Longplay

Update: Decided to give this another try after some time, and of course it’s still disappointing. Continues to be unusable and a complete waste of money. Starts loading my music library and then just crashes. Over and over. It’s a toy. If you’ve got like 10 songs in your library it might work, but it doesn’t work with any decently-size one. Exactly the target audience for a non-first-party music app, and this app just doesn’t work. Hyped up and useless. Save your money and keep using the Music app. For all its faults and warts, it at least loads and plays music most of the time. Old review: It has a very difficult time loading all the music in my library and the UI is constantly frozen and my device gets very hot when that happens, and then crashes. I’ve had to completely uninstall and reinstall it several times. Even when it’s supposedly done loading everything, it doesn’t actually show everything I have in my music library. It constantly crashes and freezes. I don’t have Apple Music, I’m using iTunes Match and all of my music is downloaded locally on my device, so it should be pretty straightforward. Seems like a small hobby app that can probably work with a handful of items in one’s library but it has *not* been tested with decently-sized libraries and is definitely not for anyone who actually cares about listening to music. I despise subscriptions but this is exactly why they are preferred because when coming across duds like this app, the developers would have some incentive to fix things, whereas there’s no incentive here as I’ve already paid for the app. Disappointing.

Got this on a recommendation from someone on Mastodon, and it’s a really novel way of reconnecting with your music library by putting everything on display all at once. Artwork, not text. Plus: sorting based on “Addiction”, “Brightness”, “Negligence” etc. It’s a really unique _album_ based approach. Loving it. Another plus: I found one reproducible crash almost immediately after purchase, which the developer fixed nearly overnight. Overall, well worth it. Really enjoying this app.

I hate how Apple Music/streaming culture has led me to litter my library with individual songs from artists I generally don’t like and care about. This app is fantastic in that it filters out the trash and brings you only the album — which is a shorthand for music that actually matters. All good and definitely worth the money (could easily charge that yearly, and should, maybe!). However, I would want to see a “Play Next” & “Play Later” addition. Often I’m already playing music from the Apple Music app, and browsing Longplay I’d want to be able to add to that day’s list. Also a “show album in Apple Music” button would be great — ie a link back to the same album in Apple Music where you could then delete, etc.