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

Available now with iOS upgrade 8.4. Thoughts/concerns/tips/tricks/playlists/rants/raves/etc.

http://rack.3.mshcdn.com/media/ZgkyMDE1LzAzLzMxLzFmL3RpZGFscHJlc3NjLmUzM2M4LmpwZwpwCXRodW1iCTEyMDB4OTYwMD4/497de5a0/cac/tidal-press-conference.jpg

This is much better than I thought it'd be. But no collab playlists? wtf

First impression: This blows Spotify out of the water. Being able to save albums to my phone so I can stream them even when I'm offline or in airplane mode is incredible. The interface is great, too.

Do I have to update the desktop OS to 10.10.4 to get the iTunes update to 12.2? Because it's saying my current version of iTunes, 12.1, is the most up to date.

xpost Being able to save albums to my phone so I can stream them even when I'm offline or in airplane mode is incredible.

You can do this with Spotify, too.

only with Premium iirc, and I dunno about stuff from yr personal library

Yeah this saves all the albums you want right to your iTunes music library, within seconds

only with Premium iirc

Yeah, but Spotify Premium costs the same as this, so it's a wash.

http://i60.tinypic.com/13yp66e.jpg

THINK ABOUT IT, SHEEPLE

I might not have time to do an update for a few days, so can someone who has the new iOS Music app report how the library artist view (local files) is handled? Essentially I'm wondering if you can get to an individual album view by navigating from artist > albums > album track list, rather than the combined album/track list view that was introduced a couple of years ago. It drives me nuts that you can't just view a list of the artist's albums from artist view without seeing all the tracks too, making it a pain to scroll through when you have a lot of albums from an artist and making it impossible to play a single album without the next one in the list starting up when the one you selected is finished.

(Was kind of hoping this thread would be titled "Apple Music - anyone heard of it?")

It drives me nuts that you can't just view a list of the artist's albums from artist view without seeing all the tracks too, making it a pain to scroll through when you have a lot of albums from an artist

oh yeah this is kind of a dealbreaker if it is still in effect

how does the library compare to the spotify library?

That part is better. You choose the artist and it shows their albums. Doesn't seem to be a way to see all tracks by an artist regardless of album though.

(And no way to see the tracks you don't have but which are available on Apple Music, which is a miss)

Library seems better/as good as Spotify. Has the new Fall, which Spotify didn't when I looked.

I assume Drag City has withheld its catalog from Apple Music?

only with Premium iirc

Yeah, but Spotify Premium costs the same as this, so it's a wash.

haha youre gonna have to pay premium for apple . Dont be conned

So I upgraded my stupid iTunes to 12.1.2.27 just to check this out, and I'm not seeing where the Apple Music part of it exists. Still just the store/library/etc.

Oh, nm. I'm running into the same problem William mentioned upthread. I need 12.2 but was only offered 12.1 - further reinforcing my position that iTunes for PC is total bullshit and I have good reasons for hating it.

I'm reading it's not available for desktop yet

Did some googling and 12.2 is coming out later this afternoon according to Apple tech support.
xp

I get that mobile is the focus these days, but don't launch your product until it's available in all formats! Tidal did this too. Not saying Apple Music will go the way of Tidal, but c'mon!

My hopes are pretty low for the desktop version, tbh. iTunes is one giant, clunky, slow program, and I can't imagine this massive new addition making it run any smoother. I'll probably wait a while before downloading that update.

Apple has even less stuff on Tzadik than Spotify does, near as I can tell.

i thought spotify had nothing from tzadik

They have a little. Aram Bajakian's Kef; MC Maguire - Meta-conspiracy; Derek Keller - Impositions and Consequences; Ayelet Rose Gottlieb - Mayim Rabim.

Apple only has the Gottlieb I think. Still exploring.

Figured out how to do the complete album thing: press the ... Next to a track, then press its title in the action sheet that appears.

they have peter gabriel unlike spotify, nice since i've been in a pg place for awhile

This app seems to have wiped out all my mp3s from my phone. Anyone else have this problem?

There's no way the mp3s got wiped, they're probably just not accessible or hidden from view. Check your Settings to see how much space is allocated to music.

When you add the app it asks you if you want to "merge" Apple Music with your My Music library or "replace" your library. You might have clicked replace.

The UI is so fast and responsive. At least compared to spotify.

Still playing around with adding things to my music, have found everything I've looked for so far. Will need to add my local files to get a true test.

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

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...

Q-Tip is killing it on abstract radio right now..

Having some issues with iCloud library turning itself off, which is causing some issues. Also confusing with album stars, sometimes it is staring the whole album when I star a song within the album. Which screws up my 3 star song playlist by throwing all the tracks on the album.

Also having this issue: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7110361

ANother issue. Carl and I use the same iTunes instance, just logging in and out of each other's account. We shared a local file library, but it doesn't seem to differenate between my loved song list and hers. and also if I add apple music to the library, it's showing up for her sometimes and sometimes not. We need to be able to keep separate loved playlists.

Haha i was just searching around for a solution to that greyed out tracks thing, must be something universally off with it today. Overall i'm loving this tho, looking forward to when its all running smoooooth.

The turning if iCloud library off seems to be linked to logging out as me and in as Carl. It just turns it off, then when I log back in as me, all those albums have a 3 star album rating that I have to fix again. Bizarre.

Out of curiosity I enabled the iCloud library on my iPad. Later when I synced it with the iTunes on my PC somehow the contents of all the static playlists that had been on the iPad had been wiped in my iTunes library.
I could see the playlist titles in iTunes but when I opened the playlists there were no songs in the playlists. This was for 90 odd playlists!
Fortunately the files were all still there and could recover the playlists by using a backup copy of the itunes library itl and xml files.
Imagine if I weren't paranoid about my iTunes library and didn't take regular backups?

I've turned iCloud library off on the iPad and it's never getting enabled on any other device.
For context - my current ITunes library was started in 2007 and has full basic metadata and cover art for all ~30K tracks. Being a librarian (and prone to these things) I use the comments field to provide extended metadata for about 18K tracks. That metadata powers about 250 smart playlists. I've put too much effort into it to risk having it wiped by some iCloud library related bug.

It's not all bad. I've found the Apple Music streaming fairly useful so I'll keep using it for the length of the free trial. After that I'll need to decide between Apple Music and Spotify Premium.

This thread is serving as a reminder of the extent to which catalogue discrepancies reflect regional issues. With few exceptions (The Necks, Keiji Haino, The Dead C, Henry Cow and the new The Fall record) the artists/albums in this thread are on Spotify in my corner of the world.

I uploaded some songs and can see that this has been done in ITunes successfully. But they are nowhere to be found on my phone. Anyone have any ideas?

I had the same problem. Open the app, go to "My Music". There's a dropdown below recently added to sort - Artists, Albums, Songs etc. At the bottom of that dropdown is a toggle for "Show Music Available Offline". Set that to off.

Thanks, I tried that. Still no go. I must have done something wrong with the upload. But then, not sure the iCloud status would say "uploaded." Oh well. Things seemed easier back in the day.

Well overnight they popped into my library. But on the downside, everything else was wiped off of my phone. ?!?!?!

More thoughts:

• I think everything is coming together nicely. It feels like I have more control over my music collection than I ever had with Spotify. Sure, there are still issues, but hopefully they will be fixed with an update.
• 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
• 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.
• Another issue is the matching of tracks. Pretty much ruins the flow of DJ mixes sometimes, because it will match album tracks that are completely different versions. This doesn't seem to be a new issue, subscribers to iTunes Match had it as well. It would be ideal to somehow designate a track to force an upload rather than matching with an Apple Music track.
• Can't wait for the match limit to be raised to 100K. Currently I changed my whole collection to voice memo for media kind and selectively switching the tracks I want to match back to music. It would be nice if I could tell how close to the limit I am, but I can't see an easy way to tell that.
• I still have concerns about profile switching. Really need to have it so we can maintain separate libraries/playlists/loved tracks, but still have access to the same local files.

OH, and the siri integration is great.

what can you do w/siri?

Lots! I particularly like play songs from 19XX.

http://appadvice.com/appnn/2015/07/learn-and-listen-top-siri-commands-for-apple-music

I also like the many ways in which you can display your music. I've seen people complaining that it makes the interface too complex, but I prefer to have options rather than be forced to view the music one way. Most of the time I have it in the Song's display, but I do switch back and forth to Albums/Artists/Playlist.

It would be ideal to somehow designate a track to force an upload rather than matching with an Apple Music track.

So if I have uploaded my own files of (e.g.) Martha Argerich playing Schumann's Kriesleriana and I go to listen to it in AM on my phone, I'll hear their defective version and not my undefective one? That super sucks and I wonder if it can be worked around by tagging my stuff with artist or album names that don't match Apple's before I upload them?

I've read about some workarounds, but wow, pain in the ass. Like this one: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4544764?tstart=0

It doesn't seem to affect me too much, but it can ruin DJ mixes for sure.

"play me the number one song in the country"

Here's 'Girl Crush' by Little Big Town

"play me the number one song in the UK"

Here 'Anarchy in the U.K.' by Sex Pistols

"play me the number one single on the official chart"

OK, let's hear 'Wavin' Flag (the Celebration Mix) (World Cup 2010 Official Anthem)' by Backing Force

that's a karaoke version btw

"play me the top selling song in britain"

I couldn't find 'in Britain' on Apple Music or in your library.

"play me the number one single"

OK. Playing your music (shuffled)...

"play me the most popular song in the charts"

Now playing 'Egyptian In the Night' by Nuttin' But Stringz...

"play me the number one song in the official chart"

Sorry, 'In Music We Trust (Official Wesermove Hymn 2014) [Video Version] [feat. Tabee]' by Linden & Senerano isn't available for streaming.

Does Siri work with a Scottish accent?

this may be of interest:

New app lets you transfer Spotify playlists to Apple Music
http://www.factmag.com/2015/07/09/new-app-lets-you-transfer-spotify-playlists-to-apple-music/

"As a testament to that simplicity it’s literally called Spotify To Apple Music Playlist or S.t.A.M.P. for short. You can download the app here and although it’s only available for Mac currently, a Windows version is said to be on the way."

it makes it an option, thanks.

To transfer more than 10 tracks you must buy then activate the app.

Sneaky

i'm enjoying this for the convenience but it appears that I can't, now, add music to my iphone from my computer. and I can't seem to get upload to icloud music to work either.

Yeah. Not sure why the delay between uploading and having the songs appear on the phone.

suddenly (well, not suddenly, just at some point later) there they were. but itunes doesn't give me any indication that's uploading things to the cloud; i click that cloud icon, and then some time later it's gone.

The missing social and sharing features are sorely lacking. They should have had embeddable playlists at launch. And I miss the passive friends listening feed on Spotify.

Also missing popularity meters for individual songs (the best thing spotify borrowed from audio galaxy)

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.

this has been much better for me in the past four days. The most irritiating thing about it on mobile is when your connection drops. I can't fathom how or why anyone would LOSE mp3s from their library unless they deliberately deleted them from their computer which is dumb. They stay whether you have Music on or off. Music that you 'save' for offline from Music though, yes, disappears; I have no idea where apple stores it on your laptop when you're offline. But I can see no reason why anyone would expect that stuff to still be available to them if they canceled the service. At any rate, so far, I'm a fan, I find it satisfies my psychological disorder to feel like I "have" these songs on my computer in the same place as everything else.

spottie otm

this has been much better for me in the past four days.

in what way? asking genuinely because i still really want to use this thing.

I can't fathom how or why anyone would LOSE mp3s from their library unless they deliberately deleted them from their computer which is dumb. They stay whether you have Music on or off.

my study audio did actually vanish from my phone. it wasn't in offline music, it wasn't anywhere. i tried it three times, and every time all but four random tracks (which i assume got through by accident) disappeared.

certainly an arresting headline here
Virtually no one is using Apple Music even though it is utterly free

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/08/06/two_months_to_cancel_apple_music_subscriptions/

i've gone back to this with a test itunes library and the bug count is astonishing. it's nearly six weeks old and the bloody thing still doesn't work. several missing tracks in some albums, duplicate/triplicate songs in other albums (and it plays all of them like they're unique songs), favourites don't stick, adding to my music doesn't stick, downloads get stuck and can't be cleared, the music app crashes and the current song stops playing (and the music app forgets what was playing), whole albums suddenly delete themselves, incorrect artwork (the beatles anthology is "90s pop hits performed by audio idols"), tracks claim one length but are actually another, songs i own are greyed out and unplayable, playback of downloaded music pauses when i leave wifi range, etc etc.

certainly a dumb headline xp

the spin --> http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2015-08/07/apple-music-jimmy-iovine-interview

thank god apple are here to put meaning back in musical culture.

something only someone with a predominant view of music as a commodity could say.

downloading playlists off "for you", no problem. saving whole albums to "my music", less than 25% success rate. downloading whole albums (if it even downloads them correctly in the first place), no point because 50% chance they'll delete themselves. favouriting anything at all, approx 50% success rate. nearly six weeks since launch. at least the playlists are fun.

On one recent afternoon, Lowe opened his 5PM BST show with one-hit-wonder Len's 'Steal My Sunshine', then transitioned to 'Supersonic' by Oasis, via Lou Reed's 'Walk on the Wild Side', which merged seamlessly into A Tribe Called Quest's 'Can I Kick It?'. It was intense, but in the moment pretty much perfect radio. "I love it when a plan comes together," Lowe shouted at one point, in between sounds of pre-recorded explosions.

Remind me again how irritating jingle-happy DJs playing over-familiar records is the exciting and radical new future of music...

I've had no issues saving to My Music, works fine and syncs back to iTunes and vice versa. Making available offline still not working great. Optimistic though, reports from the iOS 9 beta users is that it works much better.

Most of the time my loved lists syncs, except for like 5 songs, which refuse to stay loved. I guess Apple just doesn't want me to live those. Ok.

i just tried to save an apple music album to "my music" on my phone, four times. didn't take. i opened itunes on my mac and the album is listed as "apple music" four times. every song, four times.

meanwhile a different album (one i uploaded) that (a) failed to download to my phone last week and (b) i had given up on is listed as "removed" on my mac, even though all the songs are still on the hard drive. i'm trying to force it to sync: the thing's spinning and all the songs are stuck at "waiting", even though my phone can see them (including one song listed twice for some reason).

in amongst all this my album artwork is so deeply up the shitter that i'd rather not have any.

Most of the time my loved lists syncs, except for like 5 songs, which refuse to stay loved. I guess Apple just doesn't want me to live those. Ok.

i'm sure i was able to love songs off beats 1, but today i can't. thing is, i genuinely don't know what is and isn't a bug any more.

also:

reports from the iOS 9 beta users is that it works much better.

there's an 8.4.1 beta floating around:

The second iOS 8.4.1 beta comes with a number of performance improvements and bug fixes, specifically for Apple Music

if it does, i can stop carting round two iphones. maybe.

I find it really confusing. I liked the 'for you' playlists, but I felt like they were making me lazy, like 'fuck it I'll just listen to this Dinosaur Jr playlist I'll enjoy that', and now I'm getting a little bored of their tasteful, aimed-straight-at-me curation.

But I don't know what it does to my library, my music, my phone… it confuses me.

I'm going back to spotify.

And I've bought a sandisk mp3 player.

the playlists i saved off "for you" are emptying themselves. i open a playlist and half the songs vanish while i'm looking at them. it's like the songs would rather kill themselves than be heard by me.

I tried to put a few new CDs that I'd ripped into iTunes onto my phone (5S w/8.4) the other night and couldn't find any way to do it. I'm not really into the whole cloud idea(l), I quite like just having a rotating cast of 500-600 songs on my portable device (I don't have unlimited 4G and the office wifi blocks iTunes/App Store). It would appear that Match (which I don't subscribe to but which appears to be "on", according to iTunes, since iOS 8.4) and iCloud Music Library (also "on" by default) prevent any kind of manual management of the library and associated device.

Found this today, so I will try it tonight (turning Apple Music off forever in the process)...
https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT201593

apparently icloud music library turns itself on (and off!) for some people. bug #6283692863573836364. once you turn the bloody thing off you should be able to drop music onto your phone and sync like you used to.

how annoying is it that I can only listen to the new Dre single on Apple Music, I'm not going to download iTunes on my work pc just to hear 1 song... these streaming wars are not to the benefit of customers imo, like having to sign up for 3-4 different services to get singles from 10 fave artists....

well I guess I could torrent it but preferably not on my work pc

In the last couple of days, making files available offline on mobile has become significantly more reliable for me. I still don't have guts to do all my 2100 song loved playlist all at once, so I've been going through and doing each song individually. Less than 900 songs to go.

the playlists i saved off "for you" are emptying themselves. i open a playlist and half the songs vanish while i'm looking at them.

they re-downloaded themselves this morning (~140 songs). i don't know whether they've all been restored though.

One song is playing but is listed 7 times wtf

http://i.imgur.com/TLmdPSY.jpg

The link above (about disabling iCloud library on the phone an re-enabling manual management in iTunes) did the trick for me, eventually (in terms of just putting 500-600 songs I wanted on the phone). iTunes had forgotten the location (external HDD, which was attached) of about 80% of my library initially, so I had to wait for it to sort that out.

So, now I've definitely got what I want on there (incl the newest rips), I may as well enable the iCloud Library thing and see if other music appears for streaming. I doubt it will.

when i did that it deleted some of my local stuff.

Oh, brilliant. Even after choosing "merge" and not "replace"?

it didn't give me a choice for some reason (looks like yet another bug). i think mine defaulted to merge.

incidentally, just now i restarted my phone and all the music vanished. everything. then it sat and span for a few minutes, and now all my offline albums have disappeared and most of the playlists are empty. now it's re-downloading 600 songs that were on there 10 minutes ago. my phone's available storage hasn't changed, so presumably all the old songs are sitting in a cache somewhere.

(i had to manually download these 600 songs, it didn't happen automatically like this morning)

Right, I've disabled it all. I'm not ready for this brave new cloudy world. I have about 40 hours of music on my phone, the continuous/sitting down/low ambient noise bits of my commute only total about about 70min/day, so I think I can cope with what is effectively a standalone 4GB MP3 player that I manually refresh every few weeks (like I had ten years ago).

best plan imo. i'm persevering because (a) it's still free and (b) this is all a test setup, with all my proper music safely on an old phone.

what baffles me most is how the world's richest company can release this galloping train wreck and then just leave it for six weeks and not say anything.

I'm currently using it on a desktop (PC) and an iPad mini and it's all syncing fine - playlists, my music, all that malarkey. I've not had to mess with too much metadata, though I am adding some grouping data, which does seem to be syncing fine as well. I've also been able to add stuff to my iPod as usual (from the PC, obvs). I've got an Android phone, so haven't come across any mobile issues (by default). Will be intrigued as to how the mooted Android app copes.

so weird how some people have had no problems whatsoever. it'd make sense if i'd seen one or two bugs that might be overlooked, but i've hit at least half a dozen super-critical bugs that make it unusable. apart from live streaming, not a single function works.

As mentioned up thread, I have had issues, but maybe I've had more that I'm not aware of or just don't care that much about right now. Like my compilations are just a mess. I'm just going to leave them be for right now and fix then once Apple fixes some bugs with matching. I have plenty of music that is working just fine to listen to until then, especially now that my massive playlist is almost all available offline now.

I'm just so happy to have the loved feature and corresponding smart playlist, even though there are still bugs with that as well. If spotify hadn't removed the starred feature, i'd probably still be using it.

I also don't worry about my library getting fucked up either because I have it backed up in triplicate in various places, onsite and off. Worst case scenario, I just revert back.

same

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.

Wary of a revamp. Much prefer the incremental changes they've been making.

almanac, how old is your phone and what version of ios are you running?

yeah, difficult to believe apple will suddenly fix it in one blow, but if they can sort out all the really deep bugs (shitty cloud upload/match, people's downloads vanishing) it'll be the best service available.

xp it's an iphone 6 with 9.3.1

I agree with your approach.

My biggest UI beef is not being able to search Apple Music and My Music at the same time.

find u a girl who can do both

still randomly skipping tracks, a lot. apple music tracks. i'm even working off a totally clean database. this should straight up not happen. their magic revamp really needs to fix dumb shit like this.

https://blog.vellumatlanta.com/2016/05/04/apple-stole-my-music-no-seriously/

i swear to god I have never once had this issue people complain about. I can only think that they're doing something really weird or wrong.

"still randomly skipping tracks, a lot. apple music tracks" is this while streaming? how is your connection?

I haven't experienced track skipping either, with neither local or streamed music. Not to say other people don't, just that I haven't personally.

have you experienced wholesale deletion of local files?

utterly baffled as to why anybody would give these clowns access to their system/storage

the cloud is a lie

it's almost economically feasible to just run your own cloud these days

I just have a hidden board on ilx where I encode my files as text and then post them, it's very good

streaming did 9/11

lol apple

seriously though it's bad and lame xp

it's almost economically feasible to just run your own cloud these days

Subsonic

is that any good? I use Plex for home streaming and like it.

It's very good and works a charm, not that hard to set up either. I've heard Plex is similar.

I mostly use Plex for video streaming, the PS/Apple TV bits are pretty nice

i use plex for streaming my old library plus video, it's fine. it stutters a bit if I stream to my phone over the data plan and not on wifi but otherwise it's great.

lol at "update"

http://mjtsai.com/blog/2016/05/05/apple-officially-discontinues-webobjects/

"still randomly skipping tracks, a lot. apple music tracks" is this while streaming? how is your connection?

all tracks downloaded and connection is solid. no errors popping up. when it skips, i go straight back and it plays the skipped song like nothing happened.

I haven't experienced track skipping either, with neither local or streamed music. Not to say other people don't, just that I haven't personally.

this time around i deleted my whole library and started from scratch, so it's not even a 10yo corrupt itunes library. playing an mp3 is hardly a pioneering task. i'm assuming the code base is terrifying and hilarious.

https://c2.staticflickr.com/8/7523/26782080441_edbf152024_o.png

Confirmed, I use Apple Music and still have all my original local files.

Same problem with the skipping tracks on iOS but I would only notice this by looking at my phone and seeing artwork flash by (ie the song does not start it just seems unplayable). I've been having this problem on iPhone way before apple music and he files in iTunes do not seem corrupt so I suspect it's a phone issue?

I've been having this problem on iPhone way before apple music and he files in iTunes do not seem corrupt so I suspect it's a phone issue?

same here. i think it started happening around ios7/8 (hence me assuming my itunes db was corrupt). i scrapped and resynced the music db several times but the skipping continued. my ipod classic's playback never missed a beat syncing with the same itunes library. so yeah, ios/music app issue, most likely down to shitty code.

My iPod classic used to skip tracks as well, it was just harder to notice unless you say watching the display

lol @ the webobjects saga

afaik webobjects is pretty good, definitely solid for enterprise-type development. i don't think any startups are going to jump on that technology stack any time soon, though.

It was also great for iOS back ends, especially with native plist support when that was by far the fastest thing on iOS.

We retired our final bit of WO at work this month. It started in the objective C days!

awesome

I did quite a bit of WO work back in 1998-1999 when it was still a NeXT product. Good times, but never dealt with it since then.

http://www.macrumors.com/2016/05/11/apple-ending-itunes-music-downloads/

(Update: Apple Says 'Not True')

i just added a playlist in itunes and my phone stopped playback. when i started playback all my hearts were gone. the rebuild wants to be impeccable because this current service is trash.

hearts are back. uh okay.

http://www.imore.com/apple-confirms-reports-potential-bug-itunes-safeguard-patch-expected-next-week

In an extremely small number of cases users have reported that music files saved on their computer were removed without their permission. We’re taking these reports seriously as we know how important music is to our customers and our teams are focused on identifying the cause. We have not been able to reproduce this issue, however, we’re releasing an update to iTunes early next week which includes additional safeguards. If a user experiences this issue they should contact AppleCare.

Good to know that a couple of idiots button mash-deleting their entire libraries is occupying the dev team's time, rather than oh I don't know, something important like FIXING MATCHING

on the whole the new ios app redeems its weird ugliness by being pretty solid. the only functional bug i have now is that non-downloaded songs get loud after 6 seconds. apparently it's been this way since the ios 10 betas.

also there's a fuzzy rumour that individual & family subscriptions will drop by ~20%.

also since ios 10.1.1 the You may also like section is now called FUSE.Product.YouMayAlsoLike.CapitolCase

it's skipping tracks again. a major rebuild and it still can't do the one thing it's supposed to do.

when i go to android i think i'll ditch this. apple has completely lost the plot.

I'd say I'm about 95% satisfied. One annoying issue: My Loved songs playlist has about 2500 songs that I keep downloaded on my mobile. However when a song becomes unavailable for whatever reason, the playlist shows as not being completely downloaded and I have to scroll though all those songs to see which one has been grated out. Takes a good 5 minutes. Minor annoyance.

on top of that, when it downloads tracks as normal and one gets stuck, it interrupts me (with a modal dialogue) to ask whether i want to try again. instead of just trying again. this shouldn't ever happen and indicates their ui design is being done by circus clowns.

how about remembering what state you were in / what minute of the 2 hour mix i was at you piece of shit app

and updating/downloading playlists automatically. and not deleting my downloads. and not undoing my loved songs.

i swear they didn't address most of the major bugs. record-breaking profits and vastly overpriced hardware, and they can't pay four developers to fix this bloody thing.

why the hell does apple music just list every release, even guest spots, under "albums"

i've cycled through most of the streaming music apps by this point and Tidal (tidal! of all things) is the only one that does albums/eps/singles/guest appearances correctly

i mean, it's all splitting hairs as to what counts as a release but wanting to see a newer artist's 2 - 3 albums and having to sort through a dozen "albums" that are singles or different versions of a single with one remix is ridiculous

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.