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

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