Show HN: I wanted better offline music on the iPhone, so I made Doppler (opens in new tab)

There is a wealth of comment online and here on HN about the inadequacies of the native music app. If you are enjoying the iOS music app you probably dont:

- sync the library to a local machine

- have any songs in your library that are unavailable via streaming service

- use custom playlists that are organized on a desktop machine

- listen to music by Genre

- don’t mind authenticating all the time

You no longer have that banner("Sign up to Apple Music") everywhere. Since the streaming service was launched the Music app became unusuable.

>I sincerely cannot tell how this is different from the Music app that I already use on my iPhone other than the color-matching background stuff.

Especially since the Music app already does "the color-matching background stuff":

https://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/how-to-create-colore...

Oof. My first day back on HN in a while. Forgot how tough the crowd is around here!

My thoughts exactly.

> I can get my old MP3 files to the app without stupid iTunes sync? Does it support "File sharing" so the app is shown in iTunes and I can drag and drop my MP3 files to its storage?

That’s what I want to know too. My biggest problem is having iTunes in the middle.

the syncing to desktop library is a key feature for me, please address this in your FAQ

I have a standalone MP3 player the size of a matchbox. (Anybody remember matchboxes?)

The battery is good for 15 hours of play, it takes a 128GB microSD card, and it can play FLAC as well as MP3. The buttons are real and tactile and oriented so that you don't have to look at it to figure them out. It appears as a USB mass storage device with a FAT32 filesystem, so every computer I've used in the last 20 years can put music on it. If you put music in directories, it will navigate the directory structure. If you build m3u playlists, it will use those. You can ask for a random shuffle of all tracks or inside a directory.

It doesn't have play counts or ratings. If you have a USB3 microSD reader, that's faster than updating directly through the USB2 interface.

Also, it's running an open-source alternative firmware called Rockbox.

>Apple went from being a leader in the music-listening industry with excellent UX to trying to compete with Spotify and YouTube, who are frankly not even that great

They might "not even be that great", but they are where all the listeners and the money are.

Ripping, listening to non-streaming music, etc, is becoming rapidly a hobbyist thing for older generations and a minority of hipsters. The whole rise in music industry profits in the last years was in the streaming area, purchases and digital downloads are down.

So anybody touting some specialized device, that takes ripped or bought mp3s, etc, is mostly living in the past as far as the market is concerned.

> I use iTunes 10.6.3 and sync to an iPod.

> That keeps track of play counts on both devices, lets me make smart playlists and playlist folders, and syncs music, contacts, and calendars all over USB without any cloud services prying into my personal data.

I use the latest version of iTunes and an iPhone with the latest iOS on it, and still use them in exactly the same way you describe. Like you, I prefer to have complete control over my own data, without passing it through third-party cloud services. So far, Apple has not taken away the ability to do this, despite their heavy marketing push for iCloud. (I literally have never used iCloud at all for anything, ever.)

I use whatever the latest version of iTunes is and sync to an iPhone X over my personal Wi-Fi connection. For whatever reason their default sync is very bad. If you instead put all your iTunes music in a playlist and choose the option to sync only that playlist it works nearly perfectly. I've been using this method since the iPhone 4s came out and have only had issues syncing maybe once or twice a year. I sync a few times per month.

They allow Spotify soooooo.....

Depends on what mood they're in

"Where do you get the music from though?"

I personally download actual mp3 files from Amazon (not amazon "music" but just purchase actual tracks). In fact, I continue to be pleasantly surprised that in 2018 one of the big providers is doing something as simple and friendly as this: selling me unprotected, plain old mp3 files.

However, they are compressed mp3 files and not suitable for future transformation so if there is an album that I want, I will still purchase the actual CD and rip it to the full WAV/PCM.

My system is a mac pro (2009) which still has an optical drive. I use the (excellent) 'abcde'[1] tool to rip the CDs. I particularly like the fact that it pops up a 'vi' session with the gracenote/cddb/metadata so I can quickly "fix" the usually braindead cddb entry right in the workflow.

[1] http://www.andrews-corner.org/linux/abcde/index.html

At the moment it imports from the Music.app (so whatever you've synced with iTunes). Adding more providers in the next few months

You can still buy them from Bandcamp, Qobuz or even buy it on iTunes. What are you trying to imply?

Google play music allows downloading the mp3, but only twice.

The old way?

You should check out Cesium. I've been using it for the past couple of years. It accesses your music library, so all your music and playlists are there. You can play by album (and shuffle the music) or even play by artist (and shuffle all songs by the artist). You can even play by genre if you so desire. Of course it provides all the typical music queue management facilities as well, but I don't tend to use those too much. I like it's extreme simplicity.

The Apple Music parts can be disabled in Settings. It's not quite as nice as it was back in the day, but I've found that doing that helps to make it closer to how it was.

Should be possible https://developer.apple.com/musickit/

I'm genuinely curious why you say to get a lawyer for all music apps as I can't really see why this one would necessarily need a lawyer. Are you talking in terms of music licensing issues or patent violations, or other?

Haven't heard of Subsonic before. Will see what I can do. Cheers!

Yep that's right!

I have importing mp3/flac etc working but needs a bit more work before I can release it. Coming very soon!

VLC for iOS can do that now afaik.

+1 - I have a couple Chromecast Audios that I use as a poor-man's Sonos and it works pretty well, but the Spotify iOS app's Chromecast streaming is pretty half-assed. It can only adjust volume when the app is in the forground, and sometimes not even then, sometimes forgets it's streaming and loses sync.

Great idea! I'll add to the roadmap, thanks

I find Apple's music app on iOS terribly hard to use. It didn't used to be this way. I struggle to do basic things, like just playing the songs in order on an album! Sounds silly, but there are so many buttons that sweep away to different screens, and it's not at all clear what you are doing.

Now I just use GoodReader to store and play back all offline albums, since it's just a file directory and I can just play the tracks in the order they are stored.

What about it?

0 calories water baby!

Still, as a non-iPhone user I actually expect Apple hardware to only work properly with Apple software, I was never able to use airplay on any other software than iTunes (in Windows), it always broke after some time when I did find something that worked on Linux. So perhaps it's not so bad to mention it.

It's like putting "Asbestos FREE" on chips bag. It will definitely stand out on the shelf. And it's true also.

I pretty much said “oh come on” out loud when reading that.

Lucky Strike... it's toasted

It's good marketing to outline the fact for a slight competitive advantage.

I spent probably a minute more than I should have pondering why it would not.

It's the good old MP3s that you download and send to your phone with iTunes.