Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Apple suggests entire genres of music of which I have absolutely no interest. They are completely tone deaf...

Same.

I went through unliking and liking everything that fit my interests, they still push stuff I don't want. I get the impression that 'big names' are deliberately forced on users. As well as 'big genres'.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Marzzz
A small rant: WHY Apple Music app on iPad keeps deleting playlist I am synced using iTunes? iOS 14 beta 4.

To the topic, it looks like Apple is trying to go to a direction where design across multiple apps are somewhat consistent. It is good, as before, inconsistencies creep in all over the place. iOS 14 music app design is my favourite so far, slightly above iOS 9 version and much better than whatever iOS 10-13 has offered. I don't use Apple Music subscription but it is good to see web version using the same design as everywhere else.

Apple writes strict design guidelines to developers. At least respect those guidelines written by themselves.
Because it’s a beta. Have you reported it to Apple?
 
No advice about suggestions of Apple Music as I discover new artists via old school ways, press and radios. If interested, I buy them on ITunes, sometimes after checking on Apple Music if buying the whole album is worthy. I’m wondering when Apple will take in consideration that having the name of the album of which you listen a song is really important.
 
Somehow I missed the launch of the browser version of apple music. Probably because I have 0 non Apple computers
Curious - when I access the beta site and am signed in I get a message CONTENT_EQUIVALENT whenever I attempt to play anything.
Me too, I was going to complain about browser compatibility since I tried both Brave and Firefox on Windows 10 with the same CONTENT_EQUIVALENT error, but then I observed that this is also shown in Safari.
Grudgingly I launched (the new) Edge and wow, it works? Wonder what's going on there
 
So Apple have a great store for purchasing music (and I've purchased a lot of music there), but what really kills me is that their music apps (especially the Music app on the Mac) are 24-carat disgusting - so jaw droppingly awful it boggles me that the people making those apps are even still on the payroll.
 
So Apple have a great store for purchasing music (and I've purchased a lot of music there), but what really kills me is that their music apps (especially the Music app on the Mac) are 24-carat disgusting - so jaw droppingly awful it boggles me that the people making those apps are even still on the payroll.


Couldn't agree more. A few versions ago, music in iTunes was fast and easy to use. Now they seem to have 'webified' Apple Music, views of music default to awful looking HTML style layouts that take an age to load. I resent having to constantly go to view > Show filter field just to a free text search of my music.

The only reason why I still use Apple Music is I always have, I guess. From What I've seen of Spotify it's just as fast and somewhat improved to how it was 10 years ago. I don't move across because it's a hassle to do so.
 
Not in my experience. For some reason, Spotify seems to perpetually think my interests in heavy metal, 90s grunge, Rush and Pink Floyd means I will love playlists filled with electronic and dance music. :confused:

Fascinating! It’s so interesting to me how some people have dramatically better results with one service vs another.
 
  • Like
Reactions: inkswamp
Not in my experience. For some reason, Spotify seems to perpetually think my interests in heavy metal, 90s grunge, Rush and Pink Floyd means I will love playlists filled with electronic and dance music. :confused:
This is my experience as well. We used to get Spotify bundled with our ISP package so it was a no-brainer, then we were looking for a family package. and that was not possible with the 'free' Spotify we got, or at least it didn't add up with any discount, so the price was €15 for either Apple Music or Spotify, both the family pack. Also: my wife and I initially shared a Spotify account since we just had that 1 and we noticed it was far from optimal (obviously!) so I decided to give Apple Music a try and just bought a subscription for myself and changed my wife to a new Spotify account for her and killing the old shared one.

Yes, Apple Music has had its quirks in the beginning, but nowadays I don't have any issues anymore on iOS and macOS and the recommendations were pretty good, while my wife complained even after months of using her new Spotify account that her recommendations/playlists/etc were garbage, like just one or two songs and the rest not even close to her taste. You might call it "discovery of new music" but the thing is: if you don't like drum n bass, never listen to it, and give it a thumbs down, stop recommending it! Spotify didn't. So when a new iOS version had some big Apple Music improvements we switch to an Apple Music family pack and stopped her Spotify account completely. We've never looked back and almost straight away she was much more happy with the Apple Music playlists, especially the mood playlists and Friday playlists for example.

Now this obviously will not be everyone's experience and if you like Spotify better, by all means stick with it. They're equally priced and as far as regular music tastes go the amount of music they offer is about the same as well. However, having said that, I notice in my daily life when people see me using Apple Music most of the times I get a reaction like "You use Apple Music? Why? Why not Spotify?". And if you ask why the question marks, you find out 95% of the people never actually tried Apple Music or their experience was based purely on the initial 3 (or was it 1?) months trial period about 5 years ago.

Just like the endless iOS vs. Android debate, there is no "better" or "worse" option by default, it completely depends on what you want from it. If someone is using mainly Apple products then I always recommended at least trying out Apple Music for a month or so, but if someone has an Android phone, an iPad and a Windows laptop, then they should stick with Spotify of course. Besides that it's mainly a personal preference and what I think is good in Apple Music might not be the case for someone else and vice versa. But there are too many toxic "Apple Music is sh*t" comments that are not based on recent experience if any, even on MacRumors.

The Apple web player is the number one reason I use Spotify.
Nice, such well constructed criticism.
Without being sarcastic: could you please elaborate? Most often I use the native apps and sometimes the web player, but haven't found any issues with so I'm curious honestly as to what it is why you think Spotify's better.
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: inkswamp
A small rant: WHY Apple Music app on iPad keeps deleting playlist I am synced using iTunes? iOS 14 beta 4.

Because Apple sucks when it comes to syncing. I just had Music on my Mac (running on Catalina) delete playlists from my library during a sync with iCloud music library. This happened the other day for no reason. Apple has never provided reliable online services, and I say this as someone who has used Apple services all the way back to the AppleLink days. If you use Apple services, you better have a lot of backups!
 
I have a question about this. As we know, those of us who subscribe to Apple Music are limited to 5 computers and 10 devices overall, in accessing our music. Since Apple hasn't said anything about access limits via the web interface, this kind of makes the Apple Music limits a moot point, no?
 
Not in my experience. For some reason, Spotify seems to perpetually think my interests in heavy metal, 90s grunge, Rush and Pink Floyd means I will love playlists filled with electronic and dance music. :confused:

Still better than Apple's insistence that everyone must love hip-hop. Speaking of that, why is there still only a Beats"1" radio? How about some other stations already?

As for the For You playlists...I've noticed that the Get Up and Chill mixes pull from your own library, as opposed to, say, presenting you with something new to listen to. I find that annoying.

</end random brain dump>
 
Top Picks based on usage habits

That is so gonna conserve your already limited exposure to music.

And that's why I am still oldskool, collecting actual digital files, making an effort in discovering both old and new music of all kinds. Wish they had an “AI” for that.

I find Apple suggests plenty of new artist and music for me with the specified new music playlist they formulate for me. But I also will use siri to find songs that I hear in shows, movies, commercials, radio etc so I don't think I'm missing out on much but it does sound like spotify playlist are superior according to other people but I'm aslo not sure if they are still using Apple Music so unless you're someone who uses both I think people are super biased. I also think AM still has a larger library, I could be wrong, but to me that's enough to consider AM at least as good as Spotify. AM bigger Library vs Spotify apparently better curated playlists.
 
I find Apple suggests plenty of new artist and music for me with the specified new music playlist they formulate for me. But I also will use siri to find songs that I hear in shows, movies, commercials, radio etc so I don't think I'm missing out on much but it does sound like spotify playlist are superior according to other people but I'm aslo not sure if they are still using Apple Music so unless you're someone who uses both I think people are super biased. I also think AM still has a larger library, I could be wrong, but to me that's enough to consider AM at least as good as Spotify. AM bigger Library vs Spotify apparently better curated playlists.

I could be wrong but neither Spotify or Apple Music has what I believe to be the most crucial feature, a jukebox like/unlimited skips feature that I've only encountered on SiriusXM through their Onyx Plus player.

Basically you set up to 20 favorite music channels, (80's/90's/Sinatra Channel/Lithium/etc.), the Onyx Plus remembers the past 30 minutes of any preset channel, you hit a button called TuneMix and it will randomly generate a song from all 20 preset channels, you can skip through the entire set list, once you get to the end it will cycle back to the beginning.

Basically this replicates a "Recommended for You" master playlist that you can skip through like a jukebox, I use this feature most days and I would sign up with Apple Music or Spotify if they could copy this feature, the problem I always had with Spotify or Apple Music was their custom stations, e.g. their 80's channel custom stations did not have the same playlist as a SiriusXM 80's channel, the algorithms were disappointing.

I emailed Tim Cook about this but for some reason he did not respond, perhaps he has implemented this feature into the 2020 version of Apple Music.

By combining old school SiriusXM music channels and current hits channels, the TuneMix feature both allows me to discover new music and bring back nostalgic memories, if Apple or Spotify has failed to replicate this, I just don't get who they are hiring.
 
Me too, I was going to complain about browser compatibility since I tried both Brave and Firefox on Windows 10 with the same CONTENT_EQUIVALENT error, but then I observed that this is also shown in Safari.
Grudgingly I launched (the new) Edge and wow, it works? Wonder what's going on there
Try limiting the privacy settings. It works for me.
 
Still better than Apple's insistence that everyone must love hip-hop. Speaking of that, why is there still only a Beats"1" radio? How about some other stations already?

As for the For You playlists...I've noticed that the Get Up and Chill mixes pull from your own library, as opposed to, say, presenting you with something new to listen to. I find that annoying.

</end random brain dump>


The hip-hop/rap/rnb bias is so annoying. I get that Apple is a US company, and hip hop is tremendously popular even in mainstream music charts. And I get that a number of songs crossover and become breakout hits generally.

But Beats One is mostly unlistenable. A single, global radio station, spouting whatever apple think is appropriate? Yes there are some quite eclectic shows, but the filler material and the majority of stuff seems to be rnb.

I click on 'radio' in the Mac music app and what do I see front and centre:

Ebro Darden, Victoria Monet, The Charlie Sloth Rap Show, Rap life, Rnb Now radio, a handful of others, but overwhelmingly it's clear that Apple isn't interested in tastes outside rnb/hiphop.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Feyl
I have a question about this. As we know, those of us who subscribe to Apple Music are limited to 5 computers and 10 devices overall, in accessing our music. Since Apple hasn't said anything about access limits via the web interface, this kind of makes the Apple Music limits a moot point, no?
Apple can easily block browser access or count each browser as a separate computer or something, or allow only one active listening session from browser at a time.
 
Because Apple sucks when it comes to syncing. I just had Music on my Mac (running on Catalina) delete playlists from my library during a sync with iCloud music library. This happened the other day for no reason. Apple has never provided reliable online services, and I say this as someone who has used Apple services all the way back to the AppleLink days. If you use Apple services, you better have a lot of backups!
Yeah, on top of engineering using all kinds of shady practices to speed up development or bandaids problems. I better spend a lot of money buying HDD for backup of various stuff.
 
  • Like
Reactions: rwxx
Yeah, on top of engineering using all kinds of shady practices to speed up development or bandaids problems. I better spend a lot of money buying HDD for backup of various stuff.

There are signs everywhere that Apple is spread too thin these days, especially on the software front. I'm shocked by how many iTunes bugs are still present in Music despite it being a new app. I've had the most problems with Apple Music and the cloud music library lately. Photos has been relatively stable for me, as has Drive, but I don't trust any Apple cloud service and always have multiple backups!
 
  • Like
  • Sad
Reactions: Feyl and Shirasaki
I tried spotify recently, and i havent stopped using it ever since - and i've been using Apple music since its launch in 2015! Also, its 2020 and there is still no crossfade option in apple music! And their music suggestions is crap, they just keep forcing ****** known artists that they probably have a lucrative contracts with. And the app is ****, spotify is far more intuitive even when it comes to a simple function as liking a song.
I had a rap song come on during a classical music station in Apple Music. :confused:
 
This is true, however I have found the Friday’s New Music playlist to have similar music that I might like plus a few mutants here and there that I might or might not enjoy.
In fact I look forward to Friday’s now as it has been resulting in quite some discoveries for me personally.

I’m exactly the same, Friday is my favourite day of the week thanks to this playlist!

While Spotify is the king of automatic recommendations, AM works when you tell it what you like and don’t like, by using the respective buttons when songs are playing. I liked all the songs in my library and if a playlist plays something I don’t like I respond with a dislike. I find the recommendations to be spot on most of them time, and have discovered a lot of new artists and songs as a result.

Having smart playlists is also an advantage of AM.
 
Fascinating! It’s so interesting to me how some people have dramatically better results with one service vs another.

You know what company really got this right? Pandora. I have yet to see a music service algorithm that worked as well as theirs. I discovered so many new and interesting bands that way. If I discover something on other music services, it's usually a result of me digging around for a while and listening to random snippets.
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.