Apple Music Apple Music – by far the worst music streaming service

[okkibs]

Now the Music client has yet another bug where the EQ will just randomly stop being applied until the "On" checkbox is unchecked and checked again. Currently I can reproduce this reliably on the latest Monterey. Open Music, play any track, pause it and unpause it a moment later, and the EQ will no longer be applied despite being set to on.

I'll really have to start looking into a new music player as the Music client is literally unable to simply play music at this point. Though I can't fully abandon it since it's required to have a library there in order to sync it with my other Apple devices.

 

[adamel]

- The most unforgivable thing is when previously available entire albums I purchased years ago from the iTunes store have suddenly "grayed out" songs as being unavailable. This is thievery.
- I have just accepted at this point that so many of my CD rips are lost forever to inferior or alternate matches.
- The forced recommendation of hip-hop albums despite me NEVER listening to hip-hop just shows how their algorithm is only partly based on your listening history.
- At the same time it is very annoying that listening to one album out of curiosity will cause that artist/genre to then dominate your subsequent "favorites". There needs to be an option to block an artist from the algorithm and not just "play less like this"

 

[salutcemoi]

I love Apple Music
But I can see why other people prefer other music services

They all have their pros and cons, there is no perfect service

 

[tonyr6]

What bothers me the most is that the recommendations are not good. I listen to a few lo-fi instrumental hip hop tracks then suddenly for weeks I get vulgar hip hop recommendations which I keep disliking the albums.

Then the search is also terrible always pushing explicit hip hop music first in the search. I usually must Google the song to find it on Apple Music.

 

[grandinetti]

the last time Apple Music, formerly iTunes, was any good it was called Sound Jam.

 

[salutcemoi]

I left Spotify when I purchased an Apple Watch…

So I could upload music to my Apple Watch for offline listening and be able to leave my phone at home to workout in the building gym or run outside.
Watch+airpods is a pretty good combo

I don’t run outdoors as much as I used to and my building gym now has WIFI so I just subscribed back to Spotify and stream music directly from their app on my watch
Spotify Premium currently has a CAD $ 9.99 for 3 months so I jumped on it.

2 things I’ve noticed while I was using Apple Music :

- sound quality is better than Spotify but not by a wide margin tbh

- Spotify is much faster than AM, wtf Apple. From what I’ve read it’s built on old iTunes software

- Spotify has handoff between devices and for some reason AM doesn’t which is shocking because it’s one of Apple’s strengths

- You have to work harder on AM to build playlists; Spotify also has a “liked songs” playlist ; in AM you can “love” songs but they don’t automatically go to a dedicated playlist

- AM’s recommendations have improved a little but they are still utter crap compared to Spotify’s

- Search is better and faster (and predictive) on Spotify

- Spotify has gapless

I’m not saying Spotify is perfect but based on everything I’ve mentioned I prefer it over AM

To each his own of course, both are good and target different groups of users

 

[turbineseaplane]

I keep using AM in spots, just because it continues to be so easy to keep getting "another 3-4 months for free"

But from everything I've used and seen and experienced, I wouldn't ever pay for AM at this point.

 

[okkibs]

Spotify has gapless

Wait the Watch can't do gapless playback over their own Music app? I'll try this out when I find the headphones, I thought it was working as it can be pretty jarring on some albums.

 

[salutcemoi]

Wait the Watch can't do gapless playback over their own Music app? I'll try this out when I find the headphones, I thought it was working as it can be pretty jarring on some albums.

Idk about the watch specifically, I meant generally speaking

 

[TruthWatcher412]

Not that I don't agree but coming from a Pixel, Youtube Music was pretty bad too. Every time I create a new station, I get the same songs after the first song, regardless of what I tried to play. Apple Music works better than it and I've gotten a lot of good recommendations for bands and music I've never heard of before but that I really like. I agree the interface could use an uplifting though.

 

[uller6]

- The forced recommendation of hip-hop albums despite me NEVER listening to hip-hop just shows how their algorithm is only partly based on your listening history.

This drives me INSANE. I don't like rap, I've never listened to rap, and I don't ever want to listen to rap. So, Siri, stop giving me rap songs! And, when I tell you "I don't like rap music," please stop recommending rap to me!

 

[majkom]

and the ****ing most awesome part of this mess is search like, is anyone in apple usic apple music? do they SEARCH for songs/albums? i do not believe that

 

[tonyr6]

All my friends, every one of them use Spotify. I am the only person that uses Apple Music. So, when they share playlists, I can't listen to them.

 

[froby]

My biggest complaint is that many of the 60's rock songs they have online are not the original recordings, in fact some of them are just horrible, later recordings possibly by the same artists, but not originals for sure.

 

[sunapple]

I have been using Apple Music since launch and have actually never tried another service. Yet I do feel lost in the UI sometimes.

I am fine with my own library, I know it by hard and it is not really different from the old iTunes UI. But the other tabs - Listen Now/Browse/Radio - are confusing. Say I want a playlist of some pop music; Listen Now which is the old For You can have a pop playlist with songs from my favourites, Browse will have a pop playlist with new music or curated based on time of day, Radio will have all of that, but as a preset Radio station that sometimes has ads. None of that makes a lot of sense.

And it's not social at all which is classic Apple. Yes playlists can be shared but they are never easy to find. Search can also be messy. Artist pages can hide albums somewhere a couple of rows down and all the way to the right just because it contains more than one artist. Albums can have duplicates without good reason or they can be missing a song somehow.

And last but not least, every year I'm reminded that I was not the chosen one for getting a Replay mix.

 

[NewProduct]

I gave Apple Music a try after using Spotify for many many years. It has been frustrating in comparison for several reasons:

• Fundamentally Apple Music seems to have kept the mental model from iTunes where the library represents music you actually "own" (purchased from iTunes or imported from other sources). This made sense using the older non-streaming model, but now has annoying quirks when you expect to have carte blanche access to everything. For example, if you add a single song to your library then the associated album will show up in the albums list, yet when you tap on the album it will only show that single song, you have to tap again to see the rest of the album. Apple Music is missing the insight that we don't care about what is explicitly in our personal library, we just want to have "bookmarks" to quickly return to the areas of the "uber" library offered by the service.
• There are no useful smart lists. For example, I want to see a list of everything I loved while listening to stations, you can't. You have to explicitly add the song to your library AND love it AND have already created a smart list (only possible via Mac OS) to show you. Not to mention there is no dedicated button to love or add to your library, you have to tap and carefully select one out of the many options in a context menu. If you just add the song to your library it will be mixed in with everything else that you may not like as much. This could be okay if you only add music to your library that you currently really like, but for me Apple Music added all my iTune purchases from many years which was particularly annoying as I didn't much care for them and they were just getting in the way of the new music I was trying to listen to.
• Apple Music is just stupid with multiple-device use cases. If I start playing on my HomePod or iPhone and later open Music on my Mac it acts very non-cloud-like. If I try to change the song, it tells me I need to upgrade my plan because other songs are playing elsewhere—that is NOT what I'm trying to do! You have the fumble through the clunky UI to play from your Mac instead and again choose what speakers to use. With Spotify wherever you use the client it has perfect knowledge of what is going and what other device is playing what song. It syncs all the controls and gives you the ability to change songs that the other device is playing.

Again fundamentally, the mindset is different. Apple Music evolved from the iTunes model, while Spotify was designed around the concept of first-class access to a vast library.