Apple Music vs Spotify

so funny to have had to defend vinyl vs CDs and now to have to defend CDs vs streaming...

the line graphs showing total dollars spent on music over the past 30 years are a horror show for the music industry. what i'm not sure is whether it's the casual fans who are to blame (they didn't buy music anyway, right?), or the hardcore fans like the writer of the article above who have abandoned their expensive habits (are there enough of these people to make a difference?)

At my peak I was spending $3000 and change a year

2. I can't figure out how to get songs from my CDs onto my iPhone.

you're meant to:

1. rip your cd into an itunes desktop app at minimum 96 kbps
2. let icloud music library match it wrong and bugger up all your tags and artwork either match it with a streamable version it already has, or pop all your files into ~the cloud~ for retrieval
3. let your phone download a drm-encumbered version off the cloud

or, just find your cd in the apple music library and stream that.

apple sees downloading as "legacy" and CDs as basically hitting rocks together for fun

otm. the obvious problem with a streaming world is mobile data caps, which apple presumably hopes will just magically expand. even free wifi points won't always let you sit there and stream beats 1 all day. if you're at home and your country is industrialised, fine. if your work is obscenely generous with what you're allowed to do on its internet, fine.

No wonder the telecoms industry is behind streaming. You're still paying for your music and the musicians get the least money unless they're taylor swift or Metallica type superstars

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/aug/05/noel-gallagher-slams-orwellian-apple-music

He added: “It’s not playing the Kinks.

excellent point grandpa

i mean i get that his shtick is captain grumpypants but it's 2015 now. nobody's confiscating his kinks or his personal record collection.

Oh you were talking about Noel Gallagher, not deems.

not that noel isn't captain grumpypants but i think "a world music station is orwellian" and "i ain't listenin, unless they play all the shit i want to hear" are two distinct sentiments. the interviewer may have even asked him "would you listen to it?" after he said the orwell bit.

you're meant to:

1. rip your cd into an itunes desktop app at minimum 96 kbps
2. let icloud music library match it wrong and bugger up all your tags and artwork either match it with a streamable version it already has, or pop all your files into ~the cloud~ for retrieval
3. let your phone download a drm-encumbered version off the cloud

Thanks!

Well, it looks like my Mac must be too old for this shit, because I can't update iTunes anymore. So, I can't use iCloud Music Library and I can't even begin to do this.

then I looked into doing something similar on Spotify and it was easy peasy. I just made a playlist on my Mac with local files and then downloaded them to my phone with the Mobile app. Unfortunately, those files are not integrated into the search function, but fuck it, it's easier than dealing with Apple Music. I guess I've made my decision. Although, I really don't want to use up that space on my phone for music...

If the locally-originated files are not accessible via the search in spotify mobile, how do you get to them?

I have to play it through the playlist. You set up a playlist with local files on the desktop client, and the on the phone choose to make that playlist available offline on my phone and it downloads all of them.

That's cool - no more iTunes!

Yeah but doesn't the desktop client see your desktop library via iTunes? I mean you can't just direct it to a nested folder structure can you?

I think you can drag the tracks from the finder into a spotify playlist..?

Oh really...? Even if it's on an external hd?

Probably stop working once you remove the drive.

spotify's local-files solution is a nice gesture but seems clunky when really we should just be able to dump those songs somewhere on the phone and play them. it sucks that people are having to do that because they can't get apple music/icloud music library to work properly.

i've just gone back to apple music to see what it's like. it's astounding that after five weeks apple hasn't fixed even the simpler bugs in the 8.4 music app ('add to my music' not taking, having to tap stuff in 'for you' twice sometimes, songs getting stuck on download). in service of this, at home i've created a duplicate itunes library* of 18,000-odd songs that's been syncing to icloud music library for 36 hours and it's only reporting ~15% of unmatched tracks uploaded. my collection isn't that unusual or massive so i've no idea what's going on there. perhaps that's normal idk.

meanwhile i've synced my original/intact itunes library to an older iphone so i can use it as a dumb ipod in case apple music deletes my offline songs/changes everything to bob dylan/falls on its arse in some new and fascinating way.

* i should not have to do this

so i voted for spotify

Has anyone spent 4 hours with Spotify customer service for any issues? Cuz that's been my day with Apple.

what happened?

Ugh, mostly my fault for not understanding all the new technologiez. In the end it SEEMS to have all worked out. We'll see.

Signed up for Apple Music with the wrong Apple ID & couldn't get it to link to my family members, then tried to sign up for a trial with my regular Apple ID & it billed me immediately instead of signing me up for a trial. Time will tell if this has been rectified (apparently the reset can take up to a day).

So far, though, I think the interface kills Spotify's (which I find difficult to navigate).

Most say the opposite

Unless there’s a fucking section that says ‘Noel Gallagher’s music collection’ then I won’t be listening to it.

somewhere, excitable emails are exchanged about curated content

I don't have any of those issues with apple music, autumn; that is weird.

and, an album that i downloaded last night was not there this morning. and, when the music app's access to cellular data is turned off, songs keep pausing.

five weeks since launch. this should all have been fixed.

I think they're more focused on the 3 month mark.

I really see no reason to fix them until a couple of weeks before people decide to pay.

true, unless people crack the shits and give up well before then

xpost
After everyone has given up and gone back to Spotify? I get your point, but these days I feel like Apple releases stuff with bugs, and then basically never fixes them. They have so many customers that either don't experience the bugs, or don't care about them, that they just consider everyone else to be edge cases and ignore them.

You have a non-apple WiFi router?
You have a phone/computer that's more than a couple of years old?
You have a large music collection?
You care about metadata?

Edge cases.

well this is true: "and, when the music app's access to cellular data is turned off, songs keep pausing"

unless the song is rightly saved to play offline.

it was

they can't even get icloud photo library working yet :(

Do Apple really have a history of not fixing things?

with itunes they have a history of making things worse

God, I hate itunes. But i cba trying anything else for my ipod as its too much hassle

just got apple music to listen to dr. dre

man this shit is really fucking confusing w/it's integration w/the already fucked itunes

spotify is so much better than this

yeah its a mess.

Have to hope it gets better. I mean potentially it could be the gamechanger their touting it as but being sensitive to customer feedback and amenable to changing the ways in which people say your product sucks is pretty essential for a streaming service and with everything else they do Apple err on the side of prescriptive.

By some miracle the corrupted drive that my backed up music library was on decided to repair itself, so after 2.5 years in the wilderness I finally got my itunes back (give or take a dodgy itl file, 10,000 duplicates, missing album artwork, tracks and playlists).

Don't think I'll be touching any of the streaming/cloud/match features anytime soon but the idea of being able to marry the library I started building when I was 13 with a streaming service is always gonna be appealing and it never seemed to work out via spotify.

It held me down these past few years but it's always felt supplementary. The shittiness of Apple Music has renewed my appreciation but at this point I'm still looking for reasons to drop it.

For those who never buy CD's/LP's etc what are your reasons for mostly streaming? What made you take that choice, was it simply its cheaper?

Spotify.

convenience in every way xp. haven't paid for music outside of streaming within the last 2-3 years. thousands of CD's collecting dust under my bed.

But at least you will still have them to play if you need them what if the streaming service you use goes busts or bands pull their albums from it?

I subscribe to spotify to check out new releases or albums i can never afford to buy (like all of the blue note catalog; if that was pulled I'd be offski)

nah got em all ripped on hard drives and backed up. have absolutely zero reason to keep them. too lazy to try and sell them is all. Sound quality is my biggest issue but 320 rips are ok by me (with premium membership).