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

Uploaded tracks seem to appear faster on iPad than the phone for some reason

my experience as well.

Actually, the missing popularity meter is nice. On Spotify it made me a much more mercenary listener.

i heard a guy from apple give a spiel about this today. he kept saying "this is version 1.0" so who knows, maybe the popularity meter will make an appearance.

• The one with offline files not downloading on mobile is the one bugging me right now. It's just impossible to make my larger playlists have offline access.

this is probably the biggest reason Apple music has suuuucked for me (i use a playlist to sync selected music to my iphone as per an ilx user's suggestion years ago). some stuff went missing altogether (including study material i really needed last weekend) and some icloud-matched stuff was greyed out and inaccessible, but beyond that just all the shitty bugs everywhere: duplicated downloads, missing downloads, the heart button not registering half the time. in the end i turned the whole bloody thing off and restored my full itunes library from a time machine backup, and now i'm planning to just rely on spotify for music and some reliable third-party app for my study audio.

xp did he mean to say "this is version 0.1" or

he was stoked about "for you". i have never really rolled with recommendations or dynamic personalized playlists so i wouldn't know

"for you" was fun, apart from it repeatedly recommending mariah carey even after i said "i don't like this suggestion" four hundred times

it's duplicated the experience of having the lex for a friend!

nice

The benefits are outweighing the negatives for me. Nice to have a decent UI (ie NOT google play) and the ability to purge existing downloads.

Almost to 20K songs of my limit. Dag.

• The one with offline files not downloading on mobile is the one bugging me right now. It's just impossible to make my larger playlists have offline access.

this is probably the biggest reason Apple music has suuuucked for me (i use a playlist to sync selected music to my iphone as per an ilx user's suggestion years ago). some stuff went missing altogether (including study material i really needed last weekend) and some icloud-matched stuff was greyed out and inaccessible, but beyond that just all the shitty bugs everywhere: duplicated downloads, missing downloads, the heart button not registering half the time. in the end i turned the whole bloody thing off and restored my full itunes library from a time machine backup, and now i'm planning to just rely on spotify for music and some reliable third-party app for my study audio.

― Autumn Almanac, Saturday, 11 July 2015 01:33 (2 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

My experience as well but i'll stick with it a while more. So frustrating not to be able to transfer/sync playlists through USB and have to rely on shoddy icloud uploads. My huge "iphone" smart playlist (approx 15 GB) always appears empty now.

I like the new interface

fuck iCloud forever tho

Good summary of some of the issues I've had. http://www.idigitaltimes.com/apple-music-problems-how-fix-issues-syncing-playlists-icloud-library-offline-455939

wait hold on ... am I going to have these issues regardless of whether I choose to use the new streaming service? like as soon as I upgrade my phone to 8.4?

most likely not tbh

So frustrating not to be able to transfer/sync playlists through USB and have to rely on shoddy icloud uploads.

that would be fine and make perfect and brilliant sense if it worked, given what a 20th century pain in the arse usb syncing is.

i tried doing this to clear my icloud music library but the 'reset' button doesn't exist, either because it knows i never had an itunes match subscription (why that would matter is beyond me) or apple just doesn't know what it's doing.

oh and lukas, if you back up your whole entire music library (including all your music files and directories and your 'itunes library.itl' file) before upgrading, the worst that can happen is that all your music is intact somewhere that's beyond apple's reach. technically speaking upgrading ios shouldn't impact your mac, but this whole thing is so buggy that doing anything seems to be a risk now.

iTunes is refusing to put the Babymetal album on my phone ;_;

Side loading music onto iPhone, regardless of whether Apple Music is involved, is a fucking nightmare and I feel like I'm risking a corrupted database every time I do it.

main problem I've had is that saving things to 'make available offline' doesn't seem to work reliably at all. not sure how and when it actually downloads and saves it and how long that takes. but it def doesn't do it right after you select that.

I like this service overall, but I am surprised by how complicated it can be to manage the music on my phone now. I feel like for the last three or four years I've been at war with Apple over what I get to put on my phone. It wants to sync automatically with a library I don't spend much time grooming, while I want to manually allot the limited storage on my phone, the way I was conditioned to do back in the day with iPods. Slowly but surely I am losing this war.

^ feeling this post

So any long form tracks are not eligible for upload, which means I have to choose between having those tracks or enjoying the selection of apple music ...

so i've started tagging all my albums through itunes. they give me a genre tag which is nice but what should i do if i want to do more extensive tagging? like country of origin, or if i have more than one genre i want to tag a particular album in? should i just throw key words into the comments section? what's the best way to go about doing this?

You can repurpose the Composer field as your secondary Genre field. But you'd better do it to everything or else you'll have like Irving Berlin in between Ireland and Jakarta.

it would break my heart to get rid of my last.fm integration but i don't see apple music facilitating scrobbling, esp since last.fm is tied to spotify so closely...i know there are some 3rd party apps that might work on my phone but the ease of scrobbling w/ spotify is a big plus.

the big plus w apple music is that i don't have to go through such a pain in the ass to access my local files that i have to do w/ spotify.

apple music's search needs work though. i picked a song at random (jimmy ruffin's tell me what you want - tom moulton mix) and searched for it as 'ruffin moulton' and nothing came up. when i searched for 'ruffin tell me what you want' the moulton mix came up, but if i search for 'moulton tell me what you want' it doesn't. not sure if there's some funky about this particular track since it's on a compilation but spotify's search has always worked well for me regardless of how much i combined the artist, album and/or song title.

the sum of all of it for a musicphile is kind of a no-win situation, which is very sad, but only in a very first-world kind of way

So sorry I joined. Apple Music screwed up most of my song ratings, album art, etc. I've since pulled the plug but the damage is done.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204963

I'm sure it will get old, but I *really* like the "for you" playlists.

jazzbo, have you tried restoring the backed-up .itl file?

Autumn — thanks so much! All fixed now.

I finally updated iOS to get the new Music app. First thing I noticed when I started it up is that the Apple Music logo is hideous. I guess that's their new San Francisco typeface? I thought it looked ok (if not great) when they first announced the regular version of the font, but the bold version set in all caps just looks awful. Love that you can once again view and play individual albums from the Artist view; I switched to a third-party app a couple of years ago when they'd eliminated that. But then I looked at the Genre view, and discovered that that view sorts by album rather than artist, which makes no sense to me. Won't be checking out the streaming service until they get the library issues sorted.

http://www.loopinsight.com/2015/07/22/apple-music-is-a-nightmare-and-im-done-with-it/

of all people

it's a dreadful mess it's true. trying to get my playlists onto my phone is next to impossible and disconcertingly inconsistent.

also, i know apple are rolling in it, but it's hard not to see curated playlists and probably beats becoming algorithmic after the initial publicity push and bedding in.

I'm guessing 3 months free was put in place to try and iron at the wrinkles. not sure the iron's going to sort out this abyssal shitpile tho.

the thing about music metadata is that it's really hard

^ especially taxonomies of genre and universal systems that can take into account mixtapes, classical, compulations etc. and how do you enforce uniformity? it's next to impossible.

if publishers all standardized on, say, musicbrainz, it would help a lot

what are the chances tho? i don't know about the music industry, but broadcast media has all sorts of problems with legacy systems and lack of uniform file and database protocols that mean any chance of getting industry uniformity is next to zero.

at the very least it'd be helpful if apple let you select a particular album and say "no, you didn't match this one properly, upload my version instead" (i believe google play music lets you do this)

but adding a feature has probably taken a back seat to fixing ninety billion bugs before everyone's free period ends

at the very least it'd be helpful if apple let you select a particular album and say "no, you didn't match this one properly, upload my version instead" (i believe google play music lets you do this)

Allowing this and fixing download of offline playlists would make apple music completely awesome for me. And raising the 25k limit.

if it's relying on the 4yo itunes match way of doing things + is concerned about 100 million users taking up significant extra cloud storage space with live bootlegs/greatest hits/remixes/etc, then that's probably not likely, but with a huge number of new users potentially throwing up their hands and buggering off forever, a feature like that might at least find its way into itunes to assuage the more vocally angry people.

afaik apple never announces when it's fixed major icloud bugs (especially when it hasn't acknowledged they exist in the first place), so we won't know when/whether they've fixed some of the big problems unless a load of users persist blindly with it and record their progress somewhere public. will it leave the music on my iphone intact for a week and then delete it all? i have no way of knowing without testing the whole process every few days until it works, and i don't have time to do that.

BeOS had the radical idea of embedding track tags/metadata in the track file itself 20 years ago. iTunes still doesn't do this reliably.

well now

http://www.loopinsight.com/2015/07/24/i-got-my-music-back-at-least-most-of-it/

I arrived at Apple this morning to talk to them about my issues with Apple Music and to hopefully fix my problems. The good news is that I have about 99 percent of my music back.

Let’s get the easy stuff out of the way. The missing and duplicate song issues that we’ve all seen in Apple Music are being fixed shortly. They are certainly aware of what’s been going on, I can assure you.

The trick is to go visit Apple and get their engineers to fix it?

http://www.valuewalk.com/2015/07/apple-music-10m-members-four-weeks/

So can someone summarize the issue w/ Apple Music and personal libraries? Since I use Spotify I have almost no music saved locally to my iPhone (I only have local files I added through Spotify desktop that I can access on my phone). If I moved to Apple Music I would have to add all my personal music from scratch to iTunes. Is the issue w/ Apple Music that it messes up existing libraries, or would adding a bunch of personal mp3s to my iPhone be painful as well?

http://mjtsai.com/blog/2015/07/31/apple-music-matches-files-with-metadata-only/

the second link says:

"I highly recommend disabling iCloud Music Library and migrating away from any reliance you have on iTunes Match. You can still listen to Apple Music without them. Don’t let these cloud-matching “features” anywhere near your music collection."

so it sounds like you can get around this issue while using Apple Music and your own personal files. If I end up trying out Apple Music I'll have to look into that if it's still being buggy.

yeah this stuff all scared me away. signed up for the free three months and stopped using it after 2 days cos it asked me to match or something, i just force quitted it and haven't opened it since, I'm nervous to open again. spotify 4 lyfe.