Show HN: QuickTunes: Apple Music player for Mac with iPod vibes | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: QuickTunes: Apple Music player for Mac with iPod vibes

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98 pointsalbertru9040 comments

The slow and bloated nature of the Mac Apple Music app inspired us to create QuickTunes. It is a simple, fast, and native Apple Music player inspired by the simplicity of the iPod. You can use keyboard shortcuts to navigate a simple multi column layout, pick something, and press Play.

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Another alternate client that’s great is LongPlay.

Instead of being a better UI like QuickTunes, LongPlay is specifically designed for one thing and one thing only: full album listening.

Things are presented as full albums, and they play as full albums. You can choose whether skipping skips a single track or an entire album.

Tracks in an album are always played in order.

The main picking interface? Just a grid of album covers, like that old screensaver Macs used to have.

It’s great.

just curious? Can we integrate Apple Music Subscription into LongPlay? Or This works only when you have your own collection of music that you own?

I’m not sure.

I suspect you can just play anything in your library, whether Apple Music or purchased/ripped, but honestly I don’t know.

Apple Music, iTunes, and manually synced music.

It’s a pet peeve of mine to continually hear about how the Apple Music app is bloated.

Apple literally reduced the bloat compared to the past. They removed podcast, TV/movie, and device management out of the app and moved them into dedicated places.

What mythical person is struggling with the performance of Apple Music on an Apple Silicon Mac? The same Macs that can handle 4K Final Cut Pro video editing with 8GB of RAM are struggling with a 20 year old music app?

I have a lot of complaints about the app but “slow” and “bloated” are not on that list. It’s just an outdated take.

It's not about the feature set. The Music app is the only software I use which randomly locks up my whole mac, just trying to do basic stuff like play a song or navigate albums. Doesn't seem to be related to whether I'm browsing Apple Music or my own library. This is on both my M1 MacBook Pro, and on my M2 Ultra Mac Studio in the office. It's baffling that something that worked so well in 2008 is such a dog in 2025. It's like using winamp in 1998.

Can’t say I’ve witnessed or heard of that behavior.

> The same Macs that can handle 4K Final Cut Pro video editing with 8GB of RAM are struggling with a 20 year old music app?

Yes.

The fax app on their website is a great solution to having the ability to send a fax without subscribing to anything.

Found the german?

> We hate subscriptions as much as you do, so our business model is simple: Simplefax is a one-time purchase that costs as much as lunch in San Francisco.

Is it possible to get lunch in SF for $10!?

Some soup and a piece of bread, yes! Across the street from Salesforce!

Two slices of very good vegetarian pizza from arizmendi is $8

There's an excellent banh mi place in the Tenderloin that will give you a sandwich and a coffee for less than that

Reminiscent of Spot for Linux, another great shortcut-oriented streaming interface for those of you who ditched the Mac: https://github.com/xou816/spot

Any alt- Apple Music players for Windows? The Apple Music app on Windows has a lot of “native platform app” shortcomings.

The one thing I always missed about Windows was foobar2k

Foobar2000 is available on Windows, macOS, iOS and Android

Looks cool.

There’s also Cider, I use it on Linux https://cider.sh/.

Any alternatives for iOS? I’m sick of the search defaulting to Apple Music the streaming service

Yes, please. The iOS Music app has been getting worse for years.

https://www.cesium-app.com was great for me for a long time. I forgot why I quit using it, but I don't think it was because it stopped being great.

The name seems awfully close to QuickTune, another frontend to Apple Music.

https://marioaguzman.github.io/quicktune/

Modern player is not only about UIUX but also which music storage it supports, DLNA, Plex, Jellyfin, that’s the main feature users will be checking. If it’s just AppleMusic player.

That’s not true – plenty of users don’t really care about that. That said, it would be really nice to see more players (pun?) in this space.

OK there's a bunch of jellyfin clients tho. This is an Apple Music client. why you gotta drag somebody over this.

Why does it matter what the backend is? A music player is a music player; it shouldn't matter where the music comes from.

Well, it matters when you have to integrate with APIs and idiosyncrasies of third parties, and whatever draconian DRM they require. It’s obviously not impossible to add support for multiple backends, but from a development effort it definitely matters.

It’s not like streaming platforms are gingerly implementing open and common standards for music streaming. Winamp had support for .m3u and streaming back in ‘04, but we’ve moved on from that.

Sure, but presumably that is different from the actual value of the app itself—the frontend. It's just a matter of effort to connect the interface to the backend. Why you'd insist on tying the two together is anyone's guess (likely convenience).

> (likely convenience).

AKA the limited resource of developer-hours

> AKA the limited resource of developer-hours

Sure, but each connected backend magnifies value to end-user. To say any one client is worth devoting to just a single backend is crazy.

But they never marketed it as a generic music player, did they? It also isn’t a toaster.

> But they never marketed it as a generic music player, did they? It also isn’t a toaster.

A music player is very much a dumb pipe (or "toaster" as you call it). There's nothing special about Apple Music that makes it a backend worth devoting an entire client to.

That’s your opinion though, is it not? To OP, Apple Music might be the world and then some.

> If it's just AppleMusic player.

Well, considering it's an Apple Music frontend… that's really the point, isn't it?

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