Album players for Apple Music: Albums, Longplay and Spinworthy compared

Spinworthy is our app, so read this with that in mind. We’ve tried to be fair: the facts about the other two come from their own App Store listings as of November 2026, and we’ve said where Spinworthy falls short. All three are good apps, and they’re built for different listeners.

All three play music through Apple Music, so you need a subscription to play anything you haven’t bought.

Albums: Music Library Player by Adam Linder has been around since 2019 and is the most established of the three, with a 4.7-star average from nearly 400 ratings in the US App Store. It runs on iPhone and iPad (iOS 17 or later), and it’s free, with a Premium upgrade.

The free app covers album shuffle and a grid of album art, album-focused controls, Now Playing and collection widgets, CarPlay with pinned albums, iCloud sync, notes on albums and listening sessions, and Siri and App Intents.

Premium is where it goes deep: weekly, monthly and yearly listening reports with custom charts, Last.fm scrobbling and history import, Insight Collections (new and unlistened albums, old favourites you haven’t heard in a while), your own tags, a release feed for the artists and labels in your library, and production credits from MusicBrainz and Discogs.

Choose Albums if you want to manage and analyse a large library, scrobble to Last.fm, or listen in the car.

Longplay by Adrian Schoenig shows only the (near) complete albums in your library, as a wall of album art, and leaves out singles and stray songs. It’s a one-off purchase, $7.49 in the US, runs on iPhone and iPad (iOS 17.6 or later), and has a 4.6-star average from about 170 ratings. A separate Mac version is sold on its own.

Its signature is the sort orders, with names like Negligence (how long since you last played an album, weighted by your ratings), Addiction (time spent listening) and Brightness (the main colour of the artwork). It has collections that sync across devices, infinite album shuffle, a home screen widget, CarPlay, Siri, Shortcuts and Spotlight. It also works with music bought from iTunes or synced from a computer, as well as Apple Music.

Choose Longplay if you want a lovely, focused view of the albums you already own, and you’d rather pay once than subscribe.

Spinworthy is the newest of the three, released in November 2026. It’s free, with no in-app purchases and no ads, and runs on iPhone only (iOS 26.4 or later).

Where the other two are library tools, Spinworthy is built around the act of listening. You flip through your albums one cover at a time, like a crate of records, or switch to shelves. The record slides out of its sleeve and spins, and dragging the tonearm scrubs through the whole album. There’s no shuffle and no autoplay, and playback is gapless.

It counts the albums you actually finish, and when. Each morning it picks one album from your shelves and explains why (“a classic you last spun eight months ago”), with three alternates and an optional reminder. Four shelves (First Listen, Favorites, Classics and Rotation) sort your collection, and a record leaves First Listen the first time you hear it through. Rather than only showing your library, it can fill your crate from 200 classics or from more than eighty published lists, including both of Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest and Pitchfork’s and Metacritic’s best of each year.

What it doesn’t have: iPad, Mac, CarPlay, widgets, Last.fm or listening statistics, and it plays the Apple Music catalogue only, not local files or MP3s. It needs a recent iOS, and it’s brand new, so it has no track record yet.

Choose Spinworthy if you want to hear more albums all the way through, and like being handed one each morning.

• Price: Albums is free with a Premium upgrade. Longplay is a $7.49 one-off. Spinworthy is free.
• Devices: Albums and Longplay run on iPhone and iPad, and Longplay has a separate Mac app. Spinworthy is iPhone only.
• Minimum iOS: 17 for Albums, 17.6 for Longplay, 26.4 for Spinworthy.
• CarPlay and widgets: Albums and Longplay have both. Spinworthy has neither.
• Where albums come from: Albums and Longplay show your library. Spinworthy imports whole albums from your library and can add from built-in lists and classics.
• Daily pick: Spinworthy’s Album of the Day. Albums Premium has Insight Collections, and Longplay has its Negligence sort, which surface forgotten albums in their own ways.
• Stats and scrobbling: Albums Premium, including Last.fm. Spinworthy counts finished albums and a streak. Longplay sorts by listening time.
• Shuffle: Albums and Longplay both offer album shuffle. Spinworthy has none.

If you’d rather not add an app, Apple Music can play albums well with three changes: turn off Autoplay, keep shuffle off and start albums with Play, and check Song Transitions so albums aren’t blended. What you won’t get is a view built around albums, or anything that keeps track of which ones you’ve finished.