Smart Shuffle

I’m so glad to have this functionality back! I’m a long time Mac user, but new to iPhone and one of the things I was most looking forward to was album shuffle, so imagine my shock and dismay when I learned first that I had to pay Apple to have access to my library of CDs I’ve ripped over the years, and then that I wasn’t going to be able to listen to them on album shuffle. Smart Shuffle to the rescue! And after paying more than 10x the price of the app for a year of access to my iTunes library, this was worth every penny. I do have two issues, though: Choosing which album are going to shuffle is clunky and sometimes just gets lost and I have to do it again. There’s no way to save album playlists within this app. This would be especially useful because apple’s Music app doesn’t have any easy way to edit or generate an iTunes playlist, so I have to go back to the computer first. Love it, though! I’m about a hair’s width from a 5 star review on this app.

When I initially purchased this app, it worked fine. Each time I hopped in the car the album I’d been listening to would resume where it left off. Occasionally, if I’d been away from the car for a while, using other apps, it would “forget” the playlist in progress, and the iPhone music player would revert to the first track in my library by alphabetical order. Upon opening Smart Shuffle a prompt (from my iPhone I believe) would let me play from the last remembered song, which usually wasn’t exactly where I left off, but close enough. The problem is that it gradually got to the point that Smart Shuffle would rarely resume a playlist when I started the car, and could never seem to successfully restore a playlist, instead just reshuffling. I have over 500 albums on my phone, and would like to stick with a playlist that allows me to hear many different things without repeats. Constantly stopping and starting over is a deal breaker. I’ve recently added a different app that performs the same function and doesn’t seem to have any such issues. Unfortunate because I prefer the look of the Smart Shuffle interface, especially the screen that allows you to swipe through albums horizontally.

I almost feel like this app deserves 5 stars simply because it provides a stellar concept for the neglected album lover. I want to love it, I really do. Unfortunately, this is not everything it ought to be. The concept is perfect. The way you can explore playlists, combine playlists, and add/remove albums for listening is great. Once that is done, the user experience is pretty bad. The interface is slow and doesn’t react in a timely way when responding to buttons being pushed. (I’m using an iphone 7. Maybe that’s the reason. Maybe iOS is bugging. But i think it should work properly on a 1 year old phone.) There’s also no way to actually interact with songs, scrub through the track, rate or love songs. I bought it for a dollar figuring it was worth a shot but it doesnt meet the requirement. If you’re going on a road trip, this will work great. Otherwise, not so much. If only the album shuffle and album selections could be merged into what apple already has in the stock app, we would have a GREAT app. Not yet though.