Next album up? Longplay comes to the Mac
I love playlists for discovering new music, but sometimes I just want to listen to an entire album. Adrian Schönig’s Longplay app, which makes it fun to browse and play favorite albums, has been a favorite of mine since it debuted on iOS in 2020. At long last, Longplay is now out for the Mac and I got to take it for an early spin.
Like the iOS app, Longplay for Mac lets you view your Apple Music collection through a mosaic of album covers, sorted in any number of ways (from Addiction for favorites to Neglect for those untouched in a long time). If you carefully craft playlists1, you can opt to display those as well.
The Longplay miniplayer is spare and good, with playback controls and a big square for album art. (You can even opt for a Purity mode that prevents you from skipping tracks, if you’re a masochist.) And since the app is album oriented, the Up Next queue… is for entire albums rather than individual tracks.
If there’s one drawback, it’s that due to some macOS limitations, you can’t AirPlay Apple Music albums directly from the app. (The workaround is to set your Mac’s audio output to the AirPlay speaker of your choice.) That’s not ideal for me, since I often listen via AirPlay, but I used the workaround and found it a little more stable than AirPlaying from the Music app.
Perhaps the most interesting new feature in the Mac version of Longplay is its wholehearted embrace of automation. Not only does it support AppleScript and Shortcuts, but it’s got a built-in MCP (Model Context Protocol) server, which means it works with AI-enabled assistants via apps like Claude and Raycast. This means that the AI can actually interact with Longplay’s scripting interface directly, using its own broad musical knowledge to build search queries, start playback, and add albums to the queue.
I tested out the MCP integration by asking the Claude app, “Can you use the Longplay app to play an album featuring a duo or group playing pop music from the 1980s?” It queried Longplay for a list of albums from my library and then started playing “Purple Rain,” while recommending a few other albums I could also consider. I told it to add “Songs from the Big Chair” to the queue, and it did so. All in all, pretty impressive—and a reminder that while Apple’s got a lot of AI integration in a lot of places these days, Apple Music isn’t one of them.
Longplay for macOS is $25, and is available on the Mac App Store and via direct purchase.
- There are a lot of rules. ↩
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