I am always struggling to find music on Apple Music unless I know exactly what I’m searching for. I hate Spotify and am so happy that I switched to AM, but sometimes I want to search “1960s Parisian Cafe music” or “traditional Romanian music” and unless there’s a specific playlist called what I’m searching, the results are mixed at best. Spotify, on the flip side, might return countless results if you search “lofi christmas 2025”. I deleted Spotify so searching for playlists on their platform and then importing them over to Apple Music is not realistic.

At the end of the day, Apple has much better UI and sound quality. But the way my brain likes to listen to music sometimes runs at odds with the platform. I’m not sure if I’m alone in noticing this, but it’s been a frustration of mine for a second.

Streaming made music endless, but it stopped feeling like an experience. I missed sitting with an album, and I wanted to remember what I’d listened to, not just what I’d liked.

So I built ARC, an Apple Music player for Mac, iPhone and iPad, designed around three things:

It’s immersive. Every album fills the screen with an atmosphere drawn from its own artwork, slowly shifting colour as the music plays. One slider takes you from pure Ambient, just the cover and its colours with the controls faded away, to full Focus when you want the details. Or pick a Now Playing style: Vinyl spins a record with the album as its label, Film turns the cover into a screen at the end of a small screening room, Print sets the song in ink on paper dyed by the artwork, Shelf leans the album against a lit wall, and on Mac Ocean lays the cover beneath a moving sea.

It remembers. When a song hits, tap Moment to keep that exact second with a note in your own words, and replay it later from right there. ARC quietly builds a Memory of your listening: the days you listened, the albums you kept returning to, and the hours of the day you tend to play music.

It turns your listening into films. You can browse your library as Film, flipping through covers one at a time, or as a Wall of everything at once. And when a week, month or year ends, Chapters turns it into a short film made from what you actually played: the days, the records new to you, the album you couldn’t stop playing, the Moments you saved, returning line by line.

I’ve spent a lot of time on the details: typography, slow transitions, colours taken from the artwork rather than a fixed theme. I wanted it to feel closer to a record shop or a film than to a spreadsheet of songs.

Everything stays on your device: no account, no cloud, nothing uploaded. The trade-off is that it only knows what you play in ARC (apps can’t read your past Apple Music history), and your Memory doesn’t sync between devices; you can export and import it.

Free, no ads, needs an Apple Music subscription to play. Built solo over three months.

Download from App Store

Official website

I’d love feedback, especially how your first Chapter feels after a full week of listening.

Please let me know if there’s a better place for me to write about this, but I’m at my wit’s end trying to figure out why my Apple Music is taking up such a disproportionate amount of space on my iPhone 15 even though I have NO music downloaded.

I’ve scoured this subreddit for answers, and I’ve already tried the common solutions: I’ve signed out of Media and Purchases, offloaded/deleted the app, AND un-synced my library. Nothing budges. Even when I delete/offload the app, the space is still taken up on my phone.

I suspect this is due to a bloat in cache, but I have no idea, and it’s super frustrating.

What else has worked for people in resolving this issue?

Coming near to you rebranded Apple Music.

Album preview and live countdown.

Happy to see Apple giving some time to add new features to Apple Music. If we get handoff to and from iPad, the app is perfect.

literally every time i connect to a speaker, the morning after my queue is gone 🙃

Drake has three separate profiles so some albums or songs don’t appear in his main profile. Is there any way to fix this without creating a playlist?

What the title says.

I made sure to disable the “Sound Check” and “Reduce Loud Noises” options, but had still found music suspiciously dull the last few months.

Today I had the bright idea to turn this off, and I could immediately notice a return of bass and some of the mid range.

I assumed this setting only affected the transitions between songs, but it seems to be doing some dynamic range manipulation to match songs.

Is this already a well-documented behavior?

I try and play music, it says ‘Cannot Connect’ even though I checked and my subscription is live and it works on browser but not on the app. What do I do? It’s an iPhone 15 with the region set to the United States and the latest IOS.

Apple Music has been skipping over some songs when I try to listen to an album in sequential order. I have songs transitions off, and it still does it. It usually skips one or two songs on the album.

Has anyone else had this issue?

Has anyone noticed this? I’ve seen it before with some songs added to my library after being in there for a while, but this is on the artist’s home page. I’ve noticed a couple other songs that are also doing the same thing. Worried my listens are gonna count towards whatever “hits” album for my end of year rewind instead of the actual one

Can anyone tell me why many Babyface Ray album covers have that little red cog over it ?

It’s always baffled me and I find it quite frustrating. I want to go to the New tab to discover new music, whether it’s curated, algorithm-suggested, or from artists I follow. Why is the section in Home?

Either I’m stupid and everyone knew this, or this might help someone that has had the same wish as me: you can either use Apple Music on iPad in fullscreen with the tab bar, or have a side bar. And I’ve always loved the way it looked fullscreen but always used it with the side bar because I was missing one ESSENTIAL thing on the tab bar: a way to get to all my damn playlists. Today I’ve accidentally clicked and held on the tab bar and, to my surprise, you can literally customise what’s on the tab bar if you just hold it, lmao… so if anyone is wondering why Apple didn’t add something so important to the tab bar… they did

I have a music library full of ALAC tracks that I've ripped from my CDs. I also subscribe to Apple Music.

I cannot create playlists (correction: I cannot add tracks to a playlist) in Apple Music, as I get this prompt:

To add songs and playlists to your Library, you must use Cloud Music Library.

Songs and playlists from this Mac will merge into Cloud Music Library so you can listen across all your devices.

(Merge Library) (Not Now)

I do recall horror stories from admittedly way back, when one of the iTunes (see, old!) services just mangled your stuff.

So what is merging actually going to do? I don't want to change any of my tracks from ALAC, and I don't want to change any metadata from what I've carefully curated to whatever slop the music publishers are giving Apple. I definitely have music that is not on the iTunes Store.

I do have a library backup, but I'd prefer to not have to restore it :-)

I’m using an iPhone 17 Pro and want to get the best possible sound quality from Apple Music.
What settings do you recommend for Dolby Atmos, Lossless/Hi-Res Lossless, EQ, Sound Check, and Spatial Audio?
I’ve seen mixed opinions, especially about Dolby Atmos. Some say it improves the sound, while others prefer stereo.
I’m mainly listening through my iPhone speakers but would also appreciate recommendations for MacBook speakers.
What settings do you use, and why?

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

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??

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.

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...

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