The slow and bloated nature of the Mac Apple Music app inspired us to create QuickTunes. It is a simple, fast, and native Apple Music player inspired by the simplicity of the iPod. You can use keyboard shortcuts to navigate a simple multi column layout, pick something, and press Play.
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Reminiscent of Spot for Linux, another great shortcut-oriented streaming interface for those of you who ditched the Mac: https://github.com/xou816/spot
Modern player is not only about UIUX but also which music storage it supports, DLNA, Plex, Jellyfin, that’s the main feature users will be checking. If it’s just AppleMusic player.
Well, it matters when you have to integrate with APIs and idiosyncrasies of third parties, and whatever draconian DRM they require. It’s obviously not impossible to add support for multiple backends, but from a development effort it definitely matters.
It’s not like streaming platforms are gingerly implementing open and common standards for music streaming. Winamp had support for .m3u and streaming back in ‘04, but we’ve moved on from that.
Instead of being a better UI like QuickTunes, LongPlay is specifically designed for one thing and one thing only: full album listening.
Things are presented as full albums, and they play as full albums. You can choose whether skipping skips a single track or an entire album.
Tracks in an album are always played in order.
The main picking interface? Just a grid of album covers, like that old screensaver Macs used to have.
It’s great.
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