Albums 7.0: The Mac App, a Glassy UI Refresh, and a boatload of polish!
Finally, finally, finally!
Softwaaaaare version seven point oh! Where my System of a Down heads at? Already listening to Toxicity using Albums on their Macs running Sequoia 15.3 or later? Fantastic!
Yes, the day has finally arrived. The release of Albums 7.0 brings the long-awaited Mac app, a Liquid-Glassy UI refresh, and a hell of a lot of polish, bug fixes, and performance enhancements. Can I tell you about some of it? Okay, cool.
The Mac App
To paraphrase the great John Darnielle, the most remarkable thing about Albums on the Mac is that it’s Albums, and that it’s on the Mac. The app you know and love, now available on — and optimized for — the platform it has always been meant to be on.
I actually don’t have too much more to say about it than that, weirdly. It does all the things Albums does, just on the computer now. Sure, it took the last six months of active work, plus the planning, groundwork-laying, and experimentation of the last five years to get to this point, but now that we’re here it just feels so natural to sit down at my computer and resume whatever I was just listening to on my phone, like it’s always been possible.
Let’s see, I suppose there are a handful of Mac-only “features,” if you want to call them that. There’s a MiniPlayer window inspired by the iOS app’s now playing screen. You can also open the queue as its own window. There’s a bunch of new functionality in the app’s menu bar, including commands and keyboard shortcuts to control playback and take actions on the now playing album or song.
The Mac app is available at no additional cost. Toss another dumb business decision on the pile, I guess. Your Albums Premium subscription (or lifetime unlock) is shared across all platforms, so if you’re already a subscriber, just hit the Restore Purchase button on the paywall in the Mac app and you’ll be all set. More than I want to close the gap between the time I spend on Albums and the financial return I see on that time, I want it to be accessible to everyone. But hey, I wouldn’t complain if you left a tip in app or chose one of the optional higher-payment subscription tiers!
UI Refresh
As was directed from Cupertino on high, I spent a good chunk of the summer turning rounded rectangles into capsules and reducing the legibility of my user interface. Er, I mean… embracing Liquid Glass. Okay folks, we sure do have fun here at Music App Stuff, don’t we? Joking aside, I was grateful for the opportunity to take a pass through every screen and give everything a fresh coat of paint, and I think things are looking pretty darn good. How about them glassy tags?
And my goodness were there a lot of decisions to make about how each screen should behave on the Mac! What should be its own window? A modal? An inspector panel? New jargon for a new platform. Gotta take the buttons out of top-of-screen toolbars and tuck ‘em down there in the bottom-trailing corner.
There are hundreds of conditionals in the code aimed at tweaking things to be more Mac-like, which must make Albums one of the most Mac-assed Mac apps of all time, right? Nope! Some of you may be able to sniff out that this is a Mac Catalyst app, meaning at its core it’s an iOS app customized to run on the Mac rather than an app written directly for macOS. That’s where we’re headed, but there’s a good chunk of arduous refactoring needed before we can get there. Until then, please forgive some Catalyst quirks and limitations (I am so annoyed it doesn’t remember the app window size and position!), and I’ll keep chipping away at the rough edges, deal?
Polish, Enhancements, and Bug Fixes
And now, gather round for a dramatic reading of the change log. No, I won’t put you through that (though I will remind you that you can view the full change log from the app’s Settings screen). However, I’d like to recognize a few notables here.
First, my white whale, my muse, the bug that eluded me for months: albums where you have manually changed the release date no longer have their release dates mysteriously reset sometimes. Would you believe that the one code path I kept saying couldn’t possibly be the issue ended up being the issue?
Next, I’m just thrilled to announce that Apple finally brought native support for sectionIndexTitles to SwiftUI Lists. What does that mean? That means that you no longer have to put up with (or email me about) my janky, never-quite-right, self-rolled version of the scrubby letters that go along the right side of collection lists in the library. Hooray!
How about a weird-as-hell one? I am a sucker for a weird text encoding problem, and this version includes a fix for an issue where apparently some Apple Music catalog items have zero-width Unicode spaces in their names and thus didn’t show up when searching for them. Zero-width Unicode spaces! Now we’re talking.
And finally, iCloud sync enhancements. Deep in the archives of this publication you will find the spooky tale of The Summer I Wrote My Own iCloud Sync Engine, featuring your protagonist going at least as mad as the guy in The Fall of the House of Usher, or whatever. That was 2021, and Albums has been using that engine ever since, give or take some minor improvements. Those first few weeks of testing the Mac app were not exactly the seamless sync between desktop and phone they needed to be, so it was time to descend yet again into the dank darkness of the iCloud sync engine.
Luckily I’m four-years’ worth of better at this whole thing, and it actually wasn’t so bad to make some significant reliability improvements. iCloud sync is now faster to sync changes across devices and more robust against weird things happening. It’s been weeks without a weird sync thing happening for me!
Final Thoughts
So there you have it: Albums 7.0, the Mac app, the culmination of a five-year dream. This was the longest-running goal I’ve ever had. Check it off the list. So how do I feel now? Pull the string on my back and I’ll do my “the desktop music player is sacred” spiel. As you can imagine, this is a very meaningful moment for me. I’m also, frankly, spent! Like a marathoner straggling across the finish line. I’m glad it’s over, that’s for sure. Wasn’t sure I’d make it!
I deeply appreciate your time reading this, your support of the app, and any proselytizing you find yourself able to do on behalf of The Albums Lifestyle. Review the app on the App Store, maybe post about it somewhere. Tell a friend in real life, if you have any of those.
Okay, bye bye. Happy Albumsing!
Airplay works with the App "Airfoil" just fine. I use that one to hear "Albums" on all my Airplay speakers.
Now a Remote-App for Albums would be nice....
New to the app and love it - one question - I know it doesn’t update metadata (play counts in ITunes for example), but does it count towards plays for Apple Music Replay?