Using Apple Music on a slow Internet connection?

[DanielCoffey]

Before I make a decision about the HomePod, I am interested in knowing how Apple Music (or iTunes Match) is likely to perform over a relatively slow internet connection.

Here is the situation... given an Unlimited Broadband connection running at 6.0 Mbps down / 0.7 Mbps up, roughly how long would I have to wait for first track buffering before playback started? Would I have to wait again between tracks for buffering or is it clever enough to request the next track while the previous one is approaching the end?

Given a modern router that supports QoS, can the music stream be identified and prioritised over, say, downloads/YouTube etc?

I know it may be a bit to tell at the moment, but does anyone know if the HomePod can access and play a local copy of a given track rather than having to download and stream it all the time? Assume the track does exist on the iCloud Music Library and the local iTunes library.

 

[maflynn]

Why not try apple music now and see how it plays?

 

[chabig]

Why not try apple music now and see how it plays?

Good idea. It should be fine though. At 6mbpd an entire song will download in less than ten seconds.

 

[Tech198]

When i was on 8 MBit connection DSL, using Apple music was slow,,,, even pulling up all albums in my library was very slow... Playing took its time as well as the constant buffering.

But it was use-able.

 

[PeLaNo]

I think it’ll be fine. Usually when you play song it’ll buffer next song before current song end.
But one problem I have when my internet connection get slow is Apple Music always take more time to buffer song than Spotify.

 

[DanielCoffey]

Thanks for the thoughts.

I have decided to give the iTunes Match a try since we rarely buy new tracks and have all our CDs ripped for convenience and I have to say the process was pretty smooth. It scanned the library of just under 1000 tracks, matched everything it could then uploaded the ones it couldn't (which took a while on our 0.7Mbps up connection). There were only about half a dozen tracks that required manual checking since it found duplicates to match so we checked those individually and discarded the lowest quality ones.

After that, I set the iPad to point to the iCloud Music Library, winced as the old library was flushed and checked the streaming. At that point, the iPad was behaving exactly as the HomePod would have to... no local library so everything had to be streamed... and it coped fine with only a couple of seconds of buffering before playback started.

I will make sure to set up QoS on my router so that our music gets the priority over, say, YouTube or Steam Games but at the end of the day it looks like the HomePod will indeed be fine on a slow connection.

Once that was checked, I asked the iPad to download the library locally again so that we have access to music the "old way" if the internet goes out (AirPlay straight to the HomePod).