Looking for iOS music apps with specific hard-to-find features

August 4, 2015 9:11 AM

I'm looking for an iOS music app that has one or more specific features and my searching hasn't turned anything up.. it could be that these things aren't technically possible. I'll accept that as an answer. But what I would like is the ability to see the date last played for each song and be able to view and/or edit the iTunes Comments field. I would also like to be able to edit the stars rating AND view the lyrics (the official music app doesn't let you do both).
posted by bleep to Technology (2 answers total)

Best answer: I don't know of a full featured player app that does all this, but there are some janky minimal free apps that are devoted to viewing that information, but leave the actual meat of the media player experience for other apps to manage. Music Stats is one that lets you browse through your library and see these fields (and sort by lastPlayedDate, or playCount). PlayingSongInfo is the most minimal possible, just showing you a dump of info about whatever track is currently playing.

From using these, I will say that the playCounts and lastPlayedDates don't seem to be the most reliable - I'm fairly sure there's tracks I've listened to on my phone that it thinks it has never played.

I don't use iTunes comments, so I don't think there's any on my phone to test with, but from Apple's programmer documentation, I don't think it's possible for an app to edit them on the device.

The official music app does actually let you see and set the rating. On the Now Playing screen, tap on the song title, and it will turn into the rating, which you can then set. Tap near the rating but not on it to get back to the song title. I can only assume the reason such an insane UI was permitted is that QA never even found it.
posted by aubilenon at 11:11 AM on August 4, 2015 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: PlayingSongInfo is great for the time being, thanks!
posted by bleep at 11:50 AM on August 4, 2015