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Albums: Algorithm-Free Listening for Music Lovers [Sponsor]

Albums is the player that cares as much about your music library as you do. Made by music-obsessed solo developer Adam Linder, Albums provides the best alternative to the built-in Music app for true music lovers.

MacStories readers can redeem an extra-long two-week free trial of Albums Premium.

Albums is the infinite, high-tech CD binder or vinyl crate you wish you’d had in high school. Relive the glory days of the iPod with album shuffle, and use robust tagging and filtering options to build the album collections of your dreams—you can even tag music not in your library to check out later.

Beyond playback and organization, Albums is packed with features to enrich your musical life; the Release Feed keeps track of new and upcoming music from artists and record labels in your library; the app tracks your play history and generates regular listening reports; and the Insights tab offers dozens of personalized collections to help you experience your library in a new way.

Albums is deeply integrated with iOS system features, including comprehensive Shortcuts support, a first-class CarPlay app, and interactive widgets. It is available for iOS and iPadOS, with a macOS app on the horizon. Coming up on six years of iterative improvement on the App Store, the app is the best it’s ever been—and only getting better.

When you’re ready to level up your music-listening experience, redeem your two-week trial of Albums Premium. If you’re looking for something a little different, you can also check out Adam’s chaotic neutral music-discovery app, Univershuffle, which shuffles all of the music on the Apple Music catalog. Seriously!

Our thanks to Albums for supporting MacStories’ WWDC coverage this week.

Apple Music Gains New Algorithmic ‘Discovery Station’→

Juli Clover, writing for MacRumors on a new addition to Apple Music:

Apple Music today gained a new “Discovery Station,” which is located under the “Listen Now” section under Top Picks in the ‌Apple Music‌ app. The customized radio station is paired with the personalized radio station featuring your name, and it has the “Made for You” label. It can also be accessed through this link for those who do not yet see it.

As noted by AppleInsider, the radio station appears to play songs of a similar style to songs that are in your personal library and that you have listened to and liked in the past, but it chooses songs you don’t have in playlists or your library.

I’ve been writing about the topic of algorithmic discovery in music streaming services for years now, so as soon as I read about this new station, I immediately went to check it out.

It’s only been a few hours, but my impression is that Apple sees the “discovery” part of this ‘Discovery Station’ as something fundamentally different from Spotify’s Discover Weekly. Spotify’s popular algorithmic playlist (which refreshes once a week) is generally skewed toward lesser-known acts and recent releases; in the hours I’ve been testing Apple’s new radio station, it seems it’s not afraid to recommend older music from bands I am familiar with and that I wouldn’t consider “niche”, but which I don’t have in my music library either. For instance, I’ve been listening again for the last 30 minutes, and my recommendations were largely mid-2000s emo/pop-punk songs. Not that I’m complaining.

Apple hasn’t officially announced the Discovery Station yet, and I assume they’re still adjusting the balance of the algorithm powering it. I did get a few recommendations from new and unknown (at least to me) artists, which is a good sign that the ultimate goal of the radio station might be a healthy mix of songs you’ve never heard of and songs you sort of knew but never saved in your library.

I’m going to keep an eye on the Discovery Station; I have a feeling I’ll end up listening to this radio station a lot over the coming weeks.

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Apple Podcasts Adds New Subcategories and Refreshes Recommendations

As I wrote earlier today, Apple has a lot of plans for its Podcasts app this fall, but the company is not waiting to roll out all of the changes to the app. Yesterday, Apple Podcasts added the following nine new subcategories to the app’s search tab on iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple TV:

The new categories also feature their own charts with top shows and episodes in listeners’ regions.

Alongside the addition of new subcategories, the Apple Podcasts editorial team has updated its recommendations with new Podcasts Essentials and added the ability to find podcasts in more than 20 languages if you live in the US, UK, Canada, or Australia.

It’s great to see Apple Podcasts receiving as much attention as it has and continuing to get updates outside of major OS releases. I’ve been using Apple Podcasts on iOS 17 for the past couple of weeks, and I like what I’ve seen so far a lot.

Best Everyday Shortcut: A New Automation April Shortcuts Contest Category

One of our top goals with Automation April is to encourage the participation of Shortcuts users of every level. That’s why the Automation April Shortcuts Contest judges won’t just be looking for the most complex shortcuts with the most actions. They’ll be looking at factors like originality, performance, design, user experience, and usefulness, which are all applicable to simple shortcuts too.

To drive home the message that the contest isn’t just for experts, we’ve added a new category: Best Everyday Shortcut. The category will be judged like the others, but with an emphasis on clever uses of actions to create a shortcut that does one thing particularly well, from which a broad cross-section of users can benefit.

Entries for all categories are being accepted through April 20, 2022 at shortcuts.macstories.net. Full details are available in our Automation April Shortcuts Contest announcement post from last week.

We’ve been incredibly pleased with the response to the contest so far. The MacStories audience has already submitted a lot of shortcuts, many of which are in the running for the new Best Everyday Shortcut category, but we’d love to see more. So, if you’ve got a shortcut that you rely on every day and think would benefit others, we’d love it if you would submit it for consideration.

And remember, we’ve got some terrific prizes for the top shortcuts in each category:

Best Overall Shortcut

  • A 3-year subscription (or membership upgrade and/or extension for existing Club members) to Club Premier
  • An Elgato Stream Deck XL
  • An Analogue Pocket
  • A special Discord contest winner role
  • Induction into the Automation April Hall of Fame

Best Everyday Shortcut, Best HomeKit Shortcut, Best Productivity Shortcut, Best Media Shortcut, and Best Mac-specific Shortcut

  • A 1-year subscription to Club Premier (or membership upgrade and/or extension for existing Club members)
  • A special Discord category winner role
  • Induction into the Automation April Category Hall of Fame

So, whether you have a simple shortcut that you rely on every day or one that’s more complex, visit shortcuts.macstories.net to enter the contest before the April 20, 2022 deadline.

You can also follow MacStories’ Automation April coverage through our dedicated hub, or subscribe to its RSS feed.

Creating Your Own Widgets: A New Category of Apps Emerges

This summer, when Apple detailed iOS 14 and the Home screen changes it would bring, the company highlighted personalization as one of the key features of the new widget-populated Home screen. Rather than just containing an assortment of apps, iOS 14 Home screens can feature the information that matters most to you. Whether that’s your Activity rings so you can stay on top of your health, the current weather forecast, your task list, a memory from the Photos app – there are an abundance of options for personalizing your Home screens now.

I’ve tried a ton of Home screen widgets from third parties over the summer, and developers are doing lots of creative things with their apps’ widgets. One of the most exciting trends I’ve seen is the emergence of a new category of apps entirely centered around widgets. While most widgets will come built in to the apps you already know and love, some developers have built brand new apps for the sole purpose of enabling users to create and customize widgets in a hyper-personalized way. The best widgets I’ve tried offer configuration settings so you can tailor them to your exact needs, and these new apps take that idea even further, offering widget creation tools relating to a variety of traditional app categories – like weather, photos, health and fitness, productivity, and more – but in a single centralized app.

Leading the pack in this regard is Widgetsmith from David Smith, which not only covers one of the widest array of different widget types, but also features a power user-friendly scheduling option that sets it apart. The App Store hosts a growing number of other widget creation tools too, such as Widgeridoo, Widget Wizard, Glimpse, and Health Auto Export.

Because each app specializes in providing its own custom set of options, there’s no limit to the number of apps worth trying. Widget needs can be highly personalized, so it’s no surprise that the apps designed for creating widgets all offer their own takes too.

Get ready to upgrade your Home screens.

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Apple Music Debuts New ‘Get Up! Mix’ Algorithmic Playlist→

It doesn’t happen often, but Apple Music is rolling out a new algorithmic playlist today to join the existing Favorites Mix, Chill Mix, New Music Mix, and Friends Mix. Per Igor Bonifacic at Engadget:

Apple is trying something new to keep people’s spirits up during the coronavirus pandemic. In Apple Music, it’s introducing a new algorithmic playlist called the Get Up! Mix that the company says is full of “happy-making, smile-finding, sing-alonging music.” With the help of human editors, it will update the playlist each week with new songs. Think: Discovery Weekly, but with a focus on playing tunes that will encourage good vibes – though there’s the promise of discovering new music as well.

The idea behind the Get Up! Mix is exactly what I would want in a new weekly playlist. Though I’m not in love with the name, I’ve always wanted a positive, upbeat playlist containing both tracks I’m familiar with and a few I’m not. A quick glance over my first Get Up! Mix shows that this is exactly what Apple’s going for. I’ve only rarely listened to the other weekly playlists Apple Music offers, but I think things are going to be different with this latest addition.

The new playlist is still rolling out, so you may not see it in your For You tab just yet. According to the app, the Get Up! Mix will be updated every Sunday, which is when the Chill Mix was formerly updated; the Chill Mix’s weekly schedule now moves to Saturdays.

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The iPad at 10: A New Product Category Defined by Apps

When Steve Jobs strode onto the stage at the Yerba Buena Center on January 27, 2010, he carried with him the answers to years of speculation and rumors about an Apple tablet. Everyone at the event that day knew why they were there and what would be announced. Jobs acknowledged as much up front, saying that he had a ‘truly magical and revolutionary product’ to announce.

Thanks to the iPhone, everyone at the Yerba Buena Center also had a vague notion of what Apple’s tablet would probably look like. Mockups and phony leaks were all over the web, and tablets weren’t new. Everyone expected a big slab of glass. Beyond that, though, few rumors were in agreement about what the tablet’s hardware specs would be.

Source: The Verge.

Source: The Verge.

It was correctly assumed that Apple’s tablet would fit somewhere in between an iPhone and a Mac both physically and functionally, but where exactly was a mystery. That made the OS and the apps the stars of the keynote and critical to the way Apple’s tablet would be used and how it would be perceived for years to come.

Before Steve Jobs revealed Apple’s new tablet to the world, though, he paused – as is still customary during most Apple keynotes – to set the stage and provide context, which is where I will start too. Ten years ago, the tech world was a very different place, and Apple was a very different company. Not only is it fun to remember what those days were like, but it helps explain the trajectory of the iPad in the decade that followed.

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Spotify Announces New ‘Your Daily Podcasts’ Algorithmic Playlist

Spotify aims to do for podcasts what it’s done for music recommendations with today’s announcement of a new algorithmic podcast playlist.

One of the music streaming service’s greatest strengths is the analysis it does of users’ listening habits, which it uses to recommend new tracks through playlists like Discover Weekly and Daily Mix. According to Spotify, its new ‘Your Daily Podcasts’ playlist will analyze recent episodes you’ve streamed and the shows you follow to make recommendations tailored to the type of shows that match your interests. For example, for story-based sequential shows that you haven’t tried before, Spotify will offer the trailer or first episode of a show, while for daily, news-based podcasts, the playlist may include a recent, topical episode.

The addition of ‘Your Daily Podcasts’ is not surprising given remarks by Spotify CEO Daniel Ek when the company acquired Gimlet Media and Anchor. At the time, Ek said Spotify would offer improved ‘curation and customization’ for users and ‘better discovery, data, and monetization to creators.’

Podcast discovery remains an area that a number of companies are working to improve. As Spotify’s share of the podcast listener market increases, its ability to anticipate the podcasts and individual episodes that subscribers will enjoy has the potential to rival what has already made it such an attractive service for many music fans. Given its dominance of podcasting, it will also be interesting to see if Apple counters by enhancing its own discovery tools in the future.

Spotify says that the new playlist is available to subscribers in the US, UK, Germany, Sweden, Mexico, Brazil, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand who have listened to at least four podcasts in the past 90 days.

Apple Music’s Archaic Album Categorization→

Benjamin Mayo sums up one of the most annoying features of Apple Music: the way the service thinks everything is an “album”, making it extremely inconvenient to find what you’re looking for.

These artefacts of compact discs show up again when looking at an artist page. What a human would think of as an artist’s albums, and what Apple Music lists, are completely different. EPs, singles, specials, deluxe, originals are all shoehorned under one name ‘Albums’. There is no way to filter these out. This really makes finding what you want hard. When you know what you want to find, all this backwardly organised catalogue gets in your way.

There has to be a better method than packaging everything up with the same ‘album’ label. This is not a hard problem, I thought to myself. In fact, it’s already been solved … by Spotify. As you have probably noticed by now, I have included a graphical illustration of Apple Music’s biggest flaw alongside this article. If you can’t see it, your browser isn’t wide enough. If you are reading outside of a browser, like RSS, this probably won’t show up for you either. Use a browser. I encountered this exact scenario in my first day of using the service. I did not fabricate it.

Don’t miss the effective visualization of this problem on his post.

I like Apple Music, but this has been a problem since the service launched almost three years ago, and it’s time for a fix.

Here’s what makes this even more annoying: Beats Music – the very service Apple Music is largely based on – visualized albums, compilations, and different editions in separate tabs/views. Two of the worst Apple Music features (album categorization and the separation of playlists made by you vs. those made by others) had already been fixed by Beats Music, but Apple went for an inferior design that is still with us today.

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