Cs Music Pro 4+

Hate the update

I’ve been using Cesium for years now at this point, and overall it’s so much better than Apple’s Music app; kudos to the developer. However...

I’m not a huge fan of the update. It feels like it’s moving in the direction of Apple’s Music app, in terms of some UX choices, which is the reason I switched to Cesium in the first place. The new UI looks great, but now it forces you to either see all songs in a list or only the albums. You can switch between all songs and albums, but I’d rather have both without needing to go into settings every time I want to listen differently. It also now shows iCloud items that haven’t been downloaded, by default, though there is at least an option to turn it off. Personally, I would rather the default be off, some it’s not on my device for a reason.

Some other issues I have is that the time remaining in a song disappears once the song is far enough along. I care more about how much is left than how much I’ve listened to. I don’t know why the time elapsed doesn’t just remain at the left end of the bar. The update also seems to have removed the ability to swipe and tap “play next/later,” which is so much faster than having to long press on a song, and you can’t see the “jump-to” alphabet until you’ve started scrolling.

A lot to love, increasingly more things not to love

I’ve been a long time user of Cs Music Player (or Cesium as it used to be called). I’m not so old but it seems I’m a dinosaur when it comes to the way I like to listen to music since I’m a firm believer in OWNING music, having a music library that somehow reflects my own progressing tastes. Apple used to love music lovers and used to provide some very nice hardware and software to cater to guys and gals like me. Now these times are gone and streaming took over. Anyway.
I really would like to like Cs and I lindner do since it allows me to listen to my synced iTunes library in a meaningful way. A huge library needs the right tools to handle it and Cs still does that. So thanks for that. However, I don’t like the direction the app is heading with constantly changing and seemingly erratic UI choices that try to reinvent the wheel. That’s really not necessary because if Cs was just a copy of what Apple’s iTunes app used to be a few years ago, everything would be just fine. But for some unknown reason Mike seems to take pleasure in deconstructing well-proven features which is really a shame since the USP of Cs is really simple: an app that allows you to easily navigate your (huge) music collection and so helps you to enjoy it.
Please, Mike, don’t try to improve things that are just fine the way they are.

Personal wish: please bring (back) the shuffle by album feature. Thanks.

Buggy

I want to like this app, but it's pretty buggy. Sometimes when you press the home button or modify the queue, the song that is currently playing starts over. Sometimes when you add a song to the top of the queue, it doesn't play (it gets removed from the queue). Sometimes when you try to modify the queue, the changes don't get saved. Sometimes it hangs (I'm not talking about the iOS 11.2 lag, this is different) and sometimes it even crashes. It doesn't seem to update song metadata (e.g. 'last played' and play count) in a timely fashion. Songs that have just played still appear in the queue. If you add a long playlist (a couple thousand songs) to the queue, it reduces it to about 500 songs, I have no idea how it selects which songs to play when it does this. I've uninstalled and reinstalled the app and get the same results. I'm on iOS 11.3.

Update for version 4.3: This app has gotten a lot better since the developer implemented workarounds for the Apple bugs. However, the Apple bugs still make it very difficult to modify the queue. Is there anything we can do to push Apple along? Post something on the feedback site perhaps? Shame on Apple for not fixing these bugs, they've known about them for a long long time.

Developer Response ,

Sorry for the issues you are experiencing. The queue reduction issue has been fixed – update is in beta. Please email me at mike@cesium-app.com if you are interested in testing. Thanks!