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

reports of problems (while there, especially for files deleting themselves) are not at the frequency they used to be, so i've just signed back up to this. i'm home a lot atm, so if the whole thing fucks up at least i'll get a few bucks of streaming out of it.

my old 10yo itunes library was a corrupt mess, with routine playback issues on my phone for at least two years (songs skipping, stopping halfway etc until i restart my phone). because of that, itunes is running off a totally empty library this time. i'm about to upload the latest tmbg album via icml because it's not on streaming yet. anything else i'll find in apple music first and upload as a last resort.

although i've not actually done anything yet it just read a load of my own tastes back at me in 'for you', probably back from when it auto-followed a million artists i already had in my library (i thought it dumped all data after 90 days but apparently not). the interface is certainly nicer and faster than it was in august/september.

oh and all my study material is in onedrive or dropbox where apple music can't destroy it. above all that was the key reason i ditched apple music the first time iirc.

reasonably stable so far. a few hearts unhearted themselves when i added an album to my music, and the hearts in itunes don't all seem to make it to the ios app, but at least they're not fighting me like they were last year. songs can still take ages to start.

the tmbg album matched to a handful of early release songs, but by sheer luck they're identical to the album tracks. apple desperately needs to provide an icloud override.

the single biggest problem so far is that my iphone 6 get hot enough to fry eggs and the battery collapses, even when i'm just browsing and not playing or streaming anything. hoping it's something ephemeral like indexing because it's sort of ridiculous.

btw trent reznor hasn't updated connect since july, which makes me wonder what the hell strategy they have for this when their key artist-in-residence can't be arsed using it.

+ downloads have stayed downloaded
+ uploads have stayed uploaded (only two albums though, and one of them emptied the track numbers like three times)
+ better playlists: many are longer and the relevance is better, even though apple is apparently obsessed with daft punk and the beatles
+ "i don't like this suggestion" appears to do something now
- when i remove an album, it removes all those songs from all my offline playlists because reasons?
- loved tracks keep unloving for no reason, it's like apple doesn't understand how to cloud
- it skips tracks occasionally (plays 2–3 seconds then leaps to the next track)
- definitely more weird library omissions than spotify (e.g. incomplete albums)
- phone still destroys battery & gets megahot for 1/2 hr if i do ~2 minutes of browsing

worth hanging around for a while but i still don't trust it for anything important e.g. library uploads. if google ever bothers making youtube red international and adds an equaliser to ios i'll probably just do that.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-05-04/apple-to-revamp-streaming-music-service-after-mixed-reviews-departures

Apple Inc. is planning sweeping changes to its year-old music streaming service after the first iteration of the product was met with tepid reviews and several executives brought in to revive the company's music strategy departed.

The results will be on display in June at the developers conference, which will mark the one-year anniversary of Apple Music. Apple’s leaders have expressed optimism about the new look and feel the team is working better together, said a person close to the executive team.

Wary of a revamp. Much prefer the incremental changes they've been making.

almanac, how old is your phone and what version of ios are you running?

yeah, difficult to believe apple will suddenly fix it in one blow, but if they can sort out all the really deep bugs (shitty cloud upload/match, people's downloads vanishing) it'll be the best service available.

xp it's an iphone 6 with 9.3.1

I agree with your approach.

My biggest UI beef is not being able to search Apple Music and My Music at the same time.

find u a girl who can do both

still randomly skipping tracks, a lot. apple music tracks. i'm even working off a totally clean database. this should straight up not happen. their magic revamp really needs to fix dumb shit like this.

https://blog.vellumatlanta.com/2016/05/04/apple-stole-my-music-no-seriously/

i swear to god I have never once had this issue people complain about. I can only think that they're doing something really weird or wrong.

"still randomly skipping tracks, a lot. apple music tracks" is this while streaming? how is your connection?

I haven't experienced track skipping either, with neither local or streamed music. Not to say other people don't, just that I haven't personally.

have you experienced wholesale deletion of local files?

utterly baffled as to why anybody would give these clowns access to their system/storage

the cloud is a lie

it's almost economically feasible to just run your own cloud these days

I just have a hidden board on ilx where I encode my files as text and then post them, it's very good

streaming did 9/11

lol apple

seriously though it's bad and lame xp

it's almost economically feasible to just run your own cloud these days

Subsonic

is that any good? I use Plex for home streaming and like it.

It's very good and works a charm, not that hard to set up either. I've heard Plex is similar.

I mostly use Plex for video streaming, the PS/Apple TV bits are pretty nice

i use plex for streaming my old library plus video, it's fine. it stutters a bit if I stream to my phone over the data plan and not on wifi but otherwise it's great.

lol at "update"

http://mjtsai.com/blog/2016/05/05/apple-officially-discontinues-webobjects/

"still randomly skipping tracks, a lot. apple music tracks" is this while streaming? how is your connection?

all tracks downloaded and connection is solid. no errors popping up. when it skips, i go straight back and it plays the skipped song like nothing happened.

I haven't experienced track skipping either, with neither local or streamed music. Not to say other people don't, just that I haven't personally.

this time around i deleted my whole library and started from scratch, so it's not even a 10yo corrupt itunes library. playing an mp3 is hardly a pioneering task. i'm assuming the code base is terrifying and hilarious.

https://c2.staticflickr.com/8/7523/26782080441_edbf152024_o.png

Confirmed, I use Apple Music and still have all my original local files.

Same problem with the skipping tracks on iOS but I would only notice this by looking at my phone and seeing artwork flash by (ie the song does not start it just seems unplayable). I've been having this problem on iPhone way before apple music and he files in iTunes do not seem corrupt so I suspect it's a phone issue?

I've been having this problem on iPhone way before apple music and he files in iTunes do not seem corrupt so I suspect it's a phone issue?

same here. i think it started happening around ios7/8 (hence me assuming my itunes db was corrupt). i scrapped and resynced the music db several times but the skipping continued. my ipod classic's playback never missed a beat syncing with the same itunes library. so yeah, ios/music app issue, most likely down to shitty code.

My iPod classic used to skip tracks as well, it was just harder to notice unless you say watching the display

lol @ the webobjects saga

afaik webobjects is pretty good, definitely solid for enterprise-type development. i don't think any startups are going to jump on that technology stack any time soon, though.

It was also great for iOS back ends, especially with native plist support when that was by far the fastest thing on iOS.

We retired our final bit of WO at work this month. It started in the objective C days!

awesome

I did quite a bit of WO work back in 1998-1999 when it was still a NeXT product. Good times, but never dealt with it since then.

http://www.macrumors.com/2016/05/11/apple-ending-itunes-music-downloads/

(Update: Apple Says 'Not True')

i just added a playlist in itunes and my phone stopped playback. when i started playback all my hearts were gone. the rebuild wants to be impeccable because this current service is trash.

hearts are back. uh okay.

http://www.imore.com/apple-confirms-reports-potential-bug-itunes-safeguard-patch-expected-next-week

In an extremely small number of cases users have reported that music files saved on their computer were removed without their permission. We’re taking these reports seriously as we know how important music is to our customers and our teams are focused on identifying the cause. We have not been able to reproduce this issue, however, we’re releasing an update to iTunes early next week which includes additional safeguards. If a user experiences this issue they should contact AppleCare.

Good to know that a couple of idiots button mash-deleting their entire libraries is occupying the dev team's time, rather than oh I don't know, something important like FIXING MATCHING

on the whole the new ios app redeems its weird ugliness by being pretty solid. the only functional bug i have now is that non-downloaded songs get loud after 6 seconds. apparently it's been this way since the ios 10 betas.

also there's a fuzzy rumour that individual & family subscriptions will drop by ~20%.

also since ios 10.1.1 the You may also like section is now called FUSE.Product.YouMayAlsoLike.CapitolCase

it's skipping tracks again. a major rebuild and it still can't do the one thing it's supposed to do.

when i go to android i think i'll ditch this. apple has completely lost the plot.

I'd say I'm about 95% satisfied. One annoying issue: My Loved songs playlist has about 2500 songs that I keep downloaded on my mobile. However when a song becomes unavailable for whatever reason, the playlist shows as not being completely downloaded and I have to scroll though all those songs to see which one has been grated out. Takes a good 5 minutes. Minor annoyance.

on top of that, when it downloads tracks as normal and one gets stuck, it interrupts me (with a modal dialogue) to ask whether i want to try again. instead of just trying again. this shouldn't ever happen and indicates their ui design is being done by circus clowns.

how about remembering what state you were in / what minute of the 2 hour mix i was at you piece of shit app