Introducing Songpocket
Have you ever kept a physical music collection? It has this neat feature called “you can organize it however you want.”
But now, think about your digital music collection. It’s locked in place by the automatic grouping and sorting in your music app.
Now, this is peculiar. How come our digital music collections give us less freedom than physical ones?
Hell, even your to-do app probably lets you reorder tasks and move them between lists. Since when is your music collection less personalizable than your to-do list?
Introducing Songpocket, a music player that lets you organize your music manually.
It lets you reorder artists, albums, and songs:
And it lets you move albums into your own collections:
Now, why do these features matter?
1. Why allow manual reordering?
At first, I was just annoyed that Apple Music sorts albums incorrectly if they came out in the same year: alphabetically.
(… which is weird because Apple Music knows each album’s exact release date; it just doesn’t use it.)
So why not just make my app sort albums correctly using metadata? If that’s what you want, check out SongOwl by Mike Clay—it’s a great app! It has simple, powerful grouping and sorting options powered by metadata.
But it turns out, manual reordering is just useful, because it lets you do things that no automatic sort option can.
You can group similar artists together, and put your favorites at the top:
And you can move albums you’re listening to lately to the top, and sort them into chronological order later:
It’s not that reordering items is the funnest thing ever or anything; it’s that you always should have been able to arrange your music however you want, because it’s yours.
2. Why allow moving albums between collections?
Now, there’s a key problem in organizing music I call the “grouping problem”.
You’ve browsed your music by artist, by composer, by genre, and so on. Those are all ways to browse the same music library. The difference is how they group your albums: the grouping style.
The problem is, no single grouping style works for every album. If you listen to classical music or soundtracks, you’ve experienced this.
Browsing by artist works fine for pop music, but you might want to browse your classical music by composer instead. And wouldn’t it be nice if you could browse soundtracks by the movie or game franchise they’re from?
Most music apps try to address this by letting you browse your music by every single grouping style.
But that’s the wrong approach. It doesn’t actually solve the problem, because there’s still noise in every grouping style: when you browse for classical music, you don’t care about the composer of every random pop song in your library. There’s lots of stuff in the way whenever you look for things.
Instead, Songpocket groups your albums into editable collections.
It automatically makes a collection for each artist in your library, because that’s great for most music, most of the time. But you can rename each collection, move albums into and out of it, and make new collections. They’re like folders for albums.
So you can make a collection for classical albums by the same composer:
You can make a collection for soundtracks from the same franchise:
And you can make an “Archive” collection—if you’re tired of some albums for now, you can hide them from yourself here, and rediscover them later:
It turns out, when you can organize your albums yourself, you group them by the best possible grouping style for each album, for yourself.
And finding your music feels less like filtering a database and more like flipping through your own crate of records.
Once you use these features, you’ll want them in every music app. Being able to organize your music manually (again) is liberating.
I’ve been using Songpocket for a while now, and I’ve caught myself mindlessly paging through my collection while listening, like I might with physical albums. Songpocket turns browsing your music from a means to an end into the fun part. Having your music collection just so makes all the difference.
Songpocket works with songs you’ve added from Apple Music, or synced from your computer. Try it out—I’d love to hear what you think of it!
(If you’d like to read more, check out my Songpocket design posts.)