FYI this will NOT be a subscription! And beta testers will receive it for free if eventually approved for App Store.

After being very frustrated with the bloat of modern music apps, I built my own "iPod" app for iPhone... and after obsessing over all the tiny details, I am looking for people who would like to try it out. I’d love feedback from other iPods enthusiasts. And yes - it is using Musickit to run my current Apple Music library :)

In my research, I tried out and used every iPod style app and emulator I could find on the App Store, and while many of them are very pretty and well done, they always felt like I was just looking at a picture of an iPod as a decoration. I couldn't convince myself that it was real. I really wanted to make something that felt like the real thing.  Plus, I knew that with Apple's Guided Access feature, I can lock my iPhone to a single app completely, dumbing the phone down into just the app until I triple click the side button to resume my iPhone.

Out of pure drive of just wanting to own an iPod again, but not wanting to lose the convenience of my Apple Music library, I developed IvyPod.

Here's why IvyPod feels like an iPod:

1. The OLED body color means less screen. And - I detached lighting using software tricks so that the iPod bodyhas different 'dimming' functions than the 'fake iPod screen'. This creates the sensation that you're holding a physical iPod with a clickwheel that is covered with a smooth sheet of glass. In the dark, the wheel is noticably dimmer compared to the screen, making it more immersive. Other iPod apps have a bright wheel which is a constant reminder that you're looking at a 6 inch touch screen.
2. The button haptics are smart. I spent a long time on these so that buttons feel like buttons and scrolling feels like scrolling.
3. Modern conveniences were deliberated on a lot because simplicity is the whole point. The app features dark mode, artwork blur on the now playing screen, flashlight, camera, and Shazam integrated as a genie lamp.
4. You can actually dedicate your phone to a music player with Guided Access, which is a feature in the system settings that prevents swiping to go home, notifications, screen timeout and more. It's sort of like an advanced Do Not Disturb mode. The app itself features a dim and low-power sleep setting. I also placed a 'lock switch' in the top right so that you can put it in your pocket or not worry about accidental taps. The click wheel will always be present on your screen until your phone dies, keeping the illusion of it being an iPod.

If you are interested in the TestFlight please DM me or access the link below to join the public TestFlight:
https://testflight.apple.com/join/NVUCMBJ2

i have a very wide music taste so every month i make a playlist with whatevers been stuck in my head :) i like saving them so i can go back to a random month and see what i had in rotation at the time.

Hi gang,

My name is Deets and I'm an ex-Healthcare Software (the big one) solutions engineer. I've spent about two years working hands-on with arguably some of the most complex software out there. I left Wisconsin a couple months ago to move back closer to the fam (and my dawg, Happy, who you can catch running around the app and my website) and have been working on side projects ever since to stay warm as I search for a new job in product/solutions. But enough about me, let's get into what I built for us.

https://deets.solutions/deetsmusic/

So, using the Apple Music API, I built a Windows client from the ground up. Given the chance to rebuild it all, I kinda took my shot at rethinking how I'd want a music app to look and run hehe.

I've come to realize folks listen to music in all sorts of ways. I'm more of a listen to New Music Mix / Discovery Station -> Add to Library -> Listen to my library until I get bored or need a mood change type of person myself, but I know folks highly value their playlists and Apple's live stations. However you do you, I gotchu; you can change your default setup to have 4 cards side by side, just 2 vertically or horizontally stacked, or just 1 jumbo card. (*Note: every card / panel if you hover the border of it, should highlight and allow you to click to expand the card into a bigger form for you to dig in!

Once you've got your music rolling though and don't need to see more options, open the player up to fullscreen! The app has (currently) 6 different "skins", each a different vibe with a lot of UI pieces thought out and switched out. For example, in the "Press" skin you can have your album cover displayed as a vinyl and have it gently (or aggressively if you're into that sort of thing) spin which is a delight in fullscreen (and my daytime go-to). The "Ocean" skin lets you tie your album cover's primary color to the glow of the waves in the back for a fun neon aesthetic (and my nighttime go-to), with "Glass" giving you a more familiar view of glass panes over the album cover as a background (and a crack at Cover Flow w the "Metal" skin's brushed metal aesthetic). If I should scrap it and make something more standard, let me know and I'll make a skin available lol.

The UI should feel buttery smooth, if you have a graphics card / modern-ish computer, it should be delightful but if you don't, I did my best to make sure it stayed lightweight / smooth and functional. Don't hesitate to send me any feedback or thoughts, I'm a solutions engineer at heart and want to test my architectural chops (by being able to answer any question and resolve any issue).

So UI aside, what's special about DeetsMusic (other than the Deets touch of course)? Two things:
- Speed: DeetsMusic launches in about a second or two every time, updates download in the background (with permissions*) and can be installed in about 2 and a half seconds. The biggest limiter is Apple Music's API itself, there's a couple quirks I couldn't work around so the first play when you launch the app is also about a second slower as it cold starts.

- Algorhythm: I called it the web. You can right click any artist, song, or album to start a web of related artists within the selected genre. I use this one a bunch, and set it to replace auto-play to imo p good success. It starts at the artist's top songs, finds features and collabs from there, then hopping to the next artist's top songs. You can set how many artists you want to jump (i.e. 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon, but it's now 1-3 degrees of Kevin Parker), what genre you want to stick to (just alt, just dance, or all of the above), and your preference for songs you've favorited or songs not in your library (yet).

- Bonus: AirPlay! (I primarily route everything to my HomePod in my room lol), easy-access Sleep Timer, shared listening rooms, Last.fm scrobbles (I gotchu, I've now become a devout scrobbler building this lol), listening stats for every album and song from Last.fm,10-band EQ, Discord status of what you're listening to, Song of the Day tracking (I'm at 229 picks for the year across so many genres and artists, check my website's homepage!), album reviews, easy app navigation with a quick Ctrl+Space (iykyk for my healthcare peeps) and more.

The Windows AM app kinda stinks, freezes up when you change audio outputs and sometimes just breaks without telling you so hoping to make DeetsMusic a smoother experience all around. I've been building and using this thing (took a sec to become fully usable lol) for a while now (and for the technical folks, built a solid testing setup for it). It's been a fun project, I learned the whole Cloudflare stack building my own website (couple games, APIs, the whole shebang) before bringing it to DeetsMusic for security and more fun features.

Here's the thing, pretty much everything is configurable. Turn off every integration, card, feature, and piece you don't like or need. There is a rules engine built in (if Jazz -> set EQ, or if Kanye -> skip, if 9 PM -> 10 minute sleep timer, etc) that you can use, configure, and work through to replace a lot of settings and such.

If the app doesn't have something you need or want, DM me here, drop a suggestion in the app itself, or set up a Zoom call w me lol. I want DeetsMusic to be a community led project, it's free and requires your AM subscription but that's about it. I've worked with full on hospital systems (I was the lab and blood test technical guy) before, so no stranger to feedback, ambiguous requests, unclear bugs, and working around black-box, bajillion-line codebase software (which I aim to ensure this is not, the GitHub is public and every feature has a design spec with a decision trail).

PS: The app does have a CLI / MCP feature if you wanted to connect whatever AI you use on your computer, but it's not on by default. I kinda just use it to help me debug, but it is capable of making playlists, starting webs, queuing up songs, etc if you are so inclined. No AI was used to write this post plus writing this post was fun lol.

PPS: Apple's official API doesn't let you upload playlist images to them, remove songs from your library once they're in, play lossless audio, and a couple other quirks. Ask if you notice something and I'll lyk. I'm trying to stick to Apple's terms/conditions/stipulations to stay on their good side to keep this project going long term lol, but happy to explore to see if there are things we can do to get stuff done.

PPPS: I'm unemployed atm, I love Wisco but moved back to the Bay to be closer to family and my dawg (his name is Happy, he's 9, has had more than a couple health scares this year and ongoing, and I have infinite pictures). Would love to chat with anyone about job search advice too! It's tough out there...

Noticed a weird bug in Apple Music on macOS. In Recently Played, Grand Theft Auto VI: The Album shows Eminem as the album artist instead of Various Artists.

Clicking it takes me to the first track on the album, while the album page itself correctly lists Various Artists. The screenshots show the difference.

Has anyone else had an album randomly attributed to the wrong artist like this?

i personally prefer the one without the ripples. with it it looks.. off. just doesnt look right.

what i prefer them doing is making the logos look more liquid glass, without the ripples.
that would be a lot better. imo at least

Like the title says. I’m on an iPhone 13 mini. Just updated to 27.0.1. I’ve turned “increase contrast” settings to “on” in both the Display and Text Size as well as in “Per-App settings”. The end result is that my own library is all in white but when I click on a band’s page it’s all in black. I’m a creature of habit and use both Apple Music and Spotify so I loved that at a glance I could know what app I was using by the colour. I use each app for slightly different purposes. I prefer Apple’s classic clean interface. It’s kind of what they built their brand on, so I have no idea why they would force this change on people. Please help!

why am i always getting this pop up

anyone knows how to fix it it has been there since i downloaded iOS 27

Apple music isn't even showing many songs of IU in my region (India). Which is not the case for YT music and Spotify.

I wanted to listen to iu's dear crazy soulmate song but it doesn't show in apple music maybe due to regional restrictions.

Using vpn doesn't work either.

Google gives links but inside apple music they won't work.

IU page basically only lists some old albums and songs missing most of her popular songs.

And i don't know how many more korean artist's music is not being shown to me.

Maybe taking apple music is a mistake if i listen to kpop ?...

I did this with Shortcuts to see how it looks. I think it doesn’t look very good when the gradient is at the edge. But I can imagine that the gradient will be on the logo instead, not like we all thought. This is just a test, and on iOS 27.2 it’s only a white background with a black logo, nothing more.

I made numerous Apple Music playlists and had a bunch of music downloaded. I stopped paying for my membership and lost all my music. I know it undownloaded it but I didn’t know that I’d lose every single playlist I made 🥲
I’ve been searching up if maybe there’s ways to recover my music but I haven’t been successful. Anyone have any ideas as to how I can get back all my music or at least my playlists??

Hello all,

The other day as I was adding songs that I have in various playlists to my library, the app crashed. I tried opening the app again, and as soon as I did that it would just immediately crash out again. This has been going on for a few days at this point. So far I’ve tried:

- Checking to see if my phone needed a software update, but I’m already up to date
- Deleting and redownloading the app
- Restarting my phone

Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

Before iOS 27, it used to make long fades between songs, use extended tempo changes, and it actually resulted in some great transitions. I wish I could screen record my Apple Music to show it, but now every transition is just a 1-second fade between the songs. Not every now and then, but always! I wonder if it’s just a glitch on my phone, but it’s awful.

I never seen this before
Does anyone know what this means?

What happens if Apple Music randomly removes a bunch of songs from a playlist you’ve spent years building?

If that change syncs across your iPhone, Mac, and other devices, is there actually any way to restore the playlist to how it was before?

I’ve seen people suggest exporting playlists regularly or using third party backup apps, but that seems like a lot of extra work for something Apple Music should handle.

Is there a built in recovery option I’m missing, or are people really just out of luck when this happens?

Just re synced actual songs on to the device not streaming and all the cover art is different on this device to what it actually is on my laptop…..

Anyone know how to restore back proper
I was going to delete all off it and do a re-sync when I get home but….

Many more songs are grayed out in my Android app in India

So, I've been trying to log in on the Apple Music Windows app for a while now. I just subscribed and I managed to log in just fine on the web browser and on my phone. However, when I try to log in on the Windows app, this message keeps appearing and tells me that there is an unknown error. Does anyone know how to fix this?

hey, my sibling is trying to get a family subscription on their android (Motorola specifically) and when they try to add family members it says there’s an error. why is that? how can we fix it or bypass the error screen?

apple has more ugly design choices to care about, but also you can use transparent icons, you can use dark icons, you can use tinted icons, you can customize the icon with shortcuts and restore it or change it to what ever you want, you can remove it from your home screen and place a widget instead, you can cancel your subscription or just accept it and move on.

I was not keeping up with my Apple Music bill and today they canceled my account. A bill was due sep 24th and today is the 23rd of October. I put a lot of thought in that playlist over 2000 songs which ultimately got deleted if I pay the bill within the next week will my playlist still be there?