The playlist goes offline as is.
You then can add each song for offline, IF you remove the playlist, the song remains.
Not sure which playlist you're adding to. Curated, or personal (if that's an option).
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Apple Music First Impressions: Convenient All-in-One Experience With Overwhelming Design
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The playlist goes offline as is.
You then can add each song for offline, IF you remove the playlist, the song remains.
Not sure which playlist you're adding to. Curated, or personal (if that's an option).
When you go to 'New' and type in an artist like Frank Zappa for example, it has subsections for Artist, Videos etc and it has a section called 'Stations' if you click that the panel slides across and you are presented with about 50 or so songs with the word Radio after it, but it's not iTunes radio so what are all these songs. When I clicked Zoot Allures Radio for example, it played a song from Sheik Yerbouti, then it continued with something from Dweezil. So does that mean these song with Radio after them are playlists? And if they are playlists are they hand curated. I'm confused.
My iPod had same issue, maybe a processor thing.
Solution is to do a search, and then it refreshes library.
Great gesture from Apple to help accommodate the exchange rate in UK: 15.79 USD (9.99 GBP) a month
Wow, that's harsh. $12 in Australia which is just over $USD 9, it's not unlikely that the AUD will strengthen a bit so they look like they are projecting into the future, that seems to imply they are expecting Stg £ to depreciate further against the USD.
With MixRadio you can first create a few playlists and rate a few tracks/artists. Then you can set it offline and get approximately 2 hours of music per playlist (without repeat). Once in a while i update my playlist/download again to offline modus so you get a different playlist. That works great for me.
It would be great if Apple Music also had such an option to go offline with a part of the playlist (let's say 2 hours of music) besides listening online for more then 2 hours without repeat.
I doubt it. Their thinking would have been "Spotify charge £9.99 and people pay it, so we'll do the same." Also, we've got that nasty 20% VAT to take into account. The base price is £8.33 or about $12.99. Still high but because that's the "industry standard pricing" here we get stuffed. They could charge less if they wanted. Apps and iCloud storage aren't a straight $ -> £ conversion (200GB for £2.99 or $3.99) so it was a conscious decision to charge £9.99 for Music here I reckon.
Right, from playlists in Apple Music you can see the various songs from different artists etc and play them to your hearts content. Its a way of discovering new music after all right? so how come its not possible to click on an artists name and see their entire music catalog? What I dont get is how Apple missed this?
Hi.
I created my own playlist and just added songs to it.
So basically there isn't a way to make a playlist I've asked to be made available offline to automatically download songs to my iPhone. I have to manually do that?
On iOS if you scroll to the bottom the playlist it says "featured artists" and you can click on one of the artist names there and it will do what you say. In iTunes there's a menu to the right "Artists in this playlist" that does the same thing.
edit to add: iTunes does seem to have a limitation compared to iOS though. on iOS if you tap the > at the side of Featured Artists it will take you to a list of all the artists in the playlist. iTunes only seems to show you the first 6 artists with no way to see more as far as I can tell.
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I assume AM being a streaming service, that is the default, to which offline is an option. Otherwise, space will run out, and then you will have to manually start removing. Make playlist offline would download all, which is fairly easy.
Ok, 12.2 does NOT allow AM tracks to play on a burned disc. Would require to load within iTunes, making it redundant.
Convenient and a good experience? I don't think so. I've spent the best part of an entire day and a half trying to fix problems created by this piece of sh*t software on two computers, two iPhones and an iPad. Not only has it managed to screw up entire iTunes libraries on multiple machines, but it has had thousands of music tracks go missing, had artwork get completely messed up, crashed numerous times, and has caused untold stress and annoyance. This is easily the WORST experience of bad software that I have ever had in more than 13 years of using Apple products, and I'm a big fan. How this rubbish version of iTunes managed to get released I have no idea.
You can say it is used for protecting copyright. But cd player can also support related technology to play protected contents, such as blue ray disc.
You can ALSO Family Share with yourself if you don't invite anyone. That way you can stream up to 6 devices at same time.
There's always options!
When it comes to the 256 kbps AAC quality debate, especially when comparing to Spotify with it's OGG Vorbis and MP3 320 kbps combo one also have to take into consideration the fact that Apple is utilising "cVBR" which stands for "constrained-variable-bitrate" for their entire iTunes and Apple Music library.
It's the same option as you have in iTunes named "iTunes Plus" which clearly states it's using 256 kbps VBR (variable-bitrate) and according to people over at Hydrogenaudio and Head-Fi and from the creators of QAAC which allows for people to utilise Apple's very own AAC encoder to rip and convert audio the iTunes Plus is utilising cVBR with a v256 -q2 quality.
This is getting rather technical, but constrained-variable-bitrates means that Apple is setting 256 kbps as the lowest possible bitrate for the encoder to use, but because it being variable the encoder is allowed to utilise higher bandwidth when it redeems in beneficial for the audio to do so. According to Hydrogenaudio most files ripped and converted using cVBR v256 -q2 settings will resulting a 268 kbps++ file.
So most of Apples iTunes and Apple Music library should be somewhere between 260-300 kbps depending on the sound and it's sonic properties. Why does Apple keep reporting this files as 256 kbps in iTunes if their average bitrate is actually not 256 kbps? It's most likely a more streamlined and consumer friendly approach. Most people have no clue about how bitrates work, especially variable bitrates so people might react to the fact that even though they choose the "iTunes Plus, 256 kbps VBR" option in iTunes why don't they ever get a 256 kbps AAC / m4a file out of using it? So Apple is simply tagging it as 256 kbps instead.
You can verify this by using the exact same settings using QAAC (which uses Apple's very own DLL's and library and encoder) or various other AAC encoders from other parties and see how the tagging is tackled differently and actually reflects the actual average bitrate of the resulting file and not whatever you choose as the lowest bitrate during the settings.
And as AAC is considered a more modern and efficient encoder compared to especially MP3 and even OGG Vorbis and we are comparing 260-300 kbps AAC to 320 kbps MP3 and OGG Vorbis there is no wonder why people can't tell them apart. In most ABX Blind-tests people tend to not be able to tell lossless (perfectly preserved audio file) from a 128 kbps AAC apart. So 128 kbps is mostly considered "transparent". With MP3 you mostly need to push up towards 192-256 kbps, and with OGG Vorbis around 192 kbps so as long as these services keep using above 250 kbps you will have a really hard time telling them apart without taking placebo into account.
It's the same option as you have in iTunes named "iTunes Plus" which clearly states it's using 256 kbps VBR (variable-bitrate) and according to people over at Hydrogenaudio and Head-Fi and from the creators of QAAC which allows for people to utilise Apple's very own AAC encoder to rip and convert audio the iTunes Plus is utilising cVBR with a v256 -q2 quality.
This is getting rather technical, but constrained-variable-bitrates means that Apple is setting 256 kbps as the lowest possible bitrate for the encoder to use, but because it being variable the encoder is allowed to utilise higher bandwidth when it redeems in beneficial for the audio to do so. According to Hydrogenaudio most files ripped and converted using cVBR v256 -q2 settings will resulting a 268 kbps++ file.
So most of Apples iTunes and Apple Music library should be somewhere between 260-300 kbps depending on the sound and it's sonic properties. Why does Apple keep reporting this files as 256 kbps in iTunes if their average bitrate is actually not 256 kbps? It's most likely a more streamlined and consumer friendly approach. Most people have no clue about how bitrates work, especially variable bitrates so people might react to the fact that even though they choose the "iTunes Plus, 256 kbps VBR" option in iTunes why don't they ever get a 256 kbps AAC / m4a file out of using it? So Apple is simply tagging it as 256 kbps instead.
You can verify this by using the exact same settings using QAAC (which uses Apple's very own DLL's and library and encoder) or various other AAC encoders from other parties and see how the tagging is tackled differently and actually reflects the actual average bitrate of the resulting file and not whatever you choose as the lowest bitrate during the settings.
And as AAC is considered a more modern and efficient encoder compared to especially MP3 and even OGG Vorbis and we are comparing 260-300 kbps AAC to 320 kbps MP3 and OGG Vorbis there is no wonder why people can't tell them apart. In most ABX Blind-tests people tend to not be able to tell lossless (perfectly preserved audio file) from a 128 kbps AAC apart. So 128 kbps is mostly considered "transparent". With MP3 you mostly need to push up towards 192-256 kbps, and with OGG Vorbis around 192 kbps so as long as these services keep using above 250 kbps you will have a really hard time telling them apart without taking placebo into account.
There seem to be quite a few things they missed such as:
- Local syncing for iOS devices with a Mac (personally I have no desire to download 40 or 50 gb of my own music to my iPhone and then have to do the same sort of thing with an iPad. One of the great things about the Mac/iOS combination has been how fast, simple and reliable local syncing has always been).
- Easy removal of music from iOS devices (for example removing an entire playlist of music, rather than having to remove the songs one at a time).
- Easy adding of multiple albums from the same artist (clicking on an artist brings up their albums, but you have to go into each album to add them to your collection, wouldn't it be simpler to have an "add all albums by this artist" button?)
- Conflict resolution when adding multiple devices (this is the one that caused MASSIVE problems for me. At present if you add multiple devices to Apple Music, they ALL upload their music. The problem with this is that if a track has been previously uploaded, and is uploaded a second time, it will disconnect from the local copies on all previous devices. This completely fragments your collection and creates a huge mess. What is really bad about this is that these local copies are still left on your computer, so you can end up with several hundred gb of music, and thousands of tracks that iTunes can no longer play locally. This also means that you end up with multiple copies of playlists).
- Easy adding of albums in general (click on an artist to explore their albums in many places in the latest version of iTunes, and it takes you to what albums you can BUY, rather than ones you can add to your collection connected with Apple Music. Apple should have recognised that people subscribe to a music service because they DON'T want to buy albums, but want access to a huge collection for a monthly charge.
- Unstable (the latest versions of iTunes simply crashes far too often on both Macs and on iOS, at present it is one of the most unstable programs they have released in a long time).
- Missing songs when adding an album to your collection (many times when you add an album half the songs or more aren't added).
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Cloud and local sync can't co-process, it's either or. So simply turn off Cloud, and then sync, and then toggle back.
Unfortunately, what I discovered is that switching between the two doesn't work. You have to either use your Apple Music collection, or you do local syncing, you can't do both. What this means is that you loose out either way; you either have music synced locally and have none of your cloud collection available, or you do cloud syncing, and have to download large amounts of music with no real solution for removing it from your iOS device if you choose to do so; neither option is ideal. If you try to do both by syncing locally, and then turning the Apple music back on and merging the libraries, you run smack into the lack of conflict resolution, and local copies become disconnected from the libraries on your computers.
There certainly isn't any legitimate reason why Apple couldn't have include both types of syncing (along with proper conflict resolution), given that effectively a music track downloaded from the internet is not fundamentally different from one transferred through wifi or a cable; let's hope this is coming in a future update.
Given that Apple have not one product, but a mature ecosystem of products which are all designed to work together (and totally surpass ANYTHING any other company has come out with ecosystem wise), the lack of attention to integration between products seems remarkable. To their credit though, they did give us three months trial, which gives them a deadline to get it all working properly.
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