It’s a cliché at this point to say that the current infinite access to music that we enjoy through streaming services is both a blessing and a curse. It’s convenient that we can play any song ever made any time we want, and the barrier of entry to discovering new music is non-existent. And despite this, the abundance of choice leads to a paralysis of deciding.

If I want to play music, what do I pick? I have thousands of songs, hundreds of albums, and tens of playlists in my collection. I can choose from various streaming “radio” stations and other music suggested to me from my streaming service of choice (Apple Music.) And yet wading through it all feels like a chore.

Sometimes I yearn for the constraints of yore, when I had a limited selection of music in my library consisting of CDs, a few mix tapes, and the radio. I listened to my favourites over and over, even if a lot of them weren’t any good. And the debut of a new album by a favourite band was an event, where I’d set aside time to listen it after purchase. But it’s not only the scarcity I miss; it’s the tactility of handling different CDs, organizing them in the way I like, and taking the time to appreciate the art and act of playing them.

I’m not alone in missing this. iTunes’ now-deprecated CoverFlow of albums was a way to capture that joy of flipping through an album collection. Modern-day iOS apps like Longplay and Albums do a version of this by showing you a grid of complete albums in your collection to scroll through. And there are hobbyist projects that attempt to capture the tactility of flipping through albums, by printing pictures of album covers onto NFC tags that you program to play that album when taped on a reader.

I am a user of both Albums and Longplay and enjoy them. Scrolling a grid of your albums is satisfying, and both offer options to organize your albums into collections, queue up lists of albums and ‘shuffle’ whole albums. But they’re a flat grid of icons, and organizing them into meaningful categories is finicky, time intensive, and boring.

As for the albums as NFC tags option, I’ve long been tempted to try this, and I still might! But the barrier for entry for this is much higher, with equipment costs and mild programming work, not to mention the time it takes to print out your albums covers and program each one to play the album you want.

What I’d love to see, and I’ll try to articulate here, is an albums-focused music app, similar to the two I mentioned, with a focus on whole albums, that makes perusing and organizing your albums fun and delightful. How do you make an app like this fun? You start by making albums 3D objects.

Case Study - Dice by Pcalc #

Let me first step back to talk about an example of an app made fun with 3D objects.

Over the past year, I’ve learned and run the tabletop roleplaying game Star Trek Adventures. Tabletop roleplaying games (famously) rely on using different sets of rolled dice to determine game outcomes. I like using physical dice, but thought it would be handy to sometimes have a helper app to quickly roll and sum common combinations. There are a ton of dice rolling apps out there, ranging from great to absolute garbage. I tried a few, and then stumbled upon Dice by Pcalc which I fell in love with.

The thing that dice rolling has in common with perusing a CD library is that the tactility adds to experience. In the case of dice rolling, there’s a certain thrill from picking up the dice and getting the right roll that pressing a software button and seeing a result doesn’t give you. Dice by Pcalc comes close though, by crisply rendering 3D dice on a virtual tabletop, animating them with realistic physics, and combining them with realistic sounds. You can press a button to roll all the dice, or if you’re using the app on an iPad or iPhone, you can shake the device or use your finger to flick and roll each individual die. The app is highly customizable, letting you pick different tabletop surfaces, angles, different types of dice with different colour schemes. I was even able to create a version of the special D20 and D6 dice that Star Trek Adventures uses in the app.

You get all the advantages of it being software, with auto-sums, pre-saved sets of dice, and dice customization. But the experience is much closer to the fun of rolling physical dice. I installed Dice by Pcalc on my iPad for gaming sessions, and while we mostly used the physical dice we had, it was handy to have for more complicated rolls, and delighted everyone who used it. I think Dice by Pcalc is a great model for what a 3D music app could be.

Back to Music #

How then could we apply the example of Dice by Pcalc to a music app? I’d boil it down to a few things:

• High quality visuals
  • Take advantage of modern Apple processors to render albums in high definition with high frame rates.
• Realistic physics
  • When I move an album, it should behave like a real object.
  • Albums should interact with other albums. If I have a pile of albums I can knock them over onto the ‘floor’ and shuffle them around on top of each other.
  • When I play an album, its record could come out of the sleeve and go in turntable and start turning.
• Highly customizable
  • Let me store different collections of albums in different realistic looking milk crates, or on a wooden shelf, or even one of those old CD towers.
  • Let me choose my simulated medium: CD, vinyl or cassette tape. Even eight track!

But a fun music app needs core music features. Next I’ll explore how we could apply these concepts to common music app features.

Collections & Sorting #

A great music app needs great support for custom collections (e.g. “Favourites,” “Chill,” “Christmas”) to make it easy to browse your albums in a way that makes sense to you. The current slate of iOS apps let you create collections, but the process of creating them is tedious on a touch device. You need to long-press on an album, pause for the menu to come up, then choose the collection to add to (or tag if you’re using smart collections.)

But couldn’t a 3D app make sorting albums into collections fun? I mentioned the idea of letting you visualize your collections in milk crates, or another customizable object. What if you had a big pile of unsorted albums and empty milk crates representing your collections, and you went through your pile, flicking or moving them into the right milk crate?

You’d have the option to create automatic collections, based on genre, release date, or other metadata. And since it’s software, you could sort your collections automatically. But imagine how cool it would be if when you re-sorted, you saw your 3D albums being resorted in the app?

In my research, the app Jams on Toast comes closest to this model, letting you drag albums to different collections. It’s a neat concept, but I found the app was slow to load album art, and the albums were 2D squares, not 3D objects with realistic physics.¹

Playing Music #

Playing music is table stakes for a music app, and I think there’s a danger of making this feature set too fun by adding too many fiddly controls. For instance, while it might be neat to have an album to have a virtual vinyl record that comes out of the album sleeve and go onto a record player when you play it. But if the user had to fiddle with taking a 3D record out of a sleeve, placing it on a turntable, and moving the needle to the right place before it can play, it would get annoying quickly.

When music is playing you’d want a full frame view of the album being played, with easy to access buttons to pause and skip tracks. The buttons could be rendered in a way that evoked an old record player (or cassette or CD player) without getting in the way. And there could be fun little animations, like a record player’s arm moving along the vinyl when you skip a track, or the record stopping when you pause.

The app Vinyls comes close to this vision, with a spinning record and animated needle arm. But it only animates the record part, and doesn’t try to make any of the other controls “fun.”

Wrapping up #

It’s easy to overdo an app like I’m describing. As I said, it’s possible for an app to be too fun, to the point that it frustrates rather than delights. And I realize that I’m essentially describing an app with “skeuomorphic design,” a now out-of-date style with controls meant to make it easier to use the software by making it resemble its real-world counterparts. The argument holds that skeuomorphic design is no longer necessary, as users have become familiar enough with digital interfaces that they no longer require visual metaphors to guide them.

Further, making the app that I’m describing would be hard. Even someone with the technical expertise to tackle making an app like this (expertise I don’t have) would have to put an enormous effort into making it, and would need a great deal of design and user experience expertise and talent.

It’s possible that the idea for a 3D music album app is out-of-style and too labour intensive to be a profitable endeavour, having a market share of one (me.) Despite this, I’m sharing my vision for this app in the hopes that one day someone might find this and be inspired enough to make it anyway.🤞