Coverplay

I had an idea for an app while I was in the shower. Like these things do, it seemed to pop into my head out of nowhere. In retrospect, it’s at least inspired by thoughts I’ve had many times over the years. Specifically that I really like physical objects but I LOVE the convenience of digital access. My ten-year-old, jailbroken Kindle Oasis is one of my favorite things. I can hold it forever and it holds more books than I’ll ever read. It especially comes in handy when I can’t get back to sleep in the middle of the night. But that doesn’t mean I don’t buy physical books. I do. I just don’t buy many of them. I buy the ones that have special meaning for me.

For some reason this habit hasn’t really transferred to music. I’m not sure why. I do have a kick-ass, fur covered CD of Embryonic by The Flaming Lips which might be the last one I bought since the great record and CD purge about 20 years ago. My brother bought me a vinyl copy of Frank Zappa’s Sheik Yerbouti (which I originally got for my 13th birthday) a couple of years ago. Other than those, I have 30-something odd albums. Some mine; some Rebecca’s — all from the 70s and 80s. I just don’t have any way to listen to them.

So I’m in the shower when I thought it would be cool if I could just take a picture of an album and have it play on the speakers I have networked all over the house. When I got out, I stopped at my desk, typed this into Claude Code, and went to feed my cats. When I came back I had a working app on my phone. It was ugly and it got things wrong a lot but when it did work it was like a magic trick. As Raine put it, “it’s like Shazam for record covers.” So I went back and actually designed the app and its interactions. I spent a couple of weeks scanning all kinds of covers and working out edge cases. It took about a month all told.

Coverplay is available for iPhone and iPad. You can get in the App store and try it for free. It only works with Apple Music, but if that’s you, I’d love for you to give it a try. And if you don’t have any albums handy, you can take pictures of this website I made for app store testers. BTW, Spotify won’t let you make something like this work with their app unless you are not an individual and your app already has 250 thousand users per month.* So don’t expect Spotify support any time soon. Here’s a short video showing it in action.

And to be clear, I’m aware that this app is absolutely not necessary. It’s not difficult or time-consuming to type in the name of a record yourself. You can even take a photo and ask AI to find it and then as a second step to play it for you. But it still feels like a magic trick to me and it’s a fun way to “play” the albums I have.

Sidenote: I visited Dylan and her boyfriend Richard while I was working on this. Richard has a great collection of maybe 500 albums that were a big help in getting this to work correctly. If it were not for these I may not have discovered and figured out how to get around the confusion when an album without text on the cover is inside a plastic sleeve with a sticker from a different album on it. Anyway, as it happened, I ended up testing the albums Guilty by Barbara Streisand and Tea for the Tillerman by Cat Stevens A LOT and I’ve been listening to them all summer.

Footnote to the sidenote: I made this wordmark/social media avatar for Raine and I thought the typeface had a similar vibe to the one on Tea for Tillerman.

I was saying this to her and then remembered that these songs are in Harold and Maude which I hadn’t seen in a few years. So I watched that again. Y’all. If you haven’t seen this movie, consider watching it. It’s bonkers, beautiful, funny and sad. All the things.