Longplay iPhone app

An album-focused app for interacting with your music library. My specific need for this might be a little niche, but I’m going to put it up here anyway just in case this is of use to anyone else.

The situation: I listen to a lot of albums, and since I’m rarely able to listen to them in their entirety in one go, I’m nearly always somewhere in the middle of one (and sometimes paused right in the middle of a song). But I also regularly play music off of playlists in the Music app for completely different reasons (e.g., exercise playlists for when I’m working out, or playlists I put on when I’m driving the kids somewhere). When I was only using the Music app, whenever I did the latter, I would lose my spot in whatever album I was listening to and would later have to go manually figure out where I was and restart it from there.

Longplay solved that for me. I now use this app exclusively for whatever album I’m listening to, and the Music app for everything else, and they no longer interfere with each other.

The one inconvenience is that it seems get very aggressively wiped from the “this is the audio the user is currently listening to” spot in whatever part of iOS determines that—so, e.g., if you’re listening in your car, stop somewhere, go into a store, come back out, and start your car again, it’s almost certainly going to start playing whatever’s in the Music app queue even if Longplay is still the active foreground app and you didn’t touch your phone the entire time you were out of the car. This is, admittedly, annoying. (It also seems like mainly a problem with iOS, which really ought to be able to retain this state regardless of what individual apps are doing, but my podcast player is able to stay active much better than Longplay is, so I’m not sure it's entirely the OS’s fault.)

But it also has some features I really like, including actually displaying how long each song is, how much time is left in the current track, and how much time is left in the entire album (it frankly baffles me that the Music app doesn’t show any of this—particularly that, as far as I can tell, you can only see how long a specific song is by actually playing said song and then looking at the player controls). You can also order the albums in a variety of ways, including release date, how recently they were added to your library, stars, and ones you’ve listened to the most or least. And given that what I want is a separate app for playing albums, and this is designed to do exactly that, the minor inconvenience isn’t a big deal.