
Apple Music Web Client - aplusplus
http://beta.music.apple.com/
======
craze3
Wow, us Apple Music users have been waiting for this forever! For anyone who's
curious about how this product developed:

\- April 2016: Apple releases Apple Music API

\- December 2018: A third-party Apple Music web player is launched on Product
Hunt: [https://www.producthunt.com/posts/playapplemusic-
com](https://www.producthunt.com/posts/playapplemusic-com) (Created by
[https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=shivdhar](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=shivdhar))

\- January 2019: Another third-party alternative, Musish, launches on HN:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18940407](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18940407)

\- Now: Apple finally launches their own official player!

Makes sense with Spotify being so popular on web...

~~~
mortenjorck
I'm not where it fits into the timeline, but Apple has actually offered a
rather obscure and limited way to use Apple Music in a browser for some time
prior to the launch of the full web client.

There's no way to browse, or even launch it directly. You have to search, via
Google or other, for an album, and follow the link to what always used to be
the iTunes Preview page. You can still listen to the thirty-second previews on
this page, but there's a sign-in link in the header that will, quite
surprisingly, unlock full playback of the album without launching iTunes.

It's hardly the full Apple Music experience – all you get is the album you
found and some related links at the bottom, with no access to your library or
playlists – but it does work. I'm not really sure what purpose this
functionality served, other than perhaps as a testbed for the actual web
client, but it's still active for the time being.

~~~
grenoire
This is used for sites such as Genius (lyrics aggregator/social commentary
mix, still uses Apple Music I believe) to provide a snippet to browsers
without a subscription.

------
lainwashere
This is great, no longer trying to get iTunes working in wine on linux, just
play the music straight from the browser, and if you want a native app,
Windows and MacOS has iTunes, no electron non-sense.

~~~
eddieh
Actually Apple Music in iTunes is just a web view that leaks like crazy, to
the point of making iTunes slow to a crawl, if you're quickly navigating
through artists and albums.

Not much better than Electron IMO. Apple Music in the browser seems like there
isn't much hope of a truly native experience now.

~~~
ec109685
The iMessage app is also just a webview (at least up to 10.14).

~~~
reilly3000
I get a beach ball All-the-time with Messages lasting 5-10 seconds. I struggle
to imagine that anything it’s doing is that computationally intensive.

~~~
Angostura
I suspect this might be a problem with your installation - if you create a new
MacOS user account for testing, does the problem persist? I don't recall
Messages every beach-balling for me and I'm not exactly on new hardware.

~~~
oarsinsync
Tangentially, this appears to be the general (and usually, only)
troubleshooting step you can do with Apple products.

Yes, creating a new user resolves the problem. Yes, resetting my device to
factory settings without restoring from backup resolves the problem.

How do I resolve the problem _without_ deleting my entire history?

~~~
Angostura
So if you have problem that goes away with another user, the problem commonly
lies in a corrupted preference related to the app, so you start hunting out
the .plists for the application and moving them to the desktop before
relaunching and seeing if the problem is fixed.

If not, then you start poking about in Application Support for the app.

~~~
oarsinsync
After 9 years of Apple use, I have successfully made this method work one time
(iMessages), and even then, it took a full system reboot after each file move
to validate whether or not that had made a difference.

The whole process took the better part of a day. It was long, it was tedious,
but at least I got there in the end. There was no paid-support story that
would have done this for me, but hey ho, it all worked out. I can't imagine
I'll ever have the time to go through that much effort again.

The same cant be said for my iMessage history on my iPhone, which has been
lost repeatedly as the only solution was "don't restore from your backup".

~~~
Angostura
Ah - I used to use it fairly frequently in the good old OS X 10.2-10.6 days -
for various apps. Seemed to work fairly well.

------
dzonga
seems they're using Ember.js . Reason I love spotify so much is that it's
available on the web, no need to be downloading native apps everywhere. Always
bet on the web. also good to see, another web property using Ember. As a react
dev, competition is healthy

~~~
vonseel
I’m surprised. I haven’t heard anything about Ember in years. Not since 2013
or so.

~~~
tempsy
Is it really that surprising given React is FB and Angular is Google?

~~~
penagwin
> React is FB and Angular is Google

This doesn't matter in practice - they could have freely used either to design
the web client at no cost. If they wanted to take over development and go
their own direction they just had to fork them.

~~~
tempsy
Of course in doesn’t matter in practice. It’s the optics.

~~~
ssalazar
Is there still patent uncertainty around React (or Angular)? Otherwise, Im not
sure why anyone outside HN would care about the optics of which front-end
library was used.

~~~
tempsy
Are you really saying you don’t understand why Apple might not want to use a
framework created by their frenemies in Facebook and Google, especially given
Apple’s focus on privacy and willingness to make an example of FB and Google
for their comparatively lax privacy standards?

~~~
ssalazar
Sure, but how does any of that resonate with the general public? "Apple is
using Facebook's front-end code library" isnt exactly a gripping headline or
tweet. You can read the source code to either; its not as if theyre secretly
embedding tracking into every React/Angular app.

~~~
tempsy
Ok. I mean you can ask that to Tim Cook :) If not optics it’s about ego.
Again, if Apple hates FB/Goog then why use their frameworks when there’s
dozens of other alternatives.

------
new_here
Interesting to see Apple starting to move into the web app product space
(aside from iCloud, of course). Must say though that performance feels a bit
sluggish (esp. hover states) on a Macbook Pro (tested in Firefox, Chrome and
Safari).

Results of a Lighthouse audit (London):
[https://www.dropbox.com/s/jaf3gmgo0tpanba/Screenshot%202019-...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/jaf3gmgo0tpanba/Screenshot%202019-09-06%20at%2011.36.25.png?dl=0)

~~~
pier25
Not surprising as they are using Ember (one of the slowest front end
frameworks), Moment (super heavy date library), and they don't even minify
their code...

[https://js-cdn.music.apple.com/musickit/v2/components/musick...](https://js-
cdn.music.apple.com/musickit/v2/components/musickit-
components/core-02a04998.js)

~~~
dbbk
> one of the slowest front end frameworks

What metric are you referring to here?

~~~
pier25
The JS frameworks benchmarks.

Here are the latest results: [https://krausest.github.io/js-framework-
benchmark/current.ht...](https://krausest.github.io/js-framework-
benchmark/current.html)

As you can see Ember 3.11.1 doesn't fare too well in either performance,
startup metrics, or memory consumption. Glimmer does a bit better but that not
much.

------
RootReducer
Very cool! I've loved Apple Music ever since I was able to upload my library
using Match, and I feel like its recommendations are getting better and
better. Nice to have this in a pinned tab.

------
trillic
Uses 50MB less memory as the sole tab in Firefox than iTunes does on my Mac.
Easy decision to switch for normal playback purposes.

~~~
AceJohnny2
> _Uses 50MB less memory as the sole tab in Firefox than iTunes does on my
> Mac._

Well that's because iTunes also includes Calendar, and Mail, and Safari... ;)

[https://youtu.be/psL_5RIBqnY?t=6254](https://youtu.be/psL_5RIBqnY?t=6254)

~~~
saagarjha
I wonder if it’s possible to trick iTunes into browsing the web. It _is_ a web
view, after all (or at least the store portion is).

------
RandallBrown
This was the reason I chose Spotify over Apple music all those years ago.

Any reason to prefer Apple Music over Spotify? Spotify's recommendations have
been absolutely stellar for me over the years and I have a lot of playlists
and stuff "locking" me in.

~~~
hellcow
For the privacy-minded, Apple Music doesn't notify Facebook each time you open
the app. Spotify does.

~~~
ValentineC
> _For the privacy-minded, Apple Music doesn 't notify Facebook each time you
> open the app._

Isn't there a way to disconnect Facebook from one's Spotify account
altogether?

~~~
hellcow
I don't even have a Facebook account. That doesn't stop Facebook's SDK from
phoning home every time Spotify is opened.

------
ryanianian
Whatever. I was really hoping to see some improvements to the music-
organization and display aspects here but it looks like they just re-
implemented the weird parts of iTunes using html5.

For example: It drives me crazy how Apple Music emphasizes the idea that
"Recently Added" is _only grouped by albums_. I don't add whole _albums_ to my
library, I add individual _songs_. I want to play all the songs I've recently
added because hey it's new music I like. Why can't I get an auto-updating
playlist of all the songs I've recently added? None of the cloud-based Apple
platforms support smart-playlists and the "Recently Added" section only lets
you play songs from an individual album from which you may have only added a
single song.

It's super weird. - Apple music seems to really push you into either whole
albums or the overly-generic editor-curated playlists.

~~~
bendavis381
On iOS: Library -> Songs -> Sort by recently added

~~~
Rebelgecko
Unfortunately, it doesn't look like this option exists on Android. Maybe it's
hiding with the setting to let me download all of my songs.

------
flixic
Very nice to see them provide a dark CSS theme via prefers-color-scheme,
following system preference.

~~~
saagarjha
I would not be surprised if they have this because it’s used in the Music app.

------
mikewhy
It appears even Apple themselves do not bother with using the overflow
scrolling CSS that iOS needs.

~~~
floatingatoll
On iOS, it redirects to the native iTunes App. Even if you somehow manage to
overcome that, its presence clearly indicates that iOS isn’t a supported
target - at which point, assuming it’s _intentionally_ broken as you describe
for non-beta reasons (this is not necessarily true), using that CSS would
potentially be wasteful and break non-iOS users!

~~~
mikewhy
> its presence clearly indicates that iOS isn’t a supported target.

They added an "open in music" button to the hamburger menu, assumed only on
iOS. So they obviously did something for iOS users.

Also agreed that this is pretty silly, people will of course just use the
native app.

------
erikig
Finally. Live web clients are great - it makes it easier to reverse engineer,
scrape data and build add-ons. Kudos!

~~~
saagarjha
I don’t know…personally, Apple’s native apps are easier for me to reverse
engineer than most minified obfuscated JavaScript. Then again, I’m not a web
developer.

~~~
dewey
Usually you only need to look at the requests anyway and there the web client
is probably a bit nicer than iTunes with cert pinning if I remember correctly.

------
tptacek
Can't link directly to a personal playlist (even if it's "published" to
Apple's weird social network) for someone not already logged in (they just get
the Apple Music landing page). So close! They're so smart, they'll figure this
out some day!

~~~
wyclif
Right, and that's one of the reasons why I use Spotify and won't use Apple
Music.

~~~
wyclif
Actually, this won't even let me sign in with my Apple ID. It accepts my
username/password, and prompts me to "Try it now", but when I click that, I
get a drop down telling me I need to open the Apple Music client. Bravo,
Apple.

~~~
saagarjha
(It’s a beta.)

------
dewey
Now that there’s one more platform where Apple Music is available it would be
really great if we could have the playback queue synced between them. I don’t
want to recreate my listening queue I every time I’m changing my device.

------
chrischen
I’m curious what framework Apple uses for web now. Last I checked (a week ago)
icloud.com is still implemented with SproutCore.

~~~
pier25
Ember, jQuery, Moment, and RequireJS.

[https://imgur.com/DioXtwe](https://imgur.com/DioXtwe)

~~~
lajr
What extension is this?

~~~
guessmyname
Wappalyzer [1] is much better in my opinion.

And is available for both Chrome [2] and Firefox [3] as well as a Bookmarklet
[4].

The extension that @pier25 is using seems to be available only on Google
Chrome [5].

[1] [https://www.wappalyzer.com/](https://www.wappalyzer.com/)

[2]
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/wappalyzer/gppongm...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/wappalyzer/gppongmhjkpfnbhagpmjfkannfbllamg)

[3]
[https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/wappalyzer/](https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/wappalyzer/)

[4] [https://www.wappalyzer.com/download](https://www.wappalyzer.com/download)

[5] [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ui-
stack/ijagboogl...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ui-
stack/ijagbooglignnjecmjnmdfapfbgblkdk)

~~~
twhb
Wappalyzer's results for example.com, a 1.3 KB static page with no JS or sub-
requests, include eight JS frameworks and two web font providers. Its results
for facebook.com include a web framework made by Yahoo and deprecated in 2014.
It says Youtube is built on WordPress, and HN is a React app with custom
fonts.

~~~
pier25
> _HN is a React app with custom fonts_

I only see that HN runs on NGinx.

~~~
twhb
I was using the "Technology lookup" box on the homepage, testing with the
extension I get only Nginx too. And Youtube seems right and example.com maybe
right, though nothing at all for Facebook.

------
t-writescode
This is very interesting. I'm using PiHole; and, it seems that when I click
that link, I'm sent to the Chinese version of the Apple site and there's no
beta. Very strange!

I'm experiencing this issue in Firefox, where I have all my regular ad-
blocking, and an incognito window in Chrome, where I don't have any of it.

Anyone else seeing this?

------
bwip
Ah, nice! I was an early Beats Music subscriber and really lamented the
eventual loss of the web interface.

------
president
As much as I commend them for creating a web client for their music service,
the UI looks like it was designed by an amateur. Can't really put my finger on
it but it's something to do with the content alignment, the gradients used. I
would have expected better from Apple.

------
mlthoughts2018
I’m so sad that most consumers want to pay for things like this or Spotify.

I only buy digital albums, almost always from Bandcamp or bespoke band-
specific sites, or Amazon if there’s no other choice.

Always just a straight download of mp3 or ogg formats, backed up and
accessible in cloud storage.

I use VLC player on all my devices, and syncing music with the VLC wifi
download tool is so extremely easy and simple.

I have all the music I could ever possibly want, easily accessible on all
devices and easy to sync on all devices, no internet connection needed, no
monthly charge or user account, no ads, can transfer it all to any new devices
I get with no vendor lock-in.

I just can’t believe the populace was suckered into music streaming instead of
music owning. So sad.

~~~
vonseel
I would have never discovered 99% of the music I listen to if I didn't use
Spotify.

There are pros/cons to both sides of this argument. Many artists would not
have a music _career_ if it weren't for platforms like Spotify (mainly
Spotify). Spotify put their music in people's ears. Spotify made people fans
and now those fans buy tickets and go to their shows, so these bands are able
to tour.

There are pros/cons to both sides of this story.

~~~
mlthoughts2018
> “I would have never discovered 99% of the music I listen to if I didn't use
> Spotify.”

Can you take a step back and recognize this is weird and pathological. Music
recommendations should come from experience, people, multiple sources. If a
for-profit platform interested in extracting as much money from you as they
can (let alone minimize their costs paid to artists) is responsible for 99% of
what you believe you are choosing to consume... something’s pretty wrong.

Imagine saying, I wouldn’t have discovered 99% of the foods I like if not for
my Blue Apron subscription...

~~~
dmitriid
> Music recommendations should come from experience, people, multiple sources

Why do you assume streaming replaces all that? Streaming services immensely
_complement_ all that.

~~~
mlthoughts2018
The comment above specifically said 99% of the music they listen to was
discovered by Spotify. That is replacing, not complementing. This is also the
same model I see in friends or colleagues who use Spotify: it is their sole
source of music or music recommendation.

~~~
vonseel
I suppose their recommendation quality only goes up the _more_ you use the
platform. It is a damn good recommender. From _Discover Weekly_ to similar
features like "Artist/Song/Playlist Radio" that continue playing similar music
after your playlist/album ends... the Spotify recommendation systems are
probably the most successful, enhancing implementation of ML I can recall
seeing in the wild. Certainly much better than YouTube which for months has
been begging me to watch this "Pete Davidson Got Stuck Paying for Kid Cudi's
Birthday Dinner..." video (I'm not a fan of either of those guys).

Maybe you should give it a try. Certainly can't hurt.

------
eof
I recently switched to a windows machine from Mac at work, and brought in
iTunes to listen to Apple Music. It’s really as bad as I remember.

Really great timing on this for me.

------
copperx
Has anyone noticed this? On the native apps, when you click on an album, the
most popular songs have a star icon next to them. I like that. The third party
web apps that consume the Apple Music API don't have the feature, but I
thought Apple's official web app would have it, but they don't!

I hope they add this feature to the app (and API!).

------
hprotagonist
Nice!

Now, how about some cross-platform iCloud Drive love? huh?

~~~
minimaxir
You can access iCloud Drive on the web at iCloud.com

~~~
hprotagonist
i want something a lot more like dropbox or gdrive which have native
applications, preferably with command line interfaces.

~~~
minimaxir
iCloud for Windows includes Drive: [https://support.apple.com/en-
us/HT204283](https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204283)

If you are talking about Linux then you should be more explicit about that.

------
Fr0styMatt88
It’d be awesome if they did this next with their movie and TV stuff. I have a
bunch of stuff purchased on iTunes that I can’t play on my TV (out of HDMI
ports and TV stand space and no AirPlay solution for Android that I know of
will work due to the DRM).

Really cool they’re starting to open this stuff up at least.

------
wpdev_63
It's funny that the web app performs better than the desktop app.

------
baroffoos
Requires DRM to be turned on for it to work. No thanks.

~~~
duskwuff
Well, uh, yes. You really expected them to let you download an unencumbered
copy of any song in the iTunes catalog?

~~~
baroffoos
Yes, I expect that a service I paid for does not include untrusted malware.
Thankfully there are other streaming services which do not do this.

~~~
lxgr
Could you name one please? (That has a comparable catalog to Spotify/Apple
Music)

~~~
baroffoos
I used to use soundcloud which has a fairly large catalog of music if you have
the paid version. I eventually canceled it because they had an annoying habit
of replacing tracks with random remasters so something in your liked list
could change to a different version that is much worse. These days I either
use bandcamp or torrents.

------
jccalhoun
Interesting that Beats 1 doesn't seem to be listed in the radio section. They
hyped it so much and it has just faded away.

~~~
dbbk
It's a beta, live radio is forthcoming apparently.

------
Mikeb85
Apple finally comes out with something Spotify and Google have had for
years... Good job.

~~~
thekyle
Well Google is certainly trying their hardest to give Apple the upper hand by
discontinuing Google Play Music in favor of YouTube Music. I don't know a
single person who actually likes the new YouTube Music.

I ended up switching to Spotify as a result.

------
nik736
Does not work in Safari for me. When playing songs they simply don't start.
Weird.

------
IronWolve
Says my Chrome and Firefox on Linux (ubuntu) not supported. :(

~~~
frio
I get that semi-regularly; do you have strict content blocking +
fingerprinters turned on in Firefox? IIRC that advertises that you're on FF
ESR and a few sites deem that too old.

------
sys_64738
Messages beta should be along shortly! Fingers crossed.

~~~
ulkesh
Even though many providers now have end-to-end encryption with web interfaces
for messaging, Apple has maintained that it can't be done securely. We shall
see if they have changed their minds.

------
baby
I’m really sad about the state of international music on youtube. Asian music
is completely absent. Worse, all Chinese alternatives are blocked in the US.

------
major505
wow... that took a long time to happen.

------
Quiza12
About time!

------
hsk823
So much for [https://musi.sh](https://musi.sh)

~~~
mosselman
I was using this on Ubuntu, works great, but I'd rather use something
official.

------
aphextron
RIP Spotify.

~~~
hombre_fatal
Not really. I've never used Apple Music, but as far as I can tell, it has no
real free tier (just song previews) and it has a long way to go if it wants to
compete with Spotify's playlists.

For example, regional playlists. Apple Music just has "Top 100 {country}"
which is just radio pop music. Compare that to Spotify's Explore ->
{Mexico,Colombia,Arab,etc} -> all the different subgenres.

Spotify's free tier is a no-brainer. I've had to listen to so many Spotify ads
at parties and get-togethers that it's clear nobody cares about them either.
Unless I'm missing something, Apple Music is just offering a three-month free
trial.

Also, even if Apple Music managed to be a Spotify clone, doesn't it only work
on iOS/OSX?

~~~
dan1234
> Also, even if Apple Music managed to be a Spotify clone, doesn't it only
> work on iOS/OSX?

Apple Music has been available on Android for a few years.

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.apple.andr...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.apple.android.music)

~~~
Rebelgecko
Although IME it doesn't have feature parity with the desktop or iOS versions

------
ktzar
So, Apple is launching an offering on par with Google's seven years later. Is
that what we call innovation?

~~~
vonseel
People actually use Google Music? Everyone I know who listens to music via
Google-owned properties uses Youtube (free). Others use Spotify, Apple Music,
and Pandora, in that order of popularity.

~~~
pier25
I do use Google Play Music. I have minor gripes but in general I like it. You
can upload your music and sync it in all your devices.

Google is going to kill it and transfer its users/content/playlists to Youtube
Music. Not sure what I'm going to do after that happens.

