You Don’t Have To Use Apple’s Music App

Albums is a great alternative

Awhile ago, I detailed about how I switched from Spotify to Apple Music, and I mentioned how Apple’s Music app for iOS/iPadOS has a lot of issues. But as I slowly discovered, you don’t need to use Apple’s app in order to play music from the AM library or from your own personal iTunes library. There are plenty of alternative player apps out there that interface with those. Here is a good summation of many of those: Fourth Annual iOS Music Player Showcase.

The one I choose to try out is called simply Albums from developer Adam Linder, and it turned out to be good enough that I didn’t even need/want to try out any others. The idea of it appealed to me because, as is hopefully evident from my continuing series of stories on my musical media journey, I usually prefer listening to albums as a whole instead of individual songs out of context. And that is the focus of Albums. It makes it really easy to organize and listen to albums in your collection/library, and the user interface is gorgeously designed to facilitate the album listening experience.

Library/All Albums in Random order.

The main player screen (below) shows your current position within the album. The progress line shows total album time elapsed on the left and time remaining on the right. There are bars within the line to show the start of the songs. The title of the current song is displayed below the bar, as well as the track number and total number of tracks. This is something I’ve always wanted the Apple Music app to do when playing an album, but it probably never will. There is an Add button to add the album to your Apple Music library. There are controls to move to the next/previous song and the next/previous album in the queue. You cannot shuffle songs, it plays them in the order mandated by God and the artist, and that’s okay with me. You can shuffle albums though.

The Player screen.

If you swipe up on the cover art, it unveils more options, including a tracklist, and moves the progress line to the bottom of the screen. You can tap on any of the song titles to go directly to that song. To pause playback, you have to swipe back down to get the player controls to appear again. This is not a big deal, it’s all pretty fluid.

The Tracklist screen.

Another nice feature not available in the Music app is the album “Info” screen. Credits for the album are downloaded from various sources and you can actually view them. I’m obsessed with musician/production credits and love to see connections between albums from different artists.

The Info/Credits screen (part of it, at least).

You can’t create playlists in Albums per se, though you can access playlists created in Music and iTunes. However, it does have Collections (of albums), which are configurable in many different ways. This includes things like all albums in your library from a particular producer, using the credits downloaded for the album as displayed above.

As I said in my Apple Music story, one of the things I dislike about the Music app is that when you add an album to a playlist, it puts the songs in some random order instead of the sequence order from the album. I had a playlist of albums to check out in AM, but it was unplayable because of that. Albums solves this problem nicely. I created a Collection that includes only albums tagged with the “Check Out” tag I created. Whenever I want to check out an Apple Music album to play later (whether it is in my library or not), I tag the album with my “Check Out” tag. I go into that Collection and the albums are all just there, and I can play them in any order I want, and each album plays with their proper song sequence. When I’m done listening to the album, I can remove the Check Out tag from it to remove it from the collection, and then I can add it (or not) to my Apple Music library if it’s not already there.

My “Check Out” Collection, in the iPad version of the app.

Albums does not have the algorithmically created song mix lists (such as “New Music Mix”, “Chill Mix” and “Favorites Mix”) that Apple Music has. It’s just something a third party app would not have access to, plus it doesn’t make sense for the album-focused theme. However, the Insights tab in Albums does gives you a lot of information about what you have listened to and about your library, and automatically curates some collections like “New & Unheard” and “Never Played”, and will show you such things as which albums in your library were released on this day in a previous year. Albums does update the play information (play count, last played, etc) so that when you go to Music, it will know you played the song/album. And again, it has some nice screens to let you know your statistics/play history.

I frequently use New Music Mix in Apple Music to see what is new from my favorite artists. Albums has the “Release Feed” feature, which shows recent and future releases from artists in your library. This is a great little extra I use often and something I wish AM had.

The Release Feed screen.

Another big plus from me is that like the Music app, Albums does play songs in Dolby Atmos/Spatial Audio and Hi-Res Lossless etc, using the settings you have specified for that with the Music app. It can’t tell you what resolution etc it is playing the song with, but I don’t consider that a huge issue, as long as it’s actually playing it the desired way.

There are a few drawbacks. Albums does not have access to the lyrics in the Apple Music catalog, so it can’t display those like Music does. If there are lyrics available in the metadata or you have entered them yourself in iTunes or whatever, you can view those. The other thing is you can’t just play/shuffle random songs, only albums. Again, this is because of the albums-focused nature of the app. The developer has said he is working on a song-focused listening option for a future update, so that’s cool. Neither of these issues are deal breakers, and if you want to experience them, you can always go play your library in the Music app. The two are complimentary, especially since they share play history information.

The developer is very responsive and easy to contact about issues, and he publishes a blog about the app. For example, I discovered a problem where if I had a different version of an album in my iTunes library than what was in Apple Music (i.e. AM had an expanded/deluxe version of the album), the player would switch between the two versions depending on what song was being played, and so would show differing information for remaining time/number of songs etc. He quickly identified the issue and released an update that fixed it.

Albums is a great alternative to the Apple Music app for interfacing with the Apple Music service and/or your personal library. I recommend trying it out at least. It may not be a complete all-in-one replacement for some people, but that’s okay. I have only touched on some of the details and the features available, there are more. It has comprehensive support for iOS Shortcuts and Widgets, for example. You can definitely tailor the app to your music listening preferences, especially if you like listening to albums as opposed to songs, like I do. It is iOS/iPadOS only at this time, there is no Mac app. Some of the features I have mentioned are only available by a premium subscription, which is a very reasonable in-app purchase of $1.99/mo or $18.99/yr at this writing. Happy Listening!