- Minimal design: The 'now playing' drawer in the screenshot looks nearly the exact same as the Music 'now playing' drawer. If anything it has more text for buttons than the Music app.
- Adapts to my music: The background color changes?
- Import my music: Ok, but with Music app I don't have to do that.
- Search artists, albums and songs: Ok, but I can already do that with Music app.
- Edit and reorder listen queue: Ok, but I can already do that with Music app.
- sync the library to a local machine
- have any songs in your library that are unavailable via streaming service
- use custom playlists that are organized on a desktop machine
- listen to music by Genre
- don’t mind authenticating all the time
Especially since the Music app already does "the color-matching background stuff":
https://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/how-to-create-colore...
That’s what I want to know too. My biggest problem is having iTunes in the middle.
That keeps track of play counts on both devices, lets me make smart playlists and playlist folders, and syncs music, contacts, and calendars all over USB without any cloud services prying into my personal data.
Apple went from being a leader in the music-listening industry with excellent UX to trying to compete with Spotify and YouTube, who are frankly not even that great (e.g. trying to keep playing a song in the background).
Flash memory was small when the iPhone came out in 2007, so everything moved to streaming. Now the capacities are finally big enough again (e.g. 128GB iPhone SE), Apple's broken their sync services.
I like having play counts, ratings, and playlists, and I like that I've continually built up my music library since the days of Soundjam MP for the Rio 600.
Doppler is trying to put a new theme on Finder's MP3 playing feature, but it's not the syncing library manager that I need.
The battery is good for 15 hours of play, it takes a 128GB microSD card, and it can play FLAC as well as MP3. The buttons are real and tactile and oriented so that you don't have to look at it to figure them out. It appears as a USB mass storage device with a FAT32 filesystem, so every computer I've used in the last 20 years can put music on it. If you put music in directories, it will navigate the directory structure. If you build m3u playlists, it will use those. You can ask for a random shuffle of all tracks or inside a directory.
It doesn't have play counts or ratings. If you have a USB3 microSD reader, that's faster than updating directly through the USB2 interface.
Also, it's running an open-source alternative firmware called Rockbox.
They might "not even be that great", but they are where all the listeners and the money are.
Ripping, listening to non-streaming music, etc, is becoming rapidly a hobbyist thing for older generations and a minority of hipsters. The whole rise in music industry profits in the last years was in the streaming area, purchases and digital downloads are down.
So anybody touting some specialized device, that takes ripped or bought mp3s, etc, is mostly living in the past as far as the market is concerned.
Thats true I think. Or maybe people just stopped buying music and Apple had to figure out another way to make money. It wouldn't make sense for them to invest in features that made non-streaming easier or more appealing to consumers. I noticed this very recently on a road trip where somebody mentioned it was going to be boring without music since they were out of data. I was confused for a second because I guess I'm the older/hipster dude, I've always thought of streaming as a doubly wasteful model where you lose battery life along with data.
> That keeps track of play counts on both devices, lets me make smart playlists and playlist folders, and syncs music, contacts, and calendars all over USB without any cloud services prying into my personal data.
I use the latest version of iTunes and an iPhone with the latest iOS on it, and still use them in exactly the same way you describe. Like you, I prefer to have complete control over my own data, without passing it through third-party cloud services. So far, Apple has not taken away the ability to do this, despite their heavy marketing push for iCloud. (I literally have never used iCloud at all for anything, ever.)
Honestly, I'll continue using that unless "better" is substantial.
- When importing, it would be great to see that "importing" is not a copy of the exact same data, but rather a reference or link (like a symlink). I have 40 gb of music on my iPhone. I don't want to double that by using your app.
- Needs a nicer looking app logo.
- Needs a cooler app name that is more original than "Doppler".
Your "support page" is an email address, and doesn't actually contain any information on the app.
If you're going to show us something and ask us to buy your app, then put a little more care into your launch.
I personally download actual mp3 files from Amazon (not amazon "music" but just purchase actual tracks). In fact, I continue to be pleasantly surprised that in 2018 one of the big providers is doing something as simple and friendly as this: selling me unprotected, plain old mp3 files.
However, they are compressed mp3 files and not suitable for future transformation so if there is an album that I want, I will still purchase the actual CD and rip it to the full WAV/PCM.
My system is a mac pro (2009) which still has an optical drive. I use the (excellent) 'abcde'[1] tool to rip the CDs. I particularly like the fact that it pops up a 'vi' session with the gracenote/cddb/metadata so I can quickly "fix" the usually braindead cddb entry right in the workflow.
That I didn't know about any of those services? I thought everything was streaming these days. What are you trying to imply that I'm trying to imply?
Now, questions:
Any chance of supporting BS2B (Bauer stereophonic-to-binaural), which VOX player supports?
Do you plan to add, if at all possible, Spotify or VOX Music Cloud as providers?
Do you plan to support 3D Touch? I found the use of Peek on songs (+slide and release on menu options) very useful in Apple Music, and I definitely miss that in Spotify.
It looks pretty awesome by the way, any plans for android?
A few jobs ago I was working on a video player for an embedded device and the UX team mimicked the CoverFlow interface gimmick.
We had a C&D from Apple within a few months of showing it in public.
I would assume there are other patents. For example, sampling the cover art to decide on the background color. Was that an Apple thing? I don't know.
Manually choosing songs to load onto my phone is a significant chore and my phone can only fit a subset of my collection.
I really missed the album artwork color extraction from iTunes and seeing album covers in a reasonable size, so thank you for that.
One pet peeve, on iOS the audio transport buttons are in a different location in music apps than they are on the lock screen. Leading to more fumbling around than needed.
Now I just use GoodReader to store and play back all offline albums, since it's just a file directory and I can just play the tracks in the order they are stored.
[0] Pocketcasts solves that problem, though.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/foobar2000/id1072807669?mt=8
Supports your favourite speakers and headphones Doppler works with AirPods, HomePod and any Bluetooth or AirPlay enabled speaker
Still, as a non-iPhone user I actually expect Apple hardware to only work properly with Apple software, I was never able to use airplay on any other software than iTunes (in Windows), it always broke after some time when I did find something that worked on Linux. So perhaps it's not so bad to mention it.