In many ways, Cs: Music Player is the perfect music app for iOS and iPadOS
Price: $3/£3
Version: 6.3.4
Size: 3 MB
Seller: Mike Clay
Platform: iPhone / iPad
Apple’s built-in Music app is great, but the focus is undoubtedly on Apple Music – and on expanding your musical horizons through music curation and discovery. However, if you already know the type of music you like, you might find yourself diving for the Library tab all too often. If this is the case, Cs: Music Player could be the app for you.
Cs: Music Player is a no-frills music app that focuses on your own music collection – not on finding new tracks or artists, but on managing the ones you’ve already amassed in your library. It plugs into Apple Music and can show both local and iCloud Music Library tracks, making it great for mp3 hoarders and streamers alike. The first thing you’ll notice is the app’s simple, minimalist design.
The Artists tab.
In a departure from the Music app, Cs: Music Player offers a bunch of more traditional music tabs – there’s Artists, Albums, Songs, and Playlists. It feels a lot like old-school iTunes or the pre-iOS 7 Music app, but in a really good way – albeit updated for iOS 14’s interface and design. If you find all the newer additions to Music simply get in the way, this could be the stripped-back library-focused solution you need.
Minimalism at its best.
Playing tracks is as simple as navigating through one of the app’s tabs, tapping a track, and sitting back. If the app is stored in iCloud, you’ll see a little cloud icon alongside the track title and the song will stream over the internet almost instantly. Everything in Cs: Music Player is really snappy, whether you’re streaming or playing music locally.
Cs: Music Player recently got full iPadOS support, and the experience of using the app on the iPad is also really good. The extra screen real estate adds a couple of extra tabs – Composers and Genres – although it does feel that elsewhere, there’s a lot of blank space. Exploring ways that maintain the minimalist vibe while taking advantage of the extra screen space would be a smart next step for the app.
I’ve got a blank space.
On both platforms, Cs: Music Player offers a heap of settings for you to toggle. You can choose whether you’d like iCloud items to appear or not, whether cloud or explicit indicators appear alongside tracks, and you can set a theme for the app and its icon. You can also customize the tabs to suit your exact needs.
Cs: Music Player is undoubtedly an app that could replace the built-in Music player. For anyone who cares more about their own music collection and less about music discovery, this app is a great solution. It’s nimble, quick, and functional – and its no-frills approach clearly gets the job done.
Album view.
You can download Cs: Music Player for a one-time purchase of $3/£3 – it’s subscription-free and optimized for iOS and iPadOS.