Reasons to be Cheerful #2 - rediscovering my music library

Longplay - a virtual shelf for your music.

I saw a reference to Longplay on Daring Fireball, and was instantly interested. I used to love picking through the CDs on my shelves and stumbling upon albums that I'd not played for ages and rediscovering them. These days, my CDs are all stored (and I only tend to buy them for artists that I really like) and most of my music resides digitally on iTunes, crosslinked across the devices using iTunes Match. 

I do have a streaming set up, a family Spotify account, but I use that quite rarely. It tends to be used when I'm on the Chromebook, but I'm more likely to use the noise cancelling headphones and listen via my phone. I'd have got Apple Music but they didn't have any routes to my Chromebook when I got the Spotify account (and I'd also seen several reports that if you cancelled the subscription you'd lose access to the albums you'd ripped and the thought of repeating that exercise with several hundred CDs wasn't attractive).

My 'Addiction' feed

Longplay works quite simply. It displays your albums from the iOS music app as a wall of cover images. You can sort them by orderliness (artist and album), addiction (albums by play), brightness (colour), negligence (unplayed recently), recency (played recently ) and stars (rating). It means you can go a bit High Fidelity on how you look at your collection.

The only interaction is to select the album. It doesn't show tracks. So you can pick an album you used to like and just let it flow. If you want to pick tracks then you can drop into the music app and do it there. But that kind of misses the point.

I've rediscovered several albums that I'd forgotten already this week since I got this, which has been great fun. You can get the app from the iOS stores. It's £2.99 as I write this. It's not necessary, but I like it.

10 January 2021