HepCat music player

Music player and library organizer for non-DJ professionals.

HepCat music player aims to be the music player and library organizer for non-DJ professionals, such as swing dance instructors, fitness instructors or others that needs to use music in their work.

Join the TestFlight beta.

Please keep in mind that this is a very early test version of the app. Therefore you should expect that some features are missing, and you may also experience crashes and bugs from time to time. Disclaimer: The method of how the data is stored may change between the TestFlight beta versions, without providing any automatic data migration, so please do not rely on the database being compatible from one version of the app to another during the beta test period.

I appreciate any feedback, suggestions and bug reports. If you have any please get in contact by filling out this form.

Features of the app includes:

• Playback support for mp3, m4a, flac and wav file formats.
• Music visualization with rich waveforms.
• Automatic BPM calulation.
• Custom metadata fields.
• Custom playlist icons and styles.
• Timeline annotations in songs.
• Multiple panels for playlist or library browsing.
• Equalizers.

Roadmap

I am currently looking into developing the following features, and they are planned to be included during the beta or shortly after release.

• Automatic beat position finding.
• Tags for songs.
• Tags and better categorisation for playlists.
• Dual playback controls.
• Playback device selection
• Customizable charts for visualizing the tracks in playlists, such as a bar chart of how many songs there are in each genre, or the tempo of each track plotted against track number or time.
• File management tools to automize file structure organization.
• Triggers: Define actions that will be performed automatically when reaching a certain point in the music.
• Focus groups: Easily switch between different settings.
• Apple music playback.
• iTunes library integration.

I want to add the following features, but they are currently not being worked on.

• Automatic genre classification.
• Automatic detection of instruments.
• Support for more file formats.
• Music stem separation.
• Spotify integration

The following are features I might add in the future, but they are currently not prioritised.

• Cross fading between tracks.
• Beat matching and dynamic tempo syncing between tracks.

Why I made the app

My main hobby is swing dancing. I am often teaching dance classes and playing music at swing dancing parties. In order to provide the best experiences for the dancers I need to carefully match the music to what I teach in class, or to the atmosphere in the room at the parties. To do this I need to be able to look up and quickly find a song that matches my criteria, such as an energetic upbeat country song at 140-150 BPM, or a smooth blues or jazz song at 120-125 BPM with soft beats. I also needed decent library management capabilities, and to visualise the information I store for playlists and tracks. This helps me to visually see a song's qualities at a quick glance, so that I am able to make informed choices. Existing apps did not offer all of the features I needed, so I decided some ten years ago to look into creating this app with everything I needed myself.