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.
I suspect you can just play anything in your library, whether Apple Music or purchased/ripped, but honestly I don’t know.
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 It’s just an outdated take.
Is it possible to get lunch in SF for $10!?
There’s also Cider, I use it on Linux https://cider.sh/.
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.
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.
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.
Well, considering it's an Apple Music frontend… that's really the point, isn't it?