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5 New Apple Music Features Coming This Year
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Sure, but they don’t prohibit you from using any other common audio file format in your own iOS/iTunes library. So there’s no reason they should be actively prohibiting people from playing their own FLAC files. They can continue using ALAC for streaming, there’s no problem with that in the slightest.
L A N D S C A P E ... landscape, landscape, landscape.
Remember when just about every app Apple made supported LANDSCAPE???
Ever drive with your iPhone mounted to a dashboard in LANDSCAPE for Maps & then have to physically rotate it for Music?
That's a huge impact on quality of life features & functionality for the Music app ... especially with respect to distracted driving.
(CarPlay is a great workaround if your car has that, & $4.99 for the Marvis app is a great workaround if you don't have CarPlay).
Remember when just about every app Apple made supported LANDSCAPE???
Ever drive with your iPhone mounted to a dashboard in LANDSCAPE for Maps & then have to physically rotate it for Music?
That's a huge impact on quality of life features & functionality for the Music app ... especially with respect to distracted driving.
(CarPlay is a great workaround if your car has that, & $4.99 for the Marvis app is a great workaround if you don't have CarPlay).
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All I want is an option to display just the album title without the album image within the artist and album sections.
YES!!!.... finally!... cross-fade (or audio-lead/lag as we in broadcasting sometimes call it).
The only thing that is left on my wish-list is audio-proccesing. I used to have VolumeLogic on Mac, the only plugin that did almost perfectly adjusted the perceived volume per track. Combined with the crossfade option on iTunes it sounded exactly like regular radio (without jingles and DJ talk). Never too loud, never too soft, just perfect for continuous playback.
The maker Leif Claesson hasn't ported BreakAway for iOS/tvOS/iPadOS yet. Maybe Apple could purchase a licence for a port?
The only thing that is left on my wish-list is audio-proccesing. I used to have VolumeLogic on Mac, the only plugin that did almost perfectly adjusted the perceived volume per track. Combined with the crossfade option on iTunes it sounded exactly like regular radio (without jingles and DJ talk). Never too loud, never too soft, just perfect for continuous playback.
The maker Leif Claesson hasn't ported BreakAway for iOS/tvOS/iPadOS yet. Maybe Apple could purchase a licence for a port?
Maybe it is genre-specific. I like the convenience of Apple Music, but the playlist song selections and new music discovery seem lacking.
I've been an AM user since we transitioned from iTunes to AM. While there have been bumps along the way - like losing years of meticulously curating a massive, eclectic collection packed with lots of personal live recordings and other extremely rare gems, available nowhere else, when I tried moving my music to Match (still sickened by that one) - I find their algorithms to be pretty dope. I don't play a lot of their curated playlists or channels, so I can't speak to any of that. Nor do I use Spotify. But when I'm playing an album (yeah, I still listen to an artist's full album), and it ends, and AM takes over playing things it's algorithm thinks might work with what I have just been playing, I am constantly surprised by, and turned on to, some amazing new-to-me music that as helped greatly expanded my musical vocabulary and preferences. I hear Spotify does this better? Which is cool. But I have never once thought AM's algorithm sucked. From the sound of it, I may be in the minority on that one. Anyway...
What I would really like to see Am music work toward, the most, is including liner notes with all of their albums.
Who produced? Where was it recorded? What are the musician's names and on what tracks did they play what instruments? Who wrote the song? You know, the same liner notes you might find with a physical album. This type of information can facilitate deeper, more meaningful connections to the music - fostering a more self-realized (aka: rewarding) sense of music discovery that can go a long way toward cementing a deeper appreciation for the art form. As an example, it can be pretty exciting to learn that one of your favorite albums was produced by someone who produced a different band's album you had never heard. Then to listen to that new album and realize that not only do you like a new band, but as it turns out, you also really like that producer's work. Or that the drummer on that one album you like also drums with another band you've never heard of. All of those micro-realizations and connections can lead one down a whole other path of discovery that was there all along, but required extraordinary effort to uncover. As we've moved to predominantly streaming our music, we're losing a bit of understanding that actual humans (for the most part) made the music we hold so dear. That disconnect can be such an unnecessary, and easily addressed, disservice. It's not like including this type of info requires some technological wizardry on Apple's part. Hell no. It's simply tagging tracks with readily available metadata. The labels have this info for the physical formats. It would be easy to add to their digital files. It's a new section on the Music submission form. A simple tweak to the submission process. I'm so surprised this hasn't happened yet. But, it's a great opportunity for AM to deepen their users' connections with music.
Apple... Make it so.
What I would really like to see Am music work toward, the most, is including liner notes with all of their albums.
Who produced? Where was it recorded? What are the musician's names and on what tracks did they play what instruments? Who wrote the song? You know, the same liner notes you might find with a physical album. This type of information can facilitate deeper, more meaningful connections to the music - fostering a more self-realized (aka: rewarding) sense of music discovery that can go a long way toward cementing a deeper appreciation for the art form. As an example, it can be pretty exciting to learn that one of your favorite albums was produced by someone who produced a different band's album you had never heard. Then to listen to that new album and realize that not only do you like a new band, but as it turns out, you also really like that producer's work. Or that the drummer on that one album you like also drums with another band you've never heard of. All of those micro-realizations and connections can lead one down a whole other path of discovery that was there all along, but required extraordinary effort to uncover. As we've moved to predominantly streaming our music, we're losing a bit of understanding that actual humans (for the most part) made the music we hold so dear. That disconnect can be such an unnecessary, and easily addressed, disservice. It's not like including this type of info requires some technological wizardry on Apple's part. Hell no. It's simply tagging tracks with readily available metadata. The labels have this info for the physical formats. It would be easy to add to their digital files. It's a new section on the Music submission form. A simple tweak to the submission process. I'm so surprised this hasn't happened yet. But, it's a great opportunity for AM to deepen their users' connections with music.
Apple... Make it so.
I had to chuckle at this ‘big news’. I honestly thought it was an option too, and it floors me that it wasn’t. Laughable, really.
Yes. I was buying many albums as a teenager in the 70's and later and as a music fan I purchased the then newsprint Melody Maker and New Musical Express publications imported from the UK regularly. The liner notes, inserts and photo and art spreads in the physical LP gate folds were part of the joy of the whole process. Viewing and reading those as I listened to side 1 and then side 2 of the album was a wonderful experience. Streaming gets the music to us but what a cold and soulless process.
Totally agree.
The good news here is that there's opportunity to [easily] address some of this soul-nourishing experience and enrichment. Let's get to it.
I would love the option to “wipe” Music clean (of all listening history, etc) on Apple TV at each start up (or at least on demand). Everyone in my house uses it to listen to things and it becomes a mess to look at, try to find something. Just give me a blank screen and search bar. If there’s a playlist someone wants to play, they can airplay it.
How about they actually add some parental controls to the music app? Say, if you're on Apple One or the Family Plan, you can allow access to "only approved albums/playlists"? Some of the album art is horrible, and I don't want my kids to be able to "browse around". But also, I want them to be able to listen to music...
The only "parental control" you can do is to block explicit songs.
The only "parental control" you can do is to block explicit songs.
The one thing that has driven me nuts about the iOS Music app is often that the "Play" button doesn't reflect the current state of play mode. It's been very confusing at times. You'd hear the music playing, but the button would still show as "Play" instead of "Pause". I hope that's a known issue that they are working to address. This also affects the macOS Music app. It's a poor user experience that never should have been overlooked.
If AM could just stop suggesting stuff I've repeatedly said I don't like. 'Browse' is awful
I guess it's telling that nothing is happening for the Music app on macOS 
No Apple Music Classical, no improvements to the legacy "iTunes Store", etc. I wish they wouldn't ignore their Mac apps. I remember a while ago we got a rumor of a "ground-up overhaul" of the macOS Music app and it never happened. I'm starting to think it never will.
No Apple Music Classical, no improvements to the legacy "iTunes Store", etc. I wish they wouldn't ignore their Mac apps. I remember a while ago we got a rumor of a "ground-up overhaul" of the macOS Music app and it never happened. I'm starting to think it never will.
Look at it another way "Here's a highlight of 5 new features".... In other words, there could be more than these features, but this article is choosing 5 of them. Feel better now? 😁
But seriously, working on user-facing features is not all Apple does in software development. There's always a ton of under-the-hood improvements taking place that we don't "see". It's still valuable work and it's still an improvement that we benefit from, year after year.
I guess it's telling that nothing is happening for the Music app on macOS
No Apple Music Classical, no improvements to the legacy "iTunes Store", etc. I wish they wouldn't ignore their Mac apps. I remember a while ago we got a rumor of a "ground-up overhaul" of the macOS Music app and it never happened. I'm starting to think it never will.
The Music app is the ground-up version, replacing the older and archaic iTunes app. Do you remember how clunky iTunes had actually gotten? The current Music app is a vast improvement.
It's an improvement, but it still retains many legacy features of iTunes, and really, most of what was changed was that iTunes' bloat (iPhone Sync, Podcasts) was spun off of it. That's good, of course, but not really a ground-up overhaul; I'd like to see more done to the app UI, especially to the Store, which is still clunky and awkward and should be more user-friendly than it is.
I'm actually excited to see they finally added a depth effect on the minimized music player. It currently blends in with the rest of the screen like it's just another song in a list. I hope they extend this effect to other places in ios that have the same problem. It makes the UI more intuitive.
If they’d stop playing the same 10 songs I’ve already disliked when playing the just for you station, that’d be great.
