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

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.