Hezel for Apple Music

So if your subscription to Apple Music runs out, eventually your library will be wiped. The only way to recover it is to manually rebuild your library (or move it from other streaming services with an app like SongShift). But this app makes it soo much easier. It doesn’t need to be flashy and full of features, but it’s got everything you could ever need it for. The UI is clean, with ultra you can auto backup in case you forget, you can recover songs that were deleted between backups, music videos, albums or even whole playlists. And it’ll tell you how your library has changed between backups too so you can see what has been removed previously. Perfect app. Great developer, well worth the money.

Ive been living anxiously ever since my Apple music randomly wiped my ENTIRE library and no one at Apple could do anything for me. Years of music lost! 😢 But Hezel lets me rest easy knowing I've backed it all up now.

Very useful

Will report back once I’ve used it more but first impressions are good can finally have a back up of Apple Music without iTunes and I like we can set the size of the back up (defaults 2gb) also handy is the ability to go back and see what we were listening to a month or two back (or however long you had this at work) it’s always handy to have back up… 🤨

The core feature of this app is great and does its singular job perfectly, the whole app does however get let down by small but totally unnecessary and irritating stuff. I discovered that after each update the automatic backup setting was being turned off, not a big deal I thought, I’ll just inform the developer. So I go to the apps settings and tap feedback, instead of just being taken to a standard in-app email module I get taken to some weird looking Google forms feedback page, ok now if this worked reliably then I’d say fine, that’s how the developer wants to do it, it’s up to them, but instead you tap submit and you get page couldn’t be loaded, several times over, until finally Eureka, it goes through. Then when the developer responds, which I have to say was very prompt, he gets let down once again by my response to his email to me bouncing back with a message saying email has been blocked! Something that started as a non big issue ended up really upsetting the heck out of me. The developer needs to not only make sure that their core functionality within the app works flawlessly, which it does, but that other related functionality also works without issue, the small stuff matters, get rid of the google forms for feedback, it’s unnecessary fluff, and fix your email and please take care of the auto backup turning off after each update which should have been the only issue, not the fact that you’ve got a mostly non functioning feedback form or that your email doesn’t work, why put yourself through self inflicted pain!? Just makes no sense. Edit: After thinking about this a while I’ve updated my rating from 3 to 4 stars, the core functionality of the app is good although I’ve not been in a situation to test recovering music lists but this is why I removed one star. I think I was previously too harsh about other relatively small issues, don’t get me wrong, they matter, but beating the developer up over them won’t be helpful to him/her or speed up getting the issues looked at and hopefully fixed. The overriding truth is the app does work very well, at least the backup part of its feature offering, this in itself is a cause for celebration these days with so many apps riddled with bugs but still managing somehow to get past Apples reviewers who seem more and more unable to properly police App Store submissions despite Apple’s constant protestations to the contrary, Hezel is definitely not one of those!

I’m always wary of accidentally deleting tracks from my library, and this app solves this perfectly by being able to quickly and effortlessly identify changes between backups and your current library. It’s superbly well designed, and the UX is great - you’d think it’s a stock Apple app. In addition to being able to identify missing songs and playlists from your current library, you are able to also fully browse your library as it looked at the moment of the backup. The ability to also see songs that are missing in playlists between the backup and now is also a great addition, as Apple Music still removes songs from playlists if you remove them from your library. This has caught me out a few times where I’ve had to remove and re-add a song from my library, forgetting that it also disappears from playlists in the process, and this app avoids those scenarios. I also really appreciate the ultra upgrade not being a subscription, just a one-time purchase to unlock more backups and automatic backups. Well worth the price to upgrade, and a great app all round for anyone that values organisation of their music library.

i tested it out by deleting a playlist and it was restored completely! this app is really great.

This is a great app to make sure all your music is backed up to the iCloud. All playlists, albums, songs and everything are automatically backed up for a restore if you should need it.

I’ve been using this to keep backups. Fortunately I’ve not had to use it to restore yet. I would like to see it support smart playlists as I rely on them to organise my music and would be gutted if I lost those. That feature would be worth the pro version fee.

This app is great, I’ve accidentally deleted playlists in the past and this makes sure this will never happen again! Don’t know why Apple didn’t integrate this kind of feature into Apple Music but I’m glad that this app exists. Oh, and the premium version is quite helpful, but also a very reasonable one-off fee of £5 which is great!