MusicBox is the hot new listen-later app you didn't know you needed

Musicbox Devices Artwork
Musicbox Devices Artwork (Image credit: Marcos Tanaka)

What you need to know

  • MusicBox is a new listen-later app for iPhone, iPad, and Mac.
  • Throw a Spotify or Apple Music URL into MusicBox and use filters and search to find the music you want to listen to.

MusicBox is a brand new app for iPhone, iPad, and Mac that was built with one thing in mind — providing people with a place to save the music that they want to listen to in the future. It's like a read-later app. It's a listen-later app, if you will.

If you've used developer Marcos Tanaka's Play app, you're already familiar with the theme. You fill MusicBox with the songs and albums that you want to listen to and then listen to them when the time is right. Each song and album can be organized using tabs, and there is an auto-tagging feature that does the work for you based on any rules you tell it to follow.

Once everything is inside MusicBox, finding it is a cinch. Smart searching helps you filter your way through music to find what you're looking for, while deep search capabilities mean MusicBox will look beyond the song's name — record label, notes, artist, genre, tags are all fair game here. And everything syncs via iCloud, of course, so your MusicBox database is always up to date no matter which device you are using. Like all good, modern apps, MusicBox includes support for Widgets and Shortcuts, too.

Getting music into MusicBox is as simple as giving it a Spotify or Apple Music URL and you can of course use the Share Sheet to do that if you want to. Once music's been added, MusicBox shows you gorgeous artwork while displaying information about songs and albums. If you imagined a read-later app but for music, MusicBox is it. Big music fans might even find it to be the best iPhone, iPad, and Mac app they downloaded in some time!

If keeping track of the music you want to listen to is something that sounds like fun, check it out. MusicBox is in the App Store now and costs just $2.99.

Oliver Haslam
Contributor

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too.

Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.