Introducing Jams On Toast, a delightful music player
I’m not here to convince you to begin listening to albums. Although, if you do, it will absolutely change your relationship with music. You can’t truly connect with an artist’s work without context. And that the gestalt of a well-crafted album is often far greater than the sum of its parts. But that’s just my opinion.
Enough virtual ink has been spilled around the internet about our diminishing attention spans, the commodification and playlist-ification of music, and the watering down of artistic endeavor; which results in music that is engineered and mass-produced to give a momentary and disposable dopamine hit for the largest common denominator of listeners. The key word in the preceding sentence is ‘listeners’ — it seems like fewer artists are making music for people these days, but can you really blame them? Talent, alone, does not put food on the table. Liz Pelly recently wrote a fantastic piece in The Baffler touching on many of these trends in a lot more detail, I highly recommend you go read it!
For those of you who have been enthusiastically nodding along till now, I would like to introduce you to a project that I’ve been working on — Jams On Toast. It’s a delightful music player, a labor of love by and for the music-obsessed. It is also the only music app that lets you rearrange your albums in any way you’d like — kinda like a virtual record collection.
I made this app because of two major complaints that people have with music players today. The first: interacting with your digital music library — browsing, management and organization — just seems broken. Having your music arranged alphabetically, by genre, or other such heuristics never made much sense — does AC/DC really need to be followed by Aphex Twin, or Linkin Park by Metallica? Do genre labels even mean anything today? Jams On Toast lets you rearrange your music in a way that’s meaningful to you — just like you would do with physical records and crates.
The second reason is that there are no music players that are focussed on providing a quality experience for those of us who enjoy listening albums cover to cover. Everyone seems to want to shove their recommendation engine or streaming service or social network or integration with <flavor-of-the-month tech platform> into the music listening experience. I’m not saying that these things should not happen. However, I think that for many people who connect deeply with music — amateur musicologists, if you will — these add-ons are not only unnecessary, but distractions which detract from the experience.
Jams On Toast has little flourishes everywhere that are engineered for delight. It is an absolute joy to flick through your albums and crates. You can drag and drop albums to move them anywhere in your collection. There is an animated turntable up top, which you can tap on to go to the currently playing album. There’s a ring around the turntable that lets you see how much of the album (not the current track) has elapsed. Fun fact: the turntable spins at the same speed as a 33 RPM record.
Once you begin organizing your library, you will start developing an intuitive sense of ‘where’ each record in your collection is placed. You’ll find yourself reaching for old favorites, related records and forgotten gems in your collection — far more than you would if you were searching, playlisting or scrolling through an endless list. The design of the app also makes it great to use one-handed, which is fantastic when you are running, driving, or otherwise occupied. Instead of squinting at tiny, indistinguishable text, it’s super easy to browse your library by looking at artwork. Once you have decided what you want to listen to, there is a large, impossible-to-miss ‘Play’ button.
My favorite feature is ‘Read My Mind’ — it’s the most effortless way to cue up an album you want to play, whenever the current album ends. It’s a fresh approach to the ‘Up Next’ queue. Here’s how it works:
- Step 1 — Scroll to the album you want to play next.
- Step 2 — There is no Step 2!
This might seem a little trivial, but it’s a really zen experience when you’re using the app. You don’t have to press any buttons, or even think about managing a playback queue. Quick, can you tell me the difference between the ‘Play Next’ and ‘Play Later’ buttons on your current app? If you change your mind about what to play next, you’ll never get interrupted about whether or not you are sure you want to violate the sanctity of your playback queue. Finally, I think it also saves you the mental effort of trying to build out a long list of music you want to cue up next. I’m definitely guilty of underestimating the length of any music I’m adding to a queue, while simultaneously overestimating how much listening time I have before I start doing something else, or change my mind about what I want to listen to. With ‘Read My Mind’ you can have an uninterrupted stream of music, without overthinking anything, with literally the least amount of effort possible.
If any of this interests you at all, grab the app and take it for a spin — it’s available for free on the App Store. This is just version 1.0 of this project, and I look forward to your feedback in helping me evolve it. If you enjoy using the app, spread the word, tell your music-obsessed friends! I am a one-man team, without any funding or marketing budget, so I’m relying on the kindness of the internet (shush, it’s there if you look!) to let people know about this. Happy listening!
