When I draw or create, I usually do so with music playing in the background which keeps my creativity flowing. One important part of listening to music is the experience of searching for the music in your library and the user interface plays a huge part in that. Marvis Pro by Aditya Rajveer is a third party Music app on steroids. It has so much options and allows for such customization that it can fit anybody’s music listening experience.

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Design:

As an artist, design means a lot to me and how a Music player looks is very important to the overall experience. The Music app that is icluded with every iPhone is very simple and intuitive and quite minimalist in a good way but it can use a bit of tweaking. The main reason why I tend to use third party Music players is to have an alternative to the bright white interface in the stock Music app. Most third party apps offer theming options that allow users to change the look of the interface and also contain a global dark mode to make the app more easy on the eyes especially in a dimly lit environnement. Marvis Pro has a great and appealing yet simple design philosophy. Everything is balanced and thought out. The app works in landscape orientation also which makes it a bit more flexible than the stock app. The Now Playing screen is also quite intuitive and has some features reminiscent of the older ios 7 Music app by Apple that allowed star rating of tracks directly from that view.

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A tab called Home:

The main center piece of Marvis Pro resides in the Home tab. This centralized hub within the app is where I have found myself spending most of my time using the app as it provides a single page interface with shortcuts to categories I have set up to fit my music listening habits. If I want to see what tracks I “hearted”, there is a section for that. I can set up a section for albums I recently added, top rated tracks, most listened tracks and those I listened to recently. Each section you create has further settings you can tweak to suit your style. For example, I liked my albums to show up in a grid layout instead of a list and I can even set up the number of albums in a row to show more or few albums in a single grid. These options are available in any section and any tab (Albums, Songs, Artists).

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API limitations:

As awesome as the experience of using Marvis Pro is, a few shortcomings are however present because of Apple MusicKit API limitations that are out of the developer’s control. One such limitation is the fact I cannot add a track to a playlist or delete a track from the Music Library or edit a playlist already present. The workaround is to switch to the stock Music app to conduct those changes and they will be relfected in Marvis Pro when you switch back.

Update: Version 3.1.1 released today, May 6th, adds a feature to allow Playlist creation and modifications to playlists from within Marvis Pro.

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Nitpicks:

Aside from the limitations of the API, I found that the slide gesture when closing an album view shows a tad of a lag when putting the album back to the grid. This is a tiny nitpick in an otherwise fluid interface.

I also feel that the lack of 3D touch implementation is slowing down the speed of some shortcut operations. For example, if you tap and hold an album, nothing happens until you let go of the album art and then you see the options appear. If 3D touch was implemented, it would allow a quick pop into the options instead.

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Final words:

All in all, Marvis Pro has quickly become my favourite third party Music player and has been part of my daily routine and allowed me to find and listen to tracks efficiently and intuitively. The developer has been updating the app regularly (recently adding a major feature many users were asking for to allow Apple Music implementation) and has also hinted at the possibility of an iPad version in the future.

You can get Marvis Pro from the iOS App Store for US $3.99