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Somewhat off topic, I recently recovered all my mp3s and tried to import them into Apple Music. After having used Spotify for a long time, I’m finding it very d

Somewhat off topic, I recently recovered all my mp3s and tried to import them into Apple Music. After having used Spotify for a long time, I’m finding it very difficult to use. The lack of intelligence around what I’m currently listening to, intelligent groupings, etc. I’m realizing how a central catalog with great data analytics has made Spotify such a powerhouse. Perhaps Apple Music, the subscription service, would be able to do similar. But what is one to do with just mp3s these days? Is there anything remotely good, or an I always having to pick an artist/album/genre manually from the entire catalog?

deleted 5y ago
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wwalexander 5y ago
Apple should be able to identify your MP3s as long as those songs are also in the Apple Music collection (and you are subscribed to Apple Music). There’s a “Create Station” feature that might be what you’re looking for. Additionally, for discovering new music, Apple Music has plenty of recommendations and curated playlists to check out. Like most machine-curated approximations of my taste, these never quite do it for me and I end up finding new music by exploring artists/producers/labels I’m interested in “by hand”. But in any case, Apple Music is definitely a better choice over Spotify if you want to maintain a collection of personal media files while getting access to a big streaming catalogue and recommendations. If you use iCloud Music Library, your MP3s are cloud-synced to all your devices automatically. Spotify allows adding personal files, but it must be done manually per-device, so it’s quite a headache if you regularly listen to anything that isn’t available to stream (due to business, politics, or simply never having an official release).
- azinman2 5y ago
  I’m not an Apple Music subscriber. I guess I’m asking for a pure mp3 experience that matches what the subscription services can do today, or at least a good amount of it.
kitsunesoba 5y ago
I think the big blocker for an offline, subscription free Spotify-like experience is lack of a central repository where listening data from all users is stored. You could do some things with metadata on the songs themselves but automated playlists like Spotify and Apple Music have to my knowledge rely on models trained with vast amounts of listener data. You could patch something together using last.fm as the data source maybe, but I don’t think scrobbling to last.fm has been popular for many years at this point, which is going to severely limit the quality of generated playlists for newer music. Additionally, last I knew last.fm’s API was still XML based which makes it not so ergonomic to use in today’s JSON centric world.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

wwalexander 5y ago

Apple should be able to identify your MP3s as long as those songs are also in the Apple Music collection (and you are subscribed to Apple Music). There’s a “Create Station” feature that might be what you’re looking for. Additionally, for discovering new music, Apple Music has plenty of recommendations and curated playlists to check out. Like most machine-curated approximations of my taste, these never quite do it for me and I end up finding new music by exploring artists/producers/labels I’m interested in “by hand”. But in any case, Apple Music is definitely a better choice over Spotify if you want to maintain a collection of personal media files while getting access to a big streaming catalogue and recommendations. If you use iCloud Music Library, your MP3s are cloud-synced to all your devices automatically. Spotify allows adding personal files, but it must be done manually per-device, so it’s quite a headache if you regularly listen to anything that isn’t available to stream (due to business, politics, or simply never having an official release).

azinman2 5y ago
I’m not an Apple Music subscriber. I guess I’m asking for a pure mp3 experience that matches what the subscription services can do today, or at least a good amount of it.

kitsunesoba 5y ago

I think the big blocker for an offline, subscription free Spotify-like experience is lack of a central repository where listening data from all users is stored. You could do some things with metadata on the songs themselves but automated playlists like Spotify and Apple Music have to my knowledge rely on models trained with vast amounts of listener data. You could patch something together using last.fm as the data source maybe, but I don’t think scrobbling to last.fm has been popular for many years at this point, which is going to severely limit the quality of generated playlists for newer music. Additionally, last I knew last.fm’s API was still XML based which makes it not so ergonomic to use in today’s JSON centric world.