In 2025, playing your own music on an iPhone is surprisingly hard, unless you pay Apple or navigate a maze of limitations. So I built my own player from scratch, with full text search, iCloud support, and a local-first experience. GitHub link
Why I Built My Own Audio Player Like many people, I’ve picked up too many subscriptions, some through Apple (iCloud, Apple Music), others got lost in random platforms (like Netflix, which I forgot I was still paying for). I actually used Apple Music regularly (and previously Spotify), but the streaming turned out to be more convenience than necessity. With a curated local library, I didn’t lose much, just the lock-in.
Honest question, what’s hard about playing an MP3 on any Apple device?
Nothing
The article is just misleading ragebait turned into an excuse to show their app and things about iOS development.
It’s not. I use my Windows 10 video game machine to drag and drop MP3s onto my iPhone from my 400GB library. I use iTunes to do it (but I listen using Foobar2000 on my computer, I only use iTunes to put music on my phone and make iPhone incremental image backups.)
I wish I could drag and drop FLAC files, but I can easily convert them. I do t use my really nice cans on my phone anyway.
Look into PlexAmp for lossless streaming. It’s pretty dope.
I do have Apple Music for lossless streaming! But I do still load obscure things on my phone that don’t exist there. Which is shockingly few things, to my surprise.
I keep Apple Music too, because it does offer a lot of value for the price. The inclusion of Classical makes it a no-brainer for me.
I was shocked at how much stuff is there. A few outliers (a Team Teamwork album, Squincy Jones mixes, and Keifer Gr33n mixes) aren’t there, among some other super obscure shit. All the other stuff I love that isn’t popular, like The Blood Brothers or Xiu Xiu, all there.
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Apples own Music app (without Apple Music subscription), VLC, PlexAmp…
It’s not hard if you look.
Edit, I’ve taken a look at what you’ve done and I quite like it. If my comment was snippy it’s because the question of easily playing mp3s is solved. But if the existing solutions don’t fit your niche workflow preference, like it sounds like it doesn’t, I love the idea of writing something that does.
One issue I have with ALL the local and streaming platforms (save for Apple Music Classical, ironically) is every one of them organizes in Artist>Album>Track, whereas classical music have different organizational needs. I wonder if local wave can be altered a bit to accommodate such organizational changes?
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You do not.
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Did you ever have an iPod? Do you remember how you had to have a library on the computer which then synced to your iPod? That’s how this works. Create a local library on a computer, and then sync that library Apple Music.
It’s really just drag and drop. I always drop the album folder, with all mp3s and then edit all with correct meta information, album cover etc, if needed.
Edit: you have to do this, in order to add them to the itunes/music library. It actually makes copies of the mp3s in the library folder iirc.
It doesn’t even look for music on the hard drive, that’s why it has to be added to the music library.
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It’s called Music on the Mac, but it’s still basically iTunes. You might have it installed and not realize it.
Note, the syncing process happens in a Finder window.
My solution: vmware fusion or virtualbox with windows installed on a vm and running winamp with passthrough audio.
…so you’re one of those people who seeks out overly complex and convoluted solutions for the sake of being different.
Maybe it’s just that I am in IT and the problem isn’t that difficult for me or others with tech savvy to begin with.
I was just trying to offer a solution, damn, ease up
I loved to do this kind of stuff when i was younger. Especially this kind of OS interactions. It actually gave me a lot of experience and helped a lot in my job, where i have to find solutions out of the norm.