An iPod-style music player for your iPhone, click wheel included

There are two things people mean when they say they miss the iPod. One is the object: the wheel under the thumb, the click, the green-grey LCD. The other is the way of listening: a library you owned, browsed by menu, with no feed, no ads and no signal required. A good iPod-style player for iPhone has to deliver both.

The wheel has to be a wheel

A ring with four icons drawn on it is a picture. A wheel is something you run your thumb around: the list scrolls with your finger, it clicks as it passes each item, and it keeps momentum when you let go. On MP95's Classic Wheel the ring scrolls the list and scrubs the track, with haptics on every step. The four points of the ring are menu, previous, next and play/pause; the centre selects. Hold the centre to love a track.

This is an original design. It has the feel of the pocket players of the 2000s without copying one, and MP95 is not affiliated with Apple.

Menus, not a search box

The pocket players were browsed one list at a time: Songs, Albums, Artists. That constraint is half the pleasure. MP95's wheel player has its own menu-driven library with Songs, Albums, Artists, Folders, Lists, Loved and Recent, and the wheel does the scrolling. Search is there when you need it, but you can go a whole evening without touching it.

An LCD that tells you things

The display shows album art, the track, artist and album, the format and bitrate of the file (so you know when it is FLAC), what plays next, a bar equalizer that reacts to the music, and a heart when the track is loved. It is drawn as a backlit LCD, greenish, with the faint grid of the panel visible, because that is what the thing looked like.

Owning the music, again

The other half of the iPod was that the music was yours and on the device. MP95 has no network access: no account, no ads, no streaming. You add a folder from the Files app and it is read in place, import songs you own from the Music library, or drop files in from a Mac. MP3, FLAC, ALAC, AAC, WAV, AIFF and CAF. It works on a plane and in a basement. See how to add music files to an iPhone.

The wheel on your home screen and your wrist

The click-wheel widget puts the wheel on the home screen: the left, right and bottom zones of the ring are previous, next and play/pause, the elapsed time is a live system timer, and the menu and centre open the app. On Apple Watch, the same wheel is the remote for the phone. Read about widgets and the watch remote.

And it sounds better than the original

The wheel player runs the same sound desk as the other machines: a five-band EQ, presets, volume boost, stereo width, slowed + reverb and 8D. Or nothing at all, with the analog switch off, in which case a FLAC plays bit-for-bit, which is more than the old players could say.

Getting it

MP95 is free on the App Store with the cassette deck and turntable; the Classic Wheel plays for a free preview at any time and is part of MP95 Pro. See the Classic Wheel.