Mixtape

Mixtape is a companion app for Apple Music that lets you quickly manage the current track’s rating, favourite status, and playlist membership. It puts a special focus on playlist management, letting you quickly sort a track into multiple lists. It also gives you fine-grained control of what playlists show up, in what order, so you can focus on the lists that are important to you.

Mixtape is free, it has no account (beyond the need for an Apple Music subscription), and it collects no information about you.

For me and many others, listening to music can be a deeply personal, emotional experience. I found myself maintaining more and more playlists, each themed around moods or themes, so that I could connect and process my thinking around those topics with the help of well-matched musical favourites. This app was built primarily to scratch that itch for me, and I hope others find the same joy in this kind of “musical gardening” as I do.

This app is also in memory of my maternal grandfather, Jack (or, as we knew him, Grandpa Boo). For every Christmas and birthday, he would invariably gift us with burned CDs containing tracks he thought we’d enjoy. He’d hand-write the front insert for the CD case, writing out each track and artist in his beautiful, heavily-slanted cursive. I hope to keep that beautiful tradition of sharing ourselves through music alive, in my own small way, with this app; I use Mixtape to collect lists of music to share with loved ones, and lists of music that reminds me of those people. I would encourage others to give this practice a try as well.