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.
With iCloud, tracks you add to your library are automatically uploaded to Apple's cloud and become available on all devices. That helps a lot because you don't have to resort to using some other player for that those obscure albums that aren't streaming anywhere. After all, while Apple and Spotify have a lot of music, there are still many holes in their inventories.
Apple has always been much nicer about offline track availability. Just click the download icon and the tracks will stay on your device. Spotify has had this feature, but it's been flaky. After Apple Music launched, they eventually added a "Download" toggle to albums, but only in the mobile app (it's there for playlists in the desktop app, for some reason).
Spotify has a 10,000 song limit that applies to adding (or "liking" as it's now called) to your library. You can keep more in playlists, but you can't "like" more than 10,000 songs, which is crazy. It's not a lot of songs. My jazz collection alone is more than that. Apple's limit is 100,000, as far as I can tell.
Isn't there a way to disconnect Facebook from one's Spotify account altogether?
The ability to upload one's library [1] is huge — I believe both Spotify and Apple Music still aren't very good with video game music.
[1] iCloud Music Library: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204926
You can use iTunes match to provide cloud-based high quality versions for music ripped from your CDs (or collected during your teenage Napster years).
Even better, being able to mix content from your iCloud Music Library and streamable content from Apple Music is a huge plus.
For my use, all the major streaming platforms are broadly equivalent in functionality, so I go with the cheapest one. That was Amazon Music when I had Prime, which I haven't renewed. Spotify is about 50% more expensive than Apple Music in my location, so I'll likely be going with Apple Music when my Amazon subscription expires.
I imagine this is more Apple’s doing than Spotify’s, but last I tried I couldn’t put Spotify music on my Apple Watch to use untethered. I run with my Apple Watch, Bluetooth headphones and no phone, and being able to do that is worth choosing Apple Music for me.
Also no Facebook SDK if you care about that, there was the recent article here about how that pings Facebook with identifiers on app launch even if you’re not using any of its functionality yourself.
In offline mode, the app is basically useless. No way to browse through the artist's whose songs I've saved up. Gets worse -
Say I want to listen to a particular album. I type the name of the album. I do not get a result of the album which I can go to, and play start to end. I do get, however, random songs from the album which if I'm lucky, and remember the sequence in which they appear on the album, I can manually add to the queue and listen to.
The artist tab doesn't work. The album tab doesn't work. These are online only tabs which include things like "New releases", "Fans also like", "Performing Livr" etc.
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Even when I'm connected to the net ( at home), there is no way to see all the artists whose songs I've added to my library. There is no library.
Songs you can "like", artists you can "follow". When i follow an artist, and click on him, I don't see the albums I've added to my library/liked.
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tl,dr: It's a UX clusterfuck. They took something which works and fucked it up ad infinitum. I've switched to Apple music, which is undoubtedly bad in terms of recommendations, but at least it lets me listen to the stuff I know I like.
Ember’s model/view binding and event model still closely resembles Cocoa’s, as far as I know.
IIRC, the old Mac App Store was in ember too
https://blog.emberjs.com/2019/08/15/octane-release-plan.html
https://technology.riotgames.com/news/architecture-league-cl...
What some see as constraints, others see as consistency. It's more typically seen in "dashboard apps" but it's also great when you need to quickly spin up a new site and don't want to have to configure anything. I know movie studios in LA that use it for those kinds of promo websites, because of the fast turn around time.
Another thing that is cool about Ember is the community-driven process- if you have a good idea for Ember and the energy to make it happen, it typically will happen. Makes you feel like you can make a difference if that's your thing.
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.
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.
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...
- is available almost anywhere: your phone, your car, your smart waffle maker.
- leads to much better music discovery through curated playlists, “discover weekly”s, radio stations based on songs/artists/genres
- you can instantly share your music and music tastes with friends, leading to even more music discovery
- many more other minor things (like creating playlists for parties etc.)
I also heavily dispute that Spotify, Apple, etc lead to better search or discovery.
This comes from someone with a collection of roughly 1500 12" vinlys, meaning from someone who actually owns his music.
- 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 (Created by https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=shivdhar)
- January 2019: Another third-party alternative, Musish, launches on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18940407
- Now: Apple finally launches their own official player!
Makes sense with Spotify being so popular on web...
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.
Well that's because iTunes also includes Calendar, and Mail, and Safari... ;)
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.
That said, I don't see the overflow (iPhone XS).
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?
I don't have a strong preference either way, but I ultimately stayed on Apple (after switching to get 3mo trial). I can't stand ads (it's not that I mind the ads themselves so much as I don't like anything interrupting my music. I rarely use playlists of my own or the service's creation, I just want to have a high-quality library that I can expand at any time and store in the cloud.
Apple Music has been available on Android for a few years.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.apple.andr...
Not much better than Electron IMO. Apple Music in the browser seems like there isn't much hope of a truly native experience now.
Results of a Lighthouse audit (London): https://www.dropbox.com/s/jaf3gmgo0tpanba/Screenshot%202019-...
https://js-cdn.music.apple.com/musickit/v2/components/musick...
What metric are you referring to here?
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.
The fact that Apple is using third-party DRM in a web app is news. Apple TV / iTunes videos never had a web app, and presumably DRM was a big factor.
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.
Now, how about some cross-platform iCloud Drive love? huh?
I ended up switching to Spotify as a result.
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?
Really great timing on this for me.
I hope they add this feature to the app (and API!).
Really cool they’re starting to open this stuff up at least.
