Why Am I Using Albums Instead of the Official Apple Music App for Mac?
Apple Music’s selection is exceptional, but I’ve never enjoyed using the Mac app. It’s slow, glitchy, and lacks the crisp album focus I sometimes crave.
On my iPhone, I often open the excellent Albums app to quench my thirst, so I’m happy to announce that the same app has recently arrived on the Mac. I’m always looking for excuses not to open the Music app on the Mac, and Albums arrived at just the right time to do just that. While I enjoy listening to individual songs or playlists, I’m currently in an album-centric phase. The Albums app is perfect for this. It’s entirely focused on playing entire albums from your Apple Music library, rather than mixing and curating songs for you. It goes without saying that this app requires an active Apple Music subscription, but I like it much more than the official Music app.
Listen to entire albums from Apple Music
The Albums app is available as a free download from the Mac App Store, but it requires a premium subscription to unlock some of its best features. The free version lets you search and listen to albums. When you open the app, a grid appears randomly displaying all the albums in your Apple Music library. You can tap any album to start playing it, and you can also add more albums to your queue to play after the current one finishes.
Albums Premium is available as a subscription ($2 per month or $19 per year) or a one-time purchase ($90). The premium version unlocks a range of useful features, such as listening statistics, a release feed that tracks new albums from artists in your library, and an “Insights” section for discovering curated playlists of albums you’ve already listened to. To access the app on iPhone, iPad, and Mac, simply subscribe or purchase it on one device.
Statistics and analytics in Albums for Mac
The “Insights” section of the Albums app is a fun way to discover music. Here, you can enter your birthdate and generate a complete list of collections based on it. Examples of such collections include “High School,” “Late Teens/Early 20s,” “My 30s,” and so on. Opening any of these collections will show you albums (from your Apple Music library) released during that period of your life, making it a great way to reminisce.
However, most collections in the “Stats” section don’t require your personal data. The Albums app also takes your Apple Music data into account and creates useful collections, such as “Only Played Once,” “Never Played,” and so on. I also like the “Today in History” section, which displays albums released on the same day but in previous years. Once you open a collection, you can select an album to play or use the shuffle feature to automatically add other albums to the queue after the current one finishes. This is also a great way to follow the app’s core principle of focusing on entire albums while still maintaining the shuffle feature.
The Albums Premium subscription also lets you create your own collections. You can create a collection of albums by a specific artist, music from a specific decade, or even albums of a specific length. For example, if you only like short albums, you can use the app’s collection filters to group all albums under 15 minutes. That’s how I discovered that the longest album in my Apple Music library is an epic 666-minute work (Daniel Barenboim’s Beethoven: Piano Sonatas). I might listen to it from start to finish when I start writing an epic fantasy novel.
Advanced custom features in albums
If you’re looking for different ways to browse and listen to albums, this app is a great choice. It’s also ideal for those who enjoy customizing the user interface. You can edit the sidebar to reorder sections, add collections, or even opt for a minimalist design, selecting one item per section. Albums also supports batch actions, allowing you to quickly add notes to multiple albums or add a set of albums to a new collection. Plus, there are convenient sorting features, allowing you to sort albums by release date, title, listening time, and more.
In fact, some of you may complain that Albums has too many settings, as they can make the interface a bit confusing. For example, I noticed three different gear-shaped buttons on one screen of the app. One opens app settings, the second opens collection settings, and the third opens Now Playing settings. While this level of customization may appeal to experienced users, it can be confusing for those simply looking for the right button to change the sort order of their collection. I also noticed a minor interface bug where search results appear on top of sidebar items, making them difficult to read.
Still, aside from these minor issues, Albums is a great app that brings much-needed improvements to Apple Music. It’s much faster than Apple Music’s native Mac interface, loads songs flawlessly, and does a great job of sorting through all your albums. At first glance, Albums may seem like a one-trick pony, but once you start exploring, you’ll realize it has a ton of great features you’ll love.
The developer is clearly a fan of albums, and it’s nice to see that such care still goes into ensuring that you listen to the music in the order the artists intended.