

Apple Music is a nightmare and I’m done with it - uptown
http://www.loopinsight.com/2015/07/22/apple-music-is-a-nightmare-and-im-done-with-it/

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digikata
"It's great that they lavish insane attention to detail on the bezel of an
iPhone or getting the color just right. They need to lavish that insane
attention to detail on their services."

This comment to that article expresses my feelings exactly. It feels like
physical, graphical, and some interface design issues get strong attention
right at the top in Ives, but many small, but deep user issues have been
cropping up surrounding iCloud and now Apple Music. It's not so much first
order bugs (though those exist too), but focus on user perspective.

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kstenerud
And this is why I maintain my own music collection, in FLAC, stored on a
machine I control, in my house, with ZFS and backups and scripts to generate
lossy versions of any part of my collection in whatever format I choose.

My phone has plenty of space to store compressed music, my car has a usb port
that I can plug a flash card into, and I have a portable wristwatch mp3 player
for when I go running.

I can go anywhere I want by car, bus, train, airplane, boat, or foot, and
never lose my tunes to bad reception or buggy software because my music is
ALWAYS in my physical possession, with backups in a lossless format. I can
even connect to my home machine from remote to stream or download if need be.

Really, what use would I ever have of these silly walled cloud or streaming
services?

~~~
coldtea
> _Really, what use would I ever have of these silly walled cloud or streaming
> services?_

OTOH, your use case could be called "outlier" and "a throwback".

Most young kids don't care for owning music at all (not talking about the few
buying vinyl, or the slightly more buying digital, I'm talking about the huge
majority).

They are OK with streaming like Pandora and Spotify, not to mention they're
fine with just YouTube most of them time.

~~~
kactus
I used to care about owning my music, but over time the money just kept adding
up and so did the inconveniences. Want this artist's albums on my phone?
Dammit, gotta take time and copy all that over. New music? Welp, there goes my
food for the month (I don't like pirating). I made a new playlist on my
computer, and I want it on my phone? Dang it, it didn't find the tracks that I
copied on there before and so it's useless.

Paying $10 a month for a streaming service (I use Google Music) made a lot
more sense to me for than paying $30-$100 a month buying albums.

~~~
dublinben
I doubt you were actually consistently paying $30-100 per month on new music.
The average consumer spends roughly $60 _a year_ on recorded music.

Now, instead of building 'equity' in a music collection that you own, you'll
be renting your music at $10/mo for eternity. Which do you think will end up
costing more in the long run?

~~~
kactus
Worth the convenience imo. It's not like I can get value back from digital
music files.

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HSO
I'm tempted to say: "Such a rube! Welcome to the world." ;-)

Of _course_ there were going to be problems. I used to be a huge Apple fan,
but my enthusiasm has been badly tempered by experience. All the cloud and
software-related weirdness of Apple (leave aside for the moment the mysterious
hissing noise of my Mac Pro) became too much for me already a loong time ago.
For example, iTunes Match completely corrupted my iTunes database but in a
weird, random way that necessitated hours if not days of painstaking, manual
labor to repair. Then I discovered that almost all my lossless files had been
replaced by inferior substitutes, which Apple had explicitly promised would
never happen. Oh, morning of joy!!!

I still own Apple hardware; but caught between the scylla of Apple's
incompetence and the charybdis of Google's obliviousness (if not outright
evilness), I have renounced the "cloud".

My main machine is airgapped and I refuse to let "the cloud" touch any of my
files anymore (this is written from a "throwaway" laptop where I don't have
anything except a browser and Little Snitch). It's the only way I can hang on
to _some_ sense of control over my stuff. This whole intermediation business
is going too far these days.

~~~
logfromblammo
I learned about 20 years ago how to rip and compress music files from audio
CDs.

Back then, it took longer to compress a .WAV to an .MP3 than it took to listen
to the song, and Lame was distributed as a patch to a reference
implementation. Before MP3 players were cheap enough, I would create a
playlist on the PC, hook up the output from my sound card to the input of my
boom box, and record to an audio cassette tape, to play it in my car.

For a long time, my biggest problem with digital audio was a chronic lack of
disk space. Then I acquired a family, and some of them chose to buy iOS
devices. My prior experience with uploading music to a mobile device was to
plug it in via USB, or insert the SD card, and just copy to the mount point.
It worked for Sansa Clip. It worked for modded Nintendo DS.

Then along comes the iPod and the iPad and the iPhone. Obstacle one is the
proprietary 20-pin sync cable which has a habit of breaking every 3rd time you
use it. Obstacle two is a lack of lightweight USB drivers to access the
device's internal filesystem. You have to download and install a full-fledged
iTunes program to your computer to put even one song on your iOS device.
Obstacle three is iTunes user management. I, having no iOS devices, want to
upload a file from my hard drive to devices belonging to other people, without
syncing the entire contents of their device to my hard drive.

It didn't take long for me to issue a proclamation that I would no longer be
offering free technical support for any Apple devices. When the spouse has a
problem with the iPhone, I suggest a trip to the Apple store or a call to the
cellular network provider. I'd rather be put in the doghouse for a day than be
stuck in Apple's walled garden forever.

I have never trusted anyone with _my_ data. That's why my music collection is
in deep storage on the original pressed CDs, in cold storage on DVD-Rs, in
warm storage as FLAC files on an external hard drive, and live copies are
transcoded MP3 files, usually on hard disks and microSD cards. Now, my biggest
problem is deciding which songs from my kids' CDs are good enough for me to
add to my playlists. And I really like that I don't need Apple's permission to
listen to them.

~~~
joesmo
Yup. The iTunes ecosystem is a nightmare. The app is incredibly slow, crashes,
and refuses to do basic things like find a file constantly. I have to copy
files from NAS locally to transfer them to an iPod yet I can play them
directly off the NAS. iTunes is such garbage, why do people expect any better
from Apple Music?

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PebblesHD
I'll chime in here from the 18-24 crowd. I've been using Spotify since it
became available here, and Premium on top of that for a few years now and it's
a fantastic service. My Phone syncs properly, my iPad runs great and my Laptop
has all my playlists when I need to use it. As for Apple Music, I gave up
after two weeks, its just nowhere near as polished and functional, and its
missing quite a few of the songs and artists I like.

The sad thing is they both still sound and feel nowhere near as good as my CD
library proudly built over my life so far, and I don't see this changing any
time soon.

@loop - You have really pretty excellent music taste...

~~~
mattkrea
You do have 320kbps enabled right? I think it sounds quite good.

~~~
PebblesHD
Ahh but of course. It has the distinct advantage on my iPhone of having a
manual EQ as well which means I can tune it just so for my headphones. It
beats out the stock media player for listening in most situations

~~~
asimilator
[http://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/06/02/411473508/h...](http://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/06/02/411473508/how-
well-can-you-hear-audio-quality)

Can you tell the difference between uncompressed vs 320 kbps vs 128 kbps in a
blind test?

~~~
PebblesHD
In all likelihood no. Personally though I feel like AAC encoded audio is just
'nicer' than MP3 for some reason.

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ozarius
Couldn't agree more. The UX + Service suckiness just takes it to another
level. Don't even get me started about how the shuffle, repeat buttons look
and feel. It appears that the HIG is no longer read by those who work @ Apple
any more...

~~~
brador
What's HIG?

~~~
anotherangrydev
Human Interface Guidelines, a smuggy (but actually really detailed and overall
good) document they publish on how you should design the User Interface of
your program to provide a nice experience for your users, particularly on
Apple platforms.

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scrumper
Reflects my experience with iTunes Match. It was awful; I persevered for a
year and never made it work properly. Dupes, missing songs, volatile metadata,
unsynchronized syncing, the works. I removed it and little hangovers still
persist, like every track on Pet Sounds being duplicated. I did get the
benefit of my old Napster rips finally turning up in decent quality with a
nice conscience wipe.

Apple does great hardware and good operating systems, but horrid, hateful
services. Their cloudy stuff is slow, fragile, and not even all that cheap.

~~~
jameshart
I'm not sure that the iTunes Match subscription actually included a papal
indulgence and absolution of past copyright sins.

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TrevorJ
Starting around 5 years ago the whole Apple iTunes experience started a rapid
decline and is now pretty uniformly terrible. I won't touch it with a ten foot
pole now.

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Domenic_S
Can Apple please just poach some Amazon folks and figure out their cloud
business once and for all?

Cloud is hard. Synching is hard. Trust is easily lost. Hire the right people
and do it!

~~~
Polecat
Didn't the big tech companies make an agreement to not poach employees from
each other?

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dreamcompiler
Apple has had a longstanding but unstated policy that the deletion,
destruction, or damaging of a user's data during any sync-like operation is
perfectly acceptable. Because I've been burned by this policy repeatedly over
the years -- not just in Apple's cloud services but also with local USB
syncing -- I avoid such services like the plague. That Apple Music carries on
this tradition is no surprise.

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benashford
I agree entirely. I've had all those issues, and a few more: For a week until
this morning, half of the UK (and a few other non-US locations) were unable to
play any music at all, due to a CDN DNS issue; and starting new custom radio
stations has never worked either, and still doesn't.

Both of those two issues bizarrely affected iTunes only, and not the Apple
Music app on iOS.

The complete silence on product issues from Apple only adds to the
frustration. That plus there doesn't seem to be a way of reporting Apple Music
bugs yet, I went looking only to find iTunes Store was the only thing you
could report a specific issue about.

It is such a poor product, it makes me think less of Apple generally, is this
the sort of enterprise I trust to make payments? Also, this is made worse by
the gap between the iOS and OS X experience, it just highlights how little
focus OS X gets these days, not that it was in much doubt.

I might keep trying it occasionally until the three month trial expires, but
no more than that, I'll be very surprised if this can all be fixed by then.

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scelerat
Wait -- what? Apple Music deletes music without asking you? That seems to be
what the article is stating.

Same as this author, I have a large collection of digitized music, most of it
ripped from a 500+ CD collection I no longer have complete access to. It's
backed up, of course, but sheesh.

~~~
dublinben
Apple Music ingests music that you 'match' to the service, and only gives you
back DRM-infected copies if you download them back.

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msoad
I just switched back to Spotify. Apple Music has so many issues.

