RetroAMP vs Faraday

RetroAMP is a cloud music player inspired by the golden age of desktop media players — reimagined for iPhone. Sign in and instantly access your personal music library stored in the cloud. No syncing cables, no storage limits on your device. Just your music, streamed anywhere. FEATURES • Cloud Library — Browse your songs, albums, and playlists streamed from your personal cloud storage • Internet Radio — 30+ curated stations from SomaFM, covering chillout, electronic, indie, jazz, ambient, and more • 10-Band Equalizer — Fine-tune your sound with presets like Pop, Rock, Jazz, Classical, or create your own • Reverb Engine — Add depth with Hall, Plate, Room, Cathedral, and other reverb presets • Real-Time Visualizations — Spectrum analyzer, circular spectrum, VU meters, and particle effects that react to your music • 7 Themes — Linen, Sterling, Mixtape, Boombox, Audiophile, Midnight Neon, and Retro Amber. Each transforms the entire interface • Now Playing Queue — Manage your queue, shuffle, repeat, and see what's coming next • Gapless-quality streaming with seek support and range requests BUILT FOR MUSIC LOVERS RetroAMP brings back the experience of customizable music players — the themes, the visualizations, the EQ sliders — in a modern, cloud-first package. No ads. No algorithmic recommendations. Just your music and a beautiful player. Requires a RetroAMP account. Create one for free in the app.

Faraday plays music that belongs to you: MP3 and M4A files from a folder in iCloud Drive that you choose yourself. No account, no subscription, no catalogue to pick from. The app exists because of dead zones. Music made with Suno can only be streamed in their app, and without a connection it goes quiet. Faraday downloads tracks to the device and plays them from there, in the car, on the train, on a plane. FOLDERS, NOT RULES Your folder structure stays as it is, as deep as you like: genre, artist, album, or something else entirely. A folder may hold tracks and subfolders at the same time. A button at the top plays a whole folder in one go, one album after the other. An artist folder shows all albums with their tracks. TWO LEVELS, SO YOU KNOW WHAT PLAYS OFFLINE A tap streams, the download button keeps a permanent copy. Each row shows whether a track is downloaded, whether iCloud is holding it on the device right now, or whether it is not there. In airplane mode you know beforehand what will play. FAVOURITES AND PLAYLISTS A heart marks tracks and albums across all folders. On iPad you can also mark a single disc of a multi-disc album. Playlists are files in your music folder; on iPad you create them, fill them by dragging and reorder their tracks. Rename or move an album folder and playlists and favourites follow it. GENRES AND DECADES Two cards on the start screen sort your albums by genre and by decade. A decade can be played in one go. IPAD At full width the iPad shows folders and playlists in a sidebar, all tracks as a table sortable by any column, and lyrics or the queue on the right. The queue takes tracks by drag and drop and can be saved as a playlist. A full-screen visualizer reacts to bass, mids and beat. CARPLAY The same folder tree as on the phone, plus your favourite tracks and albums. Repeat, shuffle and a heart below the timeline. LYRICS THAT FOLLOW ALONG Suno puts the lyrics into the file, but without timing. Faraday creates the timestamps on the device and stores them as an .lrc file next to the music. Analysed once, it stays. Requires iOS 26. SIRI AND SHORTCUTS "Remember this track in Faraday", "Repeat this track in Faraday", "Shuffle in Faraday". All of them are available in Shortcuts and can be put on the Action button. WHAT FARADAY DOES NOT DO No account, no sign-in, no ads, no tracking. On iPhone and iPad the app talks to no server. What it stores lives on your device and in your iCloud folder.