It abbbsolutely does not. Sorry, but I've been seriously considering switching to Spotify just because the desktop Apple Music app (on macOS) might be the worst Mac app I've ever used- certainly the worst piece of Apple software I've ever used. It is shockingly, shamefully bad for what's supposed to be a flagship service of one of the worlds richest companies.
And to be clear, I'm not one of the people on here who's always complaining about various apps. I think Slack is mostly fine. I think Electron apps are generally a positive thing. But the desktop Apple Music app is an abomination. If you don't use an iOS device for the majority of your listening, steer clear of Apple Music.
Agreed, though I suspect the grass is not much greener on the other side.
iTunes became worse and worse over time, but the worst of iTunes was 100 times better than Apple Music on Mac. A total embarrassment and work of utter incompetence. I'd take iTunes back any day.
Try opening Apple Mail and searching for an email you know is there.
With that said, I own stacks blu rays and CD’s that can easily be imported into my NAS and then attached to servies like Plex[1] or Navidrome[2]. I can even share those libraries with friends and family which is an added bonus. Navidrome also exposes a subsonic api that clients can connect to. PlexAmp can also import your music library.
With the exception of Plex, I think we’re entering a golden age of open source software to allow this type of thing. Setting up these services is fairly straightforward and maintenance is also pretty easy.
Pure bliss.
It really bothers me how companies convert people to subscription services, then twist the knife in ever deeper with scummy dark patterns. I would have been happy with Spotify's old app from 2015 or so pretty much indefinitely... but they just have to shove podcasts in every crevice of the app in the name of profit. And the app continues to get laggier and buggier every month (oh, how I grew to loathe that spinning green circle).
I understand that they're trying to survive, but when I can literally run a more reliable music streaming stack from my living room with FOSS, I question their technical prowess. And boy does it make me wonder what those thousands of engineers are up to.
I don’t mind these genres but looking at my personal collection I have 400 gigs of rock, 500 gigs of rap, and 800 gigs of jazz. None of these three genres ever appear for me on Spotify. Spotify is by far the worse way for me to discover music because it’ll never show me something new or different; just the same song several dozen times.
The best way to find music is talking to people. Before what.cd shut down they had collages that I’d make heavy use of, basically lists of songs and artists for a variety of genres or feelings. One I’d heavy contribute to was jazzy hip hop. This one genre would encapsulate 30-60 artists which I’m sure that Spotify would put in separate worlds.
There has never been a “recommendation” service that I have found more useful than talking to someone.
The reviewer begins by giving a rundown of quite a range of equipment they use, their knowledge and enthusiasm about music technology, and how important sound quality is to their listening experience.
But you think they didn’t do the simplest and most obvious thing to maximize the sound quality on Spotify?
Apple Music -> Better integrated into my iPhone, iPad, etc, etc.
Is there really much beyond this? Other than some very niche/indie stuff or contract licensing oddities with an overseas market like mine (Australia) ... I don't see any difference in catalog. Can someone more familiar with the catalog dataset weigh in? I'd be interested to know if one of them actually has a more extensive collection.
My music library is around 18k songs, so not being able to store them all in my library on Spotify was not tenable.
Curious if there are other things I’m missing
- Can't search for songs in my library. I can go to a playlist and search for a song, or I can go to search, choose "my library" and search for an artist, album or playlist, but not a song. Makes it difficult to go "I want to listen to that obscure cover of All Along The Watchtower I have in one of my playlists somewhere"
- No easy way to listen to a playlist on shuffle, starting from a specific song. You can search the playlist, but that limits you to shuffling the search results. You can scroll through your playlist until you find what you are looking for, but that is not easy.
- Do note that fixing this makes it difficult to easily listen to your favorite songs by artist. E.g, now you can go to "my fave songs" list and search for Michael Jackson, and voila, you have a temp playlist of all your favourite MJ songs!
- When creating a playlist, there are no "suggested songs"
- It is very difficult to listen to 1 song. Often I just want to listen to that song and nothing else.
Some life hacks for Apple Music:
There's a lot of stuff you can do on Apple Music on your Mac, that you can't do on your phone. for example, in a playlist you can choose when a song should start and end (so you can cut off an unnecessary intro, or "hidden track") and this will follow into your phone.
Yes you can. Selecting My Library and putting the song will have the song show up and you can filter the results via the segmented-ish menu directly under the search bar.
> No easy way to listen to a playlist on shuffle, starting from a specific song. You can search the playlist, but that limits you to shuffling the search results. You can scroll through your playlist until you find what you are looking for, but that is not easy.
You select the song and enable shuffle. This will persist until you turn shuffle off.
> When creating a playlist, there are no "suggested songs"
Continuous mode should feel this niche but maybe not.
> It is very difficult to listen to 1 song. Often I just want to listen to that song and nothing else.
I listen to one song all the time by searching it putting it on repeat, or turning off continuous mode. This doesn’t work on playlist though.
Last I checked, Spotify has this issue too
The live Apple Music stations are great when you find a diamond in the rough. They let you save and like songs from the live stream. It can be a little tough to find a radio show that jibes with your taste, but there are some excellent artists and DJs on there, and most of the live shows are playable on-demand.
I don't even want to give Apple money but it's either that or pay like $40 for an imported CD...
Those (and the spotify-style mixes) are my favorite features of Tidal.
I had mixed luck with Spotify years ago, and never looked back.
- Top 10 tracks.
- Artist posted playlist if any. (Only 1 is shown here, maybe the most popular one ?)
- Entire discography. (Singles, EPs, albums in chronological order)
- Spotify editorial playlists prominently featuring said artist.
- Merch.
- Bio.
- All artist posted playlists.
- Similar artists.
- Soundtracks or albums where the artist was featured.
I've used Spotify, Deezer, currently Youtube Music because bundled with my premium. I don't like it, I'd like to move, but I'm not sure I can tell why Tidal would provide a better service that's worth the hassle of importing all my playlists. They're all a little crap in their own way.
FLAC audio is cool I guess, but honestly that would not be a good enough selling point for me.
It’s about this point in the article where I lost trust in the author. A ‘psychoacoustic model’ was used for MP3, a codec built in 91. Exploiting human perceptual traits for better compression isn’t novel to AAC, though admittedly it’s slightly better in very low bandwidth applications vs OGG. Can’t say any audiophile would stream below 128k though
(For clarification, I meant the performance of the desktop app isn’t discussed).
