CroMusic

I’ve always wanted a simple local music player with iCloud sync.

Several years ago, I spent ¥98 on Flacbox from the App Store. I also tried EverMusic and downloaded quite a few other local music players. They were usable, more or less, but none of them really worked the way I wanted.

My requirements are actually very simple. Just three things:

• Support iOS, so I can listen to music on my phone.
• Support macOS, so I can listen to music on my Mac.
• Support iCloud sync for both music files and playlists.

Put simply, I don’t want to manage playlists on my phone. I want to organize my playlists and import my music on my Mac, and then have everything automatically synced to my iPhone.

Apple’s Music app can technically do this, but it constantly reminds me to subscribe to Apple Music, which gets annoying. And its syncing has always felt unnecessarily complicated—or, frankly, like a trap. In my experience, I have to connect my phone with a cable; otherwise, it just sits there loading and refuses to sync.

I’m someone who hates unnecessary complexity. I like things simple.

If I create a playlist on my Mac, just sync that exact playlist to my phone. That’s it. Don’t make me jump through hoops.

Unfortunately, Music doesn’t work that way for me. Sometimes I even wonder whether all that friction is there just to push me toward an Apple Music subscription—but the problem is, Apple Music doesn’t even have many of the songs I actually want to listen to.

Then there are the long-established third-party music players. The only way I can describe my experience with them is exhausting.

Take Flacbox, for example. I’m an experienced software developer, and even I get confused by all of its different storage locations and options. Imagine what that experience is like for an ordinary user. In practice, getting macOS and iOS properly synchronized feels more complicated than developing an app myself.

Eventually, I had enough.

I just want to listen to my music in peace. Why does it have to involve so much work?

That’s why I created CroMusic.

CroMusic has exactly one source for music: files you import locally.

No FTP.
No WebDAV.
No SMB.
No local network transfer.
No other import methods.

Once you import a music file, CroMusic stores it in iCloud—provided that you have iCloud Sync enabled. If iCloud Sync is disabled, the file simply stays on your local device.

Then, when you open CroMusic on another device, your music is automatically synchronized from iCloud and becomes available there.

Playlists work the same way.

Create or organize them in one place, and they sync everywhere. When iCloud Sync is enabled, iCloud is the source of truth.

That’s all there is to it.

Just listen to your music in peace. No unnecessary complexity.

That’s the philosophy behind CroMusic.