Univershuffle 1.1: CarPlay, New Filtering Options, and last.fm Support!

Plus my totally-gonna-happen WWDC wishlist

If I am being completely honest—which, per the sacred covenant I have made with the readers of Music App Stuff, I am sworn to be—I have to admit that my Univershuffle usage had petered out a bit a couple of months post-launch. Album zealot that I am, I found myself back in the warm embrace of full-album listening pretty much full-time, plus chipping away at my podcast queue on walks. But with Albums 6.1 out the door, I was excited to turn my attention back to Univershuffle and add some features and quality-of-life improvements that have brought the app back into regular rotation for me.

Univershuffle 1.1 is out now, and here in this very newsletter, I’ll give an overview of what’s new, including the one new feature that CHANGED EVERYTHING ABOUT HOW I USE THE APP (okay, I guess I see how writing clickbait headlines could be fun), reflect a bit on 20 years of being on last.fm, and run through some items on my wishlist for Apple’s upcoming WWDC event.

What’s New In Univershuffle

First thing’s first: the litany of features. Univershuffle 1.1 introduces a CarPlay app, adds new filtering options, brings last.fm scrobbling support, and introduces a new, starless alternate app icon. Let’s chat a bit about each, shall we?

CarPlay App

The people, they listen to music in the car. And so many of them have cars with CarPlay! They send me emails saying so. I have literally never driven a car with CarPlay. The USB adaptor in my 2009 Honda Civic works most of the time, and when it doesn’t I just go looking for a radio station playing “Semi Charmed Life” by Third Eye Blind, although I will also settle for “How’s It Gonna Be” by Third Eye Blind or even “Graduate” or “Jumper” by Third Eye Blind.

That didn’t stop me from making an Albums CarPlay app a few years back, so I fired up my trusty Kindle Fire that screams ads in my face, hooked it up to a janky adaptor I bought that somehow converts it into a CarPlay receiver, and put together a Univershuffle CarPlay app. The CarPlay app is deceptively fully-featured, if I do say so myself. From the home page, you get just one button: Resume. But once you’re listening to music, the Now Playing screen offers just about all of the functionality you’ve come to love (or perhaps vaguely remember) from the main app.

Awooooo, look at all those buttons!

Tap the “i” button to show the album, genre(s), year, and country for this song. You can tap any individual genre, year, or country to add a filter for it (whoops, spoilers, you can filter decades and countries now too, more on that in a sec!). If you’ve configured a default action that adds a song or album to a particular playlist or your library, the lightning bolt button will show up in CarPlay, giving you easy access to that functionality. Finally, the “…” menu reveals an action menu with more options, just like in the main app, and the star button lets you rate the current song you’re listening to.

New Filtering Options

Univershuffle is about entropy and the joy of random discovery, but there’s, let’s say, a tension between drinking from the firehose of raw human creativity and hearing a bunch of shit you don’t like. The 1.0 version launched with the ability to filter out particular genres from your discovery, and 1.1 brings two more filtering options: decades and countries.

I thought long and hard about whether to offer either of these features, but ultimately I think they strike the right balance of allowing you to gently guide the random discovery without totally stripping out the chance you might stumble upon something outside of your comfort zone that resonates with you. Filtering out single years seemed a little fiddly, so I landed on the ability to filter out decades instead.

Every year, an enormous amount of new music is uploaded to streaming services. In this new dystopian hellscape of AI-generated everything, a good chunk of it is made by soulless robots. Here’s where I deliver on the clickbait headline: filtering out the 2020s decade totally transformed Univershuffle for me. I’m getting so much more interesting and varied music now that the deluge of songs from the last few years aren’t eligible. And with regard to filtering countries… I don’t know, don’t be weird and xenophobic about it. I’m not using it, but I could imagine why someone would want to and now you can.

One last note about filters — the stricter your filters, the more likely it is that Univershuffle will have trouble finding songs to play. There’s a new alert pop up in the app for when that happens. I’d still love to bring more specific discovery to the app down the line (play me random Serbian Folk Music from 1995-1998), but this isn’t that update. The intention here is still to shuffle all the music in the universe, lightly filtered to better suit your tastes.

last.fm Support

last.fm support just barely missed the cutoff for the 1.0 version, which gave me a not-insignificant amount of agita. For those not in the know, last.fm is a website that lets you track your music listening. Last month, I passed two wild milestones: 20 years on the site and 500,000 songs listened. The site has been part of my entire adult life, and I consider it to be a minor miracle it’s still around. Some part of me lives in constant fear that one day CBS(!) will remember they own it and shutter it, which seems to me like the obvious thing to do.

Albums was already tightly-integrated with last.fm, including the ability to import your entire history (and free your deeply-personal data from its clutches), so why didn’t Univershuffle have scrobbling support at launch? Easy! The last.fm framework I wrote that powers the Albums integration is a heinous mess. It’s some of the earliest code I wrote for Albums back in 2019, and I had no freaking clue what I was doing. Add in the fact that the last.fm API itself has (putting it charitably) a bit of a user-hostile design—it just wasn’t feasible or reasonable to reuse my old, terrible (albeit working) code in Univershuffle.

So I bit the bullet and wrote a new last.fm framework, which now enables scrobbling in Univershuffle. Here’s to 20 more years!

A New Alternate App Icon

One of them has stars and one of them doesn’t. Take your pick!

I like the stars in the app icon. That’s why I chose it to be the app icon. But (some of) you, with your honed aesthetic sensibility and your minimalist bent, do not like the stars, and you want me to know it. You have sent me emails about it and you have left me negative reviews on the App Store about it. And me? I am capitulating.

I ain’t changing the default icon, but if you are so dang turnt about the stars, choose the icon without them from the Settings screen. That’s all there is to it. Both icons now support the single-color tinting introduced in iOS 18, which, in my brutish bad taste, is another thing I don’t understand why anyone would want to do. So that’s the weirdly contentious section about the new alternate icon.

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WWDC Wishlist

It’s almost June, which means it’s time for me to get my hopes that up that busy Apple engineers are gearing up to announce the specific things I want my apps to be able to do at their annual developer conference. My wishlist has been relatively unchanged over the last several years, but hey, hope springs eternal. Here’s what I’m hoping Apple announces next month. I’ve included the FB numbers of my requests for the ease of anyone reading this at Apple to address my needs specifically!

Access to Lyrics

FB13866088, FB13866145

My goodness would I like to be able to display lyrics in Albums and Univershuffle! I am a very lyric-focused person, and it galls me ever-so-gallingly that I can’t display them in my apps. Ideally these would be the same time-synced lyrics available in the built-in app, but I’d settle for plain text. I get the impression that there are licensing challenges here that make this pretty unlikely, but it’s here topping my list anyway.

Deleting Items from a User’s Library

FB10042390, FB9195700

Hope springs eternal...

You know, it’s not exactly the nuclear codes. Apple offers an API to add items to a user’s music library, but not one to remove items. I guess I see how it could be abused, but it seems a little silly to me not to allow third-party developers to do this. I’ve got all sorts of junk in my library that I leave there because the only way to delete it is one-by-one from the Apple Music app on the phone or, shudder, using the Apple Music desktop app. Let me make a bulk collection action in Albums!

Exposing advanced metadata properties and editing metadata

FB15323161, FB15322997, FB13866145

The Apple Music app (and iTunes before it) offers some power user functionality that I’d love to be able to officially support in Albums, such as setting custom sort names for albums and artists, as well as custom start and end times for songs. While we’re at it, imagine a world where Albums could actually change metadata for items in your library! If only the supercomputers in our pocket were powerful enough for such high-intensity computing.

macOS bug fixes

Albums Mac app mentioned! I still don’t feel good about releasing a macOS version of Albums because of a handful of major issues:

• Audio output gets staticky and choppy for 15-20 seconds every 5-15 minutes. This is, shall we say, not a great user experience. (FB13931797)

• The in-app AirPlay picker doesn’t work to route audio, so even if you choose another source, it’ll still play through the device speakers. You can work around this by setting the AirPlay target at the system level, but it’s not the ideal experience. (FB13934910)

• Play counts for played tracks don’t updates on other devices (FB13929518)

I hope to have some time this summer to be extra annoying about these bugs, so hopefully there’s some resolution and we find ourselves one step closer to our communal dream: Universal Healthcare World Peace Albums on the Mac.

Mmkay, pretty sure that does it for both the wishlist and the newsletter. Thanks, as always, for reading/listening/caring, and I’ll see you on the next one. Happy Univershuffling!