Do you have an album collection of dozens to thousands of albums? Does the next song of an album already start playing in your head when one finishes? Longplay is for you.
Longplay presents a beautiful view of the album artworks of the (near) complete albums in your music collection. It let's you rediscover forgotten favorites or just play the music you love, and explore it with various smart sort options:
- Orderliness: by artist, then by album
- Addiction: by amount of time spent listening
- Brightness: by the primary color of the album artwork
- Negligence: by the time it’s been since you’ve last listened to the album, weighted by the rating
- Recency: by date added
- Memory: by last played
- Stars: by the rating you’ve provided for each song
- Random: a new order, every time you tap it
You can organize your albums into collections, which sync across your devices.
Infinite album shuffle let's you stay in the flow, with smart shuffle depending on your current collection or sort order.
It comes with a home screen widget that displays the top albums by your nominated sort order. On the larger widget, tap an album to play it, on the smallest it doubles as a "Feeling lucky" button to start playback of one of them.
It supports CarPlay, Siri, Shortcuts, and Spotlight.t supports CarPlay, Siri, and Shortcuts.
It works well with Apple Music, music purchased from iTunes or synced manually.
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Important: Longplay does not ship with any music included, it is instead a player for your music library - be it from Apple Music, iTunes or your synced music. It provides a filtered view of just the albums of which you have all or most of the songs, as well as your playlists; thus focusing on your album collection without any singles or albums where you only have very few songs.
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Tap an item to play (or pause). Long tap for additional options, such as adding to your album queue or to a collection.
It works with libraries big and small, and besides regular albums it also handles compilation albums and playlists.
Comes with Shortcuts actions to play a random top album by a defined sort order, or a random album, optionally filtered by artist or genre. All of that with Longplay's logic that makes sure that it's an album for which you have all or most songs.
It is compatible with iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. Fully VoiceOver accessible.
I hate how Apple Music/streaming culture has led me to litter my library with individual songs from artists I generally don’t like and care about. This app is fantastic in that it filters out the trash and brings you only the album — which is a shorthand for music that actually matters. All good and definitely worth the money (could easily charge that yearly, and should, maybe!). However, I would want to see a “Play Next” & “Play Later” addition. Often I’m already playing music from the Apple Music app, and browsing Longplay I’d want to be able to add to that day’s list. Also a “show album in Apple Music” button would be great — ie a link back to the same album in Apple Music where you could then delete, etc.
Unusable
wraithequestrain
Update: Decided to give this another try after some time, and of course it’s still disappointing. Continues to be unusable and a complete waste of money. Starts loading my music library and then just crashes. Over and over. It’s a toy. If you’ve got like 10 songs in your library it might work, but it doesn’t work with any decently-size one. Exactly the target audience for a non-first-party music app, and this app just doesn’t work. Hyped up and useless. Save your money and keep using the Music app. For all its faults and warts, it at least loads and plays music most of the time. Old review: It has a very difficult time loading all the music in my library and the UI is constantly frozen and my device gets very hot when that happens, and then crashes. I’ve had to completely uninstall and reinstall it several times. Even when it’s supposedly done loading everything, it doesn’t actually show everything I have in my music library. It constantly crashes and freezes. I don’t have Apple Music, I’m using iTunes Match and all of my music is downloaded locally on my device, so it should be pretty straightforward. Seems like a small hobby app that can probably work with a handful of items in one’s library but it has *not* been tested with decently-sized libraries and is definitely not for anyone who actually cares about listening to music. I despise subscriptions but this is exactly why they are preferred because when coming across duds like this app, the developers would have some incentive to fix things, whereas there’s no incentive here as I’ve already paid for the app. Disappointing.
Developer Response
Hi there,I’ve made significant under-the-good optimisations lately that specifically address issues with large libraries. Hope that makes it a better experience for you, too. Cheers, Adrian
I’m re-discovering music I forgot I had
venice90291
Got this on a recommendation from someone on Mastodon, and it’s a really novel way of reconnecting with your music library by putting everything on display all at once. Artwork, not text. Plus: sorting based on “Addiction”, “Brightness”, “Negligence” etc. It’s a really unique _album_ based approach. Loving it.Another plus: I found one reproducible crash almost immediately after purchase, which the developer fixed nearly overnight. Overall, well worth it. Really enjoying this app.
Bad performance with large libraries
GianniTriCity
This app is so slow as to be unusable. I’ve *never* been able to make it play a single album on AirPlay, but it’s sometimes happy to mistakenly play one locally if my finger brushes against the screen. (My personal record is *three times* last night!) The UI looks pretty when the app finally stops “Updating albums…”—it’s a long delay every time—and then I can only pick an album from the UI to play manually on Apple Music—and *then* the app updates its UI to show that, yes, yes, that album is now playing. It’s something, but not much. I have a very large music library music library. That may cause my problems, but the problems are awful. I just tried again to play an album, gave it plenty of time, but nothing. I switched apps and wrote this review, and still nothing. I just went back and the app is back to “Updating albums…”.
Developer Response
Thanks for the constructive feedback. The handling of large libraries has been much improved in recent updates. It would be great if you can give that a try and I hope it now works for you, too. If you have further issues please feel free to update your review or get in touch at words@longplay.app.Cheers, Adrian
New:
- Adds setting to disable up-sizing of playing album
Fixed:
- Tweak colour extraction from albums to better avoid poor contrast, and vibrant text on vibrant background
- When getting random albums via Shortcuts and AppleScript, return a new set each time
- Make search more relaxed regarding colons and dashes in titles
- Show artwork on album wall widget quicker after refresh or clearing cache
- Fixes handling of non-square album artwork
- Fixes missing text in Track Listens settings
- Fixes possible scrobbling mismatch of tracks in a playlists
- Fixes an issue where temporary files could accumulate and eat up disk space
- Performance improvements
Version 2.5.8
The developer, Adrian Schoenig, indicated that the app’s privacy practices may include handling of data as described below. For more information, see the developer’s privacy policy .
Data Not Linked to You
The following data may be collected but it is not linked to your identity:
Identifiers
Usage Data
Privacy practices may vary, for example, based on the features you use or your age. Learn More
The developer indicated that this app supports the following accessibility features. Learn More
