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Comment by barrowclift | Hacker News Reader

While I agree iOS 13’s Music.app is pretty shoddy in many respects, there’s plenty of alternatives other than Spotify that might better fit their requirements. (Marvis Pro, Soor, etc.)

I consolidate the biggest players yearly in a review, which might be helpful for the author’s search: https://barrowclift.me/post/second-annual-ios-music-player-c...

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Good page, I agree that Marvis is really excellent and is probably the single best reason to subscribe to Apple Music. It has a level of customisability kind of reminiscent of foobar2000, which is unusual for iOS apps, and at the same time it's the most visually smooth and polished of the lot (I also tried them all :)

While you're here, every time I try to load that page my browser (Firefox on Android) hangs with most of the page rendered, and then Android crashes. It's not my adblocker (uBO in default deny mode, still happens with it disabled), but I haven't yet nailed down what it is. Maybe some default flag I've switched, e.g. to disable notifications or block autoplay video?

Whoa, that's bad. I don't currently have an Android device to test with, but I will get an emulator set up this weekend to see if I can reproduce and fix whatever's causing this. Thanks so much for letting me know about this, I really appreciate it!

This looks incredible! I've bookmarked this to check out later, but as an immediate question: do any of these support Apple Music/Spotify as a backend for downloading music? I'd prefer to stick with a monthly subscription for access to all music if at all possible.

Edit: also, you have an incredibly pretty website.

Thanks for the kind words, Sam :) Unfortunately, I don't believe there's any third-party offering on iOS that supports downloading music within the app from Apple Music or Spotify, I'm fairly certain you'd need to kick off downloads from the first-party player itself. If any folks here are aware of a third-party player that does support this, I'd be interested to know as well.

Some support acting as a client for Apple Music, including Marvis. The API is quite comprehensive, they can do most stuff the official app can do, including libary curation and discovery stuff. One exception is downloading songs in advance (you can add new music to your library, but not download it to your device; however if you go back to the Apple app to kick off the downloads, the downloaded songs are played through the 3rd party app after that). If you just add to your library and stream, you wouldn't need to do that.

Your page is amazing! I love that you made small videos for all players, it really helps to see how the app works

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