Skip to content(if available)orjump to list(if available)

Show HN: QuickTunes: Apple Music player for Mac with iPod vibes

Show HN: QuickTunes: Apple Music player for Mac with iPod vibes

22 comments

·July 26, 2025

The slow and bloated nature of the Mac Apple Music app inspired us to create QuickTunes. It is a simple, fast, and native Apple Music player inspired by the simplicity of the iPod. You can use keyboard shortcuts to navigate a simple multi column layout, pick something, and press Play.

MBCook

Another alternate client that’s great is LongPlay.

Instead of being a better UI like QuickTunes, LongPlay is specifically designed for one thing and one thing only: full album listening.

Things are presented as full albums, and they play as full albums. You can choose whether skipping skips a single track or an entire album.

Tracks in an album are always played in order.

The main picking interface? Just a grid of album covers, like that old screensaver Macs used to have.

It’s great.

constantinum

just curious? Can we integrate Apple Music Subscription into LongPlay? Or This works only when you have your own collection of music that you own?

greymalik

Apple Music, iTunes, and manually synced music.

MBCook

I’m not sure.

I suspect you can just play anything in your library, whether Apple Music or purchased/ripped, but honestly I don’t know.

dontlaugh

Looks cool.

There’s also Cider, I use it on Linux https://cider.sh/.

eisa01

Any alternatives for iOS? I’m sick of the search defaulting to Apple Music the streaming service

leakycap

The fax app on their website is a great solution to having the ability to send a fax without subscribing to anything.

brailsafe

[delayed]

entropie

Found the german?

browningstreet

Any alt- Apple Music players for Windows? The Apple Music app on Windows has a lot of “native platform app” shortcomings.

bigyabai

Reminiscent of Spot for Linux, another great shortcut-oriented streaming interface for those of you who ditched the Mac: https://github.com/xou816/spot

zapzupnz

The name seems awfully close to QuickTune, another frontend to Apple Music.

https://marioaguzman.github.io/quicktune/

dostick

Modern player is not only about UIUX but also which music storage it supports, DLNA, Plex, Jellyfin, that’s the main feature users will be checking. If it’s just AppleMusic player.

jazzyjackson

OK there's a bunch of jellyfin clients tho. This is an Apple Music client. why you gotta drag somebody over this.

MangoToupe

Why does it matter what the backend is? A music player is a music player; it shouldn't matter where the music comes from.

slau

Well, it matters when you have to integrate with APIs and idiosyncrasies of third parties, and whatever draconian DRM they require. It’s obviously not impossible to add support for multiple backends, but from a development effort it definitely matters.

It’s not like streaming platforms are gingerly implementing open and common standards for music streaming. Winamp had support for .m3u and streaming back in ‘04, but we’ve moved on from that.

notpushkin

That’s not true – plenty of users don’t really care about that. That said, it would be really nice to see more players (pun?) in this space.

karlgkk

[flagged]

quesera

Said with affection, I presume.

nizmow

Who hurt you?

airtonix

I think it was when DHH announced he no longer uses a mac.

All these silicon valley apple cargo cultists are still in shock of the heresy.