Micro app 5: MP3 Dreams

MP3 Dreams was a little experiment to see how much of a viable music player I could create in an hour or two. I referred to a screenshot of iTunes from around 2005, back when it was generally loved and hadn't yet pivoted into the bloated mess it is today in the form of Apple Music.

My goal was to have the app point at a folder on my computer, parse the metadata from those audio files, and display them as songs I could play. What you see here is what I was able to do in a little over an hour. And to its credit, it's functional! I point it at a folder, it finds all the music files, and presents them in the interface. After a little prodding, I got sorting to work. It just works.

However, I think this is a great example of how you can make great progress and everything looks great in screenshots, but actually using it day-to-day reveals how much attention needs to go into an app like this. The keyboard shortcuts you'd expect aren't there. Micro-interactions and tabbing around the interface don't work how you'd think they would. There are no playlists, no metadata editing, no bulk updates, no scrobbling. A million little things that even a basic music app needs.

I don't doubt I could add a lot of this and build a pretty decent music player for Mac, but know I don't have the time or energy for that right now. So for my MP3 listening in 2026, I'll be using Swinsian, which has already solved all of these problems, does them really well, and even looks properly old school to boot.

I did get this pretty rad animation into the app when you switched albums, though ❤️