One of my biggest problems with iCML is removing of Hearts and Star ratings from tracks. When I first started it was doing this in mass and caused me to quite and give up for a week. I created a Smart Playlist just for the tracks to 'fix' this daly occurrence and have fought it every day since. However with each passing day the number has dropped. Yesterday I had less than 10 tracks with Hearts removed and 1 track with the Stars removed. So far as of today none have been removed.
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How would you judge your overall experience with Apple Music?
- Thread starter navaira
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Nothing special for me. Works, overly complicated for what it does, and like most Apple software only works on Apple hardware. I like music that plays on the devices I use via an app for the device, like Pandora or Spotify. Good for Apple if they can box in enough subscribers to make a go of it. Apple Music would have to be something extremely special in both value and content for me to overcome the hardware limitations. So far not there for me.
This is the core of it really... how quick can I get to an artist page of a song I like, and just play that artist... How quick can I get back to the music I was listening to last time I was in the app? Apple music is miserable at all of these things.
Get me from an artist I like into a playlist, and from a playlist to an artist, as quickly as possible. Simple.
I have Spotify Premium and I don't hear any difference in quality, even though I think Premium and free have the same bitrate. I am thinking of switching to Unlimited though, higher bitrate and offline listening.
Maybe it was just in my head. I'll wait until my free trial with Apple Music is up, and if Apple doesn't squash some of these bugs (mobile and PC desktop) I'll just go right back to Spotify.
I voted "some bugs that irritate me," but still, I moved back to Spotify Premium for now. Apple Music hasn't been a nightmare to me, but it's not a dream either, and Spotify is. I hope to come back because I really want it to work, but for now...
I too vote the "some bugs; nothing serious".
So far I've been using it more than Spotify and mostly for the radio and discovery part of it. So far in the month or so of using it, I've discovered much more new music than I have with Spotify. Also, while Beats 1 is pretty pop oriented, it's not too bad and some of the shows they have are pretty good. Really like the Rebel Sound and One Mix show. Something about that "human element" that adds another layer to the experience. Sadly Spotify is lacking that.
So far I've been using it more than Spotify and mostly for the radio and discovery part of it. So far in the month or so of using it, I've discovered much more new music than I have with Spotify. Also, while Beats 1 is pretty pop oriented, it's not too bad and some of the shows they have are pretty good. Really like the Rebel Sound and One Mix show. Something about that "human element" that adds another layer to the experience. Sadly Spotify is lacking that.
When I first got Apple Music, I thought I could discover more than through Spotify, but then the next week, Spotify came out with the Discover Weekly playlist. Couple that with the New Music Friday playlist and I'm discovering more through Spotify now--and it's much more targeted to my tastes. Wish Apple Music had those features (easily accessible anyway).
But I still can't get some of the music I like on Spotify that I can get on Apple music.
Not easy. What I have done is go to artists in AM, then do the same in Spotify and do a check. If you have lots of music is can take a while.But just a spot check shows some of the music I had in my own library (some ripped CDs) were not available on Spotify vs AM. And in another quick survey I didn't find the reverse (on Spotify not AM).
I found just the opposite, to my complete surprise. I transferred a 250-song playlist from Spotify and found that about 25 of the songs (10%) weren't on Apple Music. That said, I'm completely aware that it depends on who you're listening to, so it'll be different for everyone. Taylor Swift fans are particularly thankful for Apple Music.
I've also seen missing artists on all the major streamers. My latest spot check on stuff I really love and care about, Google Music came out ahead, Apple Music not far behind, and Spotify was the worst. I'm talking about some older punk like Dead Kennedys (Apple has it but not Spotify) and old BYO records stuff like Youth Brigade and 7 Seconds (neither Apple or Spotify have it).
I'm sure I'll eventually find something I want that's not on Google that Apple might have. The great thing about Google though is easily adding your own music to the streaming catalog.
I'm sure I'll eventually find something I want that's not on Google that Apple might have. The great thing about Google though is easily adding your own music to the streaming catalog.
Big meh.
Obviously comparing with the Spotify App
Good
+ Apple Music is obviously faster since its part of iOS
+ Seems to have more exclusives
+ $14.99 for family plan is a sick deal
Bad
- UI is by far uglier and unintuitive than Spotify
- Connect is Ping 2.0 and a waste of space
- Curated playlists work for a while, but are just not as good as Spotify's which updates its playlists with new songs
- Syncing is a mess
- Apple Music killed iTunes on Mac
- Takes forever to find playlists (ex. takes 2x long to quickly find a workout playlist on Apple Music vs Spotify)
Obviously comparing with the Spotify App
Good
+ Apple Music is obviously faster since its part of iOS
+ Seems to have more exclusives
+ $14.99 for family plan is a sick deal
Bad
- UI is by far uglier and unintuitive than Spotify
- Connect is Ping 2.0 and a waste of space
- Curated playlists work for a while, but are just not as good as Spotify's which updates its playlists with new songs
- Syncing is a mess
- Apple Music killed iTunes on Mac
- Takes forever to find playlists (ex. takes 2x long to quickly find a workout playlist on Apple Music vs Spotify)
Using it with the iCloud music service (which you need to really make it worthwhile, IMHO), hosed my existing music library on my iMac, which includes a lot of music I have collected over the years, including a great many of my own CDs. I recovered the library, but, will be going back to Spotify. I can't for the life of me figure out why Apple thinks it's a good idea for its cloud service to alter the data for my (or any user's) pre-existing music from CDs.
Here is an article that might help:
How to keep your Apple music library 100% rock solid safe
Personally, I am not sure how the files on your drive are being changed, that is bizarre. However, the way around is to backup your library, turn on iCloud and wait for everything to sync to the cloud. Then, turn off iCloud. That should leave your music library in its initial state. If not, keep iCloud off, delete all of the songs and reimport the initial library from the backup. The upside is that most of your music will be available via Apple Music in the cloud, which is a major advantage over the Spotify service. The second is that you will have Siri available to pull up albums, songs, etc.
I'm planning on ditching AM, and moving to spotify... however first adding all albums in playlist, it seems they are lacking few songs, or various albums..
However i still want to use Apple TV, and have my music offline and playable through iTunes home sharing, however i think this is going to be the limitation...
I may have to stick with AM...
any thoughts ?
my parents refuse to listen to music on their iPhone, so home sharing via iTunes would be the only way ... But i also want to use spotify.
I would agree on syncing on is a mess with Apple music.... the UI keeps jumping all the time after i make an edit. In part, that would be an iTunes issue though, not with AM.
However i still want to use Apple TV, and have my music offline and playable through iTunes home sharing, however i think this is going to be the limitation...
I may have to stick with AM...
any thoughts ?
my parents refuse to listen to music on their iPhone, so home sharing via iTunes would be the only way ... But i also want to use spotify.
I would agree on syncing on is a mess with Apple music.... the UI keeps jumping all the time after i make an edit. In part, that would be an iTunes issue though, not with AM.
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It is the metadata that is being changed, and I am by far not the only one that this happens to--there are threads on this. It results in the wrong artists being associated with albums, and the wrong album art being associated with albums. It is simply not worth the effort to spend hours waiting for everything to sync to the cloud (which will mess it up again) and then spend hours reimporting everything. Why should I do all that when I can just use Spotify, or Google Play for that matter, with no problem?
Because (a. once done, its done, (b. the users affected are *not* the ones who have backups, and (c. its "public" before this was fully tested, as the only reasons why users can do this.
I've always been a fence sitter...
I do like sitting on fences.
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I thought a lot of those issues were cleared up with the last update?
It really isn't occupying hours of time. Copying files, iTunes Matching, importing into iTunes are all processes that require you to hit a couple buttons and magically having everything in place when the process is done. There is a reason companies don't pay overtime to the person hitting a backup button when they are heading out the door.
< one thing I read a while back said you can just copy over the previously saved iTunes Library iti file. I would think that it would still work, but I never had the issues, so I can't say for sure.>
Spotify doesn't have a matching service and doesn't work with Siri. Google Play also doesn't work with Siri. If you find nothing useful about Siri, then you probably don't use your iPhone the same way I do.
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This is why I’m leaving Apple Music... even before my free trial is up!
First of all, it’s a cluttered mess. Please tell me Johnny Ive had nothing to do with its design. And I used Beats One before, which had a few messy bits, but was still better.
It also messes with my library in ways I don’t want. I have to turn on cloud music in order to download songs to play offline? Why? I did not have to do that with Beats or Spotify (which I will go back to).
Also, I have a lot of stuff in the cloud I don’t want. These are songs I got for free (legit free downloads like songs of the week, Starbucks songs, other legit sources). I turned these off on my desktop and therefore they didn’t sync to my phone. Now they’re all showing up again, because I had to turn on cloud music! This really messed up some smart playlists I have.
I really like what they’re trying to do with radio…except even there, on my own stations, I can’t select “discovery” anymore. But anyway, big thumbs down for Apple Music right now.
First of all, it’s a cluttered mess. Please tell me Johnny Ive had nothing to do with its design. And I used Beats One before, which had a few messy bits, but was still better.
It also messes with my library in ways I don’t want. I have to turn on cloud music in order to download songs to play offline? Why? I did not have to do that with Beats or Spotify (which I will go back to).
Also, I have a lot of stuff in the cloud I don’t want. These are songs I got for free (legit free downloads like songs of the week, Starbucks songs, other legit sources). I turned these off on my desktop and therefore they didn’t sync to my phone. Now they’re all showing up again, because I had to turn on cloud music! This really messed up some smart playlists I have.
I really like what they’re trying to do with radio…except even there, on my own stations, I can’t select “discovery” anymore. But anyway, big thumbs down for Apple Music right now.
Once you have all your songs in the cloud, you can simply turn iCloud off in iTunes. Then when the songs show up in the iOS library, you can simply remove them. In exchange you have access to every song you own any time you feel like it rather than a small set that you decided to sync. If you have a small library, I guess it isn't a big deal. For those of us that are at the current 25,000 song limit, it is great having our entire library available. I much prefer this to syncing a small sample set every time.
Well I decided to create a Spotify playlist based on genre music I have on AM. I found about 9% of the 790 songs available on AM were not available on Spotify. For that reason alone I will stay with AM.