Those who’ve been using Apple products for years might be familiar with the days when the iPod Classic reigned supreme as a music player. It was made famous by its click-wheel design, which responded to touch and drag gestures for navigating your music.
A new jailbreak app dubbed ClassicPlayer by iOS developer Guillermo Moran (fr0st) brings this experience to the iPhone for all the nostalgic folks out there who are missing the click-wheel experience from the days of yore.
After installation, a separate ClassicPlayer app is added to the Home screen, but it integrates directly with your Apple Music library. After you launch the app, you need to grant it permission to your music library to populate your music list properly.
Because it relies on the music library, you must use Apple’s Music app, so it won’t work with third-party music apps like Spotify. On the other hand, ClassicPlayer does work with both locally-stored music and music and playlists that you’ve created from streaming Apple Music.
ClassicPlayer doesn’t add any options to the Settings app, but it does come with some settings configurable from the app itself. You must navigate to the settings just as you would on an iPad Classic, with the click-wheel, so you can’t touch on the settings to activate them like you can anywhere else on your iPhone.
From the settings, you will find options for switching between a dark or light theme and toggling sound effects on or off:
As you can see, there’s quite a difference between the light and dark themes, and they look almost like the iPod Classic would in real life.
ClassicPlayer is not a replacement for the stock Music app, but rather a complimentary app. That said, you can still use the regular Apple Music app if you want to, but when you’re feeling a throwback moment, you can always go into iPod Classic mode by using ClassicPlayer.
If you’re interested in trying ClassicPlayer, it’s available from Cydia’s BigBoss repository for $0.99. The tweak works on jailbroken iOS 10 devices.
Do you like the idea of an emulated iPod Classic experience on your iPhone? Share why or why not in the comments section below!