Cider - An Apple Music client for Linux
Apple Music is a very popular music streaming service with around 100 million subscribers worldwide. In exchange for your monthly subscription fee, Apple gives you access to 100 million songs, offline downloads, high-resolution lossless audio and a host of other features.
However, one glaring thing missing is support for Linux. Apple enabled browser access a while back, but we tend to prefer a dedicated client and not a browser-based experience.
Cider
Cider is a custom-made client for Apple Music and is available for Windows, macOS and Linux. Cider for Linux is prepackaged in all of the popular formats like deb, rpm and flatpak.
It must be noted that Cider is not free but is sold as a one-off purchase. Regional pricing is available, and we paid £6.99. This payment gives you access to download the app as often as you want. Once downloaded, the app must be activated with the email address used during purchase.
Installation is simple. You can download the relevant package and install it or set up the Cider repository following the instructions on the Cider website. We recommend the latter since you'll always have the latest version.
The interface is beautiful and can be customised using the included templates. Cider also features an immersive mode where the cover art is the focus with minimal controls visible.
As expected, once you've connected Cider to your Apple Music account, all of your playlists will be available for playback as well as your entire library.
Final thoughts
We like Cider in terms of the quality of the app and the beautiful interface. We don't like the pricing and would have preferred it being free and open source. However, since it's a once-off purchase and not subscription-based, it's not too bad in terms of value.
We don't like that songs are limited to 256kbps and lossless is not available. This is probably due to Cider having to pull content via Apple's web interface, which has the same limitation.
We recommend Cider if you want a dedicated app for Apple Music on Linux, but in terms of cost and features, you could get a similar experience with the Apple Music web app.
