Apple Music - anyone heard of it? Or not, I don't care.

the double-entry issue where it's showing two copies of the same song in an album is really annoying. seems to be partially an artifact of iTunes Match.

also it really screws up different versions of songs. if I'm listening to an album, the album version of that song should be in the listing instead of missing because I own the single. also it shouldn't be playing a different version of the song I own instead of the one that belongs to that album.

apple music and itunes match sound great!

tbh the rest is really nice, can grab all my stuff everywhere, download speeds are fast, listening to dr. dre's radio show right now because i'm an old person

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2015/08/apple-releases-ios-8-4-1-mostly-with-fixes-for-apple-music/

Resolves issues that could prevent turning on iCloud Music Library
Resolves an issue that hides added music because Apple Music was set to show offline music only
Provides a way to add songs to a new playlist if there aren't any playlists to choose from
Resolves an issue that may show different artwork for an album on other devices
Resolves several issues for artists while posting to Connect
Fixes an issue where tapping Love doesn't work as expected while listening to Beats 1

too late, apple, too late

"tapping Love doesn't work as expected"
takes me back to my college days of playing Magic and not getting laid

Resolves an issue where we forgot to finish building it

outstanding

it's already deleted half an album i downloaded half an hour ago. excellent.

yeah this is not fixed. it thinks new forms 2 is the same as new forms 1 and just didn't bother downloading half the tracks.

There's also a new iTunes update out, 12.2.2

So glad i've waited to try out Apple Music. Jumping right into a new platform that hasn't been tested is not a smart move.

yeah this is not fixed. it thinks new forms 2 is the same as new forms 1 and just didn't bother downloading half the tracks.

when i play new forms 2 streamed from apple music, it plays the right songs. when i play the same album from "my music" (icloud music library), it throws in all the songs off new forms 1, even though the tracks lengths are correct for new forms 2. so it knows they're different songs and it even offers the different songs for streaming, but because i have the album it's playing the wrong tracks. apparently the only way i can download the correct album for offline play is to delete my copy from itunes at home. so what is the actual point.

if you delete all your local music and rely entirely on apple music, offline mode would probably work loads better. but then it couldn't do full "for you" recommendations because it wouldn't know everything you like.

One shitty thing in the iPad app is not being able to view playlists in album view, ie I've got a 'current favourites' playlist or whatever, into which I stick 40/50/60 albums, but I can only view them as songs/as a long list, as opposed to the 'album' view available in the desktop version.

Excuse the tortured syntax, I appear to be having a breakdown.

Maybe the most annoying thing about this is when you press play, and it plays for a second and then pauses itself.

Maybe the most annoying thing about this is when you press play, and it plays for a second and then pauses itself.

― calstars, Friday, August 14, 2015 7:59 AM

This - why in the Hell does my phone not play a track that is fully downloaded to iTunes app w/o having a buffering-like break. Also, Spotify Premium kicks AMusic's ass so hard when it comes to wireless streaming performance. Even on the Mac OS X iTunes interface performance has degraded, IMHO.

i have worked out that even offline tracks stop if you move between wifi and mobile data.

Hmmm, you can get to the original version of "New Rose" via Apple's "Intro to the Damned" playlist, but trying to get to the album Damned Damned Damned from there just gets an error message. Every day it's just some new fuckup.

as good as the suggested playlists are (45 minutes of ~stuff produced by magoo~ is an excellent idea), spotify's tendency to go "here's 40 alt rock classics from the '90s" or "study with these electronic beats for nine and a half hours" is a hell of a lot more fun. apple music's equivalent is still great, and i like that apple's budgeted for more human curators in office cubicles, but it feels like more effort on my part to save a load of fairly short suggested playlists.

apple music is also re-recommending playlists to me. every day it's giving me fewer new suggestions. i didn't really need that intro to my favourite band the first time, let alone five more times after i've already played and removed it.

xp the fact that it took them six weeks to not fix much indicates they've got mega-serious problems beyond a list of bugs. someone's got to be losing a job over this thing.

is heart's self-titled on apple music? can't tell

doesn't appear to be

Holding off on making any decision on this until iOS 9 and 10.11.

My quest to make my giant playlist available offline has hit a snag, my phone ran out of space... Which is interesting because I had the whole playlist offline on spotify, but came up 300 songs short this time. Are the AM files larger?

what quality level did you have spotify set to though

Good question, I don't recall! Can you change that in AM?

i think it's just stream vs download

spotify has a middle tier

xp the fact that it took them six weeks to not fix much indicates they've got mega-serious problems beyond a list of bugs. someone's got to be losing a job over this thing.

It still pauses on a network state change, ffs. Pretty sure I know why that is, and it shouldn't be a massive fix so not getting it into 8.4.1 is pretty filthy.

that and so many other bugs should have been fixed inside a week, which makes me wonder just how bad the code base, db design, etc. are.

last night it wouldn't download a playlist. i reset the app, the phone, tried everything i could think of, but the songs kept spinning without downloading. half an hour later they spontaneously downloaded, along with an album it had already downloaded three times last week (so there are four copies of each song now).

not sure whether good or bad tbh: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20150818005755/en#.VdNYBhNVhBc

Among people who had tried Apple Music, 48 percent reported they are not currently using the service.

Nearly two-thirds (64 percent) of current users said that they were extremely or very likely to pay to subscribe to Apple Music after their free trials end. On the other hand, 61 percent reported that they had already turned off the auto-renewal option in their iTunes account settings.

http://www.mcelhearn.com/apple-music-head-leaves-before-the-end-of-three-month-trial-period/

was wondering when this would start to happen

tidal and apple should switch execs every three months

http://www.reddit.com/r/AppleMusic/comments/3rlpag/offline_music_management_will_be_clearer_in_ios_92/

Showing only music on this iPhone. Show all music.

http://www.cesium-app.com/

Showing only music on this iPhone. Show all music.

Infuriating.

Yeah I'm done with this, Guess managing an offline itunes library alongside spotify isn't the worst thing in the world though

I don't miss spotify in the least. Have they brought back stars yet?

They're hearts now.

thankfully my two ipod classics are immune from this junk.

iCloud library let's you go over 25k songs now. And iOS 9.2 released today with lots of AM improvements.

like wut

desktop AM is much smoother after update, less delay for every click :)

have they fixed the offline sync of large playlists?

It's getting there. I've had a few hiccups, but I have more confidence that it's almost reliable. It is much easier to tell what's available offline, indicators are much better.

One word of warning, it did wipe all my downloaded files off, so I have to do it again. Certainly an inconvenience.

reports of problems (while there, especially for files deleting themselves) are not at the frequency they used to be, so i've just signed back up to this. i'm home a lot atm, so if the whole thing fucks up at least i'll get a few bucks of streaming out of it.

my old 10yo itunes library was a corrupt mess, with routine playback issues on my phone for at least two years (songs skipping, stopping halfway etc until i restart my phone). because of that, itunes is running off a totally empty library this time. i'm about to upload the latest tmbg album via icml because it's not on streaming yet. anything else i'll find in apple music first and upload as a last resort.

although i've not actually done anything yet it just read a load of my own tastes back at me in 'for you', probably back from when it auto-followed a million artists i already had in my library (i thought it dumped all data after 90 days but apparently not). the interface is certainly nicer and faster than it was in august/september.

oh and all my study material is in onedrive or dropbox where apple music can't destroy it. above all that was the key reason i ditched apple music the first time iirc.

reasonably stable so far. a few hearts unhearted themselves when i added an album to my music, and the hearts in itunes don't all seem to make it to the ios app, but at least they're not fighting me like they were last year. songs can still take ages to start.

the tmbg album matched to a handful of early release songs, but by sheer luck they're identical to the album tracks. apple desperately needs to provide an icloud override.

the single biggest problem so far is that my iphone 6 get hot enough to fry eggs and the battery collapses, even when i'm just browsing and not playing or streaming anything. hoping it's something ephemeral like indexing because it's sort of ridiculous.

btw trent reznor hasn't updated connect since july, which makes me wonder what the hell strategy they have for this when their key artist-in-residence can't be arsed using it.

+ downloads have stayed downloaded
+ uploads have stayed uploaded (only two albums though, and one of them emptied the track numbers like three times)
+ better playlists: many are longer and the relevance is better, even though apple is apparently obsessed with daft punk and the beatles
+ "i don't like this suggestion" appears to do something now
- when i remove an album, it removes all those songs from all my offline playlists because reasons?
- loved tracks keep unloving for no reason, it's like apple doesn't understand how to cloud
- it skips tracks occasionally (plays 2–3 seconds then leaps to the next track)
- definitely more weird library omissions than spotify (e.g. incomplete albums)
- phone still destroys battery & gets megahot for 1/2 hr if i do ~2 minutes of browsing

worth hanging around for a while but i still don't trust it for anything important e.g. library uploads. if google ever bothers making youtube red international and adds an equaliser to ios i'll probably just do that.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-05-04/apple-to-revamp-streaming-music-service-after-mixed-reviews-departures

Apple Inc. is planning sweeping changes to its year-old music streaming service after the first iteration of the product was met with tepid reviews and several executives brought in to revive the company's music strategy departed.

The results will be on display in June at the developers conference, which will mark the one-year anniversary of Apple Music. Apple’s leaders have expressed optimism about the new look and feel the team is working better together, said a person close to the executive team.