SongPocket 3
SongPocket is a music player inspired by record crates.
It’s got reorderable albums. Group related releases, or put your favorites on top.
And super fun expandable tracklists!
It’s free on the App Store.
What’s great
SongPocket is the best damn music viewer I know of. I made it for myself.
You can’t unsee reordering. How come you can reorder your to-dos, but not your albums? Your collection feels so personal when you can arrange it just so.
Artwork goes edge-to-edge because phones are tiny compared to vinyls. You don’t even need to play an album to see it at full size.
And the play confirmation prevents accidental interruptions. It makes other apps feel like hot coals.
But most importantly …
Spatialness
Each album or song appears in exactly one place. That might seem obvious, but other apps let you find each song by artist, by album, etc.
SongPocket feels different: it’s like flipping through vinyls, not querying a database.
Consider how the App Switcher shows each app as a card. If it also had an alphabetical list of the same apps, the cards wouldn’t seem like physical objects anymore. It’d feel more like Activity Monitor.
That’s actually how iOS 14 ruined the Home Screen. App icons now appear on the Home Screen and in App Library (possibly thrice!), so it no longer feels like they live on the Home Screen. It’s no longer spatial.
In SongPocket, “now playing” isn’t a screen that duplicates the current artwork; it’s a button that navigates to the current album. It doesn’t overlay a new view; it scrolls the album list to that album.
This is a surprising tradeoff because you lose your place, but the spatialness is worth it.
In SongPocket, you don’t browse info about albums; you browse albums themselves.
What could be better
SongPocket’s major design flaws are a lack of scaling and hierarchy.
The scaling problem is the horrible information density: you can see like two album titles, and the list is a kilometer long.
I don’t want a grid because it forces your eyes to zigzag.
I tried making closed albums half-height and expanding them to square when you opened them, but it felt too jumpy.
A solution could be like Cover Flow sideways, where albums shrink as you scroll them away from the center. That would be both scalable and spatial.
The hierarchy problem is that you can’t group albums to view or manipulate them.
I used to have multiple crates, but I hated the UI because it broke spatialness: “what do you mean, the crate list is both the main view and inside this sheet?”
I’ve since changed the main view to the album list, and a solution could be a crate menu, which changes the albums in the list.
To move albums between crates, you’d select them, then switch crates, and those albums would move with you to the top of that crate. That would be spatial.
A third problem is select-mode hell. “Select-albums mode” is separate from “select-songs mode”, which isn’t obvious, and in “select-songs mode”, you can scroll away, which is bananas.
A solution could be to hide other albums when an album is open, but when I reinserted them, the table view kept doing an unnecessary animation I couldn’t prevent.
Fourth, there should be an artwork-only view that hides everything except a single album cover, and allows pinch to zoom. There’s no excuse for a music app being a worse artwork viewer than the Photos app.
Anyway, future potential. SongPocket already does things no other music app does, and it’s free, so try it out!
