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Launched on September 7th, 2018
MixTape lets you easily sync any audio files to your Apple Watch for on-the-go listening. Podcasts, Audiobooks, voice memos, and more.
Files are synced via iCloud so they can be loaded to the watch via wi-fi or cellular. Supports Google Drive, Dropbox, and iCloud Drive. Drag files to the 'MixTape' folder on your Mac for instant access in app!
I really wish this app worked, but as it is today, it's useless garbage. Let me just list the most serious problems:
On the garbage side,
ā¢ it's buggy as heck. It's trivial to get it to crash -- basically any time you touch the watch icon next to a file the app will crash.
On the useless side,
ā¢ it doesn't usefully extract names from filenames (so if your files don't have ID tags they are displayed as UNKNOWN)
ā¢ it doesn't order files in any sort of useful way, so the thirty parts of your audiobook are randomly shuffled
ā¢ it provides no useful way to group files together as a single book, or course
ā¢ the only way to get files to the watch is to tap on them and force them to sync, one at a time. There's no sort of autosync with the watch
ā¢ likewise there is no auto-unsync. If you delete the files from iCloud, they auto-delete from the phone (good!) but NOT from the watch (uh, what?)
So basically using this app consists of repeatedly, one file at a time, pushing the files to the watch, then later, one file at a time, deleting them.
But wait, there's more! Even if you DO force all these files to the app, or delete them, nothing actually happens on the watch. Some random number of files will be pushed out, but not the rest. And the files on the watch will not be deleted until some random time later.
Look, I understand that aWatch provides very strong constraints on how frequently an app can communicate with the phone. But that's precisely WHY the phone has to provide intelligent behavior to handle this. Delete requests should be batched so they can go out as a single transaction, likewise for file push's. And UI on the phone should indicate an intermediate state between "fully present on watch" and "fully deleted", along with an indication as to when the pending operations will be carried out. Instead we get progress circles displayed which seem disconnected from anything --- by the time they complete, the file still does not exist on the watch, and who knows when it will appear there?
