by Jason Snell
Longplay 2.0
Adrian Schönig has released Longplay 2.0, a new version of his excellent iOS app for exploring and playing entire albums:
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.
New features include collections, album shuffle, and a playback queue. There’s also a CarPlay interface now! I spend a lot of time listening to playlists, but sometimes I just want to put on an entire album. (I’m listening to one as I write this, in fact.1) Longplay is a stylish, fun way to explore and play your albums. Check it out.
- It’s “Notes on a Conditional Form” by The 1975, coincidentally one of the albums I cited when I first wrote about Longplay 1.0 back in early 2021. ↩