CycleTimer2 is a free app that runs on iPads and iPhones and is particularly useful for spin class teachers. It displays playlists, tracks, a music player, and your own custom exercise drills that are easily read from a stationary bike when your iPad or iPhone is over on the stereo stack. The large time display counts down from the track's maximum duration to zero. On an iPad, CycleTimer2 runs in landscape orientation. On an iPhone, CycleTimer2 runs in portrait orientation.

The app presents the playlists from the Apple device's music library. Choose a playlist and the app shows the tracks within that playlist. Each track has a time, in blue, showing the remaining minutes and seconds in the playlist, counting this track. Choose a track and the app shows the music player.

The music player shows the artist, track title, controls for pause, play, skip backward and forward, and a very large countdown timer. There are buttons to skip backward and forward 15 seconds, and a slider to increase and decrease the speed of playback.

Beneath the countdown timer there is a large area where you can create, edit, and save exercise drill notes. The drill notes can be copied and pasted into other tracks drill notes using standard iOS touch editing methods.

A drill note is associated with an Artist name and Track title. By default a track will have the same drill note even if it appears in several playlists. While editing a drill note you can set a switch to make the track's drill note only apply in the current playlist. Using this switch you can have the same track appear in several playlists with different drill notes for each.

Drills can be exported and imported using the device's Share services. You may use any app that appears in the Share popup including the Apple Mail, Messages, GMail, AirDrop, etc.

• How to Export Drills
• How to Import Drills

• Tech Note: How to manually edit a drills file

Preparing the Playlists and Tracks

CycleTimer2 relies on Apple's iOS device music library to provide the playlists and tracks within the playlists. You will need to load music onto your iPhone or iPad either with the iTunes Store app or by syncing your iPad or iPhone to your Mac or PC, then transferring the music from your Mac or PC music library to your iOS device. The tracks will need to have been assembled into playlists using the Apple Music app on a Mac or PC, or the iOS device's Music app.

CycleTimer2 does not support online music servers such as Spotify, Apple Music, or Amazon Music.

Device Setup

You will probably want to modify your device Settings to disable Auto-Lock so the device doesn't "go dark" and auto-lock while exercising.

You will probably also want to turn on "Airplane Mode" to prevent notifications from pinging you, or perhaps "Do Not Disturb" to silence incoming messages, phone calls, app announcements, etc.

Any unauthorized broadcasting, public performance, copying or re-recording may constitute an infringement of copyright. Please be sure to respect the copyright of any music that you play and conform to any legal restrictions. If you use this app for cycle classes please work with your club to respect copyrights.

The iPhone app "Cycle Music Timer 2" and its developer take your privacy very seriously. Beyond the information Apple collects as part of owning and using an iPhone, "Cycle Music Timer 2" does not collect, record, or transmit any user data without the explicit permissions and actions of the user. Specifically, the user can backup and share drills using the Share button. The shared drill data contains exactly and only the Artist Name, Track Name (Song), Playlist Name, Drill text, and a flag to indicate the drill is specific to this playlist. The app uses no third-party analytics or advertising frameworks.

I am making the Swift source code available for free on github. If you copy these sources and make any fun changes please let me know so I can consider adding them to a new release.
You can find it here - https://github.com/stewartFrench/CycleMusicTimer2

This is CycleMusicTimer2. The '2' is because I released a Cycle Music Timer back in 2015 that was written in Objective-C using UIKit, Storyboards, and AutoLayout (btw, I like the SwiftUI approach much better than AutoLayout). As more Apple devices came out it became extremely difficult to test CMT. The music library API did not work in the Apple simulators (and still doesn't !) requiring me to find friends who had the various devices and buy them lunches so I could test on their hardware. This was untenable and I pulled CMT from the app store in 2019.

Recently I decided I could re-implement CMT in Swift and SwiftUI such that it would be portable across all the many Apple devices. Turns out that there are people that still use the original CMT on their old, stinky iPads! I decided to re-implement CMT as CMT2 so I wouldn't hammer their working environment and to make CMT2 backward compatible with CMT, so your old CMT drill files will import directly into CMT2. We'll see how successful this is.