Music App Stuff #13: Introducing Albums 5.0!

A redesign, song shuffle, and more

Daaaaaaang long time no talk! What makes me think I can come crawling back to your inbox like this? Well, technically the fact that you haven’t unsubscribed to Music App Stuff. Let’s assume that’s because you are the type of person who would be interested to know that Albums 5.0 is out now. Great news: Albums 5.0 is out now!

I don’t take changing that first number lightly. 3 → 4 brought support for the Apple Music catalog, 2 → 3 introduced the tab-based layout and is the skeleton of what the app is today, and 1 → 2 made the app, uhh, usable.

What’s so great about 5.0? Well, how about a major redesign and the ability to shuffle songs? If that doesn’t do it for you, no doubt being able to add text notes to individual listening sessions in your Listening History will. But I suppose we’ll start with the redesign.

The Redesign

I cannot tell you how long I have been wanting to redesign the Quick Collection experience. Quick Collections let you make custom collections of albums using a powerful (but previously confusing) filtering system. Since introducing them in 3.0 I’ve alternately gotten emails from people who create even more complicated collections than me, and from people who find them inscrutable. I’ve been sketching out solutions to this for a while, and I’m excited to finally ship the Collections tab. No need for too much ceremony; really it’s just the old Albums tab with a dock at the top that lets you toggle between your pinned Quick Collections. Thank goodness that horrible floating dock is finally gone.

The “Shuffle Albums” button has metamorphasized into the “All Albums” collection. The action itself now lives in a long-press menu with its old (“Play Next”/”Play Later”) and new (“Shuffle Songs”) friends. If you’re one of the power users already using Quick Collections, I hope you’ll find this to be as big an upgrade to the experience as I do. If you haven’t played with Quick Collections, there’s never been a better time to try, since the interface for configuring filters has also been overhauled.

The March of Progress

What else? There are new swipe actions for tagging and adding to the queue throughout the app, like on the Release Feed and in Listening History screens. You can long press collections in the Library view for a menu of actions like on the Quick Collection dock.  If you have an Apple Music subscription and/or last.fm account linked, the Now Playing screen now has a button to let you “Love” the currently playing track. Oh, right, and there’s also an entirely new iPad app design, replete with a respectable sidebar and MiniPlayer rather than the old tab view. More to come on the iPad front throughout the 5.x cycle.

Song Shuffle

Let me make one thing perfectly clear. The ideal unit of musical experience is the album. My belief in that today is as unwavering as the day I decided to name this app Albums, which people with marketing backgrounds sometimes feel compelled to tell me is objectively a bad name. But as the Quick Collections upgrades came to life, I found myself thinking “you know, for someone less dogmatic than me, it might be pretty neat to be able to shuffle songs from a collection.” So now, you can choose to do that if you want to. More power to you. I’m not the vibe police. Song listening sessions are tracked in your Listening History, but aren’t included in any statistics.

Session Tagging and Notes

Certain albums bring you back to certain moments every time you think about them. I was listening to a lot of Ezra Furman working on this update, and I always think about how her album Twelve Nudes was playing on a long and scenic drive during a vacation to Colorado my wife and I took a few years ago. I’ve imported my last.fm history, so that listen is in Albums. Now it’s tagged “Colorado 2019” and there’s a little note on the particular session that says “pretty mountains.” Tagging a session automatically tags the album, and the tag is displayed in that album’s play history.

Lossless/Dolby Icons

If a tree falls in the forest and you can actually tell the difference between a lossless and lossy recording of it, do you really need the indicator showing you the audio quality in the first place? I kid, I kid. For iOS 16 users, Lossless/Hi-Res Lossless/Dolby Atmos indicators are now shown on album pages, and the Now Playing screens displays the current quality at the bottom. If you don’t want to see those icons, there’s a setting in Settings -> Apple Music to turn them off.

Grab Bag

• The Shuffle Scheduler is now available in the menu for any collection with more than 25 albums. If you’re unfamiliar with the Shuffle Scheduler, it’s a way to generate a queue of an exact duration. I wrote about it more in Music App Stuff #4 (then called Albums The App The Newsletter).

• You can pull to refresh the Collections tab on iOS 16. Watching the albums fly around and reshuffle is kind of fun.

  

  A choppy gif of a grand old time

Okay friends, that does it for this one. Thanks for using Albums. Maybe tell someone about it or leave a review on the App Store. Or both!