Why Music.app is no longer on my home screen
tl;dr – It’s been replaced by Pod+
It was just over a year ago that a particular shortcoming of the iOS iPod app (now known simply as Music) came to my attention. I typically listen to music an album at a time, and browsing by artist for something to listen to was starting to get on my nerves. My iTunes library includes several soundtracks and compilations (such as the excellent Dark Was The Night), and my artists list was getting cluttered up with bands that only had a song or two each.
This frustration, and the lack of an existing app to solve it (I searched!), provided the spark of motivation to start another app project in my spare time. With over half a million apps in the store it’s tough to come up with a concept that brings something new to the table. And coming home after spending most of the day working in Xcode (as an iOS developer at Kobo), it’s tough to find the interest and energy to sit down and get right back to it. Coming up with a solution to my iPod problem was both concept and motivation in one.
Over the next few months I worked on-and-off on my app, using it on a daily basis and adding features as ideas occurred to me. Once I had things in a very unfinished, but quite usable state, the motivation problem struck again. I had solved my problem – the drive to continue working on it took a big hit.
After months of very sporadic work, and having dealt with some issues introduced by iOS 5, I finished and released Pod+ earlier this week. Here’s a quick run-down of its features:
• Reduce clutter in the Artists list by filtering out those that don’t meet an adjustable set number of songs (example: show only artists with 4+ songs).
• Track down stray songs, singles, and one-hit-wonders by filtering out songs by artists with a certain number of tracks (example: hide all songs by artists with more than 1 song).
• Songs are intelligently grouped by a combination of artist and album artist. What this means is that you can easily play an entire album that features multiple artists, but you can also find tracks from that album listed under the individual artists (the iOS 5 Music app forces you to choose one grouping over the other).
• The Artists list features album artwork to help as a visual cue when browsing.
• You can quickly select groups of songs to play from an album (example: play tracks 1-10 and don’t automatically play the bonus tracks).
I’m not sure what the demand for a niche feature set like this will be, but it’s made a big difference in my listening habits and officially bumped Music.app off of my home screen – buried in a shallow grave, err, folder.
Pod+ is available in the App Store at http://bit.ly/w3P0cL
If you’d like to provide feedback, report a bug, or request a feature, you can find me on Twitter: @lessthanuthink and @PodPlusApp
