I’ve been working on a Mac app that grew out of something I always missed with digital music: the visual and tactile side of albums.
When I’m listening to a record I like having the sleeve out, looking at artwork, liner notes, etc. With Apple Music that part of the experience basically disappears, especially if you’re listening from a large local library. When I’m shuffling albums, I often don’t even know what’s playing until I look, and switching to Apple Music to do that is cumbersome and breaks my work flow.
So I built a companion app called gr∞ves that runs alongside Apple Music and shows the album artwork at large scale on the desktop while music is playing. It can also cycle through additional artwork if it exists for the release (alternate covers, booklet scans, etc.), and surface a bit more album information.
It’s unobtrusive. It sits at the desktop level by default (remember GeekTool?) and you can see it with a “show desktop” click, function key (F10), or trackpad gesture.
It’s mainly aimed at people who maintain their own digital music collections and prefer listening to albums, rather than just streaming playlists.
I’ve opened a public TestFlight beta and would love feedback from anyone here who might want to try it, especially people with large libraries or lots of artwork. Please give it a spin!
I know it’s niche, but I hope there are some power users and music fans who will really love this.
