13 ms·

Apple Music is a nightmare and I’m done with it

72 points by uptown 11y ago

digikata 11y ago
"It's great that they lavish insane attention to detail on the bezel of an iPhone or getting the color just right. They need to lavish that insane attention to detail on their services." This comment to that article expresses my feelings exactly. It feels like physical, graphical, and some interface design issues get strong attention right at the top in Ives, but many small, but deep user issues have been cropping up surrounding iCloud and now Apple Music. It's not so much first order bugs (though those exist too), but focus on user perspective.
scrumper 11y ago
Reflects my experience with iTunes Match. It was awful; I persevered for a year and never made it work properly. Dupes, missing songs, volatile metadata, unsynchronized syncing, the works. I removed it and little hangovers still persist, like every track on Pet Sounds being duplicated. I did get the benefit of my old Napster rips finally turning up in decent quality with a nice conscience wipe. Apple does great hardware and good operating systems, but horrid, hateful services. Their cloudy stuff is slow, fragile, and not even all that cheap.
- jameshart 11y ago
  I'm not sure that the iTunes Match subscription actually included a papal indulgence and absolution of past copyright sins.
Domenic_S 11y ago
Can Apple please just poach some Amazon folks and figure out their cloud business once and for all? Cloud is hard. Synching is hard. Trust is easily lost. Hire the right people and do it!
- Polecat 11y ago
  Didn't the big tech companies make an agreement to not poach employees from each other?
HSO 11y ago
I'm tempted to say: "Such a rube! Welcome to the world." ;-) Of course there were going to be problems. I used to be a huge Apple fan, but my enthusiasm has been badly tempered by experience. All the cloud and software-related weirdness of Apple (leave aside for the moment the mysterious hissing noise of my Mac Pro) became too much for me already a loong time ago. For example, iTunes Match completely corrupted my iTunes database but in a weird, random way that necessitated hours if not days of painstaking, manual labor to repair. Then I discovered that almost all my lossless files had been replaced by inferior substitutes, which Apple had explicitly promised would never happen. Oh, morning of joy!!! I still own Apple hardware; but caught between the scylla of Apple's incompetence and the charybdis of Google's obliviousness (if not outright evilness), I have renounced the "cloud". My main machine is airgapped and I refuse to let "the cloud" touch any of my files anymore (this is written from a "throwaway" laptop where I don't have anything except a browser and Little Snitch). It's the only way I can hang on to some sense of control over my stuff. This whole intermediation business is going too far these days.
- logfromblammo 11y ago
  I learned about 20 years ago how to rip and compress music files from audio CDs. Back then, it took longer to compress a .WAV to an .MP3 than it took to listen to the song, and Lame was distributed as a patch to a reference implementation. Before MP3 players were cheap enough, I would create a playlist on the PC, hook up the output from my sound card to the input of my boom box, and record to an audio cassette tape, to play it in my car. For a long time, my biggest problem with digital audio was a chronic lack of disk space. Then I acquired a family, and some of them chose to buy iOS devices. My prior experience with uploading music to a mobile device was to plug it in via USB, or insert the SD card, and just copy to the mount point. It worked for Sansa Clip. It worked for modded Nintendo DS. Then along comes the iPod and the iPad and the iPhone. Obstacle one is the proprietary 20-pin sync cable which has a habit of breaking every 3rd time you use it. Obstacle two is a lack of lightweight USB drivers to access the device's internal filesystem. You have to download and install a full-fledged iTunes program to your computer to put even one song on your iOS device. Obstacle three is iTunes user management. I, having no iOS devices, want to upload a file from my hard drive to devices belonging to other people, without syncing the entire contents of their device to my hard drive. It didn't take long for me to issue a proclamation that I would no longer be offering free technical support for any Apple devices. When the spouse has a problem with the iPhone, I suggest a trip to the Apple store or a call to the cellular network provider. I'd rather be put in the doghouse for a day than be stuck in Apple's walled garden forever. I have never trusted anyone with my data. That's why my music collection is in deep storage on the original pressed CDs, in cold storage on DVD-Rs, in warm storage as FLAC files on an external hard drive, and live copies are transcoded MP3 files, usually on hard disks and microSD cards. Now, my biggest problem is deciding which songs from my kids' CDs are good enough for me to add to my playlists. And I really like that I don't need Apple's permission to listen to them.
benashford 11y ago
I agree entirely. I've had all those issues, and a few more: For a week until this morning, half of the UK (and a few other non-US locations) were unable to play any music at all, due to a CDN DNS issue; and starting new custom radio stations has never worked either, and still doesn't. Both of those two issues bizarrely affected iTunes only, and not the Apple Music app on iOS. The complete silence on product issues from Apple only adds to the frustration. That plus there doesn't seem to be a way of reporting Apple Music bugs yet, I went looking only to find iTunes Store was the only thing you could report a specific issue about. It is such a poor product, it makes me think less of Apple generally, is this the sort of enterprise I trust to make payments? Also, this is made worse by the gap between the iOS and OS X experience, it just highlights how little focus OS X gets these days, not that it was in much doubt. I might keep trying it occasionally until the three month trial expires, but no more than that, I'll be very surprised if this can all be fixed by then.
ozarius 11y ago
Couldn't agree more. The UX + Service suckiness just takes it to another level. Don't even get me started about how the shuffle, repeat buttons look and feel. It appears that the HIG is no longer read by those who work @ Apple any more...
- brador 11y ago
  What's HIG?
  - anotherangrydev 11y ago
    Human Interface Guidelines, a smuggy (but actually really detailed and overall good) document they publish on how you should design the User Interface of your program to provide a nice experience for your users, particularly on Apple platforms.
  - orand 11y ago
    Human Interface Guidelines
dreamcompiler 11y ago
Apple has had a longstanding but unstated policy that the deletion, destruction, or damaging of a user's data during any sync-like operation is perfectly acceptable. Because I've been burned by this policy repeatedly over the years -- not just in Apple's cloud services but also with local USB syncing -- I avoid such services like the plague. That Apple Music carries on this tradition is no surprise.
kstenerud 11y ago
And this is why I maintain my own music collection, in FLAC, stored on a machine I control, in my house, with ZFS and backups and scripts to generate lossy versions of any part of my collection in whatever format I choose. My phone has plenty of space to store compressed music, my car has a usb port that I can plug a flash card into, and I have a portable wristwatch mp3 player for when I go running. I can go anywhere I want by car, bus, train, airplane, boat, or foot, and never lose my tunes to bad reception or buggy software because my music is ALWAYS in my physical possession, with backups in a lossless format. I can even connect to my home machine from remote to stream or download if need be. Really, what use would I ever have of these silly walled cloud or streaming services?
- coldtea 11y ago
  >Really, what use would I ever have of these silly walled cloud or streaming services? OTOH, your use case could be called "outlier" and "a throwback". Most young kids don't care for owning music at all (not talking about the few buying vinyl, or the slightly more buying digital, I'm talking about the huge majority). They are OK with streaming like Pandora and Spotify, not to mention they're fine with just YouTube most of them time.
  - RexRollman 11y ago
    I have historically collected and owned my own music. That said, I have really enjoyed streaming music with Rdio, especially on my iPhone. The only downside I have observed is that songs come into and leave Rdio's library constantly due to licensing. It is not unusual to bring up a playlist and find that a song or two on it is no longer available. (Sadly, there is no mandatory licensing scheme for streaming services like there is for radio.)
    - kstenerud 11y ago
      That was actually the clincher for me. I want my music to STAY available.
  - kactus 11y ago
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
TrevorJ 11y ago
Starting around 5 years ago the whole Apple iTunes experience started a rapid decline and is now pretty uniformly terrible. I won't touch it with a ten foot pole now.
PebblesHD 11y ago
I'll chime in here from the 18-24 crowd. I've been using Spotify since it became available here, and Premium on top of that for a few years now and it's a fantastic service. My Phone syncs properly, my iPad runs great and my Laptop has all my playlists when I need to use it. As for Apple Music, I gave up after two weeks, its just nowhere near as polished and functional, and its missing quite a few of the songs and artists I like. The sad thing is they both still sound and feel nowhere near as good as my CD library proudly built over my life so far, and I don't see this changing any time soon. @loop - You have really pretty excellent music taste...
- mattkrea 11y ago
  You do have 320kbps enabled right? I think it sounds quite good.
  - PebblesHD 11y ago
    Ahh but of course. It has the distinct advantage on my iPhone of having a manual EQ as well which means I can tune it just so for my headphones. It beats out the stock media player for listening in most situations
    - asimilator 11y ago
      http://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/06/02/411473508/how-well-can-you-hear-audio-quality http://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/06/02/411473508/h... Can you tell the difference between uncompressed vs 320 kbps vs 128 kbps in a blind test?
      - PebblesHD 11y ago
        In all likelihood no. Personally though I feel like AAC encoded audio is just 'nicer' than MP3 for some reason.
      - zaccus 11y ago
        Between uncompressed and 320? Maybe not. Between 320 and 128? Yes absolutely.
msoad 11y ago
I just switched back to Spotify. Apple Music has so many issues.
scelerat 11y ago
Wait -- what? Apple Music deletes music without asking you? That seems to be what the article is stating. Same as this author, I have a large collection of digitized music, most of it ripped from a 500+ CD collection I no longer have complete access to. It's backed up, of course, but sheesh.
- dublinben 11y ago
  Apple Music ingests music that you 'match' to the service, and only gives you back DRM-infected copies if you download them back.

72 points by uptown 11y ago

"It's great that they lavish insane attention to detail on the bezel of an iPhone or getting the color just right. They need to lavish that insane attention to detail on their services." This comment to that article expresses my feelings exactly. It feels like physical, graphical, and some interface design issues get strong attention right at the top in Ives, but many small, but deep user issues have been cropping up surrounding iCloud and now Apple Music. It's not so much first order bugs (though those exist too), but focus on user perspective.

scrumper 11y ago

Reflects my experience with iTunes Match. It was awful; I persevered for a year and never made it work properly. Dupes, missing songs, volatile metadata, unsynchronized syncing, the works. I removed it and little hangovers still persist, like every track on Pet Sounds being duplicated. I did get the benefit of my old Napster rips finally turning up in decent quality with a nice conscience wipe. Apple does great hardware and good operating systems, but horrid, hateful services. Their cloudy stuff is slow, fragile, and not even all that cheap.

jameshart 11y ago
I'm not sure that the iTunes Match subscription actually included a papal indulgence and absolution of past copyright sins.

Domenic_S 11y ago

Can Apple please just poach some Amazon folks and figure out their cloud business once and for all? Cloud is hard. Synching is hard. Trust is easily lost. Hire the right people and do it!

Polecat 11y ago
Didn't the big tech companies make an agreement to not poach employees from each other?

HSO 11y ago

I'm tempted to say: "Such a rube! Welcome to the world." ;-) Of course there were going to be problems. I used to be a huge Apple fan, but my enthusiasm has been badly tempered by experience. All the cloud and software-related weirdness of Apple (leave aside for the moment the mysterious hissing noise of my Mac Pro) became too much for me already a loong time ago. For example, iTunes Match completely corrupted my iTunes database but in a weird, random way that necessitated hours if not days of painstaking, manual labor to repair. Then I discovered that almost all my lossless files had been replaced by inferior substitutes, which Apple had explicitly promised would never happen. Oh, morning of joy!!! I still own Apple hardware; but caught between the scylla of Apple's incompetence and the charybdis of Google's obliviousness (if not outright evilness), I have renounced the "cloud". My main machine is airgapped and I refuse to let "the cloud" touch any of my files anymore (this is written from a "throwaway" laptop where I don't have anything except a browser and Little Snitch). It's the only way I can hang on to some sense of control over my stuff. This whole intermediation business is going too far these days.

logfromblammo 11y ago
I learned about 20 years ago how to rip and compress music files from audio CDs. Back then, it took longer to compress a .WAV to an .MP3 than it took to listen to the song, and Lame was distributed as a patch to a reference implementation. Before MP3 players were cheap enough, I would create a playlist on the PC, hook up the output from my sound card to the input of my boom box, and record to an audio cassette tape, to play it in my car. For a long time, my biggest problem with digital audio was a chronic lack of disk space. Then I acquired a family, and some of them chose to buy iOS devices. My prior experience with uploading music to a mobile device was to plug it in via USB, or insert the SD card, and just copy to the mount point. It worked for Sansa Clip. It worked for modded Nintendo DS. Then along comes the iPod and the iPad and the iPhone. Obstacle one is the proprietary 20-pin sync cable which has a habit of breaking every 3rd time you use it. Obstacle two is a lack of lightweight USB drivers to access the device's internal filesystem. You have to download and install a full-fledged iTunes program to your computer to put even one song on your iOS device. Obstacle three is iTunes user management. I, having no iOS devices, want to upload a file from my hard drive to devices belonging to other people, without syncing the entire contents of their device to my hard drive. It didn't take long for me to issue a proclamation that I would no longer be offering free technical support for any Apple devices. When the spouse has a problem with the iPhone, I suggest a trip to the Apple store or a call to the cellular network provider. I'd rather be put in the doghouse for a day than be stuck in Apple's walled garden forever. I have never trusted anyone with my data. That's why my music collection is in deep storage on the original pressed CDs, in cold storage on DVD-Rs, in warm storage as FLAC files on an external hard drive, and live copies are transcoded MP3 files, usually on hard disks and microSD cards. Now, my biggest problem is deciding which songs from my kids' CDs are good enough for me to add to my playlists. And I really like that I don't need Apple's permission to listen to them.

benashford 11y ago

I agree entirely. I've had all those issues, and a few more: For a week until this morning, half of the UK (and a few other non-US locations) were unable to play any music at all, due to a CDN DNS issue; and starting new custom radio stations has never worked either, and still doesn't. Both of those two issues bizarrely affected iTunes only, and not the Apple Music app on iOS. The complete silence on product issues from Apple only adds to the frustration. That plus there doesn't seem to be a way of reporting Apple Music bugs yet, I went looking only to find iTunes Store was the only thing you could report a specific issue about. It is such a poor product, it makes me think less of Apple generally, is this the sort of enterprise I trust to make payments? Also, this is made worse by the gap between the iOS and OS X experience, it just highlights how little focus OS X gets these days, not that it was in much doubt. I might keep trying it occasionally until the three month trial expires, but no more than that, I'll be very surprised if this can all be fixed by then.

ozarius 11y ago

Couldn't agree more. The UX + Service suckiness just takes it to another level. Don't even get me started about how the shuffle, repeat buttons look and feel. It appears that the HIG is no longer read by those who work @ Apple any more...

brador 11y ago
What's HIG?
- anotherangrydev 11y ago
  Human Interface Guidelines, a smuggy (but actually really detailed and overall good) document they publish on how you should design the User Interface of your program to provide a nice experience for your users, particularly on Apple platforms.
- orand 11y ago
  Human Interface Guidelines

dreamcompiler 11y ago

Apple has had a longstanding but unstated policy that the deletion, destruction, or damaging of a user's data during any sync-like operation is perfectly acceptable. Because I've been burned by this policy repeatedly over the years -- not just in Apple's cloud services but also with local USB syncing -- I avoid such services like the plague. That Apple Music carries on this tradition is no surprise.

kstenerud 11y ago

And this is why I maintain my own music collection, in FLAC, stored on a machine I control, in my house, with ZFS and backups and scripts to generate lossy versions of any part of my collection in whatever format I choose. My phone has plenty of space to store compressed music, my car has a usb port that I can plug a flash card into, and I have a portable wristwatch mp3 player for when I go running. I can go anywhere I want by car, bus, train, airplane, boat, or foot, and never lose my tunes to bad reception or buggy software because my music is ALWAYS in my physical possession, with backups in a lossless format. I can even connect to my home machine from remote to stream or download if need be. Really, what use would I ever have of these silly walled cloud or streaming services?

coldtea 11y ago
>Really, what use would I ever have of these silly walled cloud or streaming services? OTOH, your use case could be called "outlier" and "a throwback". Most young kids don't care for owning music at all (not talking about the few buying vinyl, or the slightly more buying digital, I'm talking about the huge majority). They are OK with streaming like Pandora and Spotify, not to mention they're fine with just YouTube most of them time.
- RexRollman 11y ago
  I have historically collected and owned my own music. That said, I have really enjoyed streaming music with Rdio, especially on my iPhone. The only downside I have observed is that songs come into and leave Rdio's library constantly due to licensing. It is not unusual to bring up a playlist and find that a song or two on it is no longer available. (Sadly, there is no mandatory licensing scheme for streaming services like there is for radio.)
  - kstenerud 11y ago
    That was actually the clincher for me. I want my music to STAY available.
- kactus 11y ago

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

TrevorJ 11y ago

Starting around 5 years ago the whole Apple iTunes experience started a rapid decline and is now pretty uniformly terrible. I won't touch it with a ten foot pole now.

PebblesHD 11y ago

I'll chime in here from the 18-24 crowd. I've been using Spotify since it became available here, and Premium on top of that for a few years now and it's a fantastic service. My Phone syncs properly, my iPad runs great and my Laptop has all my playlists when I need to use it. As for Apple Music, I gave up after two weeks, its just nowhere near as polished and functional, and its missing quite a few of the songs and artists I like. The sad thing is they both still sound and feel nowhere near as good as my CD library proudly built over my life so far, and I don't see this changing any time soon. @loop - You have really pretty excellent music taste...

mattkrea 11y ago
You do have 320kbps enabled right? I think it sounds quite good.
- PebblesHD 11y ago
  Ahh but of course. It has the distinct advantage on my iPhone of having a manual EQ as well which means I can tune it just so for my headphones. It beats out the stock media player for listening in most situations
  - asimilator 11y ago
    http://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/06/02/411473508/how-well-can-you-hear-audio-quality http://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/06/02/411473508/h... Can you tell the difference between uncompressed vs 320 kbps vs 128 kbps in a blind test?
    - PebblesHD 11y ago
      In all likelihood no. Personally though I feel like AAC encoded audio is just 'nicer' than MP3 for some reason.
    - zaccus 11y ago
      Between uncompressed and 320? Maybe not. Between 320 and 128? Yes absolutely.

msoad 11y ago

I just switched back to Spotify. Apple Music has so many issues.

scelerat 11y ago

Wait -- what? Apple Music deletes music without asking you? That seems to be what the article is stating. Same as this author, I have a large collection of digitized music, most of it ripped from a 500+ CD collection I no longer have complete access to. It's backed up, of course, but sheesh.

dublinben 11y ago
Apple Music ingests music that you 'match' to the service, and only gives you back DRM-infected copies if you download them back.