Music Aim guide

01The player

Music Aim opens on the player: the cover, the wheel, and a ring of target buttons around it. It plays the music in your library through the Music app's own player, so what you start here carries on in Music, in Control Center and in the car.

The wheel is the transport: play and pause in the middle, next and previous at the sides. The small square that blinks under a target button shows the target in force.

Your music

Music Aim plays the songs in your music library — the Library tab of the Music app. To fill it, add songs, albums or playlists to your library in the Music app. With Apple Music they don't need to be downloaded: songs that are not downloaded stream when they play, so they need a connection and an active subscription, while downloaded songs also play offline. Music you bought, or synced from a computer, works too.

Songs you only stream — radio, Listen Now, a playlist you haven't added — are not in your library, so the targets can't find them. The bigger your library, the more every target has to choose from.

Pull the player up and Now Playing follows from underneath; let go and it snaps to one or the other.

Above the player is a row of seven round buttons: down to Now Playing, the info card, this guide, Settings, About, lyrics, and the skip view. Tap one to open its page and tap it again to close it; the open page's button sits on a dark disc.

Beside the player, out of sight, are two columns of captions that name every button. Swipe the player sideways and the column on that side slides in, with its arrows pointing at the buttons; swipe far enough and it stays until the next tap. Settings › Help labels turns the captions off.

02Targets

A target answers one question: what should play after this song? Pick one and the queue becomes every song in your library that matches the playing song on that property.

What a target does not do

It does not restart the song: the song carries on from where it is. It does not touch shuffle or repeat: those stay as you left them.

Target in force

The target that built the current queue is shown on the player, at the top of Now Playing and in the artwork view, in the car and on the watch. A list targeted in the car is shown by its name.

03Now Playing

Now Playing is the lower part of the player's own surface. At the top, on one rounded plate: the cover, the title, and the artist, the album and the genre on a line each; the timeline (drag the thumb to move through the song); the transport; and two rows of six tiles. The first row: Like, Shuffle off, Shuffle All, Repeat off, Repeat one, Repeat all. The second: Liked list, Songs, Playlists, Starred, Top 25, Lyrics. A tile that is on shows in the accent colour.

Below is every target as a row, with what it would play and how many songs that is. Tap a row to target it. The row that is in force is red and ticked.

A song's own page

Tap the title, or the arrow on a row in a list, and the same page opens for that song, so you can target from a song that is not playing.

Look the song up

The last group opens lyrics sites, Wikipedia and a web search for the song in the browser.

04The artwork view

Tap the cover and it fills the screen, with its reflection under it. A drawer over the lower part lists everything known about the song; rows with a target glyph can be tapped to target.

• The drawer has three rests: full, middle, and down to its handle. Drag the handle, or use the two chevrons.
• Target in force is locked at the top of the list while the rows scroll under it.
• The button with three lines lets you drag the rows into the order you want; the order is kept.
• Along the bottom: the timeline, close, previous, play, next, Like and lyrics.

05Lyrics

The lyrics button opens the words over the cover. When timed lyrics exist for the song, the line being sung is lit and the page follows it; tap any line to jump there.

Follow

The button with two arrows beside the caption turns following on and off. Scrolling by hand turns it off; press it to catch up.

Sync Here

Timed lyrics belong to one recording, and yours may be another. Press Sync Here, then tap the line you hear being sung: the timings move so that line sits at this moment. Do it again further on and the lines between are stretched to fit. The alignment is remembered for the song; hold Sync Here to put the original timings back.

06Songs, Liked and playlists

The lists show your library with a search bar at the top (pull the list down to open it) and a strip of targets under the playing song.

Pick a target, then tap a song

With a target selected in the strip, tapping a song plays it and targets it on that property. The strip scrolls sideways through every target. The arrow at the end of a row opens the song's own page.

With nothing selected, tapping a song simply plays it in the list.

Liked

The heart likes the playing song. The Liked list is kept by Music Aim on this device; it is also a target.

Sharing lists

Settings › Library can export your Liked list, or share any list — or all of them — as a Music Aim file. Send it by AirDrop or Messages, or keep it in Files as a backup. Opened in Music Aim on another device, each list shows in Playlists as shared by you, with how many of its songs are in that library; its page lists every song and marks the ones that can play. A Liked list can instead be added to the Liked list there. Import lists reads Music Aim files and plain JSON lists of songs.

07In the car

Music Aim is a CarPlay app. Its Now Playing tab shows the cover, the transport and the targets as large tiles; Liked, Starred, Songs and Library are lists. A list can be targeted as a whole from its first row.

What you target in the car is the target in force on the phone, and the other way round.

08Watch, widgets and Siri

Apple Watch: the Target page has the playing song, six targets (This album, Artist, Genre, All songs, Liked, Starred), the transport, Like, Shuffle and Repeat, the target in force, and the way to every target, including the same targets on Apple Music. The playing cover sits in the status line beside the time. Swipe right for Now Playing and the Digital Crown's volume; swipe left for your playlists.

Widgets come in every size: the Player widget (the cover, the song, the transport and the target in force) and the Targets widget (the four targets, Liked list and Songs), on the Home Screen, the Lock Screen and in StandBy, with one-tap targets. Control Center has the same controls. In the car, the Player widget's small layout is the CarPlay dashboard card.

Live Activity: while Music Aim is targeting, the Lock Screen banner and the Dynamic Island show the cover, the song, a live timeline and a row of nine buttons: Like, Liked list, previous, play / pause, next, Artist, This album, Genre, All songs. The compact Island shows the target in force on the left and play / pause on the right; the minimal one, the target in force.

Siri: “Target the artist in Music Aim”, “Target the album in Music Aim” (this album), and the other targets by name, straight to the target. Siri knows the app as Aim too: “Aim all songs”, “Aim my favorite songs” (your Liked list), “Aim the artist”, “Aim the album”, “Aim the genre”, “Aim the composer”, “Aim the song” (its name). Works in the car. Playing, pausing and skipping need no app name at all while Music Aim is playing.

Without your voice: the Music Aim controls in Control Center, on the Lock Screen and on the Action button target with one press — add one from Control Center’s edit mode (or Settings › Action Button › Controls) and choose the target.

09The look

Settings › Appearance has it all, and the player's own display menu (tap the display) has the first three.

• Skin: six, drawn by the app — Dark or Light, Rounded, Crossed or Squared. The openings around the wheel are the target glyphs themselves, and the target in force pulses white through them.
• Background: the Icon ground with its rings, plain colours, auroras and patterns, bright and dark — and Artwork (the default), an aurora in the playing cover's own colours that changes with every song.
• Now Playing plates: the rounded shapes behind Now Playing's rows and buttons. Auto follows the skin: light plates with a light skin, dark with a dark one.
• Transparency: how see-through the skin's body and the plates are, from 25 to 75 %.
• Accent colour: the colour of the target in force, Liked, Shuffle and the switches.
• Default artwork: what stands in for a missing cover.

10iPad and iPhone Duo

iPad, upright: the iPhone layout, larger, with the captions a swipe away. iPad, sideways: two columns — the player with its captions on the left, Now Playing always on the right, where the lists, Settings, the song pages and the other pages open too. The row's buttons toggle them.

iPhone Duo, closed: the player beside the camera column, with the row's buttons stacked under the time. Open it sideways and Now Playing takes the left half while the right half stays exactly as the closed screen was. Open it upright and the row moves into the status line, left of the time, so the player grows.

11Settings

The gear opens Settings, in sections:

• Appearance: the skin, the background, the plates, transparency, the accent, the default artwork and the help labels (see The look), and haptics: a gentle tap under buttons, sliders, presses and swipes, on until you turn it off.
• Playback: loop and shuffle; the Lock Screen card: while playing (the default; it goes ten minutes after a pause), always, or off
• CarPlay: what the car shows, and whether the target in force blinks in the car's lists.
• Targeting: the Targets screen and its quick targets, what the Album button targets (Album name or This album), whether an album target also implies the artist, and how close a “near” target has to be.
• Library: lists as rows or as a grid of covers, re-indexing, the index as a JSON file, and exporting, sharing and importing lists.

12Privacy

Music Aim has no accounts, ads, analytics or tracking. Your library, your Liked list and your settings stay on your device.

Three things reach the network: opening a song's lyrics (the song's title, artist, album and length go to LRCLIB); the links under “Look the song up”, which open in the browser; and, when nothing on the phone knows how long a song is, its title and artist go to Apple's music search to ask.

Music Aim began in 2010 as “t Music”, a proof of concept on the iPhone 4; its idea, a twelfth control beside play, pause and the rest, is patented as US 10,977,306 (2021). Target works on any media, not only music. More of the story is in the app’s About page and on the site.

Questions or suggestions are welcome.

The storysupport@macdevstudio.com