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

Actually, I wiped the music to make space for the new OS. But now when I click on "music" under settings, there's no option to click on various playlists to be copied to the phone.

Evan R, I think you're right about this. Any idea how to "merge" from this place?

Eep, no idea. For me I can click on the Music app, then the "My Music" tab, and get a list of mp3s on my phone integrated with albums/tracks I added from Apple Music. Maybe try re-adding mp3s to your phone from iTunes and see if it asks you if you want them merged?

Ah ha! For some reason it's now letting me add them to my phone. Thanks for the help and sorry to belabor the thread.

pleased so far. Anyone know how I upload stuff from my private library to their cloud, though? I wanna test that. Maybe that has to wait for the desktop app to come out?

Yeah, you either need iTunes Match or the new version of iTunes that supports iCloud Music Library to do that. It's causing a lot of confusion.

sounds like there's no last.fm support atm :(

have they made it so iTunes match can accommodate a big library yet or is it still 25 k songs?

100K when iOS 9 comes out in the fall http://www.engadget.com/2015/06/29/apple-itunes-match-100k-songs/

At least it's 25K more songs than spotify can handle from my local library.

yeah cool! wish it was included in the apple music fee (want cake and eat too, etc).

does this come with that free U2 album

$300 a year to get the fam setup and have iTunes matched seems ok I guess.

I'll prob do the 25 buck fee when they get to 100k; itunes informs me i have 138k at the moment

U+K: Can you import spotify playlists

aaaaaaand no, so until that's changed i guess i'm staying put
http://www.theverge.com/2015/6/30/8871591/spotify-to-apple-music-migrate

1989 front and center.

i would say the chances of the whole taylor tumblr kerfuffle not being a pr stunt are 0%

yeah cool! wish it was included in the apple music fee

Match functionality is included with the Apple Music fee, if that's what you mean. You don't need both.

Pleasant surprises in the Apple Music catalog: The Dead C, Henry Cow, Half Man Half Biscuit, Magma, Keiji Haino/Fushitsusha, Sonic Youth SYR series, The Necks.

Some of these guys were previously in the Beats catalog, but Apple Music is MUCH deeper with most/all of them.

Nice thanks xp

Issues uploading my library to the iCloud library. I assume it's just busy today.

issues with my icloud thing too... so far very impressed tho

And I got family sharing setup. It didn't make any sense at all, but then I toggled a few things off and on and it worked. Nice!

All I need is to get my library, or at least 25K songs of it up in the cloud. I never used iTunes match, so how does that work, does it just randomly pick 25K of them? Can I pick?

Then i need to start recreating playlists, which will take hours of work, but I enjoy that type of thing.

I never used iTunes match, so how does that work, does it just randomly pick 25K of them? Can I pick?

my experience has been that it will upload the first 20k songs or so and then stop working almost entirely

hopefully apple music's reliance on the match backend will improve it

Connect actually has potential to be a decent time waster, thought it would just be dead weight (as the For You tab appears to be)

This thing has a major problem with large artist discographies – it won't show more than 40 albums for Miles Davis or Zappa, and they're displayed at random and can't be sorted alphabetically or chronologically, or shown in list view.

Blergh adding this has wiped all my Stina Nordenstam file. I was *so* careful (I thought)

Anyhoo I don't like it, it's too multifunctional. Library is smaller but there's too much tab and button goofing.

The curated playlists are terrific though

NONE OF THE INTUITIVE GRACE APPLE IS FAMOUS FOR!

Lefsetz getting ever closer to the inevitable heart attack...

http://lefsetz.com/wordpress/index.php/archives/2015/06/30/apple-music-2/

Has anyone tried the voice memo trick for selectively uploading your library to iCloud?

got the itunes update this afternoon on pc and searched for a few things it passed the Skepticism* taste but not searched for other underground stuff i reckon it isnt any different catalog wise to spotify

*funeral doom band from Finland

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2015/06/apple_music_launches_you_might_never_buy_a_song_again.2.html

so spotify is better than apple music but apple music is better at hiding the unsubscribe button

Like many I've followed the introduction of these streaming services for years, but I'm still confused about stuff. Like, are curated playlists and mixes the selling point or a bonus? Are recommendations actually useful, or are they as lame, annoying and obvious as they are on, say, Amazon (if you like Bob Dylan, maybe you'll like ... Paul Simon!)? We'd been considering something for the family, since my elder daughter has just started listening to music of her own volition, but casual investigation indicates services like Spotify, Pandora and I guess this one won't supplant my long-collected music collection so much as supplement it. But I have so much accumulated music as it is that the last thing I need is a supplement; it would be super lame to pay for a service that, say, lacks a comprehensive collection of big names like Prince or Neil Young, or can't/won't go deep enough to offer obscure pieces of the various completist puzzles. Like, the music I have ... I know i have it. I know what is in, where it is, what my collection consists of. Streaming ... it's weirdly both infinite and incomplete, which is an awkward paradox to juggle, from a completist/obsessive perspective.

We do pay for Netflix and Amazon, whose limitations I ironically sort of appreciate, and we pay for Sirius in the car, which is both curated (in a sense) but deep enough to keep me engaged. But for home music listening ... I dunno.

here's an important question - spotify doesn't let two ppl listen on the same paid account at the same time. does apple?

They must have worked out the 4AD thing because all the Scott walker albums are on here.

This is better than spotify to me because for whatever reason the record-label-embedded sound quality issues with certain stuff (see my posts re watermarks in the spotify thread yesterday) are much less audible on Apple music than spotify based on some comparative listening. Idk if this is because AM's codec masks those particular distortions better or because AM's library is more recently and newly encoded from the sources, but the diff is pretty big.

or can't/won't go deep enough to offer obscure pieces of the various completist puzzles

I'm consistently amazed by how deep most of the streaming services go catalog-wise. Not everything is available by everyone, of course, but usually once a day I'll either follow a link or manually search for something myself only to be surprised that Spotify actually has it! Great for falling down a rabbit hole too if you use the "Related Artists" section. Not every connection makes sense, but it's cool if you're treating it like browsing in a store.

See, that makes it sound awesome at exploring, finding new music, etc., which is akin to curation or celebrity DJs or playlists, but not necessarily the best for listening to what you want when you want to, which is what a music collection offers.

here's an important question - spotify doesn't let two ppl listen on the same paid account at the same time. does apple?

― Mordy, Wednesday, July 1, 2015 4:04 PM (23 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I don't know but you can do "family sharing" where everybody has their own ID but is under the same paid account.

yeah only $5 more a month. well worth it

Assorted thoughts:

Was doing some back and forth listening on desktop between Spotify Premium and Apple Music. Seems like Apple is more fatiguing, with higher treble and bass. Although I guess you can use the iTunes Equalizer, which is not an option on Spotify. Looking forward to some nerd who will compare this with charts.

Playlists really are much better and "fun" on Spotify. I also have a fairly active inbox with sending stuff back and forth with a few people, and it seems like Apple Music you can't do that so much. Apple Music feels a lot more album-oriented, which might be a little backwards.

It's annoying that you can't save an album to Apple Music without opting in to iCloud. My home iTunes library is very large and messy, so I would prefer not to merge it with everything. Having Spotify in a separate app helps mitigate this. As far as I can tell, you can't add stuff from streaming to playlists without adding it to your library, so it makes playlists a non-option, at least for me.

Interesting catalogue discrepancies (Chaos and Creation in the Backyard, Landing On Water on Apple but not Spotify, the latest Colleen album on Spotify but not Apple, the good songs from the first Portishead album on neither). Annoying you can't do label search on Apple Music. For instance, in Spotify you can type in Label:"Light in the Attic" in the search bar and get a nice pile to sort through.

Will I cancel in 3 months? At this point it seems like probably. But we shall see.

the seeming avoidance of the UMG audio defect issue trumps all other sound quality comparisons for me-- i do think spotify's codec sounds fantastic all other things being equal, but i just listened to all of Tilt on apple music pretty loud and it sounded gorgeous.

How have Apple avoided the (allegedly audible) UMG watermarking? I thought the issue was that Universal had slapped it on all their lossless digital files as supplied to streaming/DTO services.

Although I guess you can use the iTunes Equalizer, which is not an option on Spotify

The Android Spotify app has a fairly robust equalizer that includes grid and graphic eq as well as presets. I actually prefer the way things sound without the eq, but I can see it being helpful for folks.

xpost idk! but maybe these lossless sources were supplied to apple after the mid 2013 date when umg stopped doing such extreme watermarks.

that being said, I've found a few old UMG stinkers now which sound as bad on apple music as they did on spotify. So it's not an across the board thing. I had my hopes up!

As far as I can tell, you can't add stuff from streaming to playlists without adding it to your library, so it makes playlists a non-option, at least for me.

This does suck, but you can kind of get around it by selecting View: Only Music Available Offline, which will hide stuff you've added to playlists (from the cloud) when viewing your regular library. Being able to automatically add streamed music that fits a criteria to your own existing Smart Playlists has been pretty amazing so far. A lot of playlists that I've been too lazy to build up in spotify's drag n drop are just growing automatically now, fairly hassle free. Song's I give a rating get automatically shuffled into a half dozen playlists based on genre/decade etc. And I don't see them when browsing albums in my library, win-win.

Have done a little back and forth listening with spotify as well and the 256/320 bit rate difference is more noticeable then I'd hoped, so for now I'm still going to download/manually add to library albums that I really like and want at 320kps.

I've been doing the same thing with rating/smart playlists. It's required me to modify my normal workflow, but I can adapt and change if the ROI is high enough, which it seems to be.

Going back and forth on whether I want to continue to use stars or loved. Both require adding to your music, so that's a moot point. Probably just end up using loved since that drives the recommendations.

nobody listening to beats1 huh?

there's something weird about a radio station that's not attuned to what time of day it is. maybe it'll work, but what engages me with radio is the feeling that the DJ and me inhabit the same world, the same rhythms, the same shared shorthands, the same moans about the weather. on beats1 they can't even say "it's 8 o'clock!" cause it's just whatever time it is for you. a lot of research has been done about peak times for radio engagement (unsurprisingly, morning, drive to work, lunch, drive home, bed) but beats1 can't capitalize on that.

also, the marquee DJs have two shows a day? are they repeats or are they actually doing 4 hours of radio a day?

also surprised at how niche it all is? i guess it's all aimed at "early adopters" and they'll provide a mainstream service after it's built critical mass (if it ever does?)

is there any evidence yet of how many records they play in an hour? 12-14? i dipped in and there's very little chat and zero guests from what i could tell so i'm guessing a lot. which makes sense if you're pushing music sales/discovery. but maybe isn't going to build the sort of loyalty that real features and genuine loosey-goosey chat can.

Apparently Pitchfork is a curator for this. It certainly feels like they are doing some light promotion of the service—for instance, interviewing Trent Reznor on what "sets it apart." But what I found to be most interesting was their news item about Justin Vernon's criticism of Apple Music - http://pitchfork.com/news/59994-bon-ivers-justin-vernon-criticizes-apple/

Check the subtitle: "He's not all that satisfied with Spotify, either." And then tell me where in that post Vernon says anything negative about Spotify. It's not there. In fact, he says, "I've been loving Spotify, for the record."

This is amusing to see—Pitchfork walking the line between advertising and impartial music journalism. But it's also pretty pathetic and disappointing.

iCloud Music Library adds DRM to your matched files - http://www.loopinsight.com/2015/07/01/icloud-music-library-adds-drm-to-your-matched-files/

the p4k news article on apple music launching is basically apple pr verbatim, kind of like a lot of tech site apple "reviews"
http://pitchfork.com/news/60171-apple-music-launches/

some of their playlists have interesting themes but like most on apple music (so far) are only like 12 tracks long.

i assume there is a subscription mechanism for those playlists where new music comes down the pipe at you on a semi-regular basis?

it's weird that you can't buy music with "Apple Music". you have to use this other thing called "iTunes". there are some rudimentary causeways that have been chiselled between them, like once you start playing a track, you can use the mysterious track-level "..." menu and find a "show in iTunes store" link but come on now, really

i think my official stance is everything is garbage, bring back what.cd

yeah spotify puts singles under "new releases" mixed with albums and ep too, it's obnoxious

i just signed up for an apple music trial after i figured out that sonos can't play spotify local files. i like how local files and streaming files in apple music coexist so seamlessly, and after a few painful minutes i think i got the hang of adding things to my library and THEN adding them to my icloud library (instinctively i still wanna drag stuff to my phone but whatever).

so i love that, i love having smart playlists back, and i love that i can control the album art of my local files instead of spotify picking some random image via match and forcing it upon me.

so things i don't like (which is always a longer list no matter what i'm talking about):

-no list view of library, just bigass icons on my phone
-have to manually mark any locally added album as "compilation" if it has more than one artist
-playlist offerings are terrible...i guess playlists are only visible if a "curator" made them? i liked that on spotify people would have already taken the time to make useful playlists public...like someone created a playlist with all the songs from jock jams 1-5, or someone else made a playlist with the billboard top 100 songs of 1972
-when you are scrolling through a specific artist's albums, the number of tracks is not specified. this really is only a big deal when i'm adding stuff from older artists, like when i'm scrolling through ray price's discography i want to add the most thorough anthology i can find to my library, but i have to open each album to see if it's some cheapo 10-song compilation or not.

anyway i have it free for three months so i'll give it a try. try to win me over apple music!!

also, for those who have been using apple music, is there a way to get notifications when a particular artist has something new?

no but you get a notification when an apple bug deletes all your local music

the ios app is infinitely more robust, but occasionally it'll refuse to play certain songs and i need to restart my phone. 'my favourites mix' is pretty good apart from being moderately repetitive and giving me the same fennesz song every fucking week (unloving it seems to have kept it away).

ON IPHONE 6 i'm forever having to tap screen elements 2–3 times before they fire, but i have ui issues with springboard too so it's probably just ios 10 being laggy on old iphones.

can someone explain why the search function takes forever sometimes

because this world is your own personal hell that you've created....
now you have a choice: you can stay here, and have access to millions of songs at your fingertips but it's all a LIE.. or you can take the red pill and i'll show you how to use some other app bc fuck apple lol

why do some albums have random missing songs?

Broke w Expensive Taste is missing Idle Delilah (Spotify has it)

the Goofy Movie soundtrack is missing Stand Out?????? (meanwhile Spotify is missing Stand Out too so idk, why would one song my Tevin Campbell be on the OST but another song of his has licensing issues?)

I saw a woman using this ON ANDROID today. Who even? I mean what?

sample clearances or label disputes xp

when I'm in the office I use apple music on my work phone (galaxy) so that if I get phone calls while listening to music I don't have to switch headsets. I had googled "apple music android" on my phone preparing to look for some 3rd party app that would let me do it, it didn't occur to me that apple actually had an android app too.

Leaving one album track out might be some sort of tactic to encourage people to buy the whole thing (tho this might make more sense if several tracks were omitted).

so, I searched for the album in apple music to see if it prompts you to buy the song in the error message, and when I pulled up the album Idle Delilah is there! And included and playable.

But when I opened the album through my library (via artists, or albums, or whatever) Idle Delilah is grey and when I click on it it says "Item Not Available: This item can't be played". So I deleted it from my library and readded it, now everything is there. Weird. you can all rest easy tonight knowing the entire album is confirmed as available and intact.

As for Stand Out...I feel like my theory that Prince ghostwrote the Tevin Campbell songs on the OST totally explains this; wherever there's Prince there's contractual issues.

Valerie 68 isn't on Lioness (Amy Winehouse) for some reason which is really annoying.

it's never the crappy throwaway bonus track that no one likes that has the "contractual issue"

Anyone tried out much Dolby Atmos-mastered stuff? Anything interesting over regular versions?

I'm playing around with this on headphones and a USB DAC to headphone amp. There's this bit on Tiesto's "BOOM" that goes in a circle around your head. I guess they could've done it on the regular master, but it's pretty flat there.

The new Billie Eilish album seems better with some added breathing room. But most of what's available sounds worse.