Longplay by Adrian Schönig is an excellent album-oriented music app that integrates with Apple Music. The app started on iOS and iPadOS, then later added support for visionOS. With today’s update, Longplay is available on macOS, too, where it adds unique automation features.

If you aren’t familiar with Longplay, be sure to check out my reviews of version 2.0 for iOS and iPadOS and the app’s debut on the Vision Pro. I love the app’s album art-forward design, collection and queuing systems for navigating and organizing large music libraries, and many other ways to sort, filter, and rediscover your favorite albums. Here’s how Adrian describes Longplay in a post introducing the Mac version:

It filters out the albums where you only have a handful of tracks, and focusses on those complete or nearly complete albums in your library instead. It analyses your album stats to help you rediscover forgotten favourites and explore your library in different ways. You can organise your albums into collections, including smart ones. And you can go deep with automation support.

With the introduction of Longplay for Mac, the app is now available everywhere, with feature parity across all versions. Plus, Longplay syncs across all devices, so your Collections and Smart Collections are available on every platform.

The other big deal about Longplay for the Mac is its deep integration with automation tools. The app features the same extensive support for Shortcuts on Mac as it does elsewhere, with over two dozen available actions. It supports AppleScript, too, which is what drives an Alfred workflow that is linked in Longplay’s settings. Longplay also integrates with Last.fm and ListenBrainz for tracking what you listen to.

Claude compiling a Longplay Collection based on a comparison of my Apple Music library to the list it created for me previously.

However, the most interesting of all of Longplay’s automation integrations is its built-in MCP server. MCP is a protocol that allows AI chatbots like Claude to interact with apps. With Longplay’s MCP server, you can do things like create Collections and Smart Collections and queue albums for playback from inside a chatbot. What makes the integration so powerful is the ability to perform those actions with the sort of natural language requests that are the bread and butter of chatbots.

For example, the other day I asked Claude Sonnet 4 to compile a list of the top 100 alternative and indie albums of the ’80s. After consulting several sources, Claude generated a list, which I then asked it to use to create a Longplay Collection using my Apple Music library. Claude got to work and created my Collection after comparing its list with my Apple Music library for a couple of minutes.

Longplay is the first app I’ve tried that uses a built-in MCP server, and I’m sold. The combination of a chatbot’s research strength and Longplay’s actions makes its MCP integration a compelling way to explore your music.

I had fewer of the albums on Claude’s list than I expected, which is something I’ll have to correct manually given MusicKit limitations.

One downside of controlling Apple Music with an MCP server – which I want to emphasize is not a Longplay limitation – is that it can only create Longplay Collections from the albums in your library. You might expect that the MCP integration would allow Longplay to add all 100 of the albums in the Top 100 list to my library, but it can’t because MusicKit doesn’t offer that functionality. It’s a shortcoming of Apple’s that has held back automation in other areas like Shortcuts ever since the debut of Apple Music a decade ago.

Apple’s API limitations aside, Longplay is one of the most automatable music apps I’ve tried. Add to that its beautiful design and thoughtful discovery features, and what you get is one of the premier music apps on any of Apple’s platforms. It’s made all the better by the addition of the Mac app, which nicely rounds out Longplay’s lineup.

Longplay for Mac is available as a standalone purchase from the Mac App Store for $24.99 and directly from the Longplay website.