When I made my recent post on what apps I’m using for what purposes, I mentioned that I’ve been using Apple Music as my music service (as I have since the day it launched in 2015). But I neglected to mention an important app I use as part of that: Marvis Pro.

There are things I like about Apple Music and things I dislike about it – and many of those dislikes center around how rough Apple’s Music app itself is in different ways. Marvis Pro is the middleman I use for interfacing with Apple Music to solve that. It’s so much nicer to use on a daily basis, and just feels better. Whether or not it’s actually faster at getting me to the music I’m looking for, it feels faster. For those who like to fiddle with things, it’s incredibly customizable (though I don’t take advantage of this very much). Two other killer features for me:

• last.fm integration: It scrobbles anything I listen to through the app, which I find much more reliable than a dedicated scrobbler app. I know it’s not as popular as it was a decade+ ago, but I still like last.fm. Marvis also has really good settings for its scrobbling, including filter lists (so when I’m playing accompaniment tracks with my beginner band, it’s not scrobbling those).
• The option to share through song.link: I have lots of friends who use Spotify or another service, and when I share a link to music, I like to make it accessible on those services rather than just sharing the Apple Music link. This isn’t enabled by default, but when I go to share a song, Marvis defaults to song.link instead (e.g. it would generate this link instead of the Apple Music link)¹.

For anyone using Apple Music, I recommend picking up Marvis. The only downside is that it’s only on iOS and iPadOS – I would argue that the Apple Music app is at its worst on the Mac, where I’ve yet to find a good substitute.

As a hat tip, I discovered Marvis in the first place through this post – there’s actually a lot of great third-party apps that work with Apple Music (which is one of a few things that keeps me with it over Spotify despite my complaints). I played with most of the apps in that review to land on Marvis Pro myself. MacStories also had some good coverage of Marvis when it came out that explains some more of the appeal.