Not surprised. The most infuriating thing about Siri (besides it being stupid) is its inconsistency. One day it recognizes a command/artist/whatever, the next it doesn’t understand the same exact request. It’s as if different servers have different algos. Also, I’ve found on device Siri to be no faster than previous generations.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Siri No Longer Able to Rate Apple Music Songs on Request in iOS 15 and Later
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Just another example of how Siri and Music are unnecessarily stripped of features while also remaining unoptimised. It’s not a good time to be an Apple user imho, watching carefully you can see the apple becoming spoiled. Not that anyone here would understand or share this opinion…
Last edited:
Luckily you ain’t in charge, cause you’d digest garbage into ****, and that wouldn’t do any good.
I can't even set the colour temperature with Siri. Adaptive Lighting itself needs work too, it does not adapt to dark grey rainy days. I've turned it off.
Apple Music should have an additional button next to thumbs down or the rating system:
Double thumbs down (or something), as in never play this song/artist/genre ever again.
When I say to Siri "play some music" it usually gives me a very good selection that matches my personal taste and sometimes it is even perfectly adjusted to the time of day. But every now and then I get a couple of songs that are just so far off. Songs that are clearly being pushed by "music pluggers" in the country I live in at this moment and possibly regionally "crowd-sourced" too.
Now I don't mind suggestions of new stuff, it should always be tailored to my taste though. But still Apple Music comes up with crap I have disliked multiple times. Like todays rap music (which isn't music IMHO) or even worse... local rap garbage (in what they call Dutch language, but really is not).
Might it have something to do with Siri on the sever-side? Like other stuff with Siri, the OS might have nothing to do with it, so it may be maintenance. Maybe they are playing around with new features, maybe it’s just a bug. Yet another bug with features going missing, great. Thank you Tim Apple amiright
Hey Google, good morning.
- Good morning! Here's the weather, here's your agenda for the day and later this afternoon. Here's your reminders. Have a wonderful day, and here's some music to get your day started.
Hey Siri, good morning.
- Good morning .....
- Good morning! Here's the weather, here's your agenda for the day and later this afternoon. Here's your reminders. Have a wonderful day, and here's some music to get your day started.
Hey Siri, good morning.
- Good morning .....
Looks like Apple is reducing functionality of Siri. Definitely not a good move.
Someone said the star rating is useless. I suspect that person maybe lacks a bit of imagination. I use the system to decide on songs I love, songs I love so much I want to play them (3 stars) and songs I want to sing *and* play (4 stars). There are lots of uses for the star system.
Star ratings, as a pattern are generally in decline for things like this. People using them in software like Apple Music/Legacy iTunes are the minority of power users. You can go to another service out of protest, but Spotify doesn't offer star ratings either. so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I'm full-on in to Homekit and, in my experience, Siri is excellent for things like lights, temperature, fans, cooking timer, music, podcasts, and radio.
Apple's whole approach to Siri is intended to be less syntactically prescriptive (for the user) than Alexa, while also not allowing third party vendors/integration partners to just reserve words or phrases for their services and stomp all over everyone else.
It is a theoretically "smarter" approach than Amazon's but a functionally less useful one since Apple really isn't applying it broadly and doesn't have the same richness of data/service integrations of Alexa. All of that said, part of them "fixing" Siri to be better at these things means cleaning out legacy cruft and paying down tech debt, which clearly they are doing, as evidenced by them removing old, low usage, deprecated features like this one.
I have so many really elaborate smart playlists that I built in college for exactly purposes like this. Star ratings were greater things like that. But in practice these days I never use them, and I suspect I'm not alone.
That said, I'd bet the people who hoard and groom massive local music libraries and want complicated precision sorting like this probably represent less than a 1/10 of the user-base. And when you add complicated, fiddly features to satisfy users like this you wind up with a bloated, cumbersome app and interface. That's literally what iTunes became, it just said "yes" to everything and became a big, lumbering beast that users love to hate on. Whereas Spotify was objectively more limited and simple and people loved it for that. Ever wonder why you can't make "smart playlists" on iOS devices? I promise you it's not because they just haven't thought of it, it's either a UI nightmare or a code soup they don't want to port forward, probably both.
We can't have both a slimmed down, easy to use, fast and smart music player/organizer AND a super-fiddly customizable power user application for managing local libraries of terabytes of data with complete precision.
Apple has been telling us for years that Star ratings are going away. They disabled the viewing of them by default, they explicitly tell you they aren't factored into Apple Music (the service) when you enable them. Now this. We know Apple is working on a rebuilt from scratch music app, it's clear to me that star ratings won't be a part of it, and as someone who used and loved them for almost 20 years, I'm okay with that. I long ago batch updated my 4 star+ songs to "likes" and 2 star- songs to "dislikes" and I left 3 star songs with no status and now Apple Music's recommendations for me are phenomenal. I'd say I should go back and edit my smart playlists with star rating rules, but I can't recall the last time I used them, might just be time to delete.
Killing them off will piss off an extremely passionate vocal minority, but it will also allow them to do much more in the future, and I'm excited by that.
Thing is though, if someone told you tomorrow that you were forced to no longer use the star system, you could create playlists and accomplish the same thing. The star rating is useful for those that don’t want to create playlists, but if you’re already creating playlists of songs, there’s not a lot “more” you get from the star system (speaking as someone who uses the star system to create smart playlists LOL)
I am yet to have Alexa skip a beat in my home. And I do t think I your explanation is going to fix Siri one bit.
I read both of your dissertations. Very “informative”.
Seriously though, apple is saying star ratings is going away, and everyone acknowledges that to a degree. But you know what happened during a beta testing period of idk, iOS 13 or sth, where apple removed all star rating features in iOS music app, enough people (including a few more prominent Mac users) express their frustration, and apple added them back later on, despite hiding the ratings away by default. Granted, we are still early in the beta cycle of next dot release of Monterey and iOS 15, but using your logic, people should’ve not been able to purchase any sort of optical media or Serial port adapter today, yet power user who needs them still can get them relatively easy today.
Besides, there are probably a million ways to de-bloat the software without touching features. Why not just leaving us “power users” alone? Oh and for people who actually uses star ratings, streaming service isn’t for them either, so why bother moving to another “service” when there’s no service to start with in the first place? To me I don’t even use Siri anyways so as long as I can still do star rating manually I’m fine.
You can count on them locking it down. BUT, part of that locking down means developers may be willing to take the risk knowing that customers are willing to use that secure marketplace to buy confidently.
Yeah, she's recently forgotten how to tell me the local weather as well, when I ask "Hey Siri, temperature outside" she just always replies "Weather for where?" I have to explicitly say "Hey Siri, temperature in <my city, country>" for her to reply with something actually usable. Really not a great look.
Before anyone asks, I've verified I have personal requests and location services enabled.
EDIT: I should be specific, this is Siri on a HomePod I'm talking about (both OG and mini, all running 15.2 apparently). It's working as expected on iOS 14 on my iPhone 12 mini.
I use Siri many times a day and find it very useful. I'm glad many other people find it useful as well. The good news is that it's not being forced on anyone.
To be clear, I'm not arguing that you shouldn't care about this or attacking you—or anyone—for caring about this feature. I'm just saying, it's very likely happening regardless of how you feel about it, and you should grieve it now or look for another tool to do the job.
Hard disagree. Feature bloat is always the number one culprit in any software project. And when you're trying to refactor something with a lot of intermingled dependencies the more you can cut the better.
Also, it's not a matter of leaving the features alone, I suspect the library management is being re-written from scratch, so it's a matter of what they re-implement and what they don't.
You reminds me to seek for other open source alternatives rather than iTunes for managing my music. It’s sad if star rating goes away, but that also means I have one less reason to stick to a Mac. Either way, I will pay close attention to next dot release of Monterey.
As for feature bloat, sure, that’s definitely one way to make software lighter, but there are many software that cuts power user features in favour of dumbing down used to be good software to make them more “modern”. Aperture comes into mind, also iWork suites, where newer version gets feature reduction to unbelievable level just to make software more “modern”.
And Final Cut Pro, AND MacOS itself. The initial release of OSX lacked a TON of features. Some folks couldn’t migrate until 10.1 and, even then, there were still lots of features that power users wanted that took a long time to be re-introduced and some have never been reintroduced.
Apple killing Aperture hurt me personally in a way that I have yet to recover from, I keep waiting for Photos to come even close to some of the workflow abilities it had. The fact that you can't copy and paste adjustments in bulk drives me bonkers. But... I digress.
iWork is an interesting one. The initial feature removals to have a shared, cross-platform, cloud-based stung a bunch at the time, but now I can't remember what, if anything, that was removed still hasn't been added back. And IMO the apps are better now than they ever were before.