How's this compare to the native macos music app formerly known as itunes?
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- Everything you'd expect from an offline music player!
- Map your music folders and browse your library in an organised view.
- Create playlists and manage the play queue interactively.
- Browse music using folder view when needed.
- Pin anything (almost!) to the sidebar for quick access to your favourite music.
- Navigate easily: right-click a track to go to its album, artist, year, etc.
- Native macOS integration with menubar and dock playback controls, plus dark mode support.
- Search quickly through large libraries containing thousands of songs.
The app is still in alpha, so things may look unpolished, but I've been testing the alpha builds for the past few weeks and fixing issues as I find them for v1 release. I welcome any feedback (and contributions!) on GitHub repo. Please give it a try and let me know what you think!
I was listening to some early 2000s alternative rock today and then randomly in the middle of my radio station it started playing a kids freeze dance song.
The best thing it has going for it is the lossless albums and native airplay casting. I got a free trial, but I’m not going to renew. I’d consider staying if they added native last.fm scrobbling, but even then I’m not sure.
I’m really bummed about the scrobbling because I lost several weeks of not a month of plays because my phone offloaded the scrobbler app and I didn’t notice. The official app for it on Mac says to use one or the other (macOS or iOS) because it will count twice.
I have been using itunes/music to do that and it honestly works just fine. I have hundreds of playlists from over 10 years ago that still works. Finding specific playlist or music to play is pretty easy, especially with Alfred.
The longevity is the biggest concern to me when considering the third party apps. If it stops being maintained in the future I would be stuck and need to do the chore of moving them properly to another application. With the native app I am sure it will work for the next 20 years.
It's something I'd have expected out of Microsoft, but from Apple it's a particularly shitty gesture. A big warning sign to the user that "your" device hasn't been fully paid-off yet.
> The longevity is the biggest concern to me when considering the third party apps.
And that's why I had to stop using MacOS entirely. It's absurd for a culture of paid software to have such horrible runtime compatibility. Meanwhile on Windows, you don't ever buy software that stops working. Even Linux has largely circumvented it's own ABI woes with sandboxed packaging. MacOS's statically linked app framework has every advantage in pushing out support timelines as far as Apple wants - they just don't want to push it very far, sadly.