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Apple Music is the most buggy and annoying software I use

374 points by nephics 4y ago

SergeAx 4y ago
If instead of ranting people would just cancel their subscriptions to bad services - we would live in a much better world.
frankjr 4y ago
I cancelled my subscription after the player regularly stopped emitting sound - the player would show it's playing a song and increment the progress bar but no sound was coming out. I have never had the same problem with any other player. Oh and sometimes any song would just keep buffering until I restarted the app. As far as the slowness goes, I attribute that to the fact that the app is not native, it's just some sort of Electron-like mess. Then again so is Spotify (I think?) and it feels much snappier.
- Eric_WVGG 4y ago
  Apple Music on Mac shifted from web views to native sometime in the last eighteen months, I think.
  - galad87 4y ago
    They did, but the new native views are quite buggy, so while it uses less memory, the user experience improvement was minimal. Apple should really stop shipping such buggy softwares.
    - senojsitruc 4y ago
      I wonder if they had to use SwiftUI.
      - galad87 4y ago
        No, it's mainly a complex NSCollectionView.
  - zwily 4y ago
    It hasn’t switched yet. Hopefully this year.
    - galad87 4y ago
      They did in macOS 12.2.
  - whywhywhywhy 4y ago
    UI became painful to use when they switched from unfurling the albums in situ to going to another screen where you have to click back.
edhelas 4y ago
Using a RPi with a 1Tb SSD connected to it. MPD + various clients on all my devices, including the wonderful https://github.com/jcorporation/myMPD https://github.com/jcorporation/myMPD Lightweight, all free-software, can handle a massive audio-database, all synchronized. What else do we need ?
- plonk 4y ago
  If I bought every song I've listened to over the past 5 years, I would have paid thousands.
  - pdimitar 4y ago
    Then pirate them.
    - plonk 4y ago
      Copyright has issues, but "not paying for any of it" isn't the solution.
      - sascha_sl 4y ago
        I'd consider "paying for the things you like within your means" a better option morally than many streaming sites though.
      - pdimitar 4y ago
        "Everything you pay for is actually rented and never truly owned" is sure as hell not the solution either.
  - edhelas 4y ago
    I've borrowed hundreds of CD from the different public-city-libraries I've been the past 15 years. In France you're allowed to make private copy of books and CDs :)
    - 4y ago
drawkbox 4y ago
I like Apple Music because it integrates well with the Apple line. More importantly though it is one of the highest paying per stream to artists [1]. Streaming needs to be much more lucrative for artists and consumer choice helps that. It is nice to be able to buy the music as well if you want to support. Being part of Apple One is huge as well. The latest music streaming royalty rates are as follows. PLATFORM ROYALTY (PER STREAM) STREAMS TO MAKE $1 Tidal Music $0.01284 78 Apple Music $0.008 125 Amazon Music $0.00402 249 Spotify $0.00318 314 YouTube Music $0.002 500 Pandora $0.00133 752 Deezer $0.0011 909 I have lots of mp3/stored music as well and Spotify client started taking like 20-30 minutes to start up. Wasn't sure what it was doing... Some of their patents for tracking are a bit dystopian as well. New Spotify Patent Involves Monitoring Users’ Speech to Recommend Music > The streaming platform is interested in extracting data points like emotional state, gender, age, and accent to hone its recommendations [2]. Nah. Apple already has my info and reasonably treats it well eventhough it is too much, I don't need another service to invade privacy. [1] https://producerhive.com/music-marketing-tips/streaming-royalties-breakdown/ https://producerhive.com/music-marketing-tips/streaming-roya... [2] https://pitchfork.com/news/new-spotify-patent-involves-monitoring-users-speech-to-recommend-music/ https://pitchfork.com/news/new-spotify-patent-involves-monit...
- plonk 4y ago
  > I like Apple Music because it integrates well with the Apple line. Is there a need to integrate with anything? All I need is to play music. Spotify is as integrated into macOS and iOS as Apple Music. > More importantly though it is one of the highest paying per stream to artists [1]. Streaming needs to be much more lucrative for artists and consumer choice helps that. Too bad they are shooting themselves in the foot by neglecting user experience.
  - drawkbox 4y ago
    > Is there a need to integrate with anything? I do like a more open/api platform and wish Apple was, but Spotify probably won't be for long. Tracking my plays takes more work with everything to closed. Apple misses some of the obscure stuff but I will always side with the higher payer to artists. I also like just being able to buy albums I like and support artists.
plonk 4y ago
I've never seen a search box that couldn't actually handle input before, but Apple Music made it. If I click in the search box and start typing, the box will lose focus at some random time and all my next keystrokes will count as play commands, usually pausing the music. If I come back to the search box, it happens again. I know "text boxes" are cutting-edge technology that's barely 3 seconds old and developers are still learning to program them safely. Still, I expected more from a trillion-dollar company.
- lancesells 4y ago
  I have this text field thing happen with Apple Maps as well. I use Apple Music and it's got all sorts of problems. "Hey Siri, play Chill Mix" "Sorry, I'm having trouble finding that in your library." Chill Mix is generated from Apple Music based on what you play. I use it every morning except those days it just can't be found.
- papito 4y ago
  Well, the driverless car software will be much more solid. We hope?
brohoolio 4y ago
I had a bunch of random stability issues with Music, they mostly went away when I deleted and reinstalled the App. Still not what I would expect out of Apple for one of their main apps. About half the time when I use it on the desktop I have to force quit Music. I have no idea how a non-technical person would use something so buggy.
infofarmer 4y ago
Loosely related, App Store is by far the worst of the top-1000 online stores. It almost sounds like proper competition would do some good here.
ushakov 4y ago
i have used Apple Music for a short time on my mac the amount of usability issues the app has are phenomenal i was actually more surprised when it worked rather when it didn’t not worth my $9.99
carlycue 4y ago
The app performance of Apple Music on MacOS and iOS is an abomination. It's consistently twice as slow as Spotify, from loading playlists to loading search results and playing a song. I would be ashamed if I worked on the Apple Music team. How can a person with any self respect go to work every day and be okay with Apple Music in it's current state?
- 5350-uiop-1130 4y ago
  there is probably some context missing, i always prefer to give the devs the benefit of the doubt. although i currently work at faang as a contractor and certainly the level of ability is not what you might think from the outside.
- ushakov 4y ago
  > How can a person with any self respect go to work every day and be okay with Apple Music in it's current state? 1) debt/mortgage 2) kids 3) vesting stock 4) all of the above
  - ec109685 4y ago
    You can have all of that and still produce good software.
- pschuegr 4y ago
  The lack of attention to detail is palpable. But it's not just an Apple problem. It feels like the vast majority of software, you can open it up and fiddle around for a few minutes and find any number of poorly conceived UX choices not to mention straight up bugs / inconsistencies. I'm not talking "I could make this software better than they did" level stuff, just things that any reasonable person would admit don't make sense.
  - musha68k 4y ago
    Agreed. I often wonder if with agile we threw the baby out with the bath water(fall).
- 4y ago
ysleepy 4y ago
The one thing that sours the entire experience for me is that songs take like 5-15s to start playing when selecting one that isn't super popular. This happens on my ipad, mac, android phone. It feels like some server is spinning up a hard drive to stream it. Apart from that, why the hell is the title and artist only shown in one line that starts scolling instead of showing multiple lines if it doesn't fit, at least in the album view and the player. It's such a pain listening to classical music when the composer and the performer and section are not visible without playing it and waiting for the line to scroll, like wtf.
- bowsamic 4y ago
  This is why I never used Apple Music. I’m too used to how instant Spotify is
- matheusmoreira 4y ago
  These streaming platforms are so bad. We had better software in the 90s and 00s. These trillion dollar corporations can't beat literally decades old technology. The only reason these little services even exist in the first place is to satisfy the whims of copyright monopolists. How many more steps backwards must this industry take before they're satisfied?
  - josephg 4y ago
    I’ve been seriously considering going back to owning a big library of mp3s. I love Spotify for its suggestions - well, when it’s not just playing the same 8 songs on repeat. And I love having my music available on all my devices. But the experience of playing songs feels like it’s taken a big step backwards into some sort of weird corporate happy land. The fact I we still can’t remove podcasts from Spotify is ridiculous. I tried Apple Music but I bounced almost immediately because of the UI.
    - ryandrake 4y ago
      > I’ve been seriously considering going back to owning a big library of mp3s. I never left! Every once in a while I go and try Streaming again to see if they have gotten their shit together, and they still haven't. My hand-curated collection of MP3s, hand-ripped by me using the quality settings I like, carefully stored in a directory structure I understand, with filenames that make sense to me, meticulously tagged with the right metadata, gives me everything I need for music listening, and it doesn't require the Internet or a subscription to play. With hard drive sizes today, the cost of storage for a library of every music I would ever want to listen to is a rounding error. I don't care about discovery and engagement and royalty costs and all those metrics streaming companies optimize for.
aniforprez 4y ago
How are first party Apple apps so horrible on first party hardware? I don't use Music but I decided to check out Severance (great show) and the TV app was absolutely horrible to use in every way. The player would only stream some really low resolution on my monitor so I tried downloading the episodes and the whole app lagged so badly every time I would queue something up or delete it. It even completely stopped streaming on my monitor because for some reason it thought my HDMI cable didn't support the HDCPI thing and after I put the laptop to sleep and woke it up, it magically started working again. So many other UX problems that I just couldn't put up with and cancelled my subscription after watching the show Like Xcode, so many of their first party apps on Mac are just badly made and awful to use
- ushakov 4y ago
  i think FaceTime is the worst macOS app ever made i’ve never seen an app that can crash or lock the whole operating system design-wise it looks completely out of place
  - lotsofpulp 4y ago
    FaceTime is the reason my whole extended family moved to Apple. There was no comparably reliable and easy to use video call app 10+ years ago.
    - munchler 4y ago
      Skype? Initial release in 2003. Purchased by Microsoft for a gazillion dollars in 2011.
      - lotsofpulp 4y ago
        Tried it, the quality was terribly inconsistency and FaceTime’s use of phone number as AppleID and not needing username/password made it much easier to use.
  - radicality 4y ago
    I think Home app tops it. Just try if you have any HomeKit enabled lights for example. I think it's some half-assed attempt at just running the iOS version on the Mac. It's just so hilariously bad - I just now tried it again and I still have no idea how do the most basic of things - change the brightness of a light. There is a slider which on iOS you would intuitively know what to do with, but on this Mac version I have no idea what the input is meant to be.
art3m 4y ago
I have 2014 year MacBook Pro and app is barely usable on it. Sometimes I just switch to browser version
sarreph 4y ago
On point 2: > Hitting play will start the music at some sound level, after about a second or two the sound level is suddenly reduced (and stays at that level until hitting pause and play again). This is likely due to "Sound Check" being enabled (I think it's on by default), which you can un-check in the "Playback" section of the Music app's preferences.
can16358p 4y ago
Another one: when I add a song to my library, sometimes the music stops playing. If it happens, it keeps happening for the entirety of that session.
- jhickok 4y ago
  Yep, one of the most frustrating experiences. What makes it worse is how hard it can be to navigate back to what I was listening to when the music stopped.
  - can16358p 4y ago
    It's so buggy that I started to think that Apple doesn't have a QA team and devs are just pushing code to master. It's that bad.
greymalik 4y ago
> The worst of the Apple Music clients is that on macOS I didn’t even know there were alternatives. Are there any decent ones?
- schipplock 4y ago
  There is Apple Music on iOS. It has different bugs :). That's what he meant.
  - librarianscott 4y ago
    But, yes, there are a number of apps that work with the Apple Music subscription that aren't Apple apps. For example, Cider[1]. [1]: https://9to5mac.com/2022/03/28/cider-is-an-alternative-apple-music-desktop-client-with-features-missing-in-itunes/ https://9to5mac.com/2022/03/28/cider-is-an-alternative-apple...
zackify 4y ago
I’ve had Apple Music convert saved songs from explicit to censored in the past. The software must be written so poorly. Another good one: If you start a station on macOS. You can’t hit previous song to go back. If you’re on iOS you can… Apple Music is pretty terrible. So many times there’s no UI feedback when pressing things and they just glitch into some new state seconds after pressing things
- staindk 4y ago
  > I’ve had Apple Music convert saved songs from explicit to censored in the past. The software must be written so poorly. This happens with YouTube Music as well and it is incredibly annoying. So weird how this same kind of thing would happen with multiple services. For me it's been mostly Aesop Rock and Big KRIT albums that frequently change from Explicit -> Censored versions, but it's happened with other artists as well.
micromacrofoot 4y ago
The desktop app is abysmal and slow, I like how they pay artists a little more and it’s a little cheaper bundled with other services, and that’s the only reason I use it. The usability sucks too. How in god’s name do you make an app in 2022 that has unclickable artist and album names sprinkled throughout? It’s incredible how terrible iTunes was and how long Apple is allowing it to drag everything down.
chse_cake 4y ago
I changed countries on the apple store and in transition I lost my entire apple music library which I curated for over 6 years (thousands of songs). All vanished. It was so painful. I have moved to spotify but I am still overcoming the grief :(
- plonk 4y ago
  The one good feature Apple Music has is the "export" feature. Spotify makes it a pain, Apple just lets you make an archive of your whole library instantly. Sorry about your old library. Don't trust Spotify either! You can download a listing on your account page.
jtuttle 4y ago
You should try Microsoft Teams on a Mac sometime...or any Microsoft product on a Mac, really.
donatj 4y ago
Maybe it’s just because I enjoy obscure music, but I find a fair number of older tracks are seemingly corrupted on Apples servers. I run into music pretty regularly that’ll get part way into a song and just fail. Sometimes it will skip to the next song, sometimes it will get stuck and I have to manually advance it. Sometimes I get the treat of horrible static/screeching. I have this problem across Mac laptop and android phone.
- 23B1 4y ago
  There's so much music from the 90s and 00s that I can't even find anymore. Little videos and movies too.
embik 4y ago
I‘ll add a comment to reflect my own experience: I’m quite happy with Apple Music, both on iOS and macOS. Sometimes I get „not authorised“ errors when playing something new and that is annoying, but other than that it just works for me as a casual user. In comparison, Spotify has grown overly complex and feels weird in terms of UI responsiveness to me.
jmuguy 4y ago
I tried switching to Apple Music from Spotify. One of my favorite features were the radio stations/shows. Elton John has one called Rocket Hour. The craziest thing to me - there was no way to favorite or bookmark those shows or track which episode you’re on. You need to navigate the labyrinth UI, drilling down to the show, or search for the show every time. Folks on the Apple Music subreddit suggested copying the “share” URL for the show, and keep that in a Notes doc. I’m back on Spotify.
mandmandam 4y ago
Really Apple, please fix these issues. 10 euro a month is so much, and I really want to like this app. I will happily yell at Apple employees while wearing a turtleneck if that's what it's gonna take.
someguydave 4y ago
I just want to sync my music library on my hard drive to my iphone. All I want is a UI on iOS that doesn’t force my classical music into an album view.
clintonwoo 4y ago
I used to use Apple Music and liked it, but the bitrate (music quality) of the music was too low so after a few years I cancelled it. For me it's really audible the difference between 320kbps music.
- lvl102 4y ago
  They offer higher quality music now. Have you tried it?
tannhaeuser 4y ago
Yeah iTunes used to be a real shitshow, having accumulated anything related to iPhone sync mgmt, media player, and a browser ofc. Then the Apple Music player came as an improvement, but still wtf: the workflow to play a title is like, search it, then wade through the results to get at your local copy (as opposed to titles on the store), then click it to arrive at the album where Apple Music doesn't select the damn title but the first of the album/collection, then browse through the possibly large list (have to select list view first) to locate it, then finally play it, if I recall correctly. If your music collection is large and/or on multiple volumes and/or copied from older or others systems, there are additional fuckups. We're always making fun of that at a die-hard Apple fanboy friend of mine. To add insult to injury, Apple Music is gender-mainstreamed in German (should be a config option IMO). But give it time; Apple is certainly able to get it right eventually. Other players have degraded as well IMHO.
- xattt 4y ago
  > But give it time; Apple is certainly able to get it right eventually For one version. Then, some hot-head new grad will come in and make it whatever UX fashion of the week will be and screw it up for another 5 years.
- iggldiggl 4y ago
  > Yeah iTunes used to be a real shitshow, having accumulated anything related to iPhone sync mgmt, media player, and a browser ofc. Then the Apple Music player came as an improvement Hmm, I'm actually glad that iTunes in its old form still lives on in Windows, because AFAIK the dedicated Podcasts app that has replaced iTunes in that regard on Macs no longer supports manually adding files as a podcast episode – something I've made heavily use of in order to get that nice listened/unlistened tracking for various radio comedy shows I've obtained through other means.
activitypea 4y ago
I love Apple Music for its live radio and curator roster, but the app is shockingly poor. On an iPhone 12 Pro, every single screen shows me multiple spinners for up to a second, like every UI component is a separate webview. On MacOS, the spinners regularly persist for over a second. It's unbelievable to me that Apple execs are okay with this.
JimBlackwood 4y ago
I switched from Spotify to AM and I still wouldn’t switch back. There’s some weird bugs for sure and the lack of switching between devices is annoying. Sometimes I’ll accidentally leave it running in my laptop and then when I’m on my phone it keeps interrupting for some reason. Their shuffle actually shuffles, it’s not just the same 20 songs. Artist matching is weird though. Frequently I’ll have an artist that songs attributed to them that are from a different artist with the same name. You could now check the electronic artist Danger (songs like 11:02) and see some weird new Russian rap song attributed to him as a “Single”. It’s not his song but it ends up in my NEW MUSIC MIX. I had it with artists like SIERRA and ALEX too. Incredibly annoying.
- b-lee 4y ago
  You basically tried to make a point and refute it on the same post lol
thefz 4y ago
I won't touch Apple* anything with a stick, but that had me laughing: Here are some suggestions for Apple to improve Apple Music on macOS: Fix the bugs, and make navigation fast! Like programmers weave a magic wand around and bugs magically fix themselves. Why can't you make navigation fast?
- _gabe_ 4y ago
  > Like programmers weave a magic wand around and bugs magically fix themselves. Why can't you make navigation fast? While it's true that these are hard things to do, I think the author may be getting at a deeper issue here. For some reason the software world of today thinks delivering more crappy half baked features is more important than making usable bug free features, or even just fixing what already exists. I don't know where this idea came from, but it's a very annoying ideology. The Unity game engine is another big corporation that does this. They released that demo awhile ago showing off how they can create realistic looking game scenes (the chess scene demo). I don't understand why they think that appeals to anyone. I'm pretty sure like 90% of people use Unity to make 2D games or low poly 3D games. And instead of fixing all their broken "features" they continue adding "features" nobody cares about or asked for.
mikhailt 4y ago
For folks on Windows/Linux that want to use Apple Music but not the web player, try Cider (https://github.com/ciderapp/Cider https://github.com/ciderapp/Cider). Yes, it is Electron but Apple did use webviews in their macOS AM app as well before they switched back to native earlier this year; which still isn't that great. Ironically, Cider works better than the Apple's web app as well; it doesn't skip or get stuck once in a while. It just works for what I need. (In case other asks, Windows/Linux is more of a work/secondary platform, and iPhone is the main device most of the time. That's why I'd use Apple Music despite having the other platforms).
- logic 4y ago
  I'll second this; I've been trialing Apple Music side by side with Spotify for the last few months, and Cider has been very usable on both Linux and Windows. If only the Android app weren't such a mess...
- hollandheese 4y ago
  Honestly, even on the Mac I prefer using Cider to the actual Apple Music app.
psyc 4y ago
I find the web interface completely unusable. It's hard to pinpoint why it's terrible. It's just bad at every step of normal use, and sluggish as something slow. I only have two problems with the ios app, but they're annoying enough. One is making you find a button to transition to a second screen to get to basic play controls, then find another button-like thing (even now I can't tell you off the top of my head where it is) to get back. I do not understand why the "play a song" interface needs multiple pages. The other thing is that once every few hours I get the popup: "song isn't authorized" and I have to click around on shit until the app remembers that yes it actually is authorized because I pay $10 a month for it to be. I'd like to hear the UX rationale for showing a message which to 99.9% of their users just means "We're not going to play your song right now, for no particular reason except that computers don't work in general" and to the rest means "We're not going to play this song right now, even though we probably could if we were less paranoid, or better software engineers, which is an us problem but we'd rather make it a you problem"
ripply 4y ago
If you sync your library, it will wipe all your custom likes/dislikes for songs you sync manually via iTunes as well as wipe your smart playlists (blank them - until you sync your device to your computer again) Therefore Apple Music is literally unusable if you have a large library of songs not on iTunes (like indie electronic stuff) and don’t want iTunes to identify them and switch them to Apple Music songs.
qgin 4y ago
I’m not saying it’s the best app I use, but I feel like I’m taking crazy pills reading this thread. I’ve used Apple Music since it launched and I haven’t had an issue since the first few releases.
- ZekeSulastin 4y ago
  It’s a HN thread on an article about the problems with ________; I’m not sure what else you expected :)
- CharlesW 4y ago
  I’m also a very happy user (and a Spotify expat). Apple Music already has about half of Spotify’s market share and its growth is accelerating. I feel like this is an “Apple Maps”-type situation, where it’s slagged on for years while Apple continues to quietly improve it. https://www.midiaresearch.com/blog/music-subscriber-market-shares-q2-2021 https://www.midiaresearch.com/blog/music-subscriber-market-s...
Decabytes 4y ago
I tried out Apple Music for the first time because I got a trial for it. I was shocked with how slow and unresponsive the interface is. Not only that songs had a noticeable delay between when they were clicked and when they actually started playing
- tokamak-teapot 4y ago
  To be fair, Spotify is doing something pretty magical here. I can’t figure out how they usually start tracks playing within what feels like microseconds after I choose them. Pre caching? Yes but sometimes I don’t see how it could have reasonably guessed that I might play that particular song, like when I start typing to search and then stab at an entry in the results. Surely they also want to be doing some buffering, so if they are pre caching a tiny bit of songs then they need to load the next piece of data quickly before I’ve heard the first part, but there is no obvious issue where this fails, as I might expect to hear. Also when I seek in a song it’s almost always instant. They have the whole song quickly enough for the whole thing to be seekable? If they were just relying on great latency and bandwidth then there should be a lot more issues with the audio pausing or dropping out.
  - Tijdreiziger 4y ago
    FWIW, I switched from Spotify to YouTube Music and both are certainly fast enough that it's not really something I think about.
grej 4y ago
This is one of my huge irritations with the “advancements” in tech. Is it too much to ask for my $1000+ 256GB device to have an mp3 experience at least as good as the one I could buy 20 years ago?! Apple Music is has slowly devolved into a worse and worse mp3 player. It’s much worse than the old ios itunes used to be, and it’s a deliberate choice they’re making.
t0mmyb0y 4y ago
throw__away7391 4y ago
Item 1 from the App Store guidelines: > Before You Submit > ... > Make sure you: > - Test your app for crashes and bugs Every time I used this app all I could think is "who is Apple to judge my app?!"
wintermutestwin 4y ago
I am fully bought in to the Apple ecosystem, but Apple Music is the poison pill that has me questioning this new prison I have chosen. The iOS app wastes three out of five buttons at the bottom that I can't change to something useful: "Listen Now" "Browse" "Radio" are all weak "discovery" tools that are probably more about label kickbacks than actually helping me find new music that I like. And really, I don't need your discovery Apple - what I need is better library discovery/organization tools because I have a massive library which is unwieldy in your crap apps. The album-centric focus is a huge PitA due to singles. Give me an Artist playlist that doesn't take up a precious playlist slot. Maybe this isn't entirely Apple's fault, but when I see greyed out songs or albums that were once there that aren't anymore, I feel pushed to stop giving these scumbag labels my cash through your service. I left out the bugs, but I feel that the quality of their flagship services product makes them look like a dying company, not a premium brand worth 2.5t$
- pupppet 4y ago
  I can’t stand the iOS Apple Music button setup. Library > Playlists > Playlist name > Play/Shuffle Four taps just to get my own music to start playing. Maddening that 3 of the 5 buttons are dedicated to not my music.
  - concinds 4y ago
    It's especially horrible if you have lots of playlists, and like to add playlists from Apple Music to your library. You can't add Apple Music playlists to playlist folders, and playlists can only be sorted alphabetically. On the Mac, your playlist folders are on top; then Apple Music playlists & your playlists are mixed together. On iPhone, it's reversed; Apple Music playlists, then your folders, forcing you to scroll all the way down to get to your playlists. And on Mac you can't add a song to a new playlist in a playlist folder directly; you need to add a song to a new playlist, and drag that playlist (that isn't highlighted) all the way up to the right folder. Yuck.
0daystock 4y ago
- b-lee 4y ago
  The hardware and the OS which are second and to none IMO. And yes I’ve used Ubuntu and Windows for years and they don’t even come close.
herodotus 4y ago
Thank you for this critique. So true. But don't even let me get started on the disaster that it is for Classical Music lovers.
duk 4y ago
Apple Music definitely sounds better when paired with Airpods to my ears compared to Spotify. Am I imagining?
- wut42 4y ago
  I don't think you are. My knowledge may be outdated but Spotify uses a lower bitrate than Apple Music (which can go up to lossless) and the Airpods supports that lossless, too.
hackerbrother 4y ago
I think it's less buggy than Spotify.
cosmiccatnap 4y ago
The best thing you can say about apple music is that it's not Spotify
spideymans 4y ago
What makes this frustrating for me is that the underlying Apple Music API is actually quite robust, such that it really is quite straightforward to create an Apple Music client that is extremely performant. I just can't wrap my head around why Apple can't do it themselves.
- mthoms 4y ago
  Are there any good third party clients? Does Apple allow that?
eatbitseveryday 4y ago
Don’t suggest to delete iTunes because it is the only place to purchase music. Unless that ability is migrated to Music.
joeman1000 4y ago
Can confirm. Sometimes there are full DAYS where there is some error and it will not play music at all… I’m paying for it and it won’t play anything. I’ve submitted big reports multiple times. It’s not good enough.
chrisbrandow 4y ago
For me th worst aspect of Apple Music is that I cannot form a mental model of how it is supposed to work. I just have no clue.
lapcat 4y ago
Let me add: 1. The playing song's time elapsed and time remaining are only displayed when you hover over the toolbar and disappear otherwise. WTF?!? 2. Sometimes when I press play, the app goes into an endless shuffle where it keeps selecting new random songs and doesn't play anything. I have to quit the app and start over. 3. The delete key stopped working in a selected song in a playlist on Monterey. 4. The Filter field doesn't appear in the window unless I press option-command-f first. Sigh.
n8cpdx 4y ago
Be careful if you ever get a suspicious billing email. Apple decided my credit card expired (it didn’t). Unlike other services, if you stop paying, it deletes your entire library (including playlists) from all your devices. So if you want to switch to another music service, you’re hosed. I’ve been fighting for a week or so now to get my playlist data via the privacy tools. Just yesterday they decided to give me a list of all my app downloads, instead of what I asked for. Apple wants me to pay to get back access, but I’m not willing to give their services division another $0.01 until they stop treating customers like shit.
aczerepinski 4y ago
I hate that in order to add a song to a playlist I have to add it to my library so that it is mixed in and listed alongside the full albums I’ve purchased. I guess I prefer using Spotify so that my library of purchased music and playlists for streaming are altogether separate. Also on the desktop app the way to find new jazz releases is to first put the curser in the search input which opens a secret menu. Is there a way for me to “favorite” new jazz releases so that I can check it each week without so much scrolling and clicking?
aczerepinski 4y ago
The UX I enjoy most is buying a vinyl record, listening to it start to finish while reading the full liner notes, knowing that the artist got the maximum amount of money, and there being no way for any tech company to track how many times I listened. Highly recommended!
tayne 4y ago
Spotify is the worst and buggiest software I use, both the app and the web app. How bad could it be? It resets to the beginning of a multi hour podcast randomly with no way to get back to where I was. It does many other unbelievable things. God damn the Spotify player.
lawgimenez 4y ago
I've always been an AM user but I can't stand the poor performance and issues anymore. I switched to Spotify again 3 months ago and amazingly they still have my 7-8 year old collaboration playlist with my wife. But Apple Music on the other end just removed my playlists that are barely a year old.
astrostl 4y ago
If you're an Alfred user (and I think you "should" be), try creating a web search keyword for https://music.apple.com/us/search?term={query} https://music.apple.com/us/search?term={query} . When it's triggered it will open up search in the app rather than your browser. I find this much more usable than directly opening and using the app.
- jonkratz 4y ago
  Great suggestion! I just added this — and it worked as expected (mostly). If the Apple Music app is in MiniPlayer mode, it will not automatically switch to the full player, but thankfully, closing the MiniPlayer immediately drops you into the search results. Thanks!
- thoughtpeddler 4y ago
  There's also Alfred's own Music feature (commonly mapped to ⌥+⌘+return), which will let you search your library and play songs without going to the Music app first.
alanh 4y ago
I still appreciate having a 'library' unlike the author, but I remain absolutely gobsmacked at how Apple buries the switch that toggles between searching Apple Music and my library. On mobile, the toggle is always right next to the search box. It gets buried in a previous page of what seems like a web view on the desktop. Some of the worst UX I have ever seen!
jb3689 4y ago
I thought Spotify was much worse. The silent playlist song cap alone was infuriating. I constantly had issues syncing between devices. UI feedback was miserable making it so you didn’t understand whether a button was pushed due to the callbacks over cellular, not that Apple Music is much better here. The worst part of Apple Music is the distinction between Apple Music and your library. You can rate things in your library but not Apple Music - which I’m guessing is an artifact of iTunes days when you had MP3s locally. The like feature in Apple Music is also terrible compared to Spotify
- therealdrag0 4y ago
  My HN, top of the day view, has a post complaining about Spotify above this post complaining about Apple Music. pretty gnarly dislike coming out.
tomcat27 4y ago
I just don't understand why Apple Music search is so bad. Sometimes only exact match returns albums. It's so bad that appending "Apple Music" in google works better.
joshdotblack 4y ago
I've had apple music full-on kernel panic & restart my m1 macbook air, I've had it crash finder & do all sorts of crazy render ghosting stuff on screen like duplicating app icons, I've had it make the OS forget my login keychain key so every app/agent/process pops up a dialog asking for it until I reboot, not to mention the airplay bugs. I've used iTunes since I first got a mac about 15 years ago so I'm not keen to change but Music on MacOS is an absolute carcrash
slmjkdbtl 4y ago
I only use the offline version of Apple Music to manage my local music library, it does the job, but there was a major quality downgrade when Big Sur came out (there was a re-write that replaced the software with a much inferior version for no reason).
thewebcount 4y ago
> primarily: ditch the iTunes Store Please, no! I often purchase a song I streamed because I liked it and want to have it even if the streaming service goes away or loses its license to stream that song or album!
lloeki 4y ago
> If I choose to "like" a song, why is it not automatically saved to the so-called "library". I like that likes and add to library are distinct as they serve two very different purposes for me, but I would really like to have a "liked" playlist. Other annoyances (on macOS): search in apple music vs library, the search box is on one end, the scope selector is on the other. Toggling it requires re-searching. It also gets covered by the right pane. "hey I'm actually searching" feedback is terrible, many parts are ungodly slow for no reason. Oh and that search box has awful behaviour regarding focus, click, start typing, and somehow it gets focused only a second later, missing input and/or not clearing what's in there, or restoring the previous content. It seems to have about a thousand subtle failure modes that keep getting in the way extremely annoyingly. Sadly (personal pov/use case) Apple Music is the "best" (== less worst) app/service out there, from the mobile UI to library management, tag editor, and BYOM+streaming. Tangent: after some time peaking and being actually good, all these music apps/streaming services have become so annoying that I'm progressively rebuilding my library (including all the non-owned discoveries I made) as flat files served by Jellyfin, which will probably take me years but ultimately I'll be able to drop the increasingly crappy app+service verticals in favour of owned music + radio for discovery (there are a couple of great curated radios around here, and a few zines made out of thin slices of dead trees)
- heretogetout 4y ago
  I prefer to use the radio feature because I don't know exactly what I want to listen to and more importantly I want to learn about new artists. The fact that you can never see liked songs again is so frustrating. You can't even see a history of playback -- when you use radio. Astounding. I wonder how Apple engineers use the application. Are they not also frustrated?
  - lloeki 4y ago
    Note that when I say radio I don't mean the Radio feature of Apple Music & al but actual FM/DAB radio stations! (which may or may not be available over shoutcast/icecast)
nobodywasishere 4y ago
Apple Music on Android is a pleasure to use for me, especially dark mode and being able to cast right from the app.
stack_framer 4y ago
The worst thing about Apple Music on macOS are the "smart" playlists. They can't be disabled, they keep coming back no matter how many times I delete them, and they're always at the top, so they push my playlists out of sight. Just absolutely terrible UX.
teaneedz 4y ago
> Adding a currently playing song to a playlist will stop the music and clear the play queue. This bugs me to no end. I'm always asking myself if a song is worth the listening interruption that will happen when I add it to a playlist. Such a stupid low hanging bug.
crossroadsguy 4y ago
Well that just means you certainly haven’t used many other Apple softwares. Because they compete quite healthily at being among the worst.
radicality 4y ago
Back when Apple Music was just introduced, I enabled the free trial on my MacBook where I already had a curated iTunes library over the years. Apple Music was so destructive that it went and started irreversibly not only reorganising my local library but also deleting my local songs because it had the same song in the cloud… No thank you. It was so destructive that my only option was to disable Apple Music, completely remove my whole iTunes music/data folder and restore everything from backup. —- I also recently realised that the Mac OS upgrade broke my iTunes playlists again, I’m not sure if it was during move to Bug Sur or earlier. I have a whole folder of music and an iTunes db file, anyone how Im supposed to import that into Music considering that iTunes is dead?
alaricus 4y ago
Most Apple software is buggy and annoying.
b-lee 4y ago
What amazes me about Apple is that they have hardware and operating system that are really great. Every other software I have used that is made by them is buggy beyond belief. Have you tried Apple TV. I stopped using it not because of lack of content but was so unreliable to the extent that you feel like it says “fuck you”. You have one packet loss, your download is doomed. Starting is takes multiple seconds. Try to search something, the UI will freeze. I love Apple products and I hope they fix their services.
- biztos 4y ago
  > You have one packet loss, your download is doomed. I’ve noticed that on my iPad with a few different video services. Makes me wonder if there’s a buggy video-download API. In any case, absolutely maddening when you’re trying to “fill up” your device on hotel WiFi before a flight.
  - b-lee 4y ago
    Don’t think so. Almost every third party app does downloading right except Apple’s. It’s like they don’t even try to recover at all. You can’t resume updates - only on Apple related software. I remember spending 5 days trying to update to Mojave because the update kept failing.
DavideNL 4y ago
I really wish Spotify had native HomePod integration... [1] "Spotify Users Growing Impatient and Canceling Subscriptions Over Lack of Native HomePod Support" : https://www.macrumors.com/2021/11/22/spotify-users-impatient-lack-homepod-support/ https://www.macrumors.com/2021/11/22/spotify-users-impatient... [2] "[iOS] Implement Native HomePod Support" : https://community.spotify.com/t5/Live-Ideas/iOS-Implement-Native-HomePod-Support/idi-p/4985214/highlight/true#comments= https://community.spotify.com/t5/Live-Ideas/iOS-Implement-Na...
wafriedemann 4y ago
Moved to Doppler a couple of weeks ago and never looked back. I put up for way too long with Apple Music and streaming.
skyzyx 4y ago
100%. I have filed so many radars against Music.app and they’ve never been fixed over the years. IMO, It’s gotten significantly worse since iTunes got broken apart in Catalina.
concinds 4y ago
The weirdest Apple Music bug I had was: Watching Netflix with Safari, and then going to the Apple Music local library ("Recently Added", then click on an album) literally broke Music. It looked like this[0], all the Music toolbar buttons were gone, and keyboard shortcuts (spacebar to play) no longer worked. Pausing the movie and switching Safari tab to non-Netflix was the only solution. This was still the case on a completely clean install with only Music and Safari launched. I guess it had to do with the DRM Safari uses to play Netflix content messing with the Music app. But did Apple really never test watching a movie and listening to music at the same time, with the built-in apps? That bug survived from early Big Sur to at least the Monterey release candidate, again on a completely clean install (I didn't test it again afterwards). Huh? How? [0]: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/252162447 https://discussions.apple.com/thread/252162447
- bobbylarrybobby 4y ago
  Some sort of drm bug when multiple sources using drm are active at once?
knodi 4y ago
Try using the Podcast app it’s even worst.
conioh 4y ago
I see you're not a paying Windows user. :_(
bobbylarrybobby 4y ago
Regarding the second point: I believe this is "sound check" a setting that normalizes audio volume between different songs. I think it takes a second to kick in (maybe it has to fill up some audio buffer to work?) and yes it's incredibly annoying. Afaik only solution is to disable sound check
glorifiedsubred 4y ago
Apple Music software on Mac is truly horrible, and I remember how bad iTunes used to be. It's the slowest UI I use (besides some Windows things), and it routinely goes catatonic if you toggle a vpn or switch networks, etc. adding some things: * the bar for scrubbing is what, 2 pixels wide? * airplay is broken. it does. not. work. It takes about 5 iterations of pausing, restarting things, and prayer to get it to play through its speakers and a homepod. And god forbid you then pause it for a couple minutes or want to hear something from the browser for a second. * If you want to mirror to an appletv and hear sound... good luck, be sure to designate a beneficiary before embarking because you'll probably want to kill yourself. These aren't complicated things to identify or describe. They aren't edge cases. It's the basic functionality and it is absolute shit. How can anything get this bad? Do apple employees not listen to music? Is each feature made by a different siloed team? It doesn't take a silicon valley visionary to fix these things, but they are clearly missing something in their org
FredPret 4y ago
Looking at the comments, I must be the only person who likes this app. - Consistently recommends music I like - Spotify went down a rabbit hole with a certain genre and got weirder every week - Opens instantly - Integrates perfectly with Siri - Doesn’t have the weird colour scheme of Spotify
- richbradshaw 4y ago
  Yeah agree - I used Spotify back in the day, then Google Play Music, then Apple Music when HomePods first came out. It’s just simple, works well, has the awesome lyrics function and has good quality human curated content. It’s just great!
  - FredPret 4y ago
    I forgot to mention the human playlists! Those are great and get updated regularly, by actual people
_23sd 4y ago
I suspect one reason the browsing and search experience is so slow and horrible on these services is that they don't want to present straightforward lists that would allow people to scrape their catalogs and put them head to head. Mainstream tech reviewers seem to have extremely mainstream tastes and insist that you won't notice the difference between the catalogs of YouTube Music (the smallest major service with about 60 million songs) and Apple Music (the largest with about 90 million). Even I noticed YouTube was missing a bunch of my favorite albums and I don't think any of my favorites could be called "obscure" unless you have a really liberal definition of that word. It would be interesting to see a list of the most popular artists missing from each service, or a venn diagram of record labels and rights groups, but I haven't found anything more detailed than isolated anecdotes and media coverage of individual artists trying to push Tidal and/or getting mad at Spotify.
pfesenmeier 4y ago
I wish I could bookmark Record Labels and Curators.
happytiger 4y ago
We just cancelled it yesterday for many of the same reasons. Apple needs to get a small team to rip through the design work and build something incredible. Listening to music has become less fun and the experience objectively worse, even as the catalog of available titles has grown to include everything. It’s not as delightful an experience as it once was.
what-imright 4y ago
I have to agree it’s buggy but awesome too. Very good value for my family plan, excellent sound quality. Every artist obviously. Makes me wish I had never spent so much time pirating in my youth. The Siri integration is quite bad. Sometimes songs only half play. Needs a restart about every day. Yep it’s buggy, but I’m a Apple music subscriber for life. They nailed it.
- thoughtpeddler 4y ago
  > Makes me wish I had never spent so much time pirating in my youth. Listen, I feel your pain, but don't feel bad about this. Streaming services didn't exist back then. The best we could do was have some reasonably-sized collection on purchased CDs that we ripped to MP3, supplemented by a digital collection acquired through ... different means. It took the (recording) industry years before they woke up. That's not your fault. Thinking back, I could even imagine an alternate late 90s / early 2000s, where the RIAA was tolerant of the streaming model, but most peoples' connections were still dial-up / weak broadband, so we'd all be content with ~64kbps-quality MP3 playback lol
janandonly 4y ago
Agree. I never managed to sync playlists between my iPhone and iPad. The only way to make it work turned out to be: 1. Delete all playlists 2. Buy a MacBook 3. In the music.app, re-create the playlists. 4. Then, sync your iPhone’s music library including the just created playlists with the MacBook. Took me a while to figure this out I even started using Spotify just because at least syncing playlists would just work in that app.
cbare 4y ago
The desktop client is really buggy and reflects poorly on Apple. Some say, an all-you-can-eat buffet of a big chunk of all published music is just too good to be true and can't last. But, then wasn't that the promise? Too cheap to meter? To have at your fingertips the accumulated product of hundreds of years of culture, millions of hours of practice... Currently streaming: JS Bach, Sonatas for Viola da Gamba, Sergei Istomin and Viviana Sofronitsky which I had to type 'cause you can't even cut-n-paste out that piece of junk.
floatinglotus 4y ago
Amazing. His list is totally different from my list of bugs!
tsp 4y ago
I wanted to switch from Spotify to Apple Music, for reasons why see [1]. While I enjoyed that most of the music I am listening to is available on Apple Music as well, I just could not make the switch because of the bad UX in some places and their recommendation system, which is barely existing and one of the features I enjoy most with cloud streaming services. With Apple TV I had similar experiences - compared to Netflix, the UX was just horrible. In a way it made me feel good - if a company with so much money as Apple can fail so miserably, it is fine if I as a developer make mistakes too sometimes :) [1] https://ra.co/news/76439 https://ra.co/news/76439
FunnyBadger 4y ago
It also has a horrible UI. Honestly iTunes had its issues but Music is a step backwards compared to iTunes!! It's UI is clearly designed by someone who 1) only listens to recent popular music, 2) isn't particularly passionate about any music they listen to, and 3) don't bother to look for new music that isn't in the top-10. Basically the last kind of person who should ever do UI design - no passion or knowledge about the application or the market!
ayush--s 4y ago
apple music is the best advert for spotify
agent00shoe 4y ago
Why can't I remove a song from a playlist in the web ui without it removing that same song from all playlists in my entire library?!

374 points by nephics 4y ago

If instead of ranting people would just cancel their subscriptions to bad services - we would live in a much better world.

frankjr 4y ago

I cancelled my subscription after the player regularly stopped emitting sound - the player would show it's playing a song and increment the progress bar but no sound was coming out. I have never had the same problem with any other player. Oh and sometimes any song would just keep buffering until I restarted the app. As far as the slowness goes, I attribute that to the fact that the app is not native, it's just some sort of Electron-like mess. Then again so is Spotify (I think?) and it feels much snappier.

Eric_WVGG 4y ago
Apple Music on Mac shifted from web views to native sometime in the last eighteen months, I think.
- galad87 4y ago
  They did, but the new native views are quite buggy, so while it uses less memory, the user experience improvement was minimal. Apple should really stop shipping such buggy softwares.
  - senojsitruc 4y ago
    I wonder if they had to use SwiftUI.
    - galad87 4y ago
      No, it's mainly a complex NSCollectionView.
- zwily 4y ago
  It hasn’t switched yet. Hopefully this year.
  - galad87 4y ago
    They did in macOS 12.2.
- whywhywhywhy 4y ago
  UI became painful to use when they switched from unfurling the albums in situ to going to another screen where you have to click back.

edhelas 4y ago

Using a RPi with a 1Tb SSD connected to it. MPD + various clients on all my devices, including the wonderful https://github.com/jcorporation/myMPD https://github.com/jcorporation/myMPD Lightweight, all free-software, can handle a massive audio-database, all synchronized. What else do we need ?

plonk 4y ago
If I bought every song I've listened to over the past 5 years, I would have paid thousands.
- pdimitar 4y ago
  Then pirate them.
  - plonk 4y ago
    Copyright has issues, but "not paying for any of it" isn't the solution.
    - sascha_sl 4y ago
      I'd consider "paying for the things you like within your means" a better option morally than many streaming sites though.
    - pdimitar 4y ago
      "Everything you pay for is actually rented and never truly owned" is sure as hell not the solution either.
- edhelas 4y ago
  I've borrowed hundreds of CD from the different public-city-libraries I've been the past 15 years. In France you're allowed to make private copy of books and CDs :)
  - 4y ago

drawkbox 4y ago

I like Apple Music because it integrates well with the Apple line. More importantly though it is one of the highest paying per stream to artists [1]. Streaming needs to be much more lucrative for artists and consumer choice helps that. It is nice to be able to buy the music as well if you want to support. Being part of Apple One is huge as well. The latest music streaming royalty rates are as follows. PLATFORM ROYALTY (PER STREAM) STREAMS TO MAKE $1 Tidal Music $0.01284 78 Apple Music $0.008 125 Amazon Music $0.00402 249 Spotify $0.00318 314 YouTube Music $0.002 500 Pandora $0.00133 752 Deezer $0.0011 909 I have lots of mp3/stored music as well and Spotify client started taking like 20-30 minutes to start up. Wasn't sure what it was doing... Some of their patents for tracking are a bit dystopian as well. New Spotify Patent Involves Monitoring Users’ Speech to Recommend Music > The streaming platform is interested in extracting data points like emotional state, gender, age, and accent to hone its recommendations [2]. Nah. Apple already has my info and reasonably treats it well eventhough it is too much, I don't need another service to invade privacy. [1] https://producerhive.com/music-marketing-tips/streaming-royalties-breakdown/ https://producerhive.com/music-marketing-tips/streaming-roya... [2] https://pitchfork.com/news/new-spotify-patent-involves-monitoring-users-speech-to-recommend-music/ https://pitchfork.com/news/new-spotify-patent-involves-monit...

plonk 4y ago
> I like Apple Music because it integrates well with the Apple line. Is there a need to integrate with anything? All I need is to play music. Spotify is as integrated into macOS and iOS as Apple Music. > More importantly though it is one of the highest paying per stream to artists [1]. Streaming needs to be much more lucrative for artists and consumer choice helps that. Too bad they are shooting themselves in the foot by neglecting user experience.
- drawkbox 4y ago
  > Is there a need to integrate with anything? I do like a more open/api platform and wish Apple was, but Spotify probably won't be for long. Tracking my plays takes more work with everything to closed. Apple misses some of the obscure stuff but I will always side with the higher payer to artists. I also like just being able to buy albums I like and support artists.

plonk 4y ago

I've never seen a search box that couldn't actually handle input before, but Apple Music made it. If I click in the search box and start typing, the box will lose focus at some random time and all my next keystrokes will count as play commands, usually pausing the music. If I come back to the search box, it happens again. I know "text boxes" are cutting-edge technology that's barely 3 seconds old and developers are still learning to program them safely. Still, I expected more from a trillion-dollar company.

lancesells 4y ago
I have this text field thing happen with Apple Maps as well. I use Apple Music and it's got all sorts of problems. "Hey Siri, play Chill Mix" "Sorry, I'm having trouble finding that in your library." Chill Mix is generated from Apple Music based on what you play. I use it every morning except those days it just can't be found.
papito 4y ago
Well, the driverless car software will be much more solid. We hope?

brohoolio 4y ago

I had a bunch of random stability issues with Music, they mostly went away when I deleted and reinstalled the App. Still not what I would expect out of Apple for one of their main apps. About half the time when I use it on the desktop I have to force quit Music. I have no idea how a non-technical person would use something so buggy.

infofarmer 4y ago

Loosely related, App Store is by far the worst of the top-1000 online stores. It almost sounds like proper competition would do some good here.

ushakov 4y ago

i have used Apple Music for a short time on my mac the amount of usability issues the app has are phenomenal i was actually more surprised when it worked rather when it didn’t not worth my $9.99

carlycue 4y ago

The app performance of Apple Music on MacOS and iOS is an abomination. It's consistently twice as slow as Spotify, from loading playlists to loading search results and playing a song. I would be ashamed if I worked on the Apple Music team. How can a person with any self respect go to work every day and be okay with Apple Music in it's current state?

5350-uiop-1130 4y ago
there is probably some context missing, i always prefer to give the devs the benefit of the doubt. although i currently work at faang as a contractor and certainly the level of ability is not what you might think from the outside.
ushakov 4y ago
> How can a person with any self respect go to work every day and be okay with Apple Music in it's current state? 1) debt/mortgage 2) kids 3) vesting stock 4) all of the above
- ec109685 4y ago
  You can have all of that and still produce good software.
pschuegr 4y ago
The lack of attention to detail is palpable. But it's not just an Apple problem. It feels like the vast majority of software, you can open it up and fiddle around for a few minutes and find any number of poorly conceived UX choices not to mention straight up bugs / inconsistencies. I'm not talking "I could make this software better than they did" level stuff, just things that any reasonable person would admit don't make sense.
- musha68k 4y ago
  Agreed. I often wonder if with agile we threw the baby out with the bath water(fall).
4y ago

ysleepy 4y ago

The one thing that sours the entire experience for me is that songs take like 5-15s to start playing when selecting one that isn't super popular. This happens on my ipad, mac, android phone. It feels like some server is spinning up a hard drive to stream it. Apart from that, why the hell is the title and artist only shown in one line that starts scolling instead of showing multiple lines if it doesn't fit, at least in the album view and the player. It's such a pain listening to classical music when the composer and the performer and section are not visible without playing it and waiting for the line to scroll, like wtf.

bowsamic 4y ago
This is why I never used Apple Music. I’m too used to how instant Spotify is
matheusmoreira 4y ago
These streaming platforms are so bad. We had better software in the 90s and 00s. These trillion dollar corporations can't beat literally decades old technology. The only reason these little services even exist in the first place is to satisfy the whims of copyright monopolists. How many more steps backwards must this industry take before they're satisfied?
- josephg 4y ago
  I’ve been seriously considering going back to owning a big library of mp3s. I love Spotify for its suggestions - well, when it’s not just playing the same 8 songs on repeat. And I love having my music available on all my devices. But the experience of playing songs feels like it’s taken a big step backwards into some sort of weird corporate happy land. The fact I we still can’t remove podcasts from Spotify is ridiculous. I tried Apple Music but I bounced almost immediately because of the UI.
  - ryandrake 4y ago
    > I’ve been seriously considering going back to owning a big library of mp3s. I never left! Every once in a while I go and try Streaming again to see if they have gotten their shit together, and they still haven't. My hand-curated collection of MP3s, hand-ripped by me using the quality settings I like, carefully stored in a directory structure I understand, with filenames that make sense to me, meticulously tagged with the right metadata, gives me everything I need for music listening, and it doesn't require the Internet or a subscription to play. With hard drive sizes today, the cost of storage for a library of every music I would ever want to listen to is a rounding error. I don't care about discovery and engagement and royalty costs and all those metrics streaming companies optimize for.

aniforprez 4y ago

How are first party Apple apps so horrible on first party hardware? I don't use Music but I decided to check out Severance (great show) and the TV app was absolutely horrible to use in every way. The player would only stream some really low resolution on my monitor so I tried downloading the episodes and the whole app lagged so badly every time I would queue something up or delete it. It even completely stopped streaming on my monitor because for some reason it thought my HDMI cable didn't support the HDCPI thing and after I put the laptop to sleep and woke it up, it magically started working again. So many other UX problems that I just couldn't put up with and cancelled my subscription after watching the show Like Xcode, so many of their first party apps on Mac are just badly made and awful to use

ushakov 4y ago
i think FaceTime is the worst macOS app ever made i’ve never seen an app that can crash or lock the whole operating system design-wise it looks completely out of place
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
  FaceTime is the reason my whole extended family moved to Apple. There was no comparably reliable and easy to use video call app 10+ years ago.
  - munchler 4y ago
    Skype? Initial release in 2003. Purchased by Microsoft for a gazillion dollars in 2011.
    - lotsofpulp 4y ago
      Tried it, the quality was terribly inconsistency and FaceTime’s use of phone number as AppleID and not needing username/password made it much easier to use.
- radicality 4y ago
  I think Home app tops it. Just try if you have any HomeKit enabled lights for example. I think it's some half-assed attempt at just running the iOS version on the Mac. It's just so hilariously bad - I just now tried it again and I still have no idea how do the most basic of things - change the brightness of a light. There is a slider which on iOS you would intuitively know what to do with, but on this Mac version I have no idea what the input is meant to be.

art3m 4y ago

I have 2014 year MacBook Pro and app is barely usable on it. Sometimes I just switch to browser version

sarreph 4y ago

On point 2: > Hitting play will start the music at some sound level, after about a second or two the sound level is suddenly reduced (and stays at that level until hitting pause and play again). This is likely due to "Sound Check" being enabled (I think it's on by default), which you can un-check in the "Playback" section of the Music app's preferences.

can16358p 4y ago

Another one: when I add a song to my library, sometimes the music stops playing. If it happens, it keeps happening for the entirety of that session.

jhickok 4y ago
Yep, one of the most frustrating experiences. What makes it worse is how hard it can be to navigate back to what I was listening to when the music stopped.
- can16358p 4y ago
  It's so buggy that I started to think that Apple doesn't have a QA team and devs are just pushing code to master. It's that bad.

greymalik 4y ago

> The worst of the Apple Music clients is that on macOS I didn’t even know there were alternatives. Are there any decent ones?

schipplock 4y ago
There is Apple Music on iOS. It has different bugs :). That's what he meant.
- librarianscott 4y ago
  But, yes, there are a number of apps that work with the Apple Music subscription that aren't Apple apps. For example, Cider[1]. [1]: https://9to5mac.com/2022/03/28/cider-is-an-alternative-apple-music-desktop-client-with-features-missing-in-itunes/ https://9to5mac.com/2022/03/28/cider-is-an-alternative-apple...

zackify 4y ago

I’ve had Apple Music convert saved songs from explicit to censored in the past. The software must be written so poorly. Another good one: If you start a station on macOS. You can’t hit previous song to go back. If you’re on iOS you can… Apple Music is pretty terrible. So many times there’s no UI feedback when pressing things and they just glitch into some new state seconds after pressing things

staindk 4y ago
> I’ve had Apple Music convert saved songs from explicit to censored in the past. The software must be written so poorly. This happens with YouTube Music as well and it is incredibly annoying. So weird how this same kind of thing would happen with multiple services. For me it's been mostly Aesop Rock and Big KRIT albums that frequently change from Explicit -> Censored versions, but it's happened with other artists as well.

micromacrofoot 4y ago

The desktop app is abysmal and slow, I like how they pay artists a little more and it’s a little cheaper bundled with other services, and that’s the only reason I use it. The usability sucks too. How in god’s name do you make an app in 2022 that has unclickable artist and album names sprinkled throughout? It’s incredible how terrible iTunes was and how long Apple is allowing it to drag everything down.

chse_cake 4y ago

I changed countries on the apple store and in transition I lost my entire apple music library which I curated for over 6 years (thousands of songs). All vanished. It was so painful. I have moved to spotify but I am still overcoming the grief :(

plonk 4y ago
The one good feature Apple Music has is the "export" feature. Spotify makes it a pain, Apple just lets you make an archive of your whole library instantly. Sorry about your old library. Don't trust Spotify either! You can download a listing on your account page.

jtuttle 4y ago

You should try Microsoft Teams on a Mac sometime...or any Microsoft product on a Mac, really.

donatj 4y ago

Maybe it’s just because I enjoy obscure music, but I find a fair number of older tracks are seemingly corrupted on Apples servers. I run into music pretty regularly that’ll get part way into a song and just fail. Sometimes it will skip to the next song, sometimes it will get stuck and I have to manually advance it. Sometimes I get the treat of horrible static/screeching. I have this problem across Mac laptop and android phone.

23B1 4y ago
There's so much music from the 90s and 00s that I can't even find anymore. Little videos and movies too.

embik 4y ago

I‘ll add a comment to reflect my own experience: I’m quite happy with Apple Music, both on iOS and macOS. Sometimes I get „not authorised“ errors when playing something new and that is annoying, but other than that it just works for me as a casual user. In comparison, Spotify has grown overly complex and feels weird in terms of UI responsiveness to me.

jmuguy 4y ago

I tried switching to Apple Music from Spotify. One of my favorite features were the radio stations/shows. Elton John has one called Rocket Hour. The craziest thing to me - there was no way to favorite or bookmark those shows or track which episode you’re on. You need to navigate the labyrinth UI, drilling down to the show, or search for the show every time. Folks on the Apple Music subreddit suggested copying the “share” URL for the show, and keep that in a Notes doc. I’m back on Spotify.

mandmandam 4y ago

Really Apple, please fix these issues. 10 euro a month is so much, and I really want to like this app. I will happily yell at Apple employees while wearing a turtleneck if that's what it's gonna take.

someguydave 4y ago

I just want to sync my music library on my hard drive to my iphone. All I want is a UI on iOS that doesn’t force my classical music into an album view.

clintonwoo 4y ago

I used to use Apple Music and liked it, but the bitrate (music quality) of the music was too low so after a few years I cancelled it. For me it's really audible the difference between 320kbps music.

lvl102 4y ago
They offer higher quality music now. Have you tried it?

tannhaeuser 4y ago

Yeah iTunes used to be a real shitshow, having accumulated anything related to iPhone sync mgmt, media player, and a browser ofc. Then the Apple Music player came as an improvement, but still wtf: the workflow to play a title is like, search it, then wade through the results to get at your local copy (as opposed to titles on the store), then click it to arrive at the album where Apple Music doesn't select the damn title but the first of the album/collection, then browse through the possibly large list (have to select list view first) to locate it, then finally play it, if I recall correctly. If your music collection is large and/or on multiple volumes and/or copied from older or others systems, there are additional fuckups. We're always making fun of that at a die-hard Apple fanboy friend of mine. To add insult to injury, Apple Music is gender-mainstreamed in German (should be a config option IMO). But give it time; Apple is certainly able to get it right eventually. Other players have degraded as well IMHO.

xattt 4y ago
> But give it time; Apple is certainly able to get it right eventually For one version. Then, some hot-head new grad will come in and make it whatever UX fashion of the week will be and screw it up for another 5 years.
iggldiggl 4y ago
> Yeah iTunes used to be a real shitshow, having accumulated anything related to iPhone sync mgmt, media player, and a browser ofc. Then the Apple Music player came as an improvement Hmm, I'm actually glad that iTunes in its old form still lives on in Windows, because AFAIK the dedicated Podcasts app that has replaced iTunes in that regard on Macs no longer supports manually adding files as a podcast episode – something I've made heavily use of in order to get that nice listened/unlistened tracking for various radio comedy shows I've obtained through other means.

activitypea 4y ago

I love Apple Music for its live radio and curator roster, but the app is shockingly poor. On an iPhone 12 Pro, every single screen shows me multiple spinners for up to a second, like every UI component is a separate webview. On MacOS, the spinners regularly persist for over a second. It's unbelievable to me that Apple execs are okay with this.

JimBlackwood 4y ago

I switched from Spotify to AM and I still wouldn’t switch back. There’s some weird bugs for sure and the lack of switching between devices is annoying. Sometimes I’ll accidentally leave it running in my laptop and then when I’m on my phone it keeps interrupting for some reason. Their shuffle actually shuffles, it’s not just the same 20 songs. Artist matching is weird though. Frequently I’ll have an artist that songs attributed to them that are from a different artist with the same name. You could now check the electronic artist Danger (songs like 11:02) and see some weird new Russian rap song attributed to him as a “Single”. It’s not his song but it ends up in my NEW MUSIC MIX. I had it with artists like SIERRA and ALEX too. Incredibly annoying.

b-lee 4y ago
You basically tried to make a point and refute it on the same post lol

thefz 4y ago

I won't touch Apple* anything with a stick, but that had me laughing: Here are some suggestions for Apple to improve Apple Music on macOS: Fix the bugs, and make navigation fast! Like programmers weave a magic wand around and bugs magically fix themselves. Why can't you make navigation fast?

_gabe_ 4y ago
> Like programmers weave a magic wand around and bugs magically fix themselves. Why can't you make navigation fast? While it's true that these are hard things to do, I think the author may be getting at a deeper issue here. For some reason the software world of today thinks delivering more crappy half baked features is more important than making usable bug free features, or even just fixing what already exists. I don't know where this idea came from, but it's a very annoying ideology. The Unity game engine is another big corporation that does this. They released that demo awhile ago showing off how they can create realistic looking game scenes (the chess scene demo). I don't understand why they think that appeals to anyone. I'm pretty sure like 90% of people use Unity to make 2D games or low poly 3D games. And instead of fixing all their broken "features" they continue adding "features" nobody cares about or asked for.

mikhailt 4y ago

For folks on Windows/Linux that want to use Apple Music but not the web player, try Cider (https://github.com/ciderapp/Cider https://github.com/ciderapp/Cider). Yes, it is Electron but Apple did use webviews in their macOS AM app as well before they switched back to native earlier this year; which still isn't that great. Ironically, Cider works better than the Apple's web app as well; it doesn't skip or get stuck once in a while. It just works for what I need. (In case other asks, Windows/Linux is more of a work/secondary platform, and iPhone is the main device most of the time. That's why I'd use Apple Music despite having the other platforms).

logic 4y ago
I'll second this; I've been trialing Apple Music side by side with Spotify for the last few months, and Cider has been very usable on both Linux and Windows. If only the Android app weren't such a mess...
hollandheese 4y ago
Honestly, even on the Mac I prefer using Cider to the actual Apple Music app.

psyc 4y ago

I find the web interface completely unusable. It's hard to pinpoint why it's terrible. It's just bad at every step of normal use, and sluggish as something slow. I only have two problems with the ios app, but they're annoying enough. One is making you find a button to transition to a second screen to get to basic play controls, then find another button-like thing (even now I can't tell you off the top of my head where it is) to get back. I do not understand why the "play a song" interface needs multiple pages. The other thing is that once every few hours I get the popup: "song isn't authorized" and I have to click around on shit until the app remembers that yes it actually is authorized because I pay $10 a month for it to be. I'd like to hear the UX rationale for showing a message which to 99.9% of their users just means "We're not going to play your song right now, for no particular reason except that computers don't work in general" and to the rest means "We're not going to play this song right now, even though we probably could if we were less paranoid, or better software engineers, which is an us problem but we'd rather make it a you problem"

ripply 4y ago

If you sync your library, it will wipe all your custom likes/dislikes for songs you sync manually via iTunes as well as wipe your smart playlists (blank them - until you sync your device to your computer again) Therefore Apple Music is literally unusable if you have a large library of songs not on iTunes (like indie electronic stuff) and don’t want iTunes to identify them and switch them to Apple Music songs.

qgin 4y ago

I’m not saying it’s the best app I use, but I feel like I’m taking crazy pills reading this thread. I’ve used Apple Music since it launched and I haven’t had an issue since the first few releases.

ZekeSulastin 4y ago
It’s a HN thread on an article about the problems with ________; I’m not sure what else you expected :)
CharlesW 4y ago
I’m also a very happy user (and a Spotify expat). Apple Music already has about half of Spotify’s market share and its growth is accelerating. I feel like this is an “Apple Maps”-type situation, where it’s slagged on for years while Apple continues to quietly improve it. https://www.midiaresearch.com/blog/music-subscriber-market-shares-q2-2021 https://www.midiaresearch.com/blog/music-subscriber-market-s...

Decabytes 4y ago

I tried out Apple Music for the first time because I got a trial for it. I was shocked with how slow and unresponsive the interface is. Not only that songs had a noticeable delay between when they were clicked and when they actually started playing

tokamak-teapot 4y ago
To be fair, Spotify is doing something pretty magical here. I can’t figure out how they usually start tracks playing within what feels like microseconds after I choose them. Pre caching? Yes but sometimes I don’t see how it could have reasonably guessed that I might play that particular song, like when I start typing to search and then stab at an entry in the results. Surely they also want to be doing some buffering, so if they are pre caching a tiny bit of songs then they need to load the next piece of data quickly before I’ve heard the first part, but there is no obvious issue where this fails, as I might expect to hear. Also when I seek in a song it’s almost always instant. They have the whole song quickly enough for the whole thing to be seekable? If they were just relying on great latency and bandwidth then there should be a lot more issues with the audio pausing or dropping out.
- Tijdreiziger 4y ago
  FWIW, I switched from Spotify to YouTube Music and both are certainly fast enough that it's not really something I think about.

grej 4y ago

This is one of my huge irritations with the “advancements” in tech. Is it too much to ask for my $1000+ 256GB device to have an mp3 experience at least as good as the one I could buy 20 years ago?! Apple Music is has slowly devolved into a worse and worse mp3 player. It’s much worse than the old ios itunes used to be, and it’s a deliberate choice they’re making.

t0mmyb0y 4y ago

throw__away7391 4y ago

Item 1 from the App Store guidelines: > Before You Submit > ... > Make sure you: > - Test your app for crashes and bugs Every time I used this app all I could think is "who is Apple to judge my app?!"

wintermutestwin 4y ago

I am fully bought in to the Apple ecosystem, but Apple Music is the poison pill that has me questioning this new prison I have chosen. The iOS app wastes three out of five buttons at the bottom that I can't change to something useful: "Listen Now" "Browse" "Radio" are all weak "discovery" tools that are probably more about label kickbacks than actually helping me find new music that I like. And really, I don't need your discovery Apple - what I need is better library discovery/organization tools because I have a massive library which is unwieldy in your crap apps. The album-centric focus is a huge PitA due to singles. Give me an Artist playlist that doesn't take up a precious playlist slot. Maybe this isn't entirely Apple's fault, but when I see greyed out songs or albums that were once there that aren't anymore, I feel pushed to stop giving these scumbag labels my cash through your service. I left out the bugs, but I feel that the quality of their flagship services product makes them look like a dying company, not a premium brand worth 2.5t$

pupppet 4y ago
I can’t stand the iOS Apple Music button setup. Library > Playlists > Playlist name > Play/Shuffle Four taps just to get my own music to start playing. Maddening that 3 of the 5 buttons are dedicated to not my music.
- concinds 4y ago
  It's especially horrible if you have lots of playlists, and like to add playlists from Apple Music to your library. You can't add Apple Music playlists to playlist folders, and playlists can only be sorted alphabetically. On the Mac, your playlist folders are on top; then Apple Music playlists & your playlists are mixed together. On iPhone, it's reversed; Apple Music playlists, then your folders, forcing you to scroll all the way down to get to your playlists. And on Mac you can't add a song to a new playlist in a playlist folder directly; you need to add a song to a new playlist, and drag that playlist (that isn't highlighted) all the way up to the right folder. Yuck.

0daystock 4y ago

b-lee 4y ago
The hardware and the OS which are second and to none IMO. And yes I’ve used Ubuntu and Windows for years and they don’t even come close.

herodotus 4y ago

Thank you for this critique. So true. But don't even let me get started on the disaster that it is for Classical Music lovers.

duk 4y ago

Apple Music definitely sounds better when paired with Airpods to my ears compared to Spotify. Am I imagining?

wut42 4y ago
I don't think you are. My knowledge may be outdated but Spotify uses a lower bitrate than Apple Music (which can go up to lossless) and the Airpods supports that lossless, too.

hackerbrother 4y ago

I think it's less buggy than Spotify.

cosmiccatnap 4y ago

The best thing you can say about apple music is that it's not Spotify

spideymans 4y ago

What makes this frustrating for me is that the underlying Apple Music API is actually quite robust, such that it really is quite straightforward to create an Apple Music client that is extremely performant. I just can't wrap my head around why Apple can't do it themselves.

mthoms 4y ago
Are there any good third party clients? Does Apple allow that?

eatbitseveryday 4y ago

Don’t suggest to delete iTunes because it is the only place to purchase music. Unless that ability is migrated to Music.

joeman1000 4y ago

Can confirm. Sometimes there are full DAYS where there is some error and it will not play music at all… I’m paying for it and it won’t play anything. I’ve submitted big reports multiple times. It’s not good enough.

chrisbrandow 4y ago

For me th worst aspect of Apple Music is that I cannot form a mental model of how it is supposed to work. I just have no clue.

lapcat 4y ago

Let me add: 1. The playing song's time elapsed and time remaining are only displayed when you hover over the toolbar and disappear otherwise. WTF?!? 2. Sometimes when I press play, the app goes into an endless shuffle where it keeps selecting new random songs and doesn't play anything. I have to quit the app and start over. 3. The delete key stopped working in a selected song in a playlist on Monterey. 4. The Filter field doesn't appear in the window unless I press option-command-f first. Sigh.

n8cpdx 4y ago

Be careful if you ever get a suspicious billing email. Apple decided my credit card expired (it didn’t). Unlike other services, if you stop paying, it deletes your entire library (including playlists) from all your devices. So if you want to switch to another music service, you’re hosed. I’ve been fighting for a week or so now to get my playlist data via the privacy tools. Just yesterday they decided to give me a list of all my app downloads, instead of what I asked for. Apple wants me to pay to get back access, but I’m not willing to give their services division another $0.01 until they stop treating customers like shit.

aczerepinski 4y ago

I hate that in order to add a song to a playlist I have to add it to my library so that it is mixed in and listed alongside the full albums I’ve purchased. I guess I prefer using Spotify so that my library of purchased music and playlists for streaming are altogether separate. Also on the desktop app the way to find new jazz releases is to first put the curser in the search input which opens a secret menu. Is there a way for me to “favorite” new jazz releases so that I can check it each week without so much scrolling and clicking?

aczerepinski 4y ago

The UX I enjoy most is buying a vinyl record, listening to it start to finish while reading the full liner notes, knowing that the artist got the maximum amount of money, and there being no way for any tech company to track how many times I listened. Highly recommended!

tayne 4y ago

Spotify is the worst and buggiest software I use, both the app and the web app. How bad could it be? It resets to the beginning of a multi hour podcast randomly with no way to get back to where I was. It does many other unbelievable things. God damn the Spotify player.

lawgimenez 4y ago

I've always been an AM user but I can't stand the poor performance and issues anymore. I switched to Spotify again 3 months ago and amazingly they still have my 7-8 year old collaboration playlist with my wife. But Apple Music on the other end just removed my playlists that are barely a year old.

astrostl 4y ago

If you're an Alfred user (and I think you "should" be), try creating a web search keyword for https://music.apple.com/us/search?term={query} https://music.apple.com/us/search?term={query} . When it's triggered it will open up search in the app rather than your browser. I find this much more usable than directly opening and using the app.

jonkratz 4y ago
Great suggestion! I just added this — and it worked as expected (mostly). If the Apple Music app is in MiniPlayer mode, it will not automatically switch to the full player, but thankfully, closing the MiniPlayer immediately drops you into the search results. Thanks!
thoughtpeddler 4y ago
There's also Alfred's own Music feature (commonly mapped to ⌥+⌘+return), which will let you search your library and play songs without going to the Music app first.

alanh 4y ago

I still appreciate having a 'library' unlike the author, but I remain absolutely gobsmacked at how Apple buries the switch that toggles between searching Apple Music and my library. On mobile, the toggle is always right next to the search box. It gets buried in a previous page of what seems like a web view on the desktop. Some of the worst UX I have ever seen!

jb3689 4y ago

I thought Spotify was much worse. The silent playlist song cap alone was infuriating. I constantly had issues syncing between devices. UI feedback was miserable making it so you didn’t understand whether a button was pushed due to the callbacks over cellular, not that Apple Music is much better here. The worst part of Apple Music is the distinction between Apple Music and your library. You can rate things in your library but not Apple Music - which I’m guessing is an artifact of iTunes days when you had MP3s locally. The like feature in Apple Music is also terrible compared to Spotify

therealdrag0 4y ago
My HN, top of the day view, has a post complaining about Spotify above this post complaining about Apple Music. pretty gnarly dislike coming out.

tomcat27 4y ago

I just don't understand why Apple Music search is so bad. Sometimes only exact match returns albums. It's so bad that appending "Apple Music" in google works better.

joshdotblack 4y ago

I've had apple music full-on kernel panic & restart my m1 macbook air, I've had it crash finder & do all sorts of crazy render ghosting stuff on screen like duplicating app icons, I've had it make the OS forget my login keychain key so every app/agent/process pops up a dialog asking for it until I reboot, not to mention the airplay bugs. I've used iTunes since I first got a mac about 15 years ago so I'm not keen to change but Music on MacOS is an absolute carcrash

slmjkdbtl 4y ago

I only use the offline version of Apple Music to manage my local music library, it does the job, but there was a major quality downgrade when Big Sur came out (there was a re-write that replaced the software with a much inferior version for no reason).

thewebcount 4y ago

> primarily: ditch the iTunes Store Please, no! I often purchase a song I streamed because I liked it and want to have it even if the streaming service goes away or loses its license to stream that song or album!

lloeki 4y ago

> If I choose to "like" a song, why is it not automatically saved to the so-called "library". I like that likes and add to library are distinct as they serve two very different purposes for me, but I would really like to have a "liked" playlist. Other annoyances (on macOS): search in apple music vs library, the search box is on one end, the scope selector is on the other. Toggling it requires re-searching. It also gets covered by the right pane. "hey I'm actually searching" feedback is terrible, many parts are ungodly slow for no reason. Oh and that search box has awful behaviour regarding focus, click, start typing, and somehow it gets focused only a second later, missing input and/or not clearing what's in there, or restoring the previous content. It seems to have about a thousand subtle failure modes that keep getting in the way extremely annoyingly. Sadly (personal pov/use case) Apple Music is the "best" (== less worst) app/service out there, from the mobile UI to library management, tag editor, and BYOM+streaming. Tangent: after some time peaking and being actually good, all these music apps/streaming services have become so annoying that I'm progressively rebuilding my library (including all the non-owned discoveries I made) as flat files served by Jellyfin, which will probably take me years but ultimately I'll be able to drop the increasingly crappy app+service verticals in favour of owned music + radio for discovery (there are a couple of great curated radios around here, and a few zines made out of thin slices of dead trees)

heretogetout 4y ago
I prefer to use the radio feature because I don't know exactly what I want to listen to and more importantly I want to learn about new artists. The fact that you can never see liked songs again is so frustrating. You can't even see a history of playback -- when you use radio. Astounding. I wonder how Apple engineers use the application. Are they not also frustrated?
- lloeki 4y ago
  Note that when I say radio I don't mean the Radio feature of Apple Music & al but actual FM/DAB radio stations! (which may or may not be available over shoutcast/icecast)

nobodywasishere 4y ago

Apple Music on Android is a pleasure to use for me, especially dark mode and being able to cast right from the app.

stack_framer 4y ago

The worst thing about Apple Music on macOS are the "smart" playlists. They can't be disabled, they keep coming back no matter how many times I delete them, and they're always at the top, so they push my playlists out of sight. Just absolutely terrible UX.

teaneedz 4y ago

> Adding a currently playing song to a playlist will stop the music and clear the play queue. This bugs me to no end. I'm always asking myself if a song is worth the listening interruption that will happen when I add it to a playlist. Such a stupid low hanging bug.

crossroadsguy 4y ago

Well that just means you certainly haven’t used many other Apple softwares. Because they compete quite healthily at being among the worst.

radicality 4y ago

Back when Apple Music was just introduced, I enabled the free trial on my MacBook where I already had a curated iTunes library over the years. Apple Music was so destructive that it went and started irreversibly not only reorganising my local library but also deleting my local songs because it had the same song in the cloud… No thank you. It was so destructive that my only option was to disable Apple Music, completely remove my whole iTunes music/data folder and restore everything from backup. —- I also recently realised that the Mac OS upgrade broke my iTunes playlists again, I’m not sure if it was during move to Bug Sur or earlier. I have a whole folder of music and an iTunes db file, anyone how Im supposed to import that into Music considering that iTunes is dead?

alaricus 4y ago

Most Apple software is buggy and annoying.

b-lee 4y ago

What amazes me about Apple is that they have hardware and operating system that are really great. Every other software I have used that is made by them is buggy beyond belief. Have you tried Apple TV. I stopped using it not because of lack of content but was so unreliable to the extent that you feel like it says “fuck you”. You have one packet loss, your download is doomed. Starting is takes multiple seconds. Try to search something, the UI will freeze. I love Apple products and I hope they fix their services.

biztos 4y ago
> You have one packet loss, your download is doomed. I’ve noticed that on my iPad with a few different video services. Makes me wonder if there’s a buggy video-download API. In any case, absolutely maddening when you’re trying to “fill up” your device on hotel WiFi before a flight.
- b-lee 4y ago
  Don’t think so. Almost every third party app does downloading right except Apple’s. It’s like they don’t even try to recover at all. You can’t resume updates - only on Apple related software. I remember spending 5 days trying to update to Mojave because the update kept failing.

DavideNL 4y ago

I really wish Spotify had native HomePod integration... [1] "Spotify Users Growing Impatient and Canceling Subscriptions Over Lack of Native HomePod Support" : https://www.macrumors.com/2021/11/22/spotify-users-impatient-lack-homepod-support/ https://www.macrumors.com/2021/11/22/spotify-users-impatient... [2] "[iOS] Implement Native HomePod Support" : https://community.spotify.com/t5/Live-Ideas/iOS-Implement-Native-HomePod-Support/idi-p/4985214/highlight/true#comments= https://community.spotify.com/t5/Live-Ideas/iOS-Implement-Na...

wafriedemann 4y ago

Moved to Doppler a couple of weeks ago and never looked back. I put up for way too long with Apple Music and streaming.

skyzyx 4y ago

100%. I have filed so many radars against Music.app and they’ve never been fixed over the years. IMO, It’s gotten significantly worse since iTunes got broken apart in Catalina.

concinds 4y ago

The weirdest Apple Music bug I had was: Watching Netflix with Safari, and then going to the Apple Music local library ("Recently Added", then click on an album) literally broke Music. It looked like this[0], all the Music toolbar buttons were gone, and keyboard shortcuts (spacebar to play) no longer worked. Pausing the movie and switching Safari tab to non-Netflix was the only solution. This was still the case on a completely clean install with only Music and Safari launched. I guess it had to do with the DRM Safari uses to play Netflix content messing with the Music app. But did Apple really never test watching a movie and listening to music at the same time, with the built-in apps? That bug survived from early Big Sur to at least the Monterey release candidate, again on a completely clean install (I didn't test it again afterwards). Huh? How? [0]: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/252162447 https://discussions.apple.com/thread/252162447

bobbylarrybobby 4y ago
Some sort of drm bug when multiple sources using drm are active at once?

knodi 4y ago

Try using the Podcast app it’s even worst.

conioh 4y ago

I see you're not a paying Windows user. :_(

bobbylarrybobby 4y ago

Regarding the second point: I believe this is "sound check" a setting that normalizes audio volume between different songs. I think it takes a second to kick in (maybe it has to fill up some audio buffer to work?) and yes it's incredibly annoying. Afaik only solution is to disable sound check

glorifiedsubred 4y ago

Apple Music software on Mac is truly horrible, and I remember how bad iTunes used to be. It's the slowest UI I use (besides some Windows things), and it routinely goes catatonic if you toggle a vpn or switch networks, etc. adding some things: * the bar for scrubbing is what, 2 pixels wide? * airplay is broken. it does. not. work. It takes about 5 iterations of pausing, restarting things, and prayer to get it to play through its speakers and a homepod. And god forbid you then pause it for a couple minutes or want to hear something from the browser for a second. * If you want to mirror to an appletv and hear sound... good luck, be sure to designate a beneficiary before embarking because you'll probably want to kill yourself. These aren't complicated things to identify or describe. They aren't edge cases. It's the basic functionality and it is absolute shit. How can anything get this bad? Do apple employees not listen to music? Is each feature made by a different siloed team? It doesn't take a silicon valley visionary to fix these things, but they are clearly missing something in their org

FredPret 4y ago

Looking at the comments, I must be the only person who likes this app. - Consistently recommends music I like - Spotify went down a rabbit hole with a certain genre and got weirder every week - Opens instantly - Integrates perfectly with Siri - Doesn’t have the weird colour scheme of Spotify

richbradshaw 4y ago
Yeah agree - I used Spotify back in the day, then Google Play Music, then Apple Music when HomePods first came out. It’s just simple, works well, has the awesome lyrics function and has good quality human curated content. It’s just great!
- FredPret 4y ago
  I forgot to mention the human playlists! Those are great and get updated regularly, by actual people

_23sd 4y ago

I suspect one reason the browsing and search experience is so slow and horrible on these services is that they don't want to present straightforward lists that would allow people to scrape their catalogs and put them head to head. Mainstream tech reviewers seem to have extremely mainstream tastes and insist that you won't notice the difference between the catalogs of YouTube Music (the smallest major service with about 60 million songs) and Apple Music (the largest with about 90 million). Even I noticed YouTube was missing a bunch of my favorite albums and I don't think any of my favorites could be called "obscure" unless you have a really liberal definition of that word. It would be interesting to see a list of the most popular artists missing from each service, or a venn diagram of record labels and rights groups, but I haven't found anything more detailed than isolated anecdotes and media coverage of individual artists trying to push Tidal and/or getting mad at Spotify.

pfesenmeier 4y ago

I wish I could bookmark Record Labels and Curators.

happytiger 4y ago

We just cancelled it yesterday for many of the same reasons. Apple needs to get a small team to rip through the design work and build something incredible. Listening to music has become less fun and the experience objectively worse, even as the catalog of available titles has grown to include everything. It’s not as delightful an experience as it once was.

what-imright 4y ago

I have to agree it’s buggy but awesome too. Very good value for my family plan, excellent sound quality. Every artist obviously. Makes me wish I had never spent so much time pirating in my youth. The Siri integration is quite bad. Sometimes songs only half play. Needs a restart about every day. Yep it’s buggy, but I’m a Apple music subscriber for life. They nailed it.

thoughtpeddler 4y ago
> Makes me wish I had never spent so much time pirating in my youth. Listen, I feel your pain, but don't feel bad about this. Streaming services didn't exist back then. The best we could do was have some reasonably-sized collection on purchased CDs that we ripped to MP3, supplemented by a digital collection acquired through ... different means. It took the (recording) industry years before they woke up. That's not your fault. Thinking back, I could even imagine an alternate late 90s / early 2000s, where the RIAA was tolerant of the streaming model, but most peoples' connections were still dial-up / weak broadband, so we'd all be content with ~64kbps-quality MP3 playback lol

janandonly 4y ago

Agree. I never managed to sync playlists between my iPhone and iPad. The only way to make it work turned out to be: 1. Delete all playlists 2. Buy a MacBook 3. In the music.app, re-create the playlists. 4. Then, sync your iPhone’s music library including the just created playlists with the MacBook. Took me a while to figure this out I even started using Spotify just because at least syncing playlists would just work in that app.

cbare 4y ago

The desktop client is really buggy and reflects poorly on Apple. Some say, an all-you-can-eat buffet of a big chunk of all published music is just too good to be true and can't last. But, then wasn't that the promise? Too cheap to meter? To have at your fingertips the accumulated product of hundreds of years of culture, millions of hours of practice... Currently streaming: JS Bach, Sonatas for Viola da Gamba, Sergei Istomin and Viviana Sofronitsky which I had to type 'cause you can't even cut-n-paste out that piece of junk.

floatinglotus 4y ago

Amazing. His list is totally different from my list of bugs!

tsp 4y ago

I wanted to switch from Spotify to Apple Music, for reasons why see [1]. While I enjoyed that most of the music I am listening to is available on Apple Music as well, I just could not make the switch because of the bad UX in some places and their recommendation system, which is barely existing and one of the features I enjoy most with cloud streaming services. With Apple TV I had similar experiences - compared to Netflix, the UX was just horrible. In a way it made me feel good - if a company with so much money as Apple can fail so miserably, it is fine if I as a developer make mistakes too sometimes :) [1] https://ra.co/news/76439 https://ra.co/news/76439

FunnyBadger 4y ago

It also has a horrible UI. Honestly iTunes had its issues but Music is a step backwards compared to iTunes!! It's UI is clearly designed by someone who 1) only listens to recent popular music, 2) isn't particularly passionate about any music they listen to, and 3) don't bother to look for new music that isn't in the top-10. Basically the last kind of person who should ever do UI design - no passion or knowledge about the application or the market!

ayush--s 4y ago

apple music is the best advert for spotify

agent00shoe 4y ago

Why can't I remove a song from a playlist in the web ui without it removing that same song from all playlists in my entire library?!