Apple makes products that a lot of people love. They’ve never made a music app that music lovers actually like. A decade ago, there were a number of competing products, some of them quite good. Songbird in particular had a lot of passionate users among DJs and music aficionados. But most of them failed, partly because outside apps could not compete with the iTunes sync and AppStore lock-in with Apple devices.
Now iTunes itself is no more, and the problem isn’t so much the interface or clunkiness of Apple’s Music app as much as the fact that it’s an app that is primarily designed for streaming. File handling is a legacy feature. With Apple’s history if removing features (and changing ports) rather abruptly, even that might not last much longer and is liable to disappear at any time.
Doppler is a music app designed specifically for those who buy music. This might mean people who have extensive collections already digitized, or support artists through Bandcamp, or listen to music not available on streaming platforms.
If you’ve tried it, you know it is pretty hard to stream your music collection, but Doppler requires virtually no technical expertise or IT experience to do it.
It also might just be for people who are nerds — people who want to know how to do crazy things like stream the music they already paid for rather than pay rent on music they already own.
Hey — that’s us!
If you’ve tried it, you know it is pretty hard to stream your music collection, but Doppler requires virtually no technical expertise or IT experience to do it. That’s a huge thing. Quite a lot of what Doppler does takes place under the hood. It transfers files between devices as close to seamlessly as possible using what they call “Doppler Transfer.” It gives you an option to add files via WiFi, USB or AirDrop. This is all done without having to know anything about what it’s actually doing other than making things on one device appear on another. In the fashion of the Mac, it “just works.”
I assumed from the start that a device targeting music nerds would play high quality formats. I was not wrong. In addition to mp3, AAC and m4a, Doppler also supports most (but not all) high quality formats — specifically WAV, FLAC and ALAC files.
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But the organizational tools are where Doppler really shines. iTunes never got the hang of this in its day — everything was based on file-and-folder metaphor, very mechanical and computer-oriented. Apple Music doesn’t even really try. Doppler lets you change playlists while they’re being used, find artwork and merge albums together simply. The iPhone app also works pretty well with the device, enabling you to play music via voice command using Siri and with widgets. (It also supports CarPlay, but I haven’t used this.)
There’s certainly a niche which will love this product and many others will have no use for it at all. Many of our readers could probably use this, but is that a big enough niche to build a business from it? The nature of apps today is different than it was 10 years ago — there were DJs who still used Songbird for years after it was no longer updated. Macs and phones work different now — a few years and you might find an app that was discontinued no longer functions.
A nod to sustainability is why Doppler isn’t free, and is priced a differently than most apps. The Mac app and the iPhone app are billed separately: the Mac app being $30 and the iPhone app $9. These are one-time payments. That’s more expensive than free, and there’s no ad tier because there’s no ads. Just music. But as the cost of really taking all of your music wherever you want to go? It’s not bad at all.
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