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

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.