For the last week or so I’ve been thinking more and more about reviving my local music library. There are some songs in there that are simply no longer available anywhere else or that I just want to remember again.
While Apple Music (the application, not the service) is decent on iOS and macOS, there are some things that are just annoying when it comes to handling file formats like FLAC and Ogg Vorbis and also adding new music always requires first adding them to the macOS application before being able to synchronise them onto my phone. Access via the Files app would be really nice 😉
Due to that I started looking around and quickly stumbled onto Flacbox. As the name already implies, it also supports FLAC (and other file formats). It also offers a “WiFi drive” feature that basically just started a HTTP (and WebDAV) server so that you can upload from any device in the same WiFi network that has a web-browser or WebDAV client.
Offline-music is accessible via the normal file-system of iOS/iPadOS and you can add files directly there. There are also ways to automatically integrate music stored on cloud file-shares like Google Drive but I haven’t tried those yet.
Once a song is played, you get the expected options for repeating a song, shuffling in playlists, albums, and artists. There is even an equaliser available if you need something like this. Unlike Apple Music Flacbox also lets you browse songs by genre. No idea why this was removed from the Apple application.
The UI is sadly not as fancy as Spotify or Apple Music but it works quite well. In dark-mode there are some minor glitches but nothing overly annoying. What is annoying, though, are the ads which you can get rid of for €9.99, so they’re doing a good job 😉
At this point I’m favouring Apple Music due to the more polished interface but perhaps I will move over once I find my old music archive which contained far more FLAC and Ogg Vorbis files. Once thing I’d really like from the developers, though, is some kind of about page on their website. I really like to know who is behind a software that I’m willing to pay for. I also don’t get why there are two music players by the same developer that look extremely similar with the one big difference that Flacbox seems to support FLAC while Evermusic doesn’t seem to do so (haven’t tried)…
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