11
votes
iPhone music players with good CarPlay experience?
I’m about to take a road trip and I want to be able to easily play my music and it would be a huge pain to do this with iTunes. I’ve got VLC but the UI leaves much to be desired. I can’t even view my music by album in CarPlay, which is how I’m going to be accessing my music. There are tons of music playing apps out there but they are all varying degrees of sketchy. Does anyone have any recommendations?
I have to agree with /u/SunSpotter here. Try out the default music app. Apple has the “Apple Music” subscription, but you can use the music app without it. You will have to sync your music with iTunes or Finder, which may take a bit to set up, but should be doable. Once you do, you also get access to the wealth of different music apps that piggyback off the system music catalog. My personal favorite is Albums. As the name implies, it is focused on listening to entire albums, and is fantastic. Mavis pro also seems to be well liked, but I didn’t prefer it. Albums isn’t very good at selecting new music in CarPlay, but once you queue up some stuff the CarPlay playing UI is decent.
Perhaps I’m not understanding something here, is Apple Music not an option? Seems the most sensible solution if you already have the music you want in iTunes. If you had music you that was added manually to iTunes, I’m not sure if that would show up in Apple Music or not, but otherwise everything you’ve purchased on iTunes or regularly listen to on iTunes should be available. I use Apple Music all the time via CarPlay, and I’ve never had any issues with it (just CarPlay itself being weird on occasion). It does require a subscription, but it seems you can try it for free. I’m personally sharing it as part of a family plan so it costs me almost nothing.
Alternatively, I’ve never had any issues with Spotify, though I use it less since I don’t have premium and hate ads. But Spotify does seem to do a better job of recommending music I like, and has a greater availability of playlists. Spotify also allows you to add music locally if that’s the primary concern. Again, I don’t have the experience to know if that will show up correctly in CarPlay though.
Music added via iTunes definitely does show up in Apple Music and CarPlay.
I have a very large music library on a server and to add them to my phone I would need to transcode them all to ALAC and then import them into a Mac with too small of a storage to hold them all. It’s a huge pain, and on top of that I would have to get rid of the music that is already synced with it from a Windows installation that no longer exists. Apple Music doesn’t work because Apple wants to make every step painful.
I came here to recommend Plex and I'll double down on it now that you've mentioned this. I used the plexamp carplay app for a few years and it worked pretty decently for my needs. If you have the paid version of Plex (which is on sale currently) you can download some of the songs or playlists in case you drive somewhere with spotty/no connection. But you don't need it if you'll have plenty of data wherever you go.
OP, if you do end up setting up plex, check out Prism Music. I haven’t used it personally, but it is made by the same indie developer that makes Prologue audiobook player, which is by far the best audiobook app I have ever used.
Didn't know these existed, thanks for the recommendation!
Important to note that there's a Christian music app called Prism Music as well. I was very confused for a second before I went back to the Google search and found the Prism Music you were talking about, lol.
Since you already have a server, you might think about setting up an instance of gonic/navidrome (both are free+open source) then using a client app like play:sub (paid) or Amperfy (free).
It's nice to have a spotify-like interface for your collection that can work with apps on nearly every device out there. I use play:sub with navidrome and have loads of albums synced onto my iPhone for offline listening while driving about since I live in rural nowhere. The car play integration is pretty nice too.
I would imagine that depends how your music is organized. For my non-streaming needs, I use flacbox, which works well enough on carplay. That being said, my "free floating" music just lives in dropbox, which flacbox connects well with, which may not be the case in general.
It would be perhaps wise to disclose that most of my music is in FLAC. I also have it organized into folders representing albums. I’m hoping to just drag them into a folder and have the player recognize everything automatically.
Flacbox has no issue playing FLACs, but where the issue may be is getting the files on there. If you can put them either on a cloud server, or have an SMB server, then it will import it no issue, and folder structure will be respected.
Flacbox actually ended up being the perfect solution. Thank you.
Just wanted to chime in on this topic. Since IOS 18 YouTube music has this terrible bug with car play where it only plays one song at a time, then you have to press play for the next one to start. It’s very frustrating.