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

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

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.

Loved has been super-buggy for me, thinks that I have loved are not properly appearing in their smart playlists.

Also, adding Apple Music to my library has totally knackered my genre classifications, by bringing Apple's into the mix. Need to rethink a lot here

I have yet to check it out, but is there anyone else here who's been checking it out right now, that only has iTunes and no other Apple products?

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.

― it's not arugula science (WilliamC), Wednesday, July 1, 2015 6:34 AM (12 hours ago)

Looks like this is only the case in iTunes for the desktop. On my phone, there seem to be full discographies, in some vague attempt at chronological order. The 40-album limit is there for Sinatra and Elvis as well -- haven't looked at any other artists.

"i'll use the genre field for the record label... what could go wrong"

http://rack.1.mshcdn.com/media/ZgkyMDE1LzA3LzAxLzk4L2l0dW5lc2J1ZzY0LmYzZDYyLnBuZwpwCXRodW1iCTEyMDB4OTYwMD4/8a67285c/330/itunesbug-640x553.png

http://mashable.com/2015/07/01/itunes-icloud-music-library-bug/?utm_cid=mash-com-fb-main-link

yeah you can edit any part of the meta data, including genre, of the apple tracks you add to your library, whatever you put in overrides the default and is stored

so you can! Nice, it seems to sync too.

I still wish there was some better way of making a UX distinction between "I have this full album" and "I only have one track off this and don't care about the rest". Spotify has finally started to get that, but iTunes is pretty bad at it. It's got better since they added the "Part of a Compilation" flag, but it's still not good. That's what I've been overloading genres for, and it's worked quite well up until now.

Tracer: Earlier on Beats they repeated a request show, but without any warning that it was no longer live and not to send in requests. Is that not something that would fail compliance here, or is that just competitions?

I wonder if they're not heading towards a 100-country compliance nightmare.

Hey Ya is an Andre 3000 track now?

So... You can end up with your onboard library of non drm files replaced by drm versions, in the worst case? That's pretty horrible!

[quote]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.[/quote]

i agree with this point; that said in the US we have ryan seacrest and delilah syndicated all over the land

why do i still not know how to quote on this board? sorry

i wonder how many radio stations use robots nowadays, and you can tell that they're using them

quote = {q}

stet it is just for competitions, but yes, there really should be a text overlay PLUS pre-roll audio warning you not to request anything because the show isn't live.

i wonder how many radio stations use robots nowadays, and you can tell that they're using them

This might be common knowledge, but I had some business at Sirius a few years ago and got a tour of their NYC office. It's about as close to 'robot' as you can get. They have multiple offices cubicles all in a row arranged by genre. You walk past them and they're each decorated with posters - Iron Maiden, Metallica, etc in the metal office, Run DMC, Jay Z, etc in the hip-hop office. You get the picture. In those offices are people figuring out exactly what the applicable demographics for those genres want to hear. Then a DJ comes in, is told what their relevant office has deemed playlist worthy, and he or she records a series of links between each song (usually without playing them as I understood it). Then someone splices it all together in a digital file, and there's your show. I doubt ever Sirius show is made that way, but a decent amount of them definitely are.

yeah you can definitely hear the difference between, say, the dayparts of hair nation and those periods where eddie trunk gets full reign

Mentioned earlier, but we have Sirius for the car, and robots or no the stations I listen to the most - 50s, The Groove, The Joint, Liquid Metal, Backspin, Springsteen, 1st Wave, Classic College, Willie's Roadhouse and a few others - come closest to how I listen to music. Pretty random but mostly good stuff, some very deep cuts and surprises, light on the obvious stuff, not too much repetition, a nice balance of talking and music and personality. I've not found an equivalent streaming service that can hold my attention or avoid pushing me some song I conspicuously hate, and after 6 months of Sirius I've still fine not bringing my own music on trips, which is the first time that's been the case in decades. So to my ears so far, advantage: demographic robots.

ok, iCloud library has been pretty much a disaster for me.

Just lots of errors when trying to upload my library. I did the voice memo workaround just so I could test with a few thousand files, but I had already saved from apple music some albums to "My Music" and it created some duplication and moved some things around. And then the worst was trying to make a playlist work offline on my phone, it just kept failing and popping up an error for each song that it couldn't download. I just had to turn it off all together.

Still like it overall, just need to get these bugs worked out.

Is it worth waiting or a patch/update or is this thing good to go?

I just tried a smaller test, with a smart playlist of 100 loved songs. Turned on iCloud library on my phone and the playlist sync'ed. Then when I said make available offline, it starts counting down "Downloading 100, 99, 98, etc songs". Then when it finishes, it just does it again... and again... and again. Is it just replacing those same 100 songs over and over again? Who knows.

I still wish there was some better way of making a UX distinction between "I have this full album" and "I only have one track off this and don't care about the rest".
Replace the Album Name with "Assorted Tracks", tick "part of compilation", voila.

everything about this seems kludgy as hell. why does "synching" always lead to "totally messing up yr shit"? it should be called "asynching"

It's certainly not seamless at this point, but I think once the bugs are worked out, I could potentially work with it. And still, it's handling local files better than spotify can ATM.

this one of your classic 'wait 6 months and see what everyone thinks' deals. what's that called? not a 'late adopter' but a.. i dunno, half-arsed adopter or something.

Probably for the best. I take the early adopter hits for everyone.

iTunes is still impossible to use w/out spending hours + hours tagging all my files. all my compilation albums are divided into 20 different albums, which could be okay (though tedious) if i could tag them all as compilation albums but for some reason that only sometimes works and some comp albums are bravely resisting being compiled.

Many years ago I spent HUNDREDS of hours getting all my tags in good working order. Artist, album artist, genre, year, proper case on titles, comps, all of it. Worth it.

xpost I tend to never use the 'compilation' option in iTunes, instead I put 'Various Artists' in the 'Album Artist' field and it seems to work fine.

there are batch id3 tools

*gibbers to self*

I used those, several Apple scripts, and some manually. Still took forever.

Interesting footnote: Thrill Jockey is on Spotify but not Apple Music.

are The Beatles on board?

the art blakey/ thelonius monk album I added to my music and make available offline etc kept *stopping* without me touching anything. not buffering. just *stopping*.

Beatles? Collectively, no. Solo, yes, except George.

[quote]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.[/quote]

i agree with this point; that said in the US we have ryan seacrest and delilah syndicated all over the land

yeah, and i think with individual shows it maybe doesn't matter so much. pete tong is pre-rec 95% of the time with zero listener interaction but it's scheduled at... 10pm on a friday night! so it makes sense as part of your day. there's a whole sedimented wisdom built over decades about what sort of thing works at drivetime, what sort of thing works in the morning. unless i'm missing something basic beats 1 can't take advantage of that.

another consequence of beats 1's "timelessness" is the issue of repeats. if you know what time of day your audience is listening, you can bulk out a 24-hour radio schedule with a few repeats in the wee hours. but there are no wee hours for a global station. so repeats can really stick out. (it doesn't help that the DJs keep saying they're "live" and nobody bothers telling them not to, or at least editing those bits out for the repeat)

ALLLL of that said, the tight integration of radio listening and "save for later and relisten in full whenever you want" has pretty much everybody else beat.

here's what i wonder: imagine if beats 1 did their version of spotify sessions, or the live lounge. a live set in a studio somewhere and broadcast on beats 1. as you're listening you can save to "my music". how quickly can you actually listen back to it? how quickly can you buy it?

good point that, i bet you can re-listen straight away. with the Glastonbury BBC iPlayer stuff last weekend for example it was often a next-day deal, or you know, 12 hours or whatever. sounds spoiled to say 'i wanted it straight away!' but it's the 21st century man.

i guess they would pre prec and get all their metadata straight and everything mastered and encoded and ready to go before actually broadcasting the "live" session premiere. wonder if they'd even tell people it wasn't actually live. they haven't so far...