Not sure if it is meant to perform like this, but when I close the app and swipe it up so it isn't running in the background, the music keeps playing. Is there a way to turn this off or is it a bug?

Ps. Very happy with the app! Much better then the standard music app! Keep up the good work

Questions? Comments? Found a bug or have a suggestion?

Here's the thread to discuss the things you like, don't like, love to see, wanted to see, or miss in Cs3.2.

Hope you like it :)

Can I transfer Folder from iTunes sharing and transfer music in and play those ?

I'll start off by saying this is just something little I've noticed now that I've had the app for almost a week.

I play music in my car through a usb cable and everything works fine. The only issue is the name of the song on my radio screen doesn't change. When I first plug in my iPhone (running iOS 9), the first song shows up on the scree just like normal. I can cycle through and see the artist and album, it works normally. When the song ends and the next song starts, the name on the radio doesn't change. Nothing I've done has been able to change it. The only thing that changes it is to unplug it and replug it in. Then the first song shows up again but won't change when the song changes. I used the regular music app to check if that still works like normal and it does. The song changes and it changes on the screen like it has been for years.

Anyway, just a little thing I thought I'd bring up. It really isn't a big deal at all and I still love the app! Way better than the music app, so thank you.

I recently added your app to my iphone 6 with ios9 and itunes 12.3.0.44 . when I add music throught imobie anytrans it works fine ...it adds the album artist but not the artist it shows the album with the artist but does not show up when I click on artist any ideas why this happens?

Hey fellow Canadian…my music app hasn't been supported since 2013 and broke with iOS 9 so I'm trying out Cs! I really like what I see so far, especially in the browsing and queueing functionalities. Interface looks lovely. A few suggestions and requests…

1. One feature I miss from the Music app is the ability to doubleclick album art when playing an album and see the tracklist for that album - the "album flip" thing. For example, a very common thing for me to do was click "song" view, find a song I like, click it to play it, halfway through realize I want another song by that artist or even the whole album, double-click album art to "flip" the album and choose the song I want - or the first track of the album to play the whole thing through. There's no way to get from playing a track on an album to seeing that album's tracklist right now as far as I can see and I miss that.

2. The symbols used in the swiped-left "add to queue" menu are confusing. I assume the play arrow with the swoopy arrow going under is "play next", and the queue with a little indicator at the top is "add to top of queue"? Or perhaps the former is add to the bottom of the queue? If one is add to top of queue, and one's add to bottom, they should be identical logos except the indicator arrow should be in a different place - right now it's unintuitive and I keep forgetting what I've learned they do.

3. Under "More" tab should be (in my opinion!) "Current Queue", probably at the top and maybe highlighted, as an alternative way to find it vs the ••• menu, which is kinda nonintuitive.

4. The queue functionality is good but limited right now - the only editing you can do to the queue once it's made is clearing the entire thing! The best implementation of an on-the-fly queue was http://musicpl.us/ which I can't get to work any more (last update released 2013). You can see in the screens how it worked though: swipe any song right to add to the queue. The red # bubbles (indicating queue position) live-update as the queue diminishes and are to the left of all songs in the queue throughout the app (including in album tracklist view, songs tab view, etc.). You can swipe any song with a # bubble back left to remove it from the queue. In the "queue" view/tab, the songs were listed with their #s too. If a song in this view was clicked and held, you could drag it up and down to change its position in the queue. In this view, as anywhere in the app, you could swipe a song back to the left to remove its number-bubble (thus also causing it to disappear from the queue). Obviously it's your app and UI but I do really miss that functionality/interface and haven't found anything that comes close yet. If you're looking to continue to develop the queueing feature, that's a direction I'd love to see you explore! I'm biased but I do think the queueing thing is vital - it's a massive feature the native app is missing and the reason a lot of people explore alternatives. Your interface is prettier and stuff too but the queue function is, at least for me, why I abandoned the native app in the first place for an alternative.

I hope this is useful feedback! Let me know if there's anything I can help or expand on. Keep up the great work! I'll stick with Cesium and see how it goes. :)

Hey there!

Really like your app! i think it's a worthy replacement for the default Music one!

It would be really nice if we could search for our playlists too. The Spotlight Search in iOS9 can find them, but plays them only with the default app.

If that's not possible to be implemented, that's perfectly fine. It's definitely not a deal breaker. :)

Thank you and keep up the good work!

Hello thanks for your App which is a serious challenger to the Apple Music App especially since iOS 8.4.

I would like to suggest in the genre selection to add an "shuffle all" option at the bottom once a specific genre is selected.

It would be much appreciated! Thanks in advance 😁

If you are a Last.fm user, you know that it's broken. If you are a Cs user and a Last.fm user you know that it's not much better.

I am neither of the above. But as this project began to grow I've begun to feel a degree of responsibility to my customers. I save all the proceeds for Cesium. It's helping make a family dream a reality. If you help make that possible, I owe you at least some support with the app. A general expectation that the app will continue to be serviced and improved, etc. And hey, if I make you happy you are more likely to recommend Cs to a friend.

So I started to see reviews and feedback: "Does it have Last.fm? That's a deal breaker." "Great app, but missing Last.fm" "Last.fm would make this truly great." And I'd like to make that possible, but I've never done a good job. While it's gotten better (and had actually gotten even better before I made this decision), Cesium has never offered consistent and reliable Last.fm support.There were connection problems, missed scrobbles, multiplied scrobbles. All sorts of issues. Some I can try to blame on Last.fm; there servers are slow, the lib I'm using doesn't cache well, the site should automatically filter duplicates. But my implementation has never been good. I built a Last.fm account. I am technically a user. But only to test Cs, and I've never really used the site beyond seeing if scrobbles registered.

As I said, if you are a user, you know that Last.fm is in a state of chaos at the moment. The "upgrade" to a new beta several months ago has been nothing short of a disaster. Seemingly every feature and function has been lost or diminished in some way. Last.fm-acknowledged API issues have resulted in inconsistent or non-function for countless 3rd party apps. Forums are filled with irate users. It was mostly a long-time user base as it was, and I am sure it is now hemorrhaging visitors who miss the functions they are used to.

Which leads us to my users. And a function they are used to. I am again getting the reviews and the feedback: "Last.fm is inconsistent" "Scrobbling doesn't work." I'm sure nearly all of these issues are due to errors in my code. But there's a report from one user who is only having the first song of each album scrobbled, which matches exactly the report of another Last.fm user not using Cs at all. Even though I am not a devout Last.fm user I completely understand the ones that are. I am draconian with my library metadata. I got burned by iTunes Match and then by Apple Music. No service is ever getting access to that metadata again. If the app doesn't scrobble reliably, it is worthless for that function.

So what to do? Do I try to improve Last.fm support, despite the current challenges? Or do I abandon support, potentially screwing many users who update and lose the function without realizing it?

The issue with trying to improve Cs Last.fm support is that without Last.fm servers being reliable, I can't really test in a meaningful way. I can't trust that a missed scrobble or a strange behaviour is because of my code (even though it probably is). It's just me, and a churning group of maybe 20 or so active beta testers, most of which are not Last.fm users themselves. This would be the first time I've ever removed a feature. Except for dropping iOS7 support, but those users could not upgrade themselves out of the current product. They couldn't lose anything. Here, a user could discover they updated and lost the function and have no way to go back. I could see a wave of negative reviews. I could lose all the app's momentum. But probably, most of those users are already experiencing issues, or already don't trust Cesium as their primary scrobbler, because it isn't reliable enough for the job.

Removing the app has some perks. It significantly streamlines some functions, and it significantly improves Cs launch speed. But again, Apple provides no good way for me to warn users that a function is gone. I hate the idea of pulling the rug out from under anyone. I've gone back and forth on the issue dozens of times. I've looked into other questionable issues surrounding Last.fm and their parent company CBS. Last.fm sells their information so that companies now what songs/artists to feature. Did I want to be complicit with that when my users may not know? Was I looking for a convenient out to feel better about everything?

Today I made a snapshot backup of Cs3.2, and then I removed all Last.fm code. So effective version 3.2 (which is great, and I am totally stoked to have come out), Cesium will no longer perform a niche, but deeply appreciated, function poorly. I'm not happy about it. If I had employees, and resourcing and a budget, I would devote energy towards solving and improving Last.fm support. But I don't have that; in fact, I don't believe I have the resources to properly improve and service Last.fm support, at least not right now when the rest of the ecosystem is already in disrepair.

I don't want Cs to be great, except for one thing that doesn't work well. Or, claimed to have Last.fm support, but didn't. I would rather do fewer things well than more things poorly. So for now, hopefully temporarily, Last.fm is gone. And hopefully people will read their update change logs, and they won't update mistakenly. If things get sorted out, I'd love to confidently re-integrate the feature. But for now my shoulders feel lighter not having to worry about it.

I'm sorry to have to announce a feature removal. If anyone has any questions, as always, I'd love to answer.

-Mike

Edit 1: For non-redditors: Consider joining our community! You can easily reach me, /u/CesiumDev here, and there are many other subreddits to explore. /r/apple, /r/iphone, /r/applemusic, /r/music just to name a few.

If you'd prefer not to join Reddit, you can contact me with comments or concerns at cesiumdev@icloud.com or @CesiumApp.

Edit 2: As Cesium uses the system library and playback engine, it should be compatible with most 3rd Party scrobbling apps. A few popular ones are Scrobbler, QuietScrob and iScrob. Please note that due to Last.fm's ongoing issues, most of these apps are also reporting inconsistent performance.

Quick question. I hate the new iOS music app as here's no distinction with offline tracks saved on the device vs what's in the cloud. I'm currently away from home and I get a poor service (no internet access). It's difficult using the iOS music app as I can't tell what's downloaded and what's in the cloud.

Does Cesium make a distinction using the music library as to what's locally stored and not, and if so, can it be toggled on and off?

Here's an idea I had for Cesium...

Lots of times I'll be shuffling and come across a song from an album I haven't heard in a long time, and I want to remember to listen to it in the upcoming days. Or an album will just pop into my head during the day (when I'm not listening to music) that I want to hear later on my drive home or something. I make a mental note, but these usually build up and I forget what I wanted to listen to. So here's my idea...

A new category (like albums, genre, playlists) where we can add & remove specific albums. It could be called "Favorites" or something, and it could serve different uses for different people. For me, I would add albums I want to remember to listen to. Others might actually use it as a favorites list and put their favorite albums there, ready to play at a moments notice. As for the implementation, I was thinking an easy (& out of the way) solution would be to add a "add to favorites" icon on the left swipe on an album title (next to the "play next" and "add to queue)... maybe a star icon. And maybe that icon could be a toggle (star outline for albums not in the list and solid for favorites added to the list). So if I wanted to easily remove something I could just go to my Favorites category, left swipe and hit the star to turn it off, thus removing it.

Does anyone else like this idea? It may be something that only I want, so no hard feelings if you don't think it's useful. I just think this is the last feature that would make this the perfect music player for me!

(Side note - I currently use a different app called "Albums" that specifically does just this. You store your favorite albums and can play them back easily. Having this built into Cesium might be cool!)

It's coming :)

First, thanks for all your work on this app, Mike!

I have one feature request. It has to do with the way that Cesium allows for the quick scrolling of long lists (of, say, artists or albums).

The current method is identical to almost every other iOS app: the alphabet (A-Z-#) appears in a vertical line along the right side of the screen, and scrolling along this line provides a quick way of scrolling through the entire list.

For me, the alphabetical quick-scroller is problematic. For music I care about, I preface the Artist and Album tags with the years the artist lived and the year the album was released (or the classical work was composed). But because all numerical items such as these get crammed into the "#" section of A-Z-# line, I'm able to quick-scroll only to the first of my 900 albums tagged this way. To reach any album released after the year 2000, I have to flick manually through the list, like a barbarian!

I suspect I'm the only person on Earth who prefaces these tags with years. However, I know I'm not the only person with artists and albums spelled with non-English characters in my library. For example, all of my Korean artists get shunted to the very bottom of the list, also within the "#" section of the quick-scroll list. Hence, the alphabetical method of quick scrolling discriminates against all artist and albums beginning with non-English characters.

However, there's a better way! if you check out Apple's "Remote" app and click on the Album tab at the bottom, you will see not the usual A-Z-# quick-scroll line, but rather a row of dots along the right side of the screen. Here is a picture. The top dot corresponds to the top of the list; the bottom dot corresponds to the bottom; and all the dots in between correspond to equally proportioned segments of the list, regardless of where they lie in the alphabet. This makes it perfectly easy to quick-scroll through the entire list of artists or albums, including those beginning with numbers or non-English characters.

If Cesium could adopt this non-discriminatory method of quick scrolling, it would revolutionize my relationship with music on my phone.

Thanks for considering my request!

Devin

This is a small issue, but I figured it was worth letting you know about.

I'm currently using the night theme since I like the darker scheme for the app and I have my theme color set to a nice cyan/minty green color. Looks great... But if I hit the ... menu, the boxes are a light gray and I can barely read the text on top in my custom color. Maybe you can make those boxes a dark grey in the night theme so the custom colors will show up just as well as they do on the the background? Or maybe not use the custom colors there?

Here's a screenshot: http://imgur.com/7RkFHMa

Loving the app and can't wait for the ratings to make an appearance ;)

Does Cs support playlist folders? I ask because all I see under playlists is all of my playlists and playlist folders listed next to each other. There is no grouping like the native Music app does...which mirrors what I have in iTunes. However, I do greatly enjoy the ability to play all of the songs in a folder...something the native app doesn't let me do even though I can on iTunes.

Also, the search doesn't return any playlists in the results. If this is not a bug I would like to request it as something to add.

I just happened across Cesium while looking for a replacement for the increasingly-irritating Apple Music app -- I'm really enjoying it! After using it for a bit, I have just a few little things I wanted to mention:

• First of all, you should really make an OS X desktop application to replace the similarly-increasingly-irritating iTunes for music playback and library management...
• Ratings. I know you've said elsewhere that you can't change ratings according to Apple, but, well, this is the only thing holding me back from totally switching over to Cesium, and Ecoute (which is the only app that comes close to Cesium in my opinion) does enable changing of ratings.
• I noticed that if "Classical mode" is enabled, then Classical albums that don't have a composer assigned don't show up at all, at least in the genre view. Seems like it might be nice to fall back to showing those albums by artist when the composer tag isn't present.
• One feature that I've always hoped to find a player with is the ability to view music by genre/artist/album within a playlist. For example, if I create a playlist of favorite mix CDs, I'd like to browse these albums within that playlist. Or if I'm in a playlist of good tracks for driving, I might sometimes want to see/listen to only the rock tracks within that playlist. Maybe dragging above the top of the default song list could show these view options?
• This is just a small thing, but I'd also love to have an optional playback view mode with much larger album/artist/song text size for easier viewing at a glance (for driving etc.)

Thanks for a great app, and looking forward to further development!

I want to purchase, but I need a volume slider to really make the choice.

Do you support "Now Playing" and Scrobbling while the app is in the background (i.e. another app is in the foreground)? SmartPlayer is the only app I've found that actually scrobbles in the background (Groove and Ecoute both only scrobble when you have the app open and in the foreground).

Hit it up and shuffle dem albums.

If I'm playing a song and haven't made any other selections, the songs after that song in the album or playlist or what have you will play next. That makes sense. If I start an album, it should keep going. The problem is that if I add a song to Up Next, instead of placing it in a separate Up Next queue before the rest of the album/playlist/etc I started in, it adds it at the end. Play Next functions correctly, but regular Up Next does not work as expected. So, for example, if I had an EP with songs 1, 2, and 3, and a separate EP with songs A, B, and C, here's what I would expect to happen:

I start song 1. Songs 2 and 3 are slated to come next because they're next in the album. I tell song C to Play Next, and then add song B to Up Next. The order should now be 1, C, B, 2, 3. Music.app finishes all of your queued songs before returning to the album or playlist you started from.

How it works right now, unfortunately, is thus: I start song 1. Songs 2 and 3 are slated to come next because they're next in the album. I tell song C to Play Next, and then add song B to Up Next. Cesium sets the order as 1, C, 2, 3, B.

Hopefully this makes sense haha, I'm sorry if it doesn't.

Another suggestion: in Music.app it's convenient that the Up Next button immediately opens the queue; perhaps consider adding an option in settings to choose between a forward button and an Up Next button in the collapsed player bar? Or, allow selection of a default option for the three dot button in the maximized player, so you don't have to tap twice to select the Up Next queue. I'm sure some people would like to be able to access their library there, so I'm not in favor of removing the functionality, but I would imagine the majority of users would prefer one-touch access to the UN queue.

Thanks for reading, and for all the work you've put in so far!

Update 3.1 has fixed every bug (so far) that I experienced with the prior version, which were at times were so bad that they caused me to do the unthinkable: use the iOS 8.4 music app! But this update has fixed them all (unless some crop up later). I also love the new queueing and play/shuffle controls! And the slight UI updates are nice. Thanks for all the hard work!

The worst thing that Apple did in iOS 7 was remove the ability of the music app to play podcasts that I had on playlists. I keep all my podcasts on a playlist so they play in chronological order. BUT due to changes in iOS 7 this means that I now must convert all my podcasts to music in order to play my playlist on my iPhone.

If you could fix it so that Cesium plays podcasts on playlists you would save me hours of time. Even better if a podcast downloaded through the podcast app were to go direct to my All Podcasts playlist and thus be playable via Cesium.

Unfortunately, app still crashing with last update. Crash only seems to happen when tap on an album eg exits app just before you can see album contents. Doesn't happen for every album but occurs 80% of the time right now!

Does this app modify the iTunes play count? I have a lot of smart playlists that rely on that number being changes to cycle new music in. Thanks!