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There Is a Better Way to Approach iOS Music

by Keith Gatling | 4 years ago

Yes, I can hear you all now saying, “Better than Apple Music? Whaddaya mean better? What’s wrong with the Apple Music app? For that matter, what’s wrong with Spotify and Pandora?”

Well...let’s work this backward.

The problem with Spotify and Pandora are that they’re both streaming apps. They’re playing music that you’re borrowing from somewhere else, and not music that you own and have stored on your device.

Apple Music? Well...it’ll let you play stuff that you own and have stored on your device, but at the end of the day (and early in the morning too), it wants to be a streaming service. It wants to be a streaming service so badly that it gets downright annoying about it, bothering you all the time asking, “Wanna be a member? Wanna be a member?”

Actually, no. I didn’t want to be a member. I just wanted to be left in peace to play my own music the way that I used to be able to on my iPods and in the old Music app. There were ways to make it less annoying, but it still wanted to be an app for a streaming service, and it made it hard for me to just play my own music from my own playlists.

And then I discovered the Cs music app.

What’s with the weird name? Well, it used to be called Cesium, which is an anagram of “eMusic.” Then it became CsMusic (Cs is the chemical symbol for the element cesium). Now it’s just the Cs music app.

So what does it do?

It just plays music. It just plays your music that you synced over from your computer. It doesn’t ask if you want to join anything. It doesn’t try to make you download your music from anywhere else.

It just plays what you already have.

In other words, it acts like the old Music app when all it did was play your music, podcasts, and audiobooks; and didn’t bug you about joining a streaming service.

How does it do it? Well...it uses the Apple Music app. It takes a look at what you have there, what songs and playlists are there, synced from your computer, and then just lets you play them.

I absolutely love this app. I’ve had a couple of problems with it, but none so bad as to make me try to find something better.

It’s $1.99 at Apple’s App Store.

You should check it out.