[HN Gopher] Apple Music is the most buggy and annoying software ...
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Apple Music is the most buggy and annoying software I use
Author : nephics
Score : 317 points
Date : 2022-06-04 10:20 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.nephics.se)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.nephics.se)
| knodi wrote:
| Try using the Podcast app it's even worst.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| 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.
| astrostl wrote:
| If you're an Alfred user (and I think you "should" be), try
| creating a web search keyword for
| https://music.apple.com/us/search?term={query} . When it's
| triggered it will open up search in the app rather than your
| browser. I find this much more usable than directly opening and
| using the app.
| jonkratz wrote:
| Great suggestion! I just added this -- and it worked as
| expected (mostly). If the Apple Music app is in MiniPlayer
| mode, it will not automatically switch to the full player, but
| thankfully, closing the MiniPlayer immediately drops you into
| the search results. Thanks!
| thoughtpeddler wrote:
| There's also Alfred's own Music feature (commonly mapped to
| [?]+[?]+return), which will let you search your library and
| play songs without going to the Music app first.
| brohoolio wrote:
| 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.
| qgin wrote:
| I'm not saying it's the best app I use, but I feel like I'm
| taking crazy pills reading this thread. I've used Apple Music
| since it launched and I haven't had an issue since the first few
| releases.
| CharlesW wrote:
| I'm also a very happy user (and a Spotify expat). Apple Music
| already has about half of Spotify's market share and its growth
| is accelerating. I feel like this is an "Apple Maps"-type
| situation, where it's slagged on for years while Apple
| continues to quietly improve it.
|
| https://www.midiaresearch.com/blog/music-subscriber-market-s...
| ZekeSulastin wrote:
| It's a HN thread on an article about the problems with
| ________; I'm not sure what else you expected :)
| jtuttle wrote:
| You should try Microsoft Teams on a Mac sometime...or any
| Microsoft product on a Mac, really.
| wintermutestwin wrote:
| I am fully bought in to the Apple ecosystem, but Apple Music is
| the poison pill that has me questioning this new prison I have
| chosen.
|
| The iOS app wastes three out of five buttons at the bottom that I
| can't change to something useful: "Listen Now" "Browse" "Radio"
| are all weak "discovery" tools that are probably more about label
| kickbacks than actually helping me find new music that I like.
|
| And really, I don't need your discovery Apple - what I need is
| better library discovery/organization tools because I have a
| massive library which is unwieldy in your crap apps.
|
| The album-centric focus is a huge PitA due to singles. Give me an
| Artist playlist that doesn't take up a precious playlist slot.
|
| Maybe this isn't entirely Apple's fault, but when I see greyed
| out songs or albums that were once there that aren't anymore, I
| feel pushed to stop giving these scumbag labels my cash through
| your service.
|
| I left out the bugs, but I feel that the quality of their
| flagship services product makes them look like a dying company,
| not a premium brand worth 2.5t$
| pupppet wrote:
| I can't stand the iOS Apple Music button setup.
|
| Library > Playlists > Playlist name > Play/Shuffle
|
| Four taps just to get my own music to start playing. Maddening
| that 3 of the 5 buttons are dedicated to not my music.
| concinds wrote:
| It's especially horrible if you have lots of playlists, and
| like to add playlists from Apple Music to your library.
|
| You can't add Apple Music playlists to playlist folders, and
| playlists can only be sorted alphabetically. On the Mac, your
| playlist folders are on top; then Apple Music playlists &
| your playlists are mixed together. On iPhone, it's reversed;
| Apple Music playlists, then your folders, forcing you to
| scroll all the way down to get to your playlists. And on Mac
| you can't add a song to a new playlist in a playlist folder
| directly; you need to add a song to a new playlist, and drag
| that playlist (that isn't highlighted) all the way up to the
| right folder. Yuck.
| donatj wrote:
| 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.
| 23B1 wrote:
| There's so much music from the 90s and 00s that I can't even
| find anymore. Little videos and movies too.
| infofarmer wrote:
| Loosely related, App Store is by far the worst of the top-1000
| online stores.
|
| It almost sounds like proper competition would do some good here.
| stack_framer wrote:
| The worst thing about Apple Music on macOS are the "smart"
| playlists. They can't be disabled, they keep coming back no
| matter how many times I delete them, and they're always at the
| top, so they push my playlists out of sight. Just absolutely
| terrible UX.
| ushakov wrote:
| i have used Apple Music for a short time on my mac
|
| 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
| embik wrote:
| 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.
| jmuguy wrote:
| 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'm back on Spotify.
| mandmandam wrote:
| Really Apple, please fix these issues. 10 euro a month is so
| much, and I really want to like this app.
|
| I will happily yell at Apple employees while wearing a turtleneck
| if that's what it's gonna take.
| JimBlackwood wrote:
| I switched from Spotify to AM and I still wouldn't switch back.
|
| There's some weird bugs for sure and the lack of switching
| between devices is annoying. Sometimes I'll accidentally leave it
| running in my laptop and then when I'm on my phone it keeps
| interrupting for some reason.
|
| Their shuffle actually shuffles, it's not just the same 20 songs.
|
| Artist matching is weird though. Frequently I'll have an artist
| that songs attributed to them that are from a different artist
| with the same name. You could now check the electronic artist
| Danger (songs like 11:02) and see some weird new Russian rap song
| attributed to him as a "Single". It's not his song but it ends up
| in my NEW MUSIC MIX. I had it with artists like SIERRA and ALEX
| too. Incredibly annoying.
| b-lee wrote:
| You basically tried to make a point and refute it on the same
| post lol
| radicality wrote:
| Back when Apple Music was just introduced, I enabled the free
| trial on my MacBook where I already had a curated iTunes library
| over the years. Apple Music was so destructive that it went and
| started irreversibly not only reorganising my local library but
| also deleting my local songs because it had the same song in the
| cloud... No thank you.
|
| It was so destructive that my only option was to disable Apple
| Music, completely remove my whole iTunes music/data folder and
| restore everything from backup.
|
| ---
|
| I also recently realised that the Mac OS upgrade broke my iTunes
| playlists again, I'm not sure if it was during move to Bug Sur or
| earlier. I have a whole folder of music and an iTunes db file,
| anyone how Im supposed to import that into Music considering that
| iTunes is dead?
| carlycue wrote:
| 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?
| mouzogu wrote:
| there is probably some context missing, i always prefer to give
| the devs the benefit of the doubt.
|
| although i currently work at faang as a contractor and
| certainly the level of ability is not what you might think from
| the outside.
| nmlt wrote:
| 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.
| ushakov wrote:
| > How can a person with any self respect go to work every day
| and be okay with Apple Music in it's current state?
|
| 1) debt/mortgage
|
| 2) kids
|
| 3) vesting stock
|
| 4) all of the above
| ec109685 wrote:
| You can have all of that and still produce good software.
| pschuegr wrote:
| The lack of attention to detail is palpable.
|
| 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.
| musha68k wrote:
| Agreed. I often wonder if with agile we threw the baby out
| with the bath water(fall).
| ysleepy wrote:
| 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.
| bowsamic wrote:
| This is why I never used Apple Music. I'm too used to how
| instant Spotify is
| jolux wrote:
| Huh, I've never experienced that 15s delay, and I definitely
| listen to some obscure stuff.
| Gigachad wrote:
| 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.
| hirvi74 wrote:
| > Not at all what I expect from apple.
|
| It what happens when you use Leetcode proficiency to find
| your developers.
| freedomben wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| 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?
| dash2 wrote:
| >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 PS10/month fee.
| In the 90s I was buying CDs with five good songs and five
| filler for PS15. 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.
| madengr wrote:
| mrweasel wrote:
| 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.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _You are sitting in a chair in the sky._
|
| 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 PS10 /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%).
| jzackpete wrote:
| 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].
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oink%27s_Pink_Palace [2]
| https://old.reddit.com/r/spotify/comments/5ph69t/why_does_s
| p...
| mwest217 wrote:
| OiNK was succeeded by What.CD, which was succeeded by
| Redacted.ch. The highly refined catalog of music is still
| there on the right place.
| achairapart wrote:
| How does Redacted.ch work? I can't see any signup forms.
| Actually, I can't see anything but a login form...
| joecool1029 wrote:
| 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.
| droopyEyelids wrote:
| I dont think this is the right forum to ask how to join
| piracy groups
| pa7ch wrote:
| Anyone rememberLordShaft? I miss those forums
| buggeryorkshire wrote:
| I've never had an experience quite like Oink when it came
| to catalogue curation and community.
| carlivar wrote:
| I would give up these modern improvements in return for my
| attention span.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| What is stopping you?
| carlivar wrote:
| Addiction / dopamine
| jancsika wrote:
| > You are sitting in a chair in the sky.
|
| 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.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > I can play any music I want right now for a PS10/month
| fee.
|
| _Any_ music? Nope. Maybe the popular stuff that plays on
| the radio.
| the_only_law wrote:
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| MontyCarloHall wrote:
| 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.
|
| [0] https://mainstream.ghan.nl/
| tyrfing wrote:
| 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.
| swozey wrote:
| I use datpiff for truly obscure/b-sides stuff
| tvararu wrote:
| I personally find it to be true.
|
| 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.
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| It has none of the songs from Kids Learning Tube.
| https://music.apple.com/us/artist/kids-learning-
| tube/9933602...
|
| This is not an obscure artist. They have over 1 million
| subscribers.
| abruzzi wrote:
| 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.
| jghn wrote:
| 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.
|
| EDIT: `Cloud Status` lists this. TIL
| samtheDamned wrote:
| With spotify maybe but for youtube music this is
| definitely true
| rchaud wrote:
| > In the 90s I was buying CDs with five good songs and five
| filler for PS15.
|
| 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.
| dash2 wrote:
| I'm a regular person, and I buy music because I want to
| listen to music.
| failTide wrote:
| > 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.
| ambrose2 wrote:
| 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.
| SheinhardtWigCo wrote:
| 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.
| npteljes wrote:
| 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.
| josephg wrote:
| 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.
| hirvi74 wrote:
| > I tried Apple Music but I bounced almost immediately
| because of the UI.
|
| I feel like everyone says this, but Apple Music's UI is why
| I left Spotify.
| ryandrake wrote:
| > 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.
| freedomben wrote:
| 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?
| ryandrake wrote:
| Debian Linux for networked storage. Kodi as client on
| home theater system. rsync or iTunes to sync to USB
| devices or to a 15 year old iPod classic.
| infinityio wrote:
| 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?)
| sebastien_bois wrote:
| > _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.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Was thinking a tape robot, but that's cool too.
| smugma wrote:
| Apple has acknowledged the challenges of searching for and
| browsing classical music.
|
| They acquired Primephonic to address this, but no results yet.
|
| https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2021/08/apple-acquires-classi...
| eatbitseveryday wrote:
| Don't suggest to delete iTunes because it is the only place to
| purchase music. Unless that ability is migrated to Music.
| tomcat27 wrote:
| I just don't understand why Apple Music search is so bad.
| Sometimes only exact match returns albums. It's so bad that
| appending "Apple Music" in google works better.
| thefz wrote:
| I won't touch Apple* anything with a stick, but that had me
| laughing: Here are some suggestions for Apple
| to improve Apple Music on macOS: Fix the bugs, and
| make navigation fast!
|
| Like programmers weave a magic wand around and bugs magically fix
| themselves. Why can't you make navigation _fast_?
| _gabe_ wrote:
| > Like programmers weave a magic wand around and bugs magically
| fix themselves. Why can't you make navigation fast?
|
| While it's true that these are _hard_ things to do, I think the
| author may be getting at a deeper issue here. For some reason
| the software world of today thinks delivering more crappy half
| baked features is more important than making usable bug free
| features, or even just fixing what already exists. I don 't
| know where this idea came from, but it's a very annoying
| ideology.
|
| The Unity game engine is another big corporation that does
| this. They released that demo awhile ago showing off how they
| can create realistic looking game scenes (the chess scene
| demo). I don't understand why they think that appeals to
| anyone. I'm pretty sure like 90% of people use Unity to make 2D
| games or low poly 3D games. And instead of fixing all their
| broken "features" they continue adding "features" nobody cares
| about or asked for.
| jiripospisil wrote:
| 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.
| Eric_WVGG wrote:
| Apple Music on Mac shifted from web views to native sometime in
| the last eighteen months, I think.
| galad87 wrote:
| 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.
| senojsitruc wrote:
| I wonder if they had to use SwiftUI.
| zwily wrote:
| It hasn't switched yet. Hopefully this year.
| galad87 wrote:
| They did in macOS 12.2.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| UI became painful to use when they switched from unfurling
| the albums in situ to going to another screen where you have
| to click back.
| aniforprez wrote:
| 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
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| 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.
| ushakov wrote:
| i think FaceTime is the worst macOS app ever made
|
| i've never seen an app that can crash or lock the whole
| operating system
|
| design-wise it looks completely out of place
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| FaceTime is the reason my whole extended family moved to
| Apple. There was no comparably reliable and easy to use video
| call app 10+ years ago.
| munchler wrote:
| Skype? Initial release in 2003. Purchased by Microsoft for
| a gazillion dollars in 2011.
| radicality wrote:
| 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.
| ravenstine wrote:
| 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.
| ninth_ant wrote:
| 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.
| pschuegr wrote:
| 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.
| ninth_ant wrote:
| 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.
| concinds wrote:
| > 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.
| [deleted]
| qgin wrote:
| Not for subscription services
| pschuegr wrote:
| 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.
| 0daystock wrote:
| If it's so bad, why do you keep using it? Apple users seem to
| forget they have a choice to leave the closed-wall "garden".
| b-lee wrote:
| The hardware and the OS which are second and to none IMO. And
| yes I've used Ubuntu and Windows for years and they don't even
| come close.
| joeman1000 wrote:
| Can confirm. Sometimes there are full DAYS where there is some
| error and it will not play music at all... I'm paying for it and
| it won't play anything. I've submitted big reports multiple
| times. It's not good enough.
| herodotus wrote:
| Thank you for this critique. So true. But don't even let me get
| started on the disaster that it is for Classical Music lovers.
| mikhailt wrote:
| For folks on Windows/Linux that want to use Apple Music but not
| the web player, try Cider (https://github.com/ciderapp/Cider).
|
| Yes, it is Electron but Apple did use webviews in their macOS AM
| app as well before they switched back to native earlier this
| year; which still isn't that great.
|
| Ironically, Cider works better than the Apple's web app as well;
| it doesn't skip or get stuck once in a while. It just works for
| what I need.
|
| (In case other asks, Windows/Linux is more of a work/secondary
| platform, and iPhone is the main device most of the time. That's
| why I'd use Apple Music despite having the other platforms).
| logic wrote:
| I'll second this; I've been trialing Apple Music side by side
| with Spotify for the last few months, and Cider has been very
| usable on both Linux and Windows.
|
| If only the Android app weren't such a mess...
| art3m wrote:
| I have 2014 year MacBook Pro and app is barely usable on it.
| Sometimes I just switch to browser version
| duk wrote:
| Apple Music definitely sounds better when paired with Airpods to
| my ears compared to Spotify. Am I imagining?
| wut42 wrote:
| I don't think you are. My knowledge may be outdated but Spotify
| uses a lower bitrate than Apple Music (which can go up to
| lossless) and the Airpods supports that lossless, too.
| grej wrote:
| This is one of my huge irritations with the "advancements" in
| tech. Is it too much to ask for my $1000+ 256GB device to have an
| mp3 experience at least as good as the one I could buy 20 years
| ago?! Apple Music is has slowly devolved into a worse and worse
| mp3 player. It's much worse than the old ios itunes used to be,
| and it's a deliberate choice they're making.
| psyc wrote:
| I find the web interface completely unusable. It's hard to
| pinpoint why it's terrible. It's just bad at every step of normal
| use, and sluggish as something slow.
|
| I only have two problems with the ios app, but they're annoying
| enough. One is making you find a button to transition to a second
| screen to get to basic play controls, then find another button-
| like thing (even now I can't tell you off the top of my head
| where it is) to get back. I do not understand why the "play a
| song" interface needs multiple pages.
|
| The other thing is that once every few hours I get the popup:
| "song isn't authorized" and I have to click around on shit until
| the app remembers that yes it actually is authorized because I
| pay $10 a month for it to be. I'd like to hear the UX rationale
| for showing a message which to 99.9% of their users just means
| "We're not going to play your song right now, for no particular
| reason except that computers don't work in general" and to the
| rest means "We're not going to play this song right now, even
| though we probably could if we were less paranoid, or better
| software engineers, which is an us problem but we'd rather make
| it a you problem"
| teaneedz wrote:
| > Adding a currently playing song to a playlist will stop the
| music and clear the play queue.
|
| This bugs me to no end. I'm always asking myself if a song is
| worth the listening interruption that will happen when I add it
| to a playlist.
|
| Such a stupid low hanging bug.
| FredPret wrote:
| Looking at the comments, I must be the only person who likes this
| app.
|
| - Consistently recommends music I like - Spotify went down a
| rabbit hole with a certain genre and got weirder every week
|
| - Opens instantly
|
| - Integrates perfectly with Siri
|
| - Doesn't have the weird colour scheme of Spotify
| richbradshaw wrote:
| Yeah agree - I used Spotify back in the day, then Google Play
| Music, then Apple Music when HomePods first came out. It's just
| simple, works well, has the awesome lyrics function and has
| good quality human curated content.
|
| It's just great!
| FredPret wrote:
| I forgot to mention the human playlists! Those are great and
| get updated regularly, by actual people
| aczerepinski wrote:
| The UX I enjoy most is buying a vinyl record, listening to it
| start to finish while reading the full liner notes, knowing that
| the artist got the maximum amount of money, and there being no
| way for any tech company to track how many times I listened.
| Highly recommended!
| lawgimenez wrote:
| I've always been an AM user but I can't stand the poor
| performance and issues anymore. I switched to Spotify again 3
| months ago and amazingly they still have my 7-8 year old
| collaboration playlist with my wife. But Apple Music on the other
| end just removed my playlists that are barely a year old.
| Decabytes wrote:
| I tried out Apple Music for the first time because I got a trial
| for it. I was shocked with how slow and unresponsive the
| interface is. Not only that songs had a noticeable delay between
| when they were clicked and when they actually started playing
| tokamak-teapot wrote:
| To be fair, Spotify is doing something pretty magical here. I
| can't figure out how they usually start tracks playing within
| what feels like microseconds after I choose them.
|
| Pre caching? Yes but sometimes I don't see how it could have
| reasonably guessed that I might play that particular song, like
| when I start typing to search and then stab at an entry in the
| results.
|
| Surely they also want to be doing some buffering, so if they
| are pre caching a tiny bit of songs then they need to load the
| next piece of data quickly before I've heard the first part,
| but there is no obvious issue where this fails, as I might
| expect to hear.
|
| Also when I seek in a song it's almost always instant. They
| have the whole song quickly enough for the whole thing to be
| seekable?
|
| If they were just relying on great latency and bandwidth then
| there should be a lot more issues with the audio pausing or
| dropping out.
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| FWIW, I switched from Spotify to YouTube Music and both are
| certainly fast enough that it's not really something I think
| about.
| sarreph wrote:
| On point 2:
|
| > 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.
| tayne wrote:
| Spotify is the worst and buggiest software I use, both the app
| and the web app. How bad could it be? It resets to the beginning
| of a multi hour podcast randomly with no way to get back to where
| I was. It does many other unbelievable things. God damn the
| Spotify player.
| chrisbrandow wrote:
| For me th worst aspect of Apple Music is that I cannot form a
| mental model of how it is supposed to work. I just have no clue.
| someguydave wrote:
| 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.
| clintonwoo wrote:
| 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.
| lvl102 wrote:
| They offer higher quality music now. Have you tried it?
| joshdotblack wrote:
| I've had apple music full-on kernel panic & restart my m1 macbook
| air, I've had it crash finder & do all sorts of crazy render
| ghosting stuff on screen like duplicating app icons, I've had it
| make the OS forget my login keychain key so every
| app/agent/process pops up a dialog asking for it until I reboot,
| not to mention the airplay bugs. I've used iTunes since I first
| got a mac about 15 years ago so I'm not keen to change but Music
| on MacOS is an absolute carcrash
| conioh wrote:
| I see you're not a paying Windows user. :_(
| cosmiccatnap wrote:
| The best thing you can say about apple music is that it's not
| Spotify
| hackerbrother wrote:
| I think it's less buggy than Spotify.
| alaricus wrote:
| Most Apple software is buggy and annoying.
| resfirestar wrote:
| I suspect one reason the browsing and search experience is so
| slow and horrible on these services is that they don't want to
| present straightforward lists that would allow people to scrape
| their catalogs and put them head to head. Mainstream tech
| reviewers seem to have extremely mainstream tastes and insist
| that you won't notice the difference between the catalogs of
| YouTube Music (the smallest major service with about 60 million
| songs) and Apple Music (the largest with about 90 million). Even
| I noticed YouTube was missing a bunch of my favorite albums and I
| don't think any of my favorites could be called "obscure" unless
| you have a really liberal definition of that word. It would be
| interesting to see a list of the most popular artists missing
| from each service, or a venn diagram of record labels and rights
| groups, but I haven't found anything more detailed than isolated
| anecdotes and media coverage of individual artists trying to push
| Tidal and/or getting mad at Spotify.
| happytiger wrote:
| We just cancelled it yesterday for many of the same reasons.
| Apple needs to get a small team to rip through the design work
| and build something incredible.
|
| Listening to music has become less fun and the experience
| objectively worse, even as the catalog of available titles has
| grown to include everything. It's not as delightful an experience
| as it once was.
| jb3689 wrote:
| I thought Spotify was much worse. The silent playlist song cap
| alone was infuriating. I constantly had issues syncing between
| devices. UI feedback was miserable making it so you didn't
| understand whether a button was pushed due to the callbacks over
| cellular, not that Apple Music is much better here. The worst
| part of Apple Music is the distinction between Apple Music and
| your library. You can rate things in your library but not Apple
| Music - which I'm guessing is an artifact of iTunes days when you
| had MP3s locally. The like feature in Apple Music is also
| terrible compared to Spotify
| therealdrag0 wrote:
| My HN, top of the day view, has a post complaining about
| Spotify above this post complaining about Apple Music. pretty
| gnarly dislike coming out.
| spideymans wrote:
| What makes this frustrating for me is that the underlying Apple
| Music API is actually quite robust, such that it really is quite
| straightforward to create an Apple Music client that is extremely
| performant. I just can't wrap my head around why Apple can't do
| it themselves.
| mthoms wrote:
| Are there any good third party clients? Does Apple allow that?
| b-lee wrote:
| What amazes me about Apple is that they have hardware and
| operating system that are really great. Every other software I
| have used that is made by them is buggy beyond belief. Have you
| tried Apple TV. I stopped using it not because of lack of content
| but was so unreliable to the extent that you feel like it says
| "fuck you". You have one packet loss, your download is doomed.
| Starting is takes multiple seconds. Try to search something, the
| UI will freeze. I love Apple products and I hope they fix their
| services.
| biztos wrote:
| > You have one packet loss, your download is doomed.
|
| I've noticed that on my iPad with a few different video
| services. Makes me wonder if there's a buggy video-download
| API.
|
| In any case, absolutely maddening when you're trying to "fill
| up" your device on hotel WiFi before a flight.
| b-lee wrote:
| Don't think so. Almost every third party app does downloading
| right except Apple's. It's like they don't even try to
| recover at all. You can't resume updates - only on Apple
| related software. I remember spending 5 days trying to update
| to Mojave because the update kept failing.
| lloeki wrote:
| > If I choose to "like" a song, why is it not automatically saved
| to the so-called "library".
|
| I like that likes and add to library are distinct as they serve
| two very different purposes for me, but I would really like to
| have a "liked" playlist.
|
| Other annoyances (on macOS): search in apple music vs library,
| the search box is on one end, the scope selector is on the other.
| Toggling it requires re-searching. It also gets covered by the
| right pane. "hey I'm actually searching" feedback is terrible,
| many parts are ungodly slow for no reason.
|
| Oh and that search box has awful behaviour regarding focus,
| click, start typing, and somehow it gets focused only a second
| later, missing input and/or not clearing what's in there, or
| restoring the previous content. It seems to have about a thousand
| subtle failure modes that keep getting in the way extremely
| annoyingly.
|
| Sadly (personal pov/use case) Apple Music is the "best" (== less
| worst) app/service out there, from the mobile UI to library
| management, tag editor, and BYOM+streaming.
|
| Tangent: after some time peaking and being actually good, all
| these music apps/streaming services have become so annoying that
| I'm progressively rebuilding my library (including all the non-
| owned discoveries I made) as flat files served by Jellyfin, which
| will probably take me years but ultimately I'll be able to drop
| the increasingly crappy app+service verticals in favour of owned
| music + radio for discovery (there are a couple of great curated
| radios around here, and a few zines made out of thin slices of
| dead trees)
| heretogetout wrote:
| I prefer to use the radio feature because I don't know exactly
| what I want to listen to and more importantly I want to learn
| about new artists. The fact that you can never see liked songs
| again is so frustrating. You can't even see a history of
| playback -- when you use radio. Astounding.
|
| I wonder how Apple engineers use the application. Are they not
| also frustrated?
| lloeki wrote:
| Note that when I say radio I don't mean the Radio feature of
| Apple Music & al but actual FM/DAB radio stations! (which may
| or may not be available over shoutcast/icecast)
| pfesenmeier wrote:
| I wish I could bookmark Record Labels and Curators.
| lapcat wrote:
| Let me add:
|
| 1. The playing song's time elapsed and time remaining are only
| displayed when you hover over the toolbar and disappear
| otherwise. WTF?!?
|
| 2. Sometimes when I press play, the app goes into an endless
| shuffle where it keeps selecting new random songs and doesn't
| play anything. I have to quit the app and start over.
|
| 3. The delete key stopped working in a selected song in a
| playlist on Monterey.
|
| 4. The Filter field doesn't appear in the window unless I press
| option-command-f first. Sigh.
| crossroadsguy wrote:
| Well that just means you certainly haven't used many other Apple
| softwares. Because they compete quite healthily at being among
| the worst.
| can16358p wrote:
| Another one: when I add a song to my library, _sometimes_ the
| music stops playing. If it happens, it keeps happening for the
| entirety of that session.
| jhickok wrote:
| 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.
| can16358p wrote:
| It's so buggy that I started to think that Apple doesn't have
| a QA team and devs are just pushing code to master.
|
| It's _that_ bad.
| n8cpdx wrote:
| Be careful if you ever get a suspicious billing email.
|
| Apple decided my credit card expired (it didn't).
|
| Unlike other services, if you stop paying, it deletes your entire
| library (including playlists) from all your devices. So if you
| want to switch to another music service, you're hosed.
|
| I've been fighting for a week or so now to get my playlist data
| via the privacy tools. Just yesterday they decided to give me a
| list of all my app downloads, instead of what I asked for.
|
| Apple wants me to pay to get back access, but I'm not willing to
| give their services division another $0.01 until they stop
| treating customers like shit.
| alanh wrote:
| I still appreciate having a 'library' unlike the author, but I
| remain absolutely gobsmacked at how Apple buries the switch that
| toggles between searching Apple Music and my library. On mobile,
| the toggle is always right next to the search box. It gets buried
| in a previous page of what seems like a web view on the desktop.
| Some of the worst UX I have ever seen!
| slmjkdbtl wrote:
| I only use the offline version of Apple Music to manage my local
| music library, it does the job, but there was a major quality
| downgrade when Big Sur came out (there was a re-write that
| replaced the software with a much inferior version for no
| reason).
| DavideNL wrote:
| I really wish Spotify had native HomePod integration...
|
| [1] " _Spotify Users Growing Impatient and Canceling
| Subscriptions Over Lack of Native HomePod Support_ " :
| https://www.macrumors.com/2021/11/22/spotify-users-impatient...
|
| [2] " _[iOS] Implement Native HomePod Support_ " :
| https://community.spotify.com/t5/Live-Ideas/iOS-Implement-Na...
| edhelas wrote:
| Using a RPi with a 1Tb SSD connected to it. MPD + various clients
| on all my devices, including the wonderful
| https://github.com/jcorporation/myMPD
|
| Lightweight, all free-software, can handle a massive audio-
| database, all synchronized. What else do we need ?
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| 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.
| edhelas wrote:
| 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 :)
| mr_sturd wrote:
| What are you using for network streaming? SnapCast is great
| for that - there's a delay, but only about .5s. On the home
| network, that is.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| I configured it years ago with the built-in HTTP streaming
| feature. I have an android application that supports it.
|
| https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Music_Player_Daemon/Tips_a
| n...
|
| It appears the latency issues have been well documented by
| now.
| alin23 wrote:
| 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
| plonk wrote:
| If I bought every song I've listened to over the past 5 years,
| I would have paid thousands.
| pdimitar wrote:
| Then pirate them.
| plonk wrote:
| Copyright has issues, but "not paying for any of it" isn't
| the solution.
| sascha_sl wrote:
| I'd consider "paying for the things you like within your
| means" a better option morally than many streaming sites
| though.
| edhelas wrote:
| 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 :)
| plonk wrote:
| 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.
| ushakov wrote:
| in Germany if you try to do this, lawyers will show up
| immediately at your doorstep and will treat you like a
| criminal
| [deleted]
| sascha_sl wrote:
| 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.
| ushakov wrote:
| from Wikipedia
|
| > Das Gesetz trat am 1. Januar 2008 in Kraft.[7] SS 53
| Abs. 1 S. 1 UrhG wurde geandert, so dass Privatkopien
| nicht zulassig sind, sofern zur Vervielfaltigung ,,eine
| offensichtlich rechtswidrig hergestellte oder offentlich
| zuganglich 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
| [deleted]
| blibble wrote:
| how could they find out unless you tell them?
| bobbylarrybobby wrote:
| Regarding the second point: I believe this is "sound check" a
| setting that normalizes audio volume between different songs. I
| think it takes a second to kick in (maybe it has to fill up some
| audio buffer to work?) and yes it's incredibly annoying. Afaik
| only solution is to disable sound check
| what-imright wrote:
| I have to agree it's buggy but awesome too. Very good value for
| my family plan, excellent sound quality. Every artist obviously.
| Makes me wish I had never spent so much time pirating in my
| youth. The Siri integration is quite bad. Sometimes songs only
| half play. Needs a restart about every day. Yep it's buggy, but
| I'm a Apple music subscriber for life. They nailed it.
| thoughtpeddler wrote:
| > Makes me wish I had never spent so much time pirating in my
| youth.
|
| Listen, I feel your pain, but don't feel bad about this.
| Streaming services didn't exist back then. The best we could do
| was have some reasonably-sized collection on purchased CDs that
| we ripped to MP3, supplemented by a digital collection acquired
| through ... different means.
|
| It took the (recording) industry years before they woke up.
| That's not your fault.
|
| Thinking back, I could even imagine an alternate late 90s /
| early 2000s, where the RIAA was tolerant of the streaming
| model, but most peoples' connections were still dial-up / weak
| broadband, so we'd all be content with ~64kbps-quality MP3
| playback lol
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| 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.
| iggldiggl wrote:
| > 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.
| xattt wrote:
| > But give it time; Apple is certainly able to get it right
| eventually
|
| 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.
| glorifiedsubred wrote:
| wafriedemann wrote:
| Moved to Doppler a couple of weeks ago and never looked back. I
| put up for way too long with Apple Music and streaming.
| ripply wrote:
| If you sync your library, it will wipe all your custom
| likes/dislikes for songs you sync manually via iTunes as well as
| wipe your smart playlists (blank them - until you sync your
| device to your computer again)
|
| Therefore Apple Music is literally unusable if you have a large
| library of songs not on iTunes (like indie electronic stuff) and
| don't want iTunes to identify them and switch them to Apple Music
| songs.
| skyzyx wrote:
| 100%.
|
| I have filed so many radars against Music.app and they've never
| been fixed over the years. IMO, It's gotten significantly worse
| since iTunes got broken apart in Catalina.
| drawkbox wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] https://producerhive.com/music-marketing-tips/streaming-
| roya...
|
| [2] https://pitchfork.com/news/new-spotify-patent-involves-
| monit...
| dmitriid wrote:
| > The latest music streaming royalty rates are as follows.
|
| 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
| dawnerd wrote:
| Tidal is pretty great and worth a shot. Their recommendations
| are about as good as Spotify and they don't try to shove
| podcasts into your ears.
| DougMellon wrote:
| 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.
| SSLy wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRjsu9-Vznc&t=347s
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| 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
| jrmg wrote:
| What do you think would be a fair amount to pay per stream?
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| since you're asking me, I think artists should be able to
| make a living wage whether or not they're popular
| concinds wrote:
| The "comparing royalty payouts" talking point needs to die.
|
| 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.
| dev_tty01 wrote:
| 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...)
| concinds wrote:
| 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.
| nsgi wrote:
| So if you don't like Apple Music just use another service but
| listen to more music?
| Lendal wrote:
| 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?
| plonk wrote:
| > 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.
| drawkbox wrote:
| > Is there a need to integrate with anything?
|
| 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.
| eloisius wrote:
| That higher royalty isn't because of altruism. It's
| probably a factor of licensing volume.
| mikkergp wrote:
| Yeah, don't go work for FAANG's because that increased
| salary is probably just a ploy to increase profits.
| wfhordie wrote:
| 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.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > 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.wik
| ipedia.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.
| [deleted]
| DangitBobby wrote:
| But the artist does get more peanuts if I stream on a
| service that spends more on royalties per play, yes?
| 8note wrote:
| 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
| DangitBobby wrote:
| > If they just sold it, then no?
|
| 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.
| dmitriid wrote:
| Until the Big Four renegotiate the agreement, yes.
| midislack wrote:
| jolux wrote:
| This is unfathomably sadistic.
| midislack wrote:
| [deleted]
| antihero wrote:
| It is highly useful having you AppleTV playing music and this
| to show up on your iPhone lock screen
| jcelerier wrote:
| Yet KDE connect is able to do this without requiring the
| use of a KDE music player, just through the use of standard
| MPRIS interface
| ccouzens wrote:
| 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.
| OskarS wrote:
| 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.
| b1476 wrote:
| 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.
| wlesieutre wrote:
| Have you tried saying "play album _____"?
| justusthane wrote:
| This is what I always do and it works fine
| OskarS wrote:
| 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.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| In my experience, nothing Homepod and Siri related "just
| works". I do not even bother to ask it what date it is
| anymore.
| dash2 wrote:
| Actually it does work with Spotify, and pretty well in my
| experience. I guess Apple are wary of antitrust rules.
| tfehring wrote:
| 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.
| DavideNL wrote:
| Nope. Then you're streaming FROM your iPhone.
|
| As far as i know there is no native Spotify for HomePod :
| https://www.macrumors.com/2021/11/22/spotify-users-
| impatient...
| parkingrift wrote:
| 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.
| thewebcount wrote:
| > primarily: ditch the iTunes Store
|
| Please, no! I often purchase a song I streamed because I liked it
| and want to have it even if the streaming service goes away or
| loses its license to stream that song or album!
| t0mmyb0y wrote:
| plonk wrote:
| 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.
| lancesells wrote:
| I have this text field thing happen with Apple Maps as well.
|
| 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.
| papito wrote:
| Well, the driverless car software will be much more solid. We
| hope?
| nobodywasishere wrote:
| Apple Music on Android is a pleasure to use for me, especially
| dark mode and being able to cast right from the app.
| chse_cake wrote:
| 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 :(
| plonk wrote:
| 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.
| throw__away7391 wrote:
| Item 1 from the App Store guidelines:
|
| > Before You Submit
|
| > ...
|
| > Make sure you:
|
| > - Test your app for crashes and bugs
|
| Every time I used this app all I could think is "who is Apple to
| judge my app?!"
| aczerepinski wrote:
| I hate that in order to add a song to a playlist I have to add it
| to my library so that it is mixed in and listed alongside the
| full albums I've purchased. I guess I prefer using Spotify so
| that my library of purchased music and playlists for streaming
| are altogether separate.
|
| Also on the desktop app the way to find new jazz releases is to
| first put the curser in the search input which opens a secret
| menu. Is there a way for me to "favorite" new jazz releases so
| that I can check it each week without so much scrolling and
| clicking?
| greymalik wrote:
| > The worst of the Apple Music clients is that on macOS
|
| I didn't even know there were alternatives. Are there any decent
| ones?
| schipplock wrote:
| There is Apple Music on iOS. It has different bugs :). That's
| what he meant.
| activitypea wrote:
| I love Apple Music for its live radio and curator roster, but the
| app is shockingly poor. On an iPhone 12 Pro, every single screen
| shows me multiple spinners for up to a second, like every UI
| component is a separate webview. On MacOS, the spinners regularly
| persist for over a second. It's unbelievable to me that Apple
| execs are okay with this.
| concinds wrote:
| The weirdest Apple Music bug I had was:
|
| Watching Netflix with Safari, and then going to the Apple Music
| local library ("Recently Added", then click on an album)
| literally broke Music. It looked like this[0], all the Music
| toolbar buttons were gone, and keyboard shortcuts (spacebar to
| play) no longer worked. Pausing the movie and switching Safari
| tab to non-Netflix was the only solution. This was still the case
| on a completely clean install with only Music and Safari
| launched. I guess it had to do with the DRM Safari uses to play
| Netflix content messing with the Music app.
|
| But did Apple really never test watching a movie and listening to
| music at the same time, with the built-in apps? That bug survived
| from early Big Sur to at least the Monterey release candidate,
| again on a completely clean install (I didn't test it again
| afterwards). Huh? How?
|
| [0]: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/252162447
| bobbylarrybobby wrote:
| Some sort of drm bug when multiple sources using drm are active
| at once?
| zackify wrote:
| 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
| staindk wrote:
| > 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.
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