off, some it’s not on my device for a reason. Some other issues I have is that the time remaining in a song disappears once the song is far enough along. I care more about how much is left than how much I’ve listened to. I don’t know why the time elapsed doesn’t just remain at the left end of the bar. The update also seems to have removed the ability to swipe and tap “play next/later,” which is so much faster than having to long press on a song, and you can’t see the “jump-to” alphabet until you’ve started scrolling.

Cesium has been my go-to music app for a few years now and I’ve loved its interface and functionality much more than the ugly and hardly functional Apple Music app. The app has significantly improved since my last review. Previously, it crashed all the time and had barely any functionality. Now Mike restored some original functionality (ratings, queueing, etc.) and Cesium is almost back to its old self. The search has a tendency to crash the app, so that’s sad, since that means I have to defer to using Apple Music’s search and its “play next” feature, which is really annoying. As a wish list item, I wish that I could sort by artist within a playlist, because then I could use the little right sidebar to jump to a letter, since I find myself doing a bunch of scrolling looking for an artist to start off my music listening, which is time-consuming. Also, whenever I queue a song to play next, it will, then another song or two will play, then it’ll play the same exact song that I queued earlier again, which is kinda annoying because then I have to skip it. After that, my songs will play normally. This might only happen when I do multiple “play next” actions in a row, because I haven’t noticed this problem when I only do one “play next” at a time. (I’m using an iPhone 6 with the latest iOS and Cesium update, if that impacts the situation.) Looking forward to the subsequent updates and optimizations though. Keep it up, Mike, you’ve really made one of the best music apps on the market!