“A long dive into the features that make my ideal music app, and why nothing currently fulfills the brief.”
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I was genuinely surprised they didn’t like Roon more. I love Roon. The learning curve is a little steep and it can be a bit glitchy. But those are trade offs I’m happy to make to have pretty much all the features mentioned in the article. It’s a great bridge between physical and streaming media.
I'm surprised they didn't try to describe their perfect music app and try to get Claude Code to make it.
https://www.theverge.com/column/881256/parachord-vibe-coded-music-streaming-app
Interesting! (Non-paywalled link)
Most frustrating to me are the various Apple apps. iTunes wasn’t perfect but it made sense conceptually and was coherent between MacOS and iOS. The restrictions from the beginning of iTunes on iOS though have always been about lock-in. Since the rewrite to Music it has been a shambles. The MacOS client is buggy. The iOS Music app wants to pretend your own library and files don’t exist, locks them down, and pushes you to their rent-seeking streaming service. The AppleTV app is OK but also lacks basic features like a play history. The library syncing services are buggy, slow, and opaque: good luck trying to figure out why your Mac smart playlists aren’t updating based on activity on your phone or TV or HomePods. Speaking of, HomePods sound amazing. But Siri somehow is getting worse over time at recognizing what I’m asking for and can only do very basic play/stop/next track actions. Forget about asking it to do anything “complicated” like making new smart playlists.
I have thousands of albums in my library and tens of thousands of songs (all legal). I listen to music a lot. I’m pretty much all in on the Apple ecosystem.
I’ve tried a lot of the alternatives mentioned in the blog. Like the author I keep coming back to Apple Music because it is the best overall. But it is just OK. It’s frustrating because it seems like a company of Apple’s tradition, vision, and resources should have the absolute objectively best software, services, and experience. But they just do not and they haven’t really gotten better in a long time. I’m sure it’s “good enough” for most of their customers. But it is frustrating when I bump against its limitations every day.
I’d agree, I’ve been a long time Spotify user and every year or so I try to switch to Apple Music but the unnecessary limitations, and weird design/feature choices turn me off. I always hear this kind of critique from Android users criticising iOS and I never understand it, I like iOS but my recent attempted switch to Apple Music made me realise I don’t actually use many of Apple’s native apps, theres always something broken or not quite right about them and I wonder how a company of Apple’s size can output such inferior apps. I’m not ready to switch from iOS, I still think they have the best OS and product design by far, but there is something off about their app design/dev teams. I could never go back to Windows but it does make me wonder if I’ve been wrong about Android all this time and my connection with iOS is based simply on familiarity.
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