I cancelled my subscription after the player regularly stopped emitting sound - the player would show it's playing a song and increment the progress bar but no sound was coming out. I have never had the same problem with any other player. Oh and sometimes any song would just keep buffering until I restarted the app.
As far as the slowness goes, I attribute that to the fact that the app is not native, it's just some sort of Electron-like mess. Then again so is Spotify (I think?) and it feels much snappier.
They did, but the new native views are quite buggy, so while it uses less memory, the user experience improvement was minimal.
Apple should really stop shipping such buggy softwares.
I've borrowed hundreds of CD from the different public-city-libraries I've been the past 15 years. In France you're allowed to make private copy of books and CDs :)
Really? We have Privatkopie, and last I checked CD Audio was not considered copy protection. You (indirectly, via the manufacturer) already pay a fee to GEMA for every device or data storage media that can be used to make them with the assumption you will. Do it.
Unless you thought libraries were a euphemism for torrents.
> Das Gesetz trat am 1. Januar 2008 in Kraft.[7] § 53 Abs. 1 S. 1 UrhG wurde geändert, so dass Privatkopien nicht zulässig sind, sofern zur Vervielfältigung „eine offensichtlich rechtswidrig hergestellte oder öffentlich zugänglich gemachte Vorlage“ verwendet wird.
the last sentence says that no public sharing is allowed for copyrighted works
doesn’t matter if the distributor is a library or a torrent
There's no way any public library near me has more than 10% of what I listen to currently. They have famous bands and mainstream albums from my country and that's it. I hate most of it.
Did you get local network streaming to work well? Player takes over one second to respond when I try to control the streaming from my phone. Works perfectly except for this high latency issue.
Yeah that's one of the issue, but I'm living with it.
It's pretty awesome to have a stream of all my music on a unique link available on the Internet :)
Second that, Snapcast is great and the multi room feature is magical. Every friend that comes over lets out a wow when they hear the music synchronized in the kitchen, living room and patio at the same time.
I also created a free app to control Snapcast with macOS keyboard shortcuts or from your iPhone/iPad: https://lowtechguys.com/volum
I like Apple Music because it integrates well with the Apple line.
More importantly though it is one of the highest paying per stream to artists [1]. Streaming needs to be much more lucrative for artists and consumer choice helps that.
It is nice to be able to buy the music as well if you want to support. Being part of Apple One is huge as well.
The latest music streaming royalty rates are as follows.
PLATFORM ROYALTY (PER STREAM) STREAMS TO MAKE $1
Tidal Music $0.01284 78
Apple Music $0.008 125
Amazon Music $0.00402 249
Spotify $0.00318 314
YouTube Music $0.002 500
Pandora $0.00133 752
Deezer $0.0011 909
I have lots of mp3/stored music as well and Spotify client started taking like 20-30 minutes to start up. Wasn't sure what it was doing...
Some of their patents for tracking are a bit dystopian as well.
New Spotify Patent Involves Monitoring Users’ Speech to Recommend Music
> The streaming platform is interested in extracting data points like emotional state, gender, age, and accent to hone its recommendations [2].
Nah. Apple already has my info and reasonably treats it well eventhough it is too much, I don't need another service to invade privacy.
> I like Apple Music because it integrates well with the Apple line.
Is there a need to integrate with anything? All I need is to play music. Spotify is as integrated into macOS and iOS as Apple Music.
> More importantly though it is one of the highest paying per stream to artists [1]. Streaming needs to be much more lucrative for artists and consumer choice helps that.
Too bad they are shooting themselves in the foot by neglecting user experience.
I do like a more open/api platform and wish Apple was, but Spotify probably won't be for long. Tracking my plays takes more work with everything to closed.
Apple misses some of the obscure stuff but I will always side with the higher payer to artists. I also like just being able to buy albums I like and support artists.
Comments like this one are a real puzzler to me. Why does it matter that the higher royalty is not out of altruism? It’s money! Money doesn’t care. More money for artists is good. You can’t buy a cheeseburger with altruism.
I guess I’m just not sure what sort of “gotcha” this is supposed to be. The beauty of incentive alignment is that you don’t have to waste your time trying to discern nebulous motivations of large groups of people.
> Comments like this one are a real puzzler to me. Why does it matter that the higher royalty is not out of altruism? It’s money! Money doesn’t care. More money for artists is good. You can’t buy a cheeseburger with altruism.
All the money that streaming services pay out goes to copyright holders. Guess who the copyright holders are. If you say "artists", think again. For the absolute vast majority of music it's the Big Four/Three: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_industry#Consolidation
So, when the likes of Spotify pay 60-70% of their revenue to the record labels, and the artists get peanuts... Spotify (and Tidal, and Apple Music, and...) get blamed. Now this is a real puzzler.
If they just sold it, then no? They might get more for their next sale, though I imagine the count of streams is more influential for that than the revenue per stream
Because if royalties are function of licensing volume, it makes no difference who you choose. If more people ditched Spotify for Apple Music, they’d start getting more favorable rates with record labels.
If you really wanted to help artists, it would make the most sense to use whichever service is cheapest and then donate the difference to artists. But, personally I’d just go with whoever provides the best user experience, which is none of them, so I basically haven’t listened to music aside from occasional YouTube chill beats for years.
The integration with HomePod is very nice, I can just go ”Hey Siri, play Tom Waits” or whatever. Maybe that works with Spotify, I dunno, but the integration with Apple Music is obviously seamless, it just works.
I have to disagree with this. I have endless issues switching the playback between my iPhone and HomePod, sometimes I’ll have to quit the app just to get the right device to play music. When I’m playing the song on my iPhone with playback on the HomePod it sometimes ‘forgets’ the HomePod is the playback device and using the controls on the iPhone to pause the song etc do nothing forcing me to use Siri to stop playback on the HomePod. Not to mention how useless Siri is when asking to play certain things (e.g. trying to play an album that has a song with the same name on it). I generally like the HomePod but the integration (and Siri in general) are massively lacking.
I’ve had similar issues with HomePod when it comes to other apps (e.g. playing podcasts from Overcast using AirPlay), but the Apple Music integration has never been a problem, that has always just worked. Siri sometimes gets confused about what you’re asking (as with all these systems), but it’s less than I expected and at an acceptible rate for me.
Yep, until a couple years ago you had to say “Hey Siri, play Tom Waits on Spotify,” otherwise it would always try Apple Music even if you didn’t have a subscription or the app wasn’t installed. But they changed it - probably for antitrust reasons, like you said - and now it’s pretty seamless.
My phone does that on the lock screen too, but it works it out from sampling sound, so it "integrates" with everything from someone's AppleTV to an Alexa.
Music is included in Apple One Premier along with TV, News, Fitness, Arcade, and 2TB iCloud Drive. All these things integrate well within the Apple ecosystem and family sharing. One Premier is honestly one of the best value subscriptions in tech today.
However, I do think it’s anti-competitive. Spotify, for example, has absolutely no possible way to get my business until and unless my entire family were to ditch Apple.
I don’t like the Music UI but I’ve come to understand how to use it and it no longer bothers me.
Ha! Thanks for this idea. When I was on Spotify I already was listening to more music anyway, because Spotify just has more music on it period. I switched to Apple Music (family reasons), but half of what I used to listen to on Spotify isn't found on Apple Music. Apple has more money than Spotify, so why do all these problems persist for years and years?
Tidal has a long history of shady practices and failing to pay artists royalties. It reached a point where they were investigated by Norway for data fraud and faced class action lawsuits from labels and artists.
It's all pro-rated. 52% of Apple Music revenues go to labels, by contract; Spotify is around the same. Royalties are just revenues divided by # of streams (simplification).
Spotify's free users give lower royalty rates per stream, and Premium users give higher ones. If Spotify users like rap more than AM users, then rap will have higher rates on Spotify than Apple Music, since a larger proportion of revenue will go to the same amount of rap songs.
If Apple Music is more painful to use than Spotify, or has worse discoverability, then people won't listen to as many songs (or won't leave it on for 8h as background noise) as with Spotify, and royalties will be higher per stream than Spotify. The higher royalties don't make up for the lower # of streams since discoverability benefits small artists.
Are you saying the table is wrong? I don't see that in your response. If the table is right, then artists are making less money per stream on Spotify. An artist might make more in absolute terms if there are more total streams on Spotify, but the artists are still being devalued and they would do better if the rates were higher. Personally, I want to use a service that values and pays artists well. ("Well" is a relative term here...)
My point is that Apple Music payouts are an identical percentage of their revenues to Spotify's; that means that any campaign to make people switch to AM will just mechanically make AM payouts decrease, and Spotify payouts increase until they converge.
Right now, Apple pays more per stream either because they may have more users in richer countries (Indian users don't pay $10/month), users who listen to less music, maybe older users (fewer students on student plans) and because they have no free tier.
So: the "AM has higher royalty payouts" is objectively a false Apple marketing point, because it's zero-sum. It's a pure accounting gimmick. Royalty payouts are pro-rata; there's no such thing as "Spotify's chosen royalty payout". For Spotify to get as high as Apple's, they'd need to make discoverability terrible (fewer hours listened per month = fewer streams = higher payouts per stream), get rid of their free tier, etc. They can't just "decide to increase payouts" because that's 52% of revenues, same as Apple Music, by contract.
lol this magnitude of royalty does not meaningfully broadly move artists into gaining a livable wage. let's expect more please. what a neoliberal idea to support specific choice of streaming platform purchase as a moral decision
I've never seen a search box that couldn't actually handle input before, but Apple Music made it.
If I click in the search box and start typing, the box will lose focus at some random time and all my next keystrokes will count as play commands, usually pausing the music. If I come back to the search box, it happens again.
I know "text boxes" are cutting-edge technology that's barely 3 seconds old and developers are still learning to program them safely. Still, I expected more from a trillion-dollar company.
I had a bunch of random stability issues with Music, they mostly went away when I deleted and reinstalled the App. Still not what I would expect out of Apple for one of their main apps.
About half the time when I use it on the desktop I have to force quit Music. I have no idea how a non-technical person would use something so buggy.
The app performance of Apple Music on MacOS and iOS is an abomination. It's consistently twice as slow as Spotify, from loading playlists to loading search results and playing a song. I would be ashamed if I worked on the Apple Music team. How can a person with any self respect go to work every day and be okay with Apple Music in it's current state?
But it's not just an Apple problem. It feels like the vast majority of software, you can open it up and fiddle around for a few minutes and find any number of poorly conceived UX choices not to mention straight up bugs / inconsistencies. I'm not talking "I could make this software better than they did" level stuff, just things that any reasonable person would admit don't make sense.
I feel the UI at least is better than Spotify. And you don’t have to suffer from podcast advertisement with Apple Music.
In the end for all of these services you are exposed to the whims of their dev/management team. The only way around this problem is probably a regulation from the government to force services to offer a consistent unchanging api so that third party clients can be build and fix all of these problems.
The one thing that sours the entire experience for me is that songs take like 5-15s to start playing when selecting one that isn't super popular.
This happens on my ipad, mac, android phone.
It feels like some server is spinning up a hard drive to stream it.
Apart from that, why the hell is the title and artist only shown in one line that starts scolling instead of showing multiple lines if it doesn't fit, at least in the album view and the player. It's such a pain listening to classical music when the composer and the performer and section are not visible without playing it and waiting for the line to scroll, like wtf.
These streaming platforms are so bad. We had better software in the 90s and 00s. These trillion dollar corporations can't beat literally decades old technology. The only reason these little services even exist in the first place is to satisfy the whims of copyright monopolists. How many more steps backwards must this industry take before they're satisfied?
I’ve been seriously considering going back to owning a big library of mp3s. I love Spotify for its suggestions - well, when it’s not just playing the same 8 songs on repeat. And I love having my music available on all my devices.
But the experience of playing songs feels like it’s taken a big step backwards into some sort of weird corporate happy land. The fact I we still can’t remove podcasts from Spotify is ridiculous. I tried Apple Music but I bounced almost immediately because of the UI.
> I’ve been seriously considering going back to owning a big library of mp3s.
I never left! Every once in a while I go and try Streaming again to see if they have gotten their shit together, and they still haven't. My hand-curated collection of MP3s, hand-ripped by me using the quality settings I like, carefully stored in a directory structure I understand, with filenames that make sense to me, meticulously tagged with the right metadata, gives me everything I need for music listening, and it doesn't require the Internet or a subscription to play. With hard drive sizes today, the cost of storage for a library of every music I would ever want to listen to is a rounding error. I don't care about discovery and engagement and royalty costs and all those metrics streaming companies optimize for.
What platform (linux/mac/windows) are you on, and which apps do you use to manage/consume it? Do you use a streamer (like plex, jellyfin, etc) or do you load your whole collection on every device?
Have you tried plex/jelly-amp? Plexamp attempts recommendations and does a good job streaming / keeping media between devices (although for some reason you can't copy the entire library, only playlists/albums/artists?)
>These streaming platforms are so bad. We had better software in the 90s and 00s.
You are sitting in a chair in the sky.
I can play any music I want right now for a £10/month fee. In the 90s I was buying CDs with five good songs and five filler for £15. In the 2000s I was finding stuff that I could pirate, downloading it, and playing it on my beige desktop computer because there was no such thing as a smartphone.
Oh please. And in the "old days" you couldn't buy just any random indie music in a record store either. Yes, "any" music is obviously an exaggeration for a mainstream music streaming service. I'm guessing I own a few things that aren't on Apple Music or Spotify. But the vast vast majority of music most people in the West listen to is on the streaming services. It certainly isn't just Top 40.
I personally don’t find that to be true. Time for some objective anecdata.
There is a site [0] that ranks how “mainstream” one’s listening habits are based on their last.fm profile.
Punching in my username, I get ranked as 12% mainstream (i.e., only 12% of last.fm users listen to music more obscure than mine). Keep in mind, this is relative to last.fm users, whose musical tastes are probably more obscure than the general population.
Approximately 95% of my lossless library is on Spotify or Apple Music. So I’d say they’re doing a pretty good job maintaining a comprehensive catalog.
That site says I'm at 6%, and I agree 95%+ is accurate. Some particularly obscure stuff is only on YouTube or Bandcamp, that's maybe 3%, another 1-2% is simply unavailable due to various licensing issues, generally odd albums for artists that have most of their content available. If you go way, way down the long tail of 400-youtube-view music from decades ago, most of it won't be available anywhere except YouTube and pirate sites, both with spotty coverage.
Apple Music has a feature based on iTunes Match that will take your local files and attempt to match them based on their metadata and audio fingerprint.
The last time I used it, from my (then) ~5000 song library, it matched ~3600. That means that a good third of the music I listen to is not available in the same exact version on streaming services.
I dug into why, and reasons include:
- The LPs were never licensed properly. Such as Exmilitary by Death Grips, which is a bootleg release with copyright issues.
- The artist hasn't signed up for streaming, like it used to be the case with Tool. Or they only stream on one platform and not another. Dr. Dre and Jay-Z come to mind. All three artists I mentioned in this bullet are "really mainstream."
- The version I like is not the streaming release. I like the casette version of Ashes 2 Ashes, Dust 2 Dust by Tommy Wright III, but not the CD reissue.
- The artist is actually too niche. I have quite a few things in my collection from Bandcamp or Soundcloud that don't exist elsewhere.
- The release is "weird." Like the radio stations from the classic GTA games.
Also, Apple Music allows you to just put any music in there and sync across devices, if you're missing something.
The reason between Apple Music and iTunes Match is that the latter doesn't replace your existing copies with the alternatives it find in its database. AM will gladly do it unless what you have offline is truly unique.
I don't know how well iTunes tracks with music available on other streaming platforms, but when I imported my library of ~700 CDs to iTunes Match about 40% of my tracks matched, and 60% had to be uploaded, so I suspect that for me there is a lot that isn't on any platform (but is on iTunes match.) Which is why I don't subscribe to any streaming service.
How do you see the match rate? I've been using iTunes Match for years and really prefer it over services like Spotify. But I've always wondered how much of my content wasn't available on the mothership.
I’ll post my playlist and you tell me how much of it you’ve heard on the radio.
Sure, maybe you won’t find that one band from the 90s you loved that played a few shows and only ever recorded anything on tapes that have been obscured over time.
But one of the reasons I use streaming over the radio is because streaming libraries offer 1000x times the diversity of any radio station or chart.
If there was music I wanted to listen to, OiNK[1] had it. Had it been allowed to survive, I'm sure it would have evolved into something far better than our current options. I'm willing to pay for music but not a huge fan of songs/albums randomly disappearing from my library due to some licensing decision[2].
They are strictly interview based, if you want a lower hassle orpheus.network still does invites. Smaller site but they get a good % of their releases from redacted.
> In the 90s I was buying CDs with five good songs and five filler for £15.
That is unfortunate. In the early 2000s, I was cleaning up buying used CDs for $1 on Half.com and Amazon.
The whole thing about "1 good song on a 10-song album" is a remnant of Steve Jobs' iPod marketing pitch designed to get people buying songs piecemeal for 99c on iTunes.
Regular people buy music if they want to support the artist. Trying to maximize the number of good songs per dollar spent is a kind of alien calculus that's led us down this path of algorithm-driven one-hit-wonder hell.
> The whole thing about "1 good song on a 10-song album" is a remnant of Steve Jobs' iPod marketing pitch
Yup. I remember people used claim "piracy would ruin the quality of music" - but the truth is, it's these streaming services that are killing the art of the album.
True, but don’t forget that much of the mid-20th century was “single” focused, and the concept of a full cohesive LP only came about in the mid-60’s (there are earlier examples for but think Miles Davis, Bob Dylan, or The Beatles). Meanwhile, most people still consume top-40 style hits from the radio, etc. for decades after.
The software was still better. You're right that we have better, easier and cheaper access to the music we want, but that's unrelated to the software we use to play the music or manage the playlist.
You can still buy music on Apple Music, it's not copy protected if I recall correctly, then play it back in WinAmp. That would currently be the best experience from both eras.
Software doesn't matter, what matters is the experience.
Apple Music simply isn't a great app but everyone can vote with their wallet and switch to something else.
Having music only on your desktop computer and takes space isn't the best experience for the absolute majority of people. But it's good that the ones who want can still do that.
But in the 1990s we were travelling without moving through the aggregate of everybody's music collection that they already paid for.
In the 2000s we were using idle bandwidth to move the distribution cost closer to zero than ever before.
In light of that, I wonder if in a decade you'll be praising an uncomfortable sardine can that drags us across the desert with better than 25% departure delays.
>But in the 1990s we were travelling without moving through the aggregate of everybody's music collection that they already paid for.
It sounds as if you are claiming that because person X already paid for a CD, everybody else connected to them via Napster has a right to listen to that music. If so, I disagree. People complain that Spotify et al. underpay musicians. Piracy pays them zero.
Meanwhile: I pay once for all the music on Spotify; I can listen to stuff like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0T-H-fVlHE0 which was never available pirated; anything I want starts playing within seconds; and it's conveniently provided to me on my phone, along with playlists that regularly find me music and podcasts I like. Which aspect was better in the 2000s?
>I can play any music I want right now for a £10/month fee.
Which is not that great in itself.
Streaming is for the 5% of the people obsessed with variety over building a relationship with select music (and who does that while claiming its a "false dichotomy"), and casual listening skimmers (the 95%).
Why is that not great? I’ve been a Spotify user for years. The Discover Weekly, “artist radio, and daily mix playlists allow me to find other bands I’d otherwise overlook. Finding/sharing playlists with others is a joy.
Because it's not about endless consumption of new artists, which soon lose their value in the endless supply of replacements, but about getting in depth with fewer...
We need to distinguish ability and willingness. And nobody will ever be satisfied, it's a constant struggle for control, from all sides. For what they cost, I think the streaming services in general offer a good deal. Not that I'm overly satisfied with any of them.
Why compete on merit when you have an insurmountable marketing/advertising advantage?
A feature of the modern smartphone ownership experience is being bombarded with ads for clones of existing businesses, the best of which are almost as good as those pre-existing offerings.
The Music, TV, News, and Books icons on the home screen are really just ads. Each of these "apps" contains a prominent ad, followed by a torrent of push notification ads.
In a way, the home screen is a re-imagining of AOL from the 90s: a crippled proprietary take on the web, spoon-fed to a captive audience, lacking the egalitarianism that allows companies like Spotify and Netflix to thrive.
I was astounded at how bad Apple Music is. I’m not talking about missing features or lack of polish, but that I’d click play on a song and a different song on the list would start playing. And this bug persisted for months on the web version before I left. The mobile app was just so lacking as well.
Not at all what I expect from apple. Honestly the only reason Spotify still exists is because Apple and Google are doing such a dismal job.
Youtube Music (Google Music successor) is shaping up really well. It was buggy for a while (and in fact that exact bug of clicking on a song and a different song playing was on youtube music), but either I've got major Stockholm Syndrome or it's gotten really polished.
All that said though, G killed the public API for music which is a horrible tragedy to me. I may yet still go back to spotify just for the API.
>songs take like 5-15s to start playing when selecting one that isn't super popular. It feels like some server is spinning up a hard drive to stream it.
If it's really that long, it sounds like it's literally spinning up an actual vinyl record.
How are first party Apple apps so horrible on first party hardware? I don't use Music but I decided to check out Severance (great show) and the TV app was absolutely horrible to use in every way. The player would only stream some really low resolution on my monitor so I tried downloading the episodes and the whole app lagged so badly every time I would queue something up or delete it. It even completely stopped streaming on my monitor because for some reason it thought my HDMI cable didn't support the HDCPI thing and after I put the laptop to sleep and woke it up, it magically started working again. So many other UX problems that I just couldn't put up with and cancelled my subscription after watching the show
Like Xcode, so many of their first party apps on Mac are just badly made and awful to use
Tried it, the quality was terribly inconsistency and FaceTime’s use of phone number as AppleID and not needing username/password made it much easier to use.
I think Home app tops it. Just try if you have any HomeKit enabled lights for example. I think it's some half-assed attempt at just running the iOS version on the Mac. It's just so hilariously bad - I just now tried it again and I still have no idea how do the most basic of things - change the brightness of a light. There is a slider which on iOS you would intuitively know what to do with, but on this Mac version I have no idea what the input is meant to be.
Because Music is anything but "first party" from Apple's perspective.
A lot of people seem to have the wrong idea about Apple's software, with the exception of macOS. The point of the software is to entice the customer with a complete ecosystem. Once they've sold you their laptop they've made their money. At that point, they're not that interested in putting resources towards things like Music when their hardware continues to sell quite well.
I'm not advocating for that approach, but it is what it is.
Exactly, Apple is a hardware company with software as a loss leader.
Apple TV is pretty bad. I can't recall ever using it without a freeze or a crash. It's embarrassing for a company with the amount of money Apple has.
This is the reason why I'm bought into the Google ecosystem. I would say that Google is the least bad at software of any of the major tech companies. I would probably use Chromebooks if I could get proper drivers for my beloved RME hardware.
You’re re-treading an old line of argument that doesn’t make sense anymore especially in this context. Apple has identified services as an area they went to grow.
Music is an ongoing subscription service, with plenty of competition. If they want to retain or grow their paying subscribers Apple needs to improve their software with the same attention to quality they devote to hardware.
They need to improve their software to the point that the quality/price/convenience of Apple Music is more attractive than quality/price/convenience of the alternative. Since Apple Music is basically pre-installed and you get it as part of Apple One or whatever, there is a quality gap that they can accept and still grow the service. And they will, it's just basic economics.
If anybody knows of a software company that uses their excess money to make the software better instead of beefing up their balance sheet, please, hook me up. That's where I want to work.
No need to argue with a straw man, I’m not saying they should invest in software quality for altruistic or philosophical purposes.
Apple Music is a paid subscription service. Maybe they can coast on the momentum of their preinstalls and make some money, like you said.
But I’d argue, as someone who has used both apple music and Spotify in the past, that Apple is leaving money on the table by having a shoddy software component to their music service. When a superior service is equally priced and just a few taps away, they will certainly lose some percentage of paying customers.
> If they want to retain or grow their paying subscribers Apple needs to improve their software with the same attention to quality they devote to hardware.
I get your point, but no, they just need to sell more devices; act anti-competitive by bundling Apple Music on every iPhone's homescreen, thus giving Apple Music billions in free advertisement that Spotify could never get even if they paid, and by setting Apple Music as the default. Then, make it hard to switch (e.g. if you cancel Apple Music, you lose your library 90 days later). Make sure Apple Music has the home advantage by sharing advance knowledge of new APIs and hardware with the Apple Music team, but obviously not with Spotify.
Plus Apple has strong psychological advantages, since Apple users seem more likely to blindly want to stick to all-Apple solutions and default apps regardless of app quality. Compare that to Windows, where users can't wait to get rid of Edge, and Android, where only a minuscule portion of people insist on an all-Google experience.
I don't believe there's any real "corrective mechanism" inside Apple to make Apple Music or TV+ the very best, because they don't need to be.
Xcode seems very YMMV. I’ve been using it day in and day out for years now and it’s seldom irritating, particularly now that dependencies can be handled with Xcode alone thanks to Swift Package Manager (Cocoapods suuuucks). On average I find Android Studio and Visual Studio (the Windows IDE, not the editor) more consistently frustrating.
> Hitting play will start the music at some sound level, after about a second or two the sound level is suddenly reduced (and stays at that level until hitting pause and play again).
This is likely due to "Sound Check" being enabled (I think it's on by default), which you can un-check in the "Playback" section of the Music app's preferences.
Yep, one of the most frustrating experiences. What makes it worse is how hard it can be to navigate back to what I was listening to when the music stopped.
I changed countries on the apple store and in transition I lost my entire apple music library which I curated for over 6 years (thousands of songs). All vanished. It was so painful.
I have moved to spotify but I am still overcoming the grief :(
The one good feature Apple Music has is the "export" feature. Spotify makes it a pain, Apple just lets you make an archive of your whole library instantly.
Sorry about your old library. Don't trust Spotify either! You can download a listing on your account page.
I’ve had Apple Music convert saved songs from explicit to censored in the past. The software must be written so poorly.
Another good one:
If you start a station on macOS. You can’t hit previous song to go back.
If you’re on iOS you can…
Apple Music is pretty terrible. So many times there’s no UI feedback when pressing things and they just glitch into some new state seconds after pressing things
> I’ve had Apple Music convert saved songs from explicit to censored in the past. The software must be written so poorly.
This happens with YouTube Music as well and it is incredibly annoying. So weird how this same kind of thing would happen with multiple services.
For me it's been mostly Aesop Rock and Big KRIT albums that frequently change from Explicit -> Censored versions, but it's happened with other artists as well.
The desktop app is abysmal and slow, I like how they pay artists a little more and it’s a little cheaper bundled with other services, and that’s the only reason I use it.
The usability sucks too. How in god’s name do you make an app in 2022 that has unclickable artist and album names sprinkled throughout? It’s incredible how terrible iTunes was and how long Apple is allowing it to drag everything down.
Maybe it’s just because I enjoy obscure music, but I find a fair number of older tracks are seemingly corrupted on Apples servers. I run into music pretty regularly that’ll get part way into a song and just fail. Sometimes it will skip to the next song, sometimes it will get stuck and I have to manually advance it. Sometimes I get the treat of horrible static/screeching.
I have this problem across Mac laptop and android phone.
I‘ll add a comment to reflect my own experience: I’m quite happy with Apple Music, both on iOS and macOS. Sometimes I get „not authorised“ errors when playing something new and that is annoying, but other than that it just works for me as a casual user.
In comparison, Spotify has grown overly complex and feels weird in terms of UI responsiveness to me.
I tried switching to Apple Music from Spotify. One of my favorite features were the radio stations/shows. Elton John has one called Rocket Hour. The craziest thing to me - there was no way to favorite or bookmark those shows or track which episode you’re on. You need to navigate the labyrinth UI, drilling down to the show, or search for the show every time. Folks on the Apple Music subreddit suggested copying the “share” URL for the show, and keep that in a Notes doc.
I just want to sync my music library on my hard drive to my iphone. All I want is a UI on iOS that doesn’t force my classical music into an album view.
I used to use Apple Music and liked it, but the bitrate (music quality) of the music was too low so after a few years I cancelled it. For me it's really audible the difference between 320kbps music.
Yeah iTunes used to be a real shitshow, having accumulated anything related to iPhone sync mgmt, media player, and a browser ofc. Then the Apple Music player came as an improvement, but still wtf: the workflow to play a title is like, search it, then wade through the results to get at your local copy (as opposed to titles on the store), then click it to arrive at the album where Apple Music doesn't select the damn title but the first of the album/collection, then browse through the possibly large list (have to select list view first) to locate it, then finally play it, if I recall correctly. If your music collection is large and/or on multiple volumes and/or copied from older or others systems, there are additional fuckups.
We're always making fun of that at a die-hard Apple fanboy friend of mine. To add insult to injury, Apple Music is gender-mainstreamed in German (should be a config option IMO).
But give it time; Apple is certainly able to get it right eventually. Other players have degraded as well IMHO.
> Yeah iTunes used to be a real shitshow, having accumulated anything related to iPhone sync mgmt, media player, and a browser ofc. Then the Apple Music player came as an improvement
Hmm, I'm actually glad that iTunes in its old form still lives on in Windows, because AFAIK the dedicated Podcasts app that has replaced iTunes in that regard on Macs no longer supports manually adding files as a podcast episode – something I've made heavily use of in order to get that nice listened/unlistened tracking for various radio comedy shows I've obtained through other means.
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 271 ms ] threadAs far as the slowness goes, I attribute that to the fact that the app is not native, it's just some sort of Electron-like mess. Then again so is Spotify (I think?) and it feels much snappier.
Lightweight, all free-software, can handle a massive audio-database, all synchronized. What else do we need ?
Unless you thought libraries were a euphemism for torrents.
> Das Gesetz trat am 1. Januar 2008 in Kraft.[7] § 53 Abs. 1 S. 1 UrhG wurde geändert, so dass Privatkopien nicht zulässig sind, sofern zur Vervielfältigung „eine offensichtlich rechtswidrig hergestellte oder öffentlich zugänglich gemachte Vorlage“ verwendet wird.
the last sentence says that no public sharing is allowed for copyrighted works
doesn’t matter if the distributor is a library or a torrent
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Music_Player_Daemon/Tips_an...
It appears the latency issues have been well documented by now.
I also created a free app to control Snapcast with macOS keyboard shortcuts or from your iPhone/iPad: https://lowtechguys.com/volum
More importantly though it is one of the highest paying per stream to artists [1]. Streaming needs to be much more lucrative for artists and consumer choice helps that.
It is nice to be able to buy the music as well if you want to support. Being part of Apple One is huge as well.
The latest music streaming royalty rates are as follows.
I have lots of mp3/stored music as well and Spotify client started taking like 20-30 minutes to start up. Wasn't sure what it was doing...Some of their patents for tracking are a bit dystopian as well.
New Spotify Patent Involves Monitoring Users’ Speech to Recommend Music
> The streaming platform is interested in extracting data points like emotional state, gender, age, and accent to hone its recommendations [2].
Nah. Apple already has my info and reasonably treats it well eventhough it is too much, I don't need another service to invade privacy.
[1] https://producerhive.com/music-marketing-tips/streaming-roya...
[2] https://pitchfork.com/news/new-spotify-patent-involves-monit...
Is there a need to integrate with anything? All I need is to play music. Spotify is as integrated into macOS and iOS as Apple Music.
> More importantly though it is one of the highest paying per stream to artists [1]. Streaming needs to be much more lucrative for artists and consumer choice helps that.
Too bad they are shooting themselves in the foot by neglecting user experience.
I do like a more open/api platform and wish Apple was, but Spotify probably won't be for long. Tracking my plays takes more work with everything to closed.
Apple misses some of the obscure stuff but I will always side with the higher payer to artists. I also like just being able to buy albums I like and support artists.
I guess I’m just not sure what sort of “gotcha” this is supposed to be. The beauty of incentive alignment is that you don’t have to waste your time trying to discern nebulous motivations of large groups of people.
All the money that streaming services pay out goes to copyright holders. Guess who the copyright holders are. If you say "artists", think again. For the absolute vast majority of music it's the Big Four/Three: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_industry#Consolidation
So, when the likes of Spotify pay 60-70% of their revenue to the record labels, and the artists get peanuts... Spotify (and Tidal, and Apple Music, and...) get blamed. Now this is a real puzzler.
Please explain.
> though I imagine the count of streams is more influential for that than the revenue per stream
Whether I listen on Apple or Spotify, their count of streams increases by the same amount.
If you really wanted to help artists, it would make the most sense to use whichever service is cheapest and then donate the difference to artists. But, personally I’d just go with whoever provides the best user experience, which is none of them, so I basically haven’t listened to music aside from occasional YouTube chill beats for years.
As far as i know there is no native Spotify for HomePod : https://www.macrumors.com/2021/11/22/spotify-users-impatient...
However, I do think it’s anti-competitive. Spotify, for example, has absolutely no possible way to get my business until and unless my entire family were to ditch Apple.
I don’t like the Music UI but I’ve come to understand how to use it and it no longer bothers me.
Read this article to learn how $ payouts per stream are determined: https://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2022/02/music-streaming-real...
It's all pro-rated. 52% of Apple Music revenues go to labels, by contract; Spotify is around the same. Royalties are just revenues divided by # of streams (simplification).
Spotify's free users give lower royalty rates per stream, and Premium users give higher ones. If Spotify users like rap more than AM users, then rap will have higher rates on Spotify than Apple Music, since a larger proportion of revenue will go to the same amount of rap songs.
If Apple Music is more painful to use than Spotify, or has worse discoverability, then people won't listen to as many songs (or won't leave it on for 8h as background noise) as with Spotify, and royalties will be higher per stream than Spotify. The higher royalties don't make up for the lower # of streams since discoverability benefits small artists.
Right now, Apple pays more per stream either because they may have more users in richer countries (Indian users don't pay $10/month), users who listen to less music, maybe older users (fewer students on student plans) and because they have no free tier.
So: the "AM has higher royalty payouts" is objectively a false Apple marketing point, because it's zero-sum. It's a pure accounting gimmick. Royalty payouts are pro-rata; there's no such thing as "Spotify's chosen royalty payout". For Spotify to get as high as Apple's, they'd need to make discoverability terrible (fewer hours listened per month = fewer streams = higher payouts per stream), get rid of their free tier, etc. They can't just "decide to increase payouts" because that's 52% of revenues, same as Apple Music, by contract.
This has very little to do with the service, and as everything to do with the Big Four (now Three) [1] that control basically all of music.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_industry#Consolidation
If I click in the search box and start typing, the box will lose focus at some random time and all my next keystrokes will count as play commands, usually pausing the music. If I come back to the search box, it happens again.
I know "text boxes" are cutting-edge technology that's barely 3 seconds old and developers are still learning to program them safely. Still, I expected more from a trillion-dollar company.
I use Apple Music and it's got all sorts of problems. "Hey Siri, play Chill Mix" "Sorry, I'm having trouble finding that in your library."
Chill Mix is generated from Apple Music based on what you play. I use it every morning except those days it just can't be found.
About half the time when I use it on the desktop I have to force quit Music. I have no idea how a non-technical person would use something so buggy.
It almost sounds like proper competition would do some good here.
the amount of usability issues the app has are phenomenal
i was actually more surprised when it worked rather when it didn’t
not worth my $9.99
1) debt/mortgage
2) kids
3) vesting stock
4) all of the above
But it's not just an Apple problem. It feels like the vast majority of software, you can open it up and fiddle around for a few minutes and find any number of poorly conceived UX choices not to mention straight up bugs / inconsistencies. I'm not talking "I could make this software better than they did" level stuff, just things that any reasonable person would admit don't make sense.
although i currently work at faang as a contractor and certainly the level of ability is not what you might think from the outside.
In the end for all of these services you are exposed to the whims of their dev/management team. The only way around this problem is probably a regulation from the government to force services to offer a consistent unchanging api so that third party clients can be build and fix all of these problems.
This happens on my ipad, mac, android phone.
It feels like some server is spinning up a hard drive to stream it.
Apart from that, why the hell is the title and artist only shown in one line that starts scolling instead of showing multiple lines if it doesn't fit, at least in the album view and the player. It's such a pain listening to classical music when the composer and the performer and section are not visible without playing it and waiting for the line to scroll, like wtf.
But the experience of playing songs feels like it’s taken a big step backwards into some sort of weird corporate happy land. The fact I we still can’t remove podcasts from Spotify is ridiculous. I tried Apple Music but I bounced almost immediately because of the UI.
I never left! Every once in a while I go and try Streaming again to see if they have gotten their shit together, and they still haven't. My hand-curated collection of MP3s, hand-ripped by me using the quality settings I like, carefully stored in a directory structure I understand, with filenames that make sense to me, meticulously tagged with the right metadata, gives me everything I need for music listening, and it doesn't require the Internet or a subscription to play. With hard drive sizes today, the cost of storage for a library of every music I would ever want to listen to is a rounding error. I don't care about discovery and engagement and royalty costs and all those metrics streaming companies optimize for.
I feel like everyone says this, but Apple Music's UI is why I left Spotify.
You are sitting in a chair in the sky.
I can play any music I want right now for a £10/month fee. In the 90s I was buying CDs with five good songs and five filler for £15. In the 2000s I was finding stuff that I could pirate, downloading it, and playing it on my beige desktop computer because there was no such thing as a smartphone.
Any music? Nope. Maybe the popular stuff that plays on the radio.
There is a site [0] that ranks how “mainstream” one’s listening habits are based on their last.fm profile.
Punching in my username, I get ranked as 12% mainstream (i.e., only 12% of last.fm users listen to music more obscure than mine). Keep in mind, this is relative to last.fm users, whose musical tastes are probably more obscure than the general population.
Approximately 95% of my lossless library is on Spotify or Apple Music. So I’d say they’re doing a pretty good job maintaining a comprehensive catalog.
[0] https://mainstream.ghan.nl/
Apple Music has a feature based on iTunes Match that will take your local files and attempt to match them based on their metadata and audio fingerprint.
The last time I used it, from my (then) ~5000 song library, it matched ~3600. That means that a good third of the music I listen to is not available in the same exact version on streaming services.
I dug into why, and reasons include:
- The LPs were never licensed properly. Such as Exmilitary by Death Grips, which is a bootleg release with copyright issues.
- The artist hasn't signed up for streaming, like it used to be the case with Tool. Or they only stream on one platform and not another. Dr. Dre and Jay-Z come to mind. All three artists I mentioned in this bullet are "really mainstream."
- The version I like is not the streaming release. I like the casette version of Ashes 2 Ashes, Dust 2 Dust by Tommy Wright III, but not the CD reissue.
- The artist is actually too niche. I have quite a few things in my collection from Bandcamp or Soundcloud that don't exist elsewhere.
- The release is "weird." Like the radio stations from the classic GTA games.
The reason between Apple Music and iTunes Match is that the latter doesn't replace your existing copies with the alternatives it find in its database. AM will gladly do it unless what you have offline is truly unique.
EDIT: `Cloud Status` lists this. TIL
This is not an obscure artist. They have over 1 million subscribers.
Sure, maybe you won’t find that one band from the 90s you loved that played a few shows and only ever recorded anything on tapes that have been obscured over time.
But one of the reasons I use streaming over the radio is because streaming libraries offer 1000x times the diversity of any radio station or chart.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oink%27s_Pink_Palace [2] https://old.reddit.com/r/spotify/comments/5ph69t/why_does_sp...
That is unfortunate. In the early 2000s, I was cleaning up buying used CDs for $1 on Half.com and Amazon.
The whole thing about "1 good song on a 10-song album" is a remnant of Steve Jobs' iPod marketing pitch designed to get people buying songs piecemeal for 99c on iTunes.
Regular people buy music if they want to support the artist. Trying to maximize the number of good songs per dollar spent is a kind of alien calculus that's led us down this path of algorithm-driven one-hit-wonder hell.
Yup. I remember people used claim "piracy would ruin the quality of music" - but the truth is, it's these streaming services that are killing the art of the album.
You can still buy music on Apple Music, it's not copy protected if I recall correctly, then play it back in WinAmp. That would currently be the best experience from both eras.
Having music only on your desktop computer and takes space isn't the best experience for the absolute majority of people. But it's good that the ones who want can still do that.
A chair in the sky is great.
But in the 1990s we were travelling without moving through the aggregate of everybody's music collection that they already paid for.
In the 2000s we were using idle bandwidth to move the distribution cost closer to zero than ever before.
In light of that, I wonder if in a decade you'll be praising an uncomfortable sardine can that drags us across the desert with better than 25% departure delays.
It sounds as if you are claiming that because person X already paid for a CD, everybody else connected to them via Napster has a right to listen to that music. If so, I disagree. People complain that Spotify et al. underpay musicians. Piracy pays them zero.
Meanwhile: I pay once for all the music on Spotify; I can listen to stuff like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0T-H-fVlHE0 which was never available pirated; anything I want starts playing within seconds; and it's conveniently provided to me on my phone, along with playlists that regularly find me music and podcasts I like. Which aspect was better in the 2000s?
And it's a worse experience than the chairs in the sky we used to sit in the 50s and 60s...
https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/vintage-airplane-phot...
>I can play any music I want right now for a £10/month fee.
Which is not that great in itself.
Streaming is for the 5% of the people obsessed with variety over building a relationship with select music (and who does that while claiming its a "false dichotomy"), and casual listening skimmers (the 95%).
A feature of the modern smartphone ownership experience is being bombarded with ads for clones of existing businesses, the best of which are almost as good as those pre-existing offerings.
The Music, TV, News, and Books icons on the home screen are really just ads. Each of these "apps" contains a prominent ad, followed by a torrent of push notification ads.
In a way, the home screen is a re-imagining of AOL from the 90s: a crippled proprietary take on the web, spoon-fed to a captive audience, lacking the egalitarianism that allows companies like Spotify and Netflix to thrive.
Not at all what I expect from apple. Honestly the only reason Spotify still exists is because Apple and Google are doing such a dismal job.
It what happens when you use Leetcode proficiency to find your developers.
All that said though, G killed the public API for music which is a horrible tragedy to me. I may yet still go back to spotify just for the API.
They acquired Primephonic to address this, but no results yet.
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2021/08/apple-acquires-classi...
If it's really that long, it sounds like it's literally spinning up an actual vinyl record.
I DO NOT TRUST APPLE anymore.
Like Xcode, so many of their first party apps on Mac are just badly made and awful to use
i’ve never seen an app that can crash or lock the whole operating system
design-wise it looks completely out of place
A lot of people seem to have the wrong idea about Apple's software, with the exception of macOS. The point of the software is to entice the customer with a complete ecosystem. Once they've sold you their laptop they've made their money. At that point, they're not that interested in putting resources towards things like Music when their hardware continues to sell quite well.
I'm not advocating for that approach, but it is what it is.
Apple TV is pretty bad. I can't recall ever using it without a freeze or a crash. It's embarrassing for a company with the amount of money Apple has.
This is the reason why I'm bought into the Google ecosystem. I would say that Google is the least bad at software of any of the major tech companies. I would probably use Chromebooks if I could get proper drivers for my beloved RME hardware.
Music is an ongoing subscription service, with plenty of competition. If they want to retain or grow their paying subscribers Apple needs to improve their software with the same attention to quality they devote to hardware.
If anybody knows of a software company that uses their excess money to make the software better instead of beefing up their balance sheet, please, hook me up. That's where I want to work.
Apple Music is a paid subscription service. Maybe they can coast on the momentum of their preinstalls and make some money, like you said.
But I’d argue, as someone who has used both apple music and Spotify in the past, that Apple is leaving money on the table by having a shoddy software component to their music service. When a superior service is equally priced and just a few taps away, they will certainly lose some percentage of paying customers.
I get your point, but no, they just need to sell more devices; act anti-competitive by bundling Apple Music on every iPhone's homescreen, thus giving Apple Music billions in free advertisement that Spotify could never get even if they paid, and by setting Apple Music as the default. Then, make it hard to switch (e.g. if you cancel Apple Music, you lose your library 90 days later). Make sure Apple Music has the home advantage by sharing advance knowledge of new APIs and hardware with the Apple Music team, but obviously not with Spotify.
Plus Apple has strong psychological advantages, since Apple users seem more likely to blindly want to stick to all-Apple solutions and default apps regardless of app quality. Compare that to Windows, where users can't wait to get rid of Edge, and Android, where only a minuscule portion of people insist on an all-Google experience.
I don't believe there's any real "corrective mechanism" inside Apple to make Apple Music or TV+ the very best, because they don't need to be.
> Hitting play will start the music at some sound level, after about a second or two the sound level is suddenly reduced (and stays at that level until hitting pause and play again).
This is likely due to "Sound Check" being enabled (I think it's on by default), which you can un-check in the "Playback" section of the Music app's preferences.
It's that bad.
I have moved to spotify but I am still overcoming the grief :(
Sorry about your old library. Don't trust Spotify either! You can download a listing on your account page.
I didn’t even know there were alternatives. Are there any decent ones?
[1]: https://9to5mac.com/2022/03/28/cider-is-an-alternative-apple...
Another good one:
If you start a station on macOS. You can’t hit previous song to go back.
If you’re on iOS you can…
Apple Music is pretty terrible. So many times there’s no UI feedback when pressing things and they just glitch into some new state seconds after pressing things
This happens with YouTube Music as well and it is incredibly annoying. So weird how this same kind of thing would happen with multiple services.
For me it's been mostly Aesop Rock and Big KRIT albums that frequently change from Explicit -> Censored versions, but it's happened with other artists as well.
The usability sucks too. How in god’s name do you make an app in 2022 that has unclickable artist and album names sprinkled throughout? It’s incredible how terrible iTunes was and how long Apple is allowing it to drag everything down.
I have this problem across Mac laptop and android phone.
In comparison, Spotify has grown overly complex and feels weird in terms of UI responsiveness to me.
I’m back on Spotify.
I will happily yell at Apple employees while wearing a turtleneck if that's what it's gonna take.
We're always making fun of that at a die-hard Apple fanboy friend of mine. To add insult to injury, Apple Music is gender-mainstreamed in German (should be a config option IMO).
But give it time; Apple is certainly able to get it right eventually. Other players have degraded as well IMHO.
For one version. Then, some hot-head new grad will come in and make it whatever UX fashion of the week will be and screw it up for another 5 years.
Hmm, I'm actually glad that iTunes in its old form still lives on in Windows, because AFAIK the dedicated Podcasts app that has replaced iTunes in that regard on Macs no longer supports manually adding files as a podcast episode – something I've made heavily use of in order to get that nice listened/unlistened tracking for various radio comedy shows I've obtained through other means.