Longplay for Mac
Adrian Schönig (2023, via Nick Heer):
Longplay 1.0 was released in August 2020. I had used the app for years before that myself, but I didn’t know how it would be received by a wider audience. I loved the kind of feedback that I got which helped me distill the heart of the app: Music means a lot to people, and Longplay helps them reconnect with their music library in a way that reminds them of their old vinyl or CD collections. It’s a wall of their favourite albums that has been with them for many years or decades. It’s something personal. The UI very much focussed on that part of the experience, and I wanted to keep that spirit alive, keep the app fun, while adding features that people and myself found amiss.
The main idea behind 2.0 was to focus on the playing of music beyond a single album. 1.0 just stopped playback when you finished an album, but I wanted to stay in the flow – to either play an appropriate random next album or the next from a manually specified queue.
I am thrilled to be finally releasing Longplay for Mac today. Longplay is all about the joy of listening to entire albums and marvelling at their beautiful album artwork. It is built from the ground up for the Mac, with the familiar pretty album wall, a dedicated mini player, all the main features from iOS, plus Mac exclusives like AppleScript and a nifty MCP server.
[…]
Meanwhile, Apple announced in June 2023 that playback support for Apple Music tracks through MusicKit was coming to the Mac in macOS 14. I restarted work on the Mac app, and while it was working, I encountered pesky playback glitches, where Apple Music playback would often but not always start stuttering after a couple of tracks. I wouldn’t launch the app like that. However, the app worked reliable already for DRM-free tracks, which is how the “Early Access“ version of Longplay for Mac was born, as I knew some people who’d only or primarily use that (including myself).
On the glitches, I tried various workarounds that I could think of, kept lots of notes on when it happened and when it didn’t, filed a TSI (which got rejected due to no known workarounds), filed comprehensive radars including a demo app to reproduce, and reached out to Apple contacts. I did get some responses and am thankful for the support, but was still blocked. macOS 14 launched with the same glitches later in 2023. End of 2024, macOS 15 launched with the same issue still present.
I kept chipping away at the Mac app in the meantime, hoping that those glitches would be resolved at some stage. I focussed on the technical details, adding polish, hitting SwiftUI dead ends and opting AppKit in more places. Then, in late in 2024, CoverSutra relaunched for the Mac and it didn’t have the playback issue. I was stunned. So I dug in again and finally came across a workaround that worked for Longplay: Updating the dock icon every second.
It’s $6 (currently $2.99) for iOS and $25 for macOS.
However, the most interesting of all of Longplay’s automation integrations is its built-in MCP server. MCP is a protocol that allows AI chatbots like Claude to interact with apps. With Longplay’s MCP server, you can do things like create Collections and Smart Collections and queue albums for playback from inside a chatbot. What makes the integration so powerful is the ability to perform those actions with the sort of natural language requests that are the bread and butter of chatbots.
For example, the other day I asked Claude Sonnet 4 to compile a list of the top 100 alternative and indie albums of the ’80s. After consulting several sources, Claude generated a list, which I then asked it to use to create a Longplay Collection using my Apple Music library. Claude got to work and created my Collection after comparing its list with my Apple Music library for a couple of minutes.
Longplay is the first app I’ve tried that uses a built-in MCP server, and I’m sold. The combination of a chatbot’s research strength and Longplay’s actions makes its MCP integration a compelling way to explore your music.
I expect more and more developers to do this, especially now that Anthropic has a new file format and easier experience for Claude desktop extensions.
(Meanwhile, in Shortcuts, none of this is happening…)
Why isn’t the UI getting out of the way of the content by overlapping, obscuring and blurring the content?
Previously:
- Shortcuts in macOS Tahoe
- CoverSutra Is Back
- Model Context Protocol (MCP) Tools for Mac
- How Do You Request Music Using Siri?
- iOS Music Player Showcase, 2022
- Audion 4.0
- What’s Going on With Cesium
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Which albums are displayed?
Longplay's purpose is to make listening to full albums easier, so it displays those albums for which you have (nearly) every song. This is determined by the relative percentage, absolute number of songs you have of that album, and total duration of the songs you have.
I don’t have an Apple Music subscription, just local files, and am always scared these apps won’t work with them, but this idea was too cool not to try out.
Like with Halide, I’m pleasantly surprised to find it does work well with my own mp3s.
The “only shows nearly complete albums” is fantastic. I have way too many one-hot wonders cluttering up my library.
I realize this post was about the Mac version but thanks for the accidental iOS recommendation. Actually excited to try it in CarPlay.
> Why isn’t the UI getting out of the way of the content by overlapping, obscuring and blurring the content?
I chuckled.
"Why it took a while" resonates deeply. A tale of a man held back by a platform (and platform owner) in catastrophic disrepair:
- Hits walls with Apple's intern-polished "solutions" (Catalyst, SwiftUI).
- Hits walls with Apple DRM. Waits years for them to ship a solution to a problem they created.
- Files a bunch of bug reports. Apple's LeetCode Engineers don't know how to ship fixes, though.
- Finds a weird workaround. Can finally ship his app, years later.
Building apps shouldn't be like this!
Congrats to him for shipping. The MCP solution is neat.
John Appleseed nailed it. Doesn’t get more succinct than that.
How is it everyone in the world understands this except Alan Dye?
