I don't think criticism is unwarranted, when your paying a **** load of money for products, you expect the best of services.
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Jim Dalrymple: Apple Music is a nightmare and I'm done with it
- Thread starter Rogifan
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I can agree with the basic premise of this..... however when you are sitting on hundreds of billions of $$$ from profits you have to spend it somewhere. Beats was/is just another name recognition in a crowed market. They marketed it well enough to get Apple to bite on it.
When you pay for "It Just Works" and they deliver "It Works Just", does not make for happy customers.
Over at The Loop Dave Mark said one of the reasons he was sticking with Apple Music is Siri. Of course Apple has the right to use Siri as a competitive advantage but it kind of sucks for Spotify and others. I'm sure if there was a Siri API they would take advantage of it.
There was supposed to be Siri API 4 years ago. Scott Forstall got on stage and said they're opening up SIRI so that it could be used in other apps. At the time I thought it was a game changer......Still waiting Apple......
No doubt--and Siri is also one of the main reasons I'm preferring Apple Music over Spotify despite the fact that I like the Spotify experience better. Siri integration is WONDERFUL while driving, especially with an Apple Watch. That makes a difference.
That said, I converted to Mac about 9 months ago after 20 years on Windows because I was finally fed up with things not just "working." I love my Macbook, iPhone, Ipad, etc...but I'm finding my Apple Watch not quite there yet and Apple Music has a lot of problems. As Robstevo stated above, for the premium I'm paying for Apple products, I expect them to work and work well without the fuss. Suddenly they have me questioning if I'm getting that.
Jim Darymple just posted a followup over the weekend. He got most of his music back, but it involved going to Apple HQ and getting the problem solved. Since its not an option for 99.999999999999999% of people, Apple music still blows.
Apparently its a lot of backend issues on Apple's part. WHAT A SURPRISE?!?!?
http://www.loopinsight.com/2015/07/24/i-got-my-music-back-at-least-most-of-it/
Apparently its a lot of backend issues on Apple's part. WHAT A SURPRISE?!?!?
http://www.loopinsight.com/2015/07/24/i-got-my-music-back-at-least-most-of-it/
There is an API (Free) from Amazon using Alexia. From my experience using Alexia, Amazon has done a great job with it. I expect to see everyone with voice integration in one form or another. I vote, good news.
Very good points. I think Apple didn't send it out for beta testing because they get arrogant and thought after purchasing Beats and Jimmy Iovine for 3B they could just figure it out. As far as the whole royalty/not duplicating.....DING DING DING, WE HAVE A WINNER!. Absolutely I think thats the case. So now you have Apple dictating if you have albums with holes since you already own that wrong on another album.
For a company that "cares" about music thats in their DNA, there sure are a lot of bad genes floating around.
A saying about engineering projects; Takes 20% of the available resources to complete 80% of the project and 80% of the available resources to complete it. When they show management the project, release dates get set based on it is 80% done. Apple uses set in stone release dates which causes problems we are seeing. Apple management has a difficult time with the above concept.
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Apple Maps is now in 3rd grade while Google maps is working on it's Masters. There has been improvement; pictures are being added. Wonder if the locations will be right and do they match the map info .....
Anyway .....
That is one function you do not need millions of users to test. loading and integrating different structure existing libraries into AM should have been considered and tested from the inception. Too suggest / think otherwise is criminal at best.
Why? I installed MSO and didn't back up all my files. Heck, I installed Amazon Music and didn't back up my music. Why is Apple Music different? Yes I agree there is a need for backup (standard process) but not just because you are installing AM. That is ludicrous at best.
It's more like the hardware is driving the releases instead of releasing the software when it is ready. This is typically what happens when the customer needs play second fiddle to the perceived management wants.
Make It!!! Ship It!!!! We'll fix it later when we have time!!!!
Apple Music isn't different because regardless of what you do, you should always backup all your data. There is no need to do anything different with Apple Music. In fact there is no need to do anything because any sane person already has everything backed up regularly.Why? I installed MSO and didn't back up all my files. Heck, I installed Amazon Music and didn't back up my music. Why is Apple Music different? Yes I agree there is a need for backup (standard process) but not just because you are installing AM. That is ludicrous at best.
There is more than one backup service that stores a lot of older backups. Some of those services never delete the backups. TM DOES delete backups, when it runs out of space on the given drive. For some people that means they only have a handful of backups. But regardless, if you turn on iCML and leave it on for a few years, and then you need to turn it off for some reason (or Apple discontinues the service), and it takes half your hard drive with it, or you find that over those years it's replaced some of your files with DRM'd versions (and THEN deleted them, LOL), you will likely NOT have a TM backup from before you turned on iCML, years earlier.
The simplest, most fail-proof way to back up your files (just your files) in a permanent way, is simply to make a copy of them and then never delete that that copy. There's a non-delta snapshot in time. If you've got one of those from before you turned on iCML, and you add (in a separate folder) your delta (your purchased/ripped music files), you've now got a copy of all your music files.
That is one function you do not need millions of users to test. loading and integrating different structure existing libraries into AM should have been considered and tested from the inception. Too suggest / think otherwise is criminal at best.
Totally agreed. BUT, at the same time, I'm not at all surprised that they DIDN'T test this. It's a lot of manual work to build those dummy libraries, or to clone employees' existing libraries, and then to cull through to find issues. It's even possible that they did some limited testing of this but didn't either dig deep enough or use the libraries long enough (days, weeks) to see the resulting issues. I highly doubt it occurred to them to look at those dummy libraries AFTER the test, when disconnected from AM - it's just not a logical test to run from a coder's perspective - so they wouldn't have caught the music removal bug even if they did test the libraries. NOT making excuses - they should have tested them - but nobody does proper testing internally anymore. Nobody. They depend on beta testers to sort their bugs, and clearly this was not properly beta tested.
But regardless of what testing they did or didn't do, the same bugs exist in Match. So they've absolutely no excuse at all not to fix them. It's impossible for them to deny they knew about them.
It's going to be interesting to see how many people have problems with their libraries in a couple of months time when they decide they don't want to subscribe to Apple Music at the end of the trial period.
This is one of those cases when I hope I'm wrong, and lots of folks don't have their libraries and files tanked. But with my files, that's not a risk I want to take.
I have started doing this, make a complete backup, pack it away and never touch it (except to restore if needed). Initially, I am on a six-month schedule, roughly doubling the time period with every other backup. Eventually I will have one from ten years ago, one from five years ago, one from two years ago, one from one year ago and one from six months ago.
It's amazing to me that a company which claims to care so much about music pretty much ignored users with large libraries of paid music. That's where most of the issues seem to come from.
I have to say I think Dalrymple is being a bit too forgiving about all those deleted songs. Yes, he *may* have deleted them himself, but not likely. Especially not likely in that he wasn't the only one to have this issue, and I know for a fact that I didn't delete the songs that *I* had removed from my hard drive. I had fewer removed then he, possibly because I used iCML for less time, and made fewer attempts to fix things - basically I made no attempts, I turned it on, saw that it FUBARed my phone, and then turned it off. And like magic, songs disappeared from HD.
I agree from a coder's perspective, but from a process engineering perspective it should have been in the top tier. The problem when I look at this is the systems interaction and the outputs - automatic or manual. These should always be looked at.
Just a thought; how hard would it have been for Apple to build a couple of in-house libraries for testing? As a coder (ABAP, not OC) and a process engineer it would have been a premium item on my tool list for a project of this type. Perhaps they are carrying the silo effort too far in an effort to keep it "secret". Just trying to wrap my noggin' around the miss at this scale.