My perfect Music app doesn't exist

A long dive into the features that make my ideal music app, and why nothing currently fulfils the brief.

Music streaming apps leave me wanting.

While I collect albums both physically (Vinyl + CD) and digitally (from Bandcamp), there are still missing pieces that streaming services provide: discovering new music, sharing playlists and seeing what friends are playing so that I can try their recommendations. They're a valuable part of my listening habits, but none of them feel like 'the one'. I've been flip-flopping between Spotify and Apple Music for a while now, and over the last twelve months, I've added Tidal and Qobuz to that indecision, as well as a whole host of third-party apps built with Apple's MusicKit framework.

Then there are the apps for playing my own digital collection. Normally this has been played through Plex or it's music-focussed, mobile app sibling, Plexamp. I've also been trying out Doppler and Roon as alternatives.

All this flip-flopping and testing helps me realise what I want from a music app. Ideally, I'd be able to play streamed and local music in the same app, along with a combination of best parts from all these apps I've tried. Before I get into the nitty gritty of the features I'm looking for, I'll start with a summary of my experiences in each one. The focus of this will primarily be the MacOS experience, but most of it is applicable to all platforms.

Spotify

I've drifted away from Spotify in recent years, partly due to UI changes that feel a bit chaotic. It lost the easy-to-navigate sidebar and keyboard shortcut for the back button, and started pushing audiobooks and unwanted podcasts (such as the Joe Rogan Experience). Having said that, I keep coming back because it's still less friction than Apple Music, and the 'one instance playing on whatever device you want' approach really works for me.

The way I have Spotify setup - large grid view of my library on the left, and 'Now Playing' panel on the right.

I know it's weird to complain about chaotic UI when I have Spotify setup like that, but it does make sense to me!

In terms of sound quality it's the lowest of the four. No Lossless or Dolby Atmos/Spatial Audio, but that's not a huge concern to me, nor is it so much the app itself that's the problem. No streaming service pays artists handsomely, but Spotify have a particularly shitty attitude towards them, combined with some unethical business practices. They earn billions off the back of artists who mostly struggle to be paid (investing that money in military AI), telling them they should release more often, whilst padding Spotify with AI slop and changing rules to avoid paying royalties. Oh, and what about platforming the worst humans of our age? All the while, claiming that they have 'made the world value music'.

They don't care about music, it's just "content" to them.

Apple Music

I migrated from Spotify to Apple Music. It's not visually noisy, offers lossless & spatial audio, airplay direct from the app, and adds extra content, such DJ mixes, interviews and live shows. Sometimes, I find that minimalism provides a restful break, but it can equally feel a little too spartan at times.

An Apple Music subscription also lets you sync your own music across devices, so it can effectively replace Plex in my equation. In reality, I've found it can be unreliable with imported music, splitting albums up, creating duplicates and missing out tracks. These issues can eventually be manually corrected, and for those bands that aren't on streaming services (I'm looking at you Curve), I can have all my music sources together in one app.

However, I find the UI has a lot of friction points. The mode switch between Apple Music/Your Library I find particularly unnecessary and frustrating. Here’s an example, I started searching for Cowboy Sadness (my favourite and most played album of 2024). It took until 'Cowboy S’ before it appeared in the results, compared to just ‘Cow’ in Spotify. (Incidentally, Spotify brought up Cold Gawd, another band I’ve played a lot, for ‘C’ and ‘Co’.)

C'mon Apple Music, I've played Cowboy Sadness 500 times in the last year, it should come up quicker than this!

This is because of that switch between 'Apple Music' (the streaming service) and 'Library' (your saved albums, be they Apple Music or your own digital files). Pre-selecting 'Library' before searching would show it quicker, but on MacOS, the two components are at opposite sides of the window. They should be together, like on iOS and iPadOS, and not relegated to a small field in the sidebar. In many ways, the iPad version of Apple Music works so much better than the desktop version for me.

In general, Apple Music really needs to chill out with the all the error messages and beachballs:


A collage of various errors and warning dialogs from the app, particularly after I’ve been using the iOS app.

Also, a word of warning if you're a flip-flopper like me. Apple will wipe all your data after 30 days after unsubscribing. This didn't used to the be case, but (as I found out) it is now!

Wow, that's a lot of negativity for what is my default music app at the moment!

Tidal

I got on well with Tidal! Good recommendations and a nice, uncluttered UI — not unlike how Spotify used to be before it's last redesign. I particularly liked Tidal's immersive view.

Tidal's home page always shows five new recommended tracks, I've discovered great artists from this.

Tidal's immersive 'now playing' view won me over (still room for the artwork to be larger though!)

I subscribed for about eight months, and found the main drawbacks were:

• The library was smaller than Spotify and Apple Music, and occasionally I couldn't find key albums.
• Can't 'pre-save' an album when it's announced (Update: you can now!)
• No animated album artwork like Apple Music (Update: now it does!)
• You can't add your own cover image for playlists like you can on Spotify and Apple Music. (Update: you can now!)
• It has a 10,000 'item' (albums, playlists, single tracks) limit, and when you reach 9,999 it won't let you add anymore to your collection. This is a real deal breaker. Spotify used to have this limit, but is now unlimited, and Apple Music's is 100,000.
• I cottoned on to the fantastic (but now defunct) Plex integration feature too late! The ability to combine my own library with a streaming service was wonderful, and it worked perfectly in my experience. It was always really clear whether an album was mine, or from Tidal - and no awkward switch between the two sources like in Apple Music. Sadly this was removed by Tidal last year.
• Compared to Spotify and Apple Music, it just felt a bit lonely. No 'What friends are playing", or shared playlists (any that get shared are likely to be Spotify or Apple Music, never Tidal).
• I get the impression that the company is struggling. In the last twelve months, they've removed their high tier plan (which paid artists more), stopped Plex integration, and had mass layoffs. It doesn't inspire me to spend time building a collection there, if it feels like I'm going to have to migrate again.

Good news for flip-floppers though - Tidal keeps your library if you re-subscribe!

Qobuz

I've got a reasonably good quality stereo, and in my non-scientific comparison test, Qobuz sounded the best quality sound of all the streaming services. That could be as much because it was louder by default, but I'm not an audiophile, and not so concerned about the sound quality of a streaming service. I see it as temporary resource, and my permanent digital and physical library is where any perceived quality really matters to me. I did take this blind test, to see if I could tell the difference between lossless and lossy quality, and even though I got more right than wrong, it still told me "You probably can't tell the difference".

Where Qobuz really shines with it's music magazine and human curated recommendation, very much like Bandcamp Daily. You get the feeling they actually care about music. In a nice touch, it also has a store where you can buy music in high-res FLAC format.

The slightly quirky UI, and lack of some important features, meant I didn't subscribe beyond my trial period. For instance:

• Qobuz generally feels more like a magazine website than an app — one that lets you stream and save the music.
• Interactions can be a little basic (for example, I couldn't access a particular action because a hover popup for a different action was covering it. It required quite precise mouse positioning to avoid it.
• Emphasis is placed on genres (as in the screenshot above) - as well as the bright blue genre dropdown in 'Home' and 'Favourites', it's displayed when hovering an album. I can't say that I particularly care about navigating by genres in this way.
• There's a general lack of finesse. From the low-res startup animation to artist biography text that spans the whole window (no matter how wide it is).
• A smaller library meant some music I wanted wasn't there.
• The lack of social features make it a bit lonely. There is a member forum, but it's separate from the app.
• For some reason, your library is called “Releases” on iOS/iPadOS, ‘Favourites’ on MacOS, but "Albums" on CarPlay!
• It lacks any kind of 'history' on the Home screen, making it harder to jump back to recent plays that weren't saved to your Favourites. For that matter, there's no sense of the home page being tailored to me. I'm pretty sure everyone sees the same generic homepage.
• It's a small thing, but I found the repetitive yellow 'Hi-Res Audio’ label distracting and intrusive —

  

Deezer

I didn't get very far with Deezer. While it works with Last.fm (took a while to find the setting, but it’s there), it only works from the browser tab, not the desktop app. When it did scrobble, there were false matches - didn't even know that was possible! So lack of reliable scrobbling is a non-starter.

The general design was 'OK', the brand font looks a bit immature but the UI was clean and intuitive. Lacks a lot of features like immersive view (it does ha a 'queue' view that kind of gets close) but primarily no standout features to make it worth trialling further.

Roon

I had a brief trial of Roon, which looked as if it might answer a lot of my needs. It's predominantly for your own music files, but you can also combine it with a subscription to Tidal or Qobuz. However, it didn't have all the features I was looking for, and I gave up trying to set up a Roon server on my Synology NAS as it was just too complex. Ultimately, I resented paying $14.99 a month to play music I already own, and I didn't see enough of an improvement over Plex.

MusicKit Apps

On top of the main apps, it’s worth noting that MusicKit allows for an ecosystem of apps that are built to work with Apple Music. They're usually a small cost on top of the Apple Music subscription, but provide extra features, or even complete retakes on how a music app should work.

Cider, Marvis Pro, Soor, Cs Music Pro and Albums work like enhanced versions of Apple Music, but Longplay takes a unique direction on sorting. Your library can be ordered and sized by concepts such as 'Brightness' (of the album artwork), 'Addiction' (time spent listening) and 'Negligence' (time since your last listen). There's an early access version of Longplay for MacOS:

Albums in Longplay, ordered by 'Recency', and sized by 'Addiction'.

They're primarily designed for iOS and iPadOS, but some allow the app to be installed on Mac, while Cider is only available as an electron app for MacOS (no mobile version).

There's also a category of 'companion' apps, that don't play music as such, but provide some of the extra functionality I'm looking for. Namely, MusicHarbor (information about new releases and gigs), NowPlaying (Music Trivia) and Discographic (A third party Discogs client).

Doppler

I must mention Doppler here as well. If you've got a bunch of your digital files, whatever format they may be in (FLACs and WAVs are good to go!), point Doppler at your folder and you're done. So not a streaming service, but a nice native MacOS experience for playing your own music. Easier to setup than a Plex library, and cheaper than a Plex Pass too. It's a minimal app in some ways (there's no sorting of any kind - everything is alphabetical & ascending and that's it), but it supports Airplay streaming, Apple CarPlay, Last.fm scrobbling and Album Collections!

It uses the full width of the window to display as many albums as possible, something music apps rarely do. On my 27" monitor it's a joy that it makes the most of that monitor size. A native PlexAmp client for MacOS would be great, Until then, Doppler provides some of that experience. It's a moment of calm, where all the music is yours, and nothing is being pushed on to you that you don't want.

If there's a downside to Doppler, it's that the music has to be 'on device'. You can't stream from a home NAS for example.

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Criteria:

These are the key features I’m looking for. Some are supported in some of the apps, but no app does everything:

Scrobble to last.fm

This one's first because it's very important to me. Not having a record of what I've listened to is like going for a 100 mile cycle and not recording the ride on Strava. If you're someone who can easily live without end of year statistics, I envy you!

Apple Music is the only app that doesn’t provide a built-in way to scrobble, so it falls to third-party apps like NepTunes (on MacOS) and Marvis Pro (on iOS) with the last.fm+ add-onn to get this capability. The addon for Marvis is a one-time purchase of £5.99 and well worth it. Unlike other iOS scrobbling solutions, it can scrobble plays of music that hasn't been saved in your library. It also has a 'scrobble log' where you can double check that plays have been recorded.

I did find an instance where Spotify and Tidal don't scrobble — when using their respective 'Connect' features. On Sonos at least, this has been the case since the disastrous new Sonos app was launched last year. It removed last.fm integration and it's not looking like that functionality will ever be restored. Fortunately, NepTunes covers this use case for Spotify too, but no joy with Tidal.

The situation on Apple TV is more complex. Tidal (which has a focus on Music Videos) doesn't send any scrobbles. Unlike Spotify, it seems that each device you install Tidal on has to be individually authorised to connect with last.fm, and there's just no UI to do that in the Tidal app settings on AppleTV. There's no app for Qobuz either.

You can sometimes scrobble from Apple Music on ATV, if you have Marvis Pro on iOS or iPadOS with the Last.fm+ add on. It can take around 24 hours or more before they appear in your scrobble log, but sometimes it doesn't appear at all. A way around this is either using AirPlay from your phone, or an app like OpenScrobbler. I recently looked at other options that listen in automatically, but found they either gave false matches or none at all.

In short, Spotify is the only reliable scrobbler out there, even on Apple TV.

Best fit for scrobbling to last.fm from anywhere: Spotify

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Immersive View

I want to see album artwork as large as possible! It's often relegated to a small thumbnail, usually leaving a vast amount of unused space next to the track listing:

I like whitespace as much as the next designer, but look at all that wasted space!

Obviously this relies on having high resolution files for the cover, but some MacOS apps support an Immersive View: Tidal, Cider, Qobuz and to a lesser extent, PlexAmp. Cider does this particularly well, and can even show Apple Music's animated covers (where they're available, and if you want them)

Cider wins the aesthetics here (if not legibility with some covers).

Tidal's immersive view is nice, and has tabs for lyrics and credits. It could use more of the space to show the album larger though.

Qobuz's immersive view is great. It makes good use of the space, but Elements like the Autoplay option are too prominent.

PlexAmp isn't really designed for large desktop displays, and it shows.

Apple Music on the iPad has got a version of this. If you put Apple Music on MacOS into full screen you get a similar view but it leaves out the play queue.

Apple Music on iPadOS - it can even show animated artwork when available.

Whereas on iOS, some albums get this lovely colour-blended treatment (which is presumably dependant on having a large high-res artwork file). This is essentially what I'm looking for on desktop, but landscape!

I had fun fiddling with the CSS on Tidal's web player, to get an even more honed immersive view. I enjoyed using this, but sadly there seems to be a bug when airplaying from the web app, where it repeats the first couple of seconds of a track a few times.

I made my own Tidal app with Electron and my own immersive view CSS to override Tidal's default styles.

Best fit for Immersive View: Cider

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Collections

This is simply the ability to create a folder of albums, like playlist but for long players. That could be ‘All time favourites’ or ‘Ambient Albums I bought this year’, I just want to be able to group albums together.

A 2024 collection in Longplay app, sized by addiction

Smart collections (with configurable rules like Smart Albums in Photos app) would be even nicer - e.g 'Albums released last year' or even 'what I was listening to 10 years ago today'. This is something Albums app does, which makes it a real shame you can't install it on desktop.

A '2020s' smart collection in Albums app on iOS

Doppler, Albums, Longplay and Plex (but not Plexamp) all have this feature, but most of the streaming services don't let you do this. It is possible in Apple Music on MacOS however. If you add whole albums to a playlist (you can just drag and drop the album), then choose the 'View → as albums' menu option (instead of 'View as playlist') it becomes a collection! Importantly, the preference to 'view playlist as albums' sticks, so I can switch between different playlists without needing to change the view type each time! Of course, this also opens up the possibility of using Smart Playlists to create the dymanic collections I mentioned earlier. And as it's a playlist, you can add your own artwork to the collection.

An Apple Music playlist viewed as albums

The only downside is that it's desktop only - but you can still sort a playlist by album on iOS and iPadOS. This is so close to right functionality, if only it was available on mobile too! Apple Music also allows you to mark an album as a favourite, and then filter to only show favourites when viewing albums.

Best fit for Collections: Apple Music (MacOS) and Albums (iOS/iPadOS)

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Album info and Artist Information

I want to be able to read more than just lyrics - information about the album's creation, and an artist biography (particularly when listening to a new artist). I have a feeling this is a feature I'd get if I'd stumped up for that Roon subscription.

Spotify does have a 'now playing' view, which gives a small artist bio and tour dates. Apple Music sometimes has background information on the album itself, such as on Lucy Dacus' Home Videos which shows her track by track commentary. Tidal and Qobuz have all the production credits you could ever want, and sometimes album info too.

Qobuz displays album info, but it covers up the album artwork

In all cases, it's usually a little hidden away, if it's there at all. Companion apps Discographic and NowPlaying (below) have the most information:

NowPlaying app has the best info display, but is a separate 'companion' app

As with Apple Music and Discographic, you have to select a link to read everything in a modal dialog

NowPlaying app also scrobbles, and while it's not supported on MacOS yet, it does have an Apple TV app.

Best fit for Album and Artist Info: NowPlaying

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Social Club

Most social features are at the same level — you get a profile page, with public playlists, and that's about it. When I spent some time last year playing with Record Club it made me wonder why no one has built this kind of functionality into streaming apps? Here I can curate create public lists of songs or albums, and send recommendations to others (this leads back to the 'Collections' feature I'd like).

Apple Music shows 'Friends are listening to' on your homepage, and Spotify has 'Friend Activity'.

I use 'Friends are listening to' a lot, even if it's just to have confidence I'm not alone in my listening habits

Tidal has similar basic social features (although it took me a while to find them), and also allows you to display a Favourite Track, Mood Booster, Favourite Artist and albums on your profile:

Strangely, these cards don't wrap to a new line when the window is narrower! Why?

There are no notifications for any of these social features in these apps, only by visiting someone's profile will you ever see it. Bandcamp emails me when people I follow buy new music, that's the kind of connection I want. Let me choose music I want to share with friends - not just public playlists, but collections of albums and highlighting current favourites (remember this is my jam)? It feels like streaming services are missing a real trick here.

Best fit for social features: Record Club

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Ordering albums by release date

Last one! All the main music apps allow you to order albums by 'recently added', but I remember albums by the order they were released. Only Tidal, Plex, Cider and Marvis offer this option. Qobuz has this on Artist pages, so you can view their discography in order, but not in your library.

Best fit for ordering albums by release date: Tidal

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Mockup

So what does all this look like? Based on a mixture of Apple Music and Doppler, with a bit of Cider thrown in, here are sketches of what I have in my head. Don't treat this a serious UX proposal!

Large album artwork, with the play controls and album info in the sidebar

Play queue panel shown

Side panel blends in with album artwork.

• Large artwork - as large as it can be!
• Side panel with tabs for Play Queue, Lyrics and Artist/Album Info, colour blended with the album artwork.
• Collections in the sidebar.
• A 'Now Playing' entry in the sidebar, much like you get in CarPlay. It's easy to go off down other tangents when playing music, and would be nice to have an easy way back to the currently playing.
• Apple's playlists (such as the excellent 'The Crate') and my own are separated with a different icon.

Well done - you've made it to the end! This is one of those posts that will never be truly 'done'. It's been gestating for nearly a year already, and I'll continue to update it in the future.

Updates

• Edited 22/7/25 to show that Tidal now has animated album artwork, and lets you pre-save upcoming albums/add your own artwork to playlists
• Edited 10/7/25 to add information about Deezer
• Edited 12/2/25 to clarify that Apple Music can scrobble from Apple TV after all, as long as you have Marvis Pro with the last.fm+ add-on.
• Edited 7/2/25 to add how to create Collections in Apple Music (thanks to As Lennart Schoors)