Introduction
The Tape Rack App is an iOS Music Player Application. Its main use case is to interrupt hearing albums and playlists at any moment and resume them from the last track you’ve played. The application tracks the playback position for different playlists and albums and let you resume at a convenient time.
The name Tape Rack comes from the fact that audio cassette tapes have exactly this property when hearing music. It is always possible to remove the tape and play another one. When you put in the first tape in your player and do not rewind it, then you will start hearing the audio from the point where you stopped it.
When I was a child, I always heard many audio books on cassette tapes in parallel. And I was thinking about that when I switched to Audio CDs. Then we got iTunes and other music player applications with the same restriction. Today we have many music streaming services, but not this simple feature! To hear the last song of a playlist, you have to turn on the shuffle mode or hear all tracks in a row 🤷♂️.
I couldn’t believe that saving the playlist position is a problem. So I decided to learn Swift beside my main job at CARIAD SE as Simulation Software Specialist and solved this problem 😉.
The app is not available in the App Store at the moment. I plan to start the beta test in the next days via Apple TestFlight. If you are interested in using the beta version, simply ask for an invitation via info@tape-rack.app.
I plan to offer this app by a small fee to refund my costs for the Apple Developer Program, this homepage and other typical things. As written above, I have another job and do not plan to become a professional full-time app developer.
Features
The application is mostly self-explaining. Only a few hints:
- Add playlist/album from your local or Apple Music library to the application: Tap „Create tape from Media Library“. A new dialog shows all available albums and playlist. The list list can be filtered.
- Enter tape into player: Tap on a tape from the tape list. The tape will be moved to the top of the list and start playing from the last playback position.
- Direct access to any song of a tape: Tap and hold a tape. A new dialog will show all tracks from this tape. Tap to select one.
Future Ideas
Some great ideas for improving this application:
- Support for Spotify – yes there is an official SDK available. And I think this will be possible 😀
- iCloud based sync between multiple devices
- Support for CarPlay – my personal favorite feature request 😎