Apple Music

[Cressy Snr]

I used to get annoyed and bite when the uninformed got on their anti Apple hobbyhorses. Now I couldn't give a flying fook.
Windows and its equivalent software has largely caught up with Apple, so the differences are nowhere near as marked as they were in the past.
Yet there are still one or two who hate Apple simply because it exists.

I suppose us long time (20 years plus) Mac users can seen as arrogant and defensive, but that is only the old defence mechanism, adopted because of the almost constant flak and ridicule we got in the past, that has hardened our attitudes.
People new to Apple, don't have that baggage. They largely get on with it, use the gear and enjoy the experience.

What a lot of folk don't seem to realise is that by far the biggest critics of Apple are the users themselves. We expect, nay demand the very highest standards from Apple and get very noisy when they fail to deliver.

[The Stratmangler]

What a lot of folk don't seem to realise is that by far the biggest critics of Apple are the users themselves. We expect, nay demand the very highest standards from Apple and get very noisy when they fail to deliver.

Is that why your voice has developed a distinctly huskier tone of late?

[Cressy Snr]

Yeah....the Dick Tracy watch for one thing.
What the fook's that all about ?
I for one don't want to talk to my wrist whilst looking like a complete fooking dweeb
so I won't be acquiring an Apple Watch for the foreseeable.

[The Stratmangler]

I had to take my lad to the dentist the other day, and he spotted that the dentist was wearing one of those watches.
The dentist even briefly took a call while Alex was in the chair.
"Sad Bastard" was my son's comment!
It's amusing when a 14 year old isn't impressed with the latest tech bling

[Paul Barker]

MAybe I'll buy a watch to fix the fact my phone won't give me sound when on a phone call unless I put it on speaker or use headphones.

My impeccably perfect apple device!

They ain't perfect, but I am happy with them all. When they work.

[Paul Barker]

Out of the blue it works again!

[Cressy Snr]

Well, the three month free trial is almost up and I won't be subscribing.
It's not that it is not good VFM, it's the fact that the iCloud Music Library part of the deal, which you have to enable, if you want to store music for offline listening, has been continually screwing with my local music library and frankly I have had enough.

Here are a few of the things it does, that piss me off royally:

It keeps altering artwork I have painstakingly added to CDs I have ripped into iTunes.
I found this out one morning when I happened to play a soul compilation I had ripped from a CD. The artwork was completely screwed up. Individual tracks had different artwork and the album sleeve wasn't even the correct title.
I found that around 100 of my compilation albums had had their artwork changed, seemingly arbitrarily.
I spent a full day redownloading the correct artwork, either from Amazon or from Google images and applying it back to the compilations. I got up the next morning and the damned thing had undone all my work and reapplied the incorrect artwork!
I KNOW WHAT THE ARTWORK SHOULD BE FOR A PARTICULAR CD IN MY COLLECTION.....FOOKING LEAVE IT ALONE APPLE!

And furthermore as Bernard Levin would have said.....Apple music analyses your library and uploads the contents to the cloud. Then applies DRM to stuff you already own, so backups to the cloud are a waste of time because if you happened to somehow lose the CD you had ripped and had to download it back from the cloud, the music YOU OWN and have paid for would not play unless you kept up the subscription. I mean what the hell is that about?

I find the whole thing invasive and uncomfortable. Apple knows what music you have and knows at all times, day or night exactly what you are listening to and when. I realise they have to do this so that they can tell if you are listening to subscription music, so that they can pay the artists appropriately, but I don't like it.

In the end, I turned off the iCloud library and Apple Music and restored my local iTunes library from one of my backups.

I feel much better now. I'll buy what I want to listen to thanks Apple, and I'll trawl the secondhand and charity shop market for cheap CDs to rip. Sod that for a game of soldiers.

Apple.....I like your computers; have used them for 25 years and wouldn't use anything else. Love your iPads and phones, but I'm afraid, for this user, your music subscription package sucks big time.

[Ray P]

That's a very honest appraisal Steve.

You might find Roon, which I've just posted some links to in a new thread, of interest.

Ray

[Cressy Snr]

Cheers Ray, I'll certanly take a look.

[Neal]

+1 Steve I'm sticking to my own library even the daughter has moved away from AM in its current form and gone back to spotify....

[Cressy Snr]

+1 Steve I'm sticking to my own library even the daughter has moved away from AM in its current form and gone back to spotify....

Yes, it was great at first. The recommendations were good. I discovered quite a lot of music I wouldn't normally have listened to, but I soon discovered that the playlists especially seemed to be on a rolling programme and kept reappearing in the "for you" section. I mean how many times does one have to tell AM that "introduction to Stevie Wonder" is innappropriate for someone who has nearly everything Stevie Wonder recorded including rarities. That's only one of the numerous times recommendations have kept reappearing that I had indicated to AM that I didn't need.

I had read the horror stories about iCloud Music Library cocking up local libraries, but my own is so big, that the extent of the damage to it, did not become apparent until well into the trial period. Repairs turned out to be impossible to carry out as I couldn't make mine stick for more than a day.

As I said, the combination of repeating poor recommendations, the intrusive "Skynet" nature of the program, the insistent screwing with local libraries and the application of DRM to customer owned music, makes Apple Music in its current form unusable for me at least. I've voted with my feet, I'm afraid.

What Steve Jobs would have made of it, I dread to think

[Paul Barker]

I keep strongly resisting Apple Music, because I have never spent an average of £10 a month on music. So to pay for streamed music is to pay more for music. OK it gives you more choice. But most music you are curious about is available on youtube to sample. If you like it buy a second hand cd load it onto itunes and throuh itunes match own it digitally.

However, I have just discovered that for the moment (because I believe apple constantly try to sabotage it) spottify free version works on my ipad pro.

So right now have the pleasure of listening to it through my apple tv.

Long may it last.

If I find music I can't live without, I'll get it onto my itunes as described.

Apple probably right now building an "update" to cripple it again.

[Cressy Snr]

So today, I did a bit of lateral thinking re Apple Music and because the outcome of that lateral thinking was so successful, I have re-subscribed and am loving the AM experience once more.
The lateral thinking bit I will talk about tomorrow, suffice it to say that in conjunction with my new AppleTV 4, Apple Music has turned out to be really rather good and quite a big improvement over the earlier version.

[Cressy Snr]

OK, re the lateral thinking,
Apple Music is a great idea that was spoiled by Apple's insistence on the end user activating the iCloud music library, in order to be able to download and listen offline to music provided by the service. If like me, you had curated thousands of tracks ripped from CDs over the years, the iCloud music library, which is supposed to allow you to access your music on all your devices, no matter where you are, had a nasty habit of furtling in your library, in true "Apple knows best" fashion and royally fooking it up. The arrogance of it all was staggering. I won't go into the havoc it caused to my own iTunes library as I had my say on that, earlier in the thread.
Now twelve months down the line, Apple claims to have solved these issues, including the reversal of the creepy policy of applying DRM to music you yourself own when it was uploaded to the cloud. For me, I'm afraid, they lost my trust with that debacle. It took me months to put right all the cock-ups and as recently as last week, I was still finding the odd bit of incorrect artwork left over from the disaster, so you can understand my reluctance to try Apple music again.

Over the past few months, with the help of our Ant, Greg and Richard Dunn, I have resurrected my vinyl collection to tremendous effect. I have built a great new set of valve amps, given my digital listening a shot in the arm, via the superb sounding AppleTV version 4 and have also been spending quite a few bob on the iTunes Store, downloading some really great funk and jazz music. Thanks to BBC6 Music, BBC4 and Jools Holland's programmes, I have become active again, discovering new artists rather than listening to the same old same old; in short, I've rediscovered my musical mojo and am enjoying every moment.
Trouble is, as a result of that rekindled enthusiasm for music, there has come a fair bit of expense on the software and life is too short to be buying digital music. I'd rather reserve that kind of expense for the odd, one-off, nice, 180g vinyl release, if you know what I mean Never thought I'd ever be saying that, but there you go.

So, what to do? For the sake of my wallet, I wanted to join Apple Music (other streaming services are available) again, but I was not prepared to let that damned iCloud thing anywhere near my music collection; once bitten and all that.
The solution seemed obvious once I had thought of it, so I set about doing a copy/paste, to the desktop of my entire iTunes folder. Due to the large size of the library, it took around three hours for the copy process to complete, so I now had two copies of all the music on my Mac-Mini. The library folder copy was renamed and all the extraneous stuff such as the .xml and .itl files were trashed until only the music and artwork folders remained. I then fired up Swinsian; an iTunes alternative, pointed it at the copied and modified music folder and let it do its thing. 5 minutes later Swinsian had imported all the library metadata and was showing an exact clone of my original iTunes library, with artwork and everything else intact.
Turning back to my original library I fired up iTunes and deleted every one of my ripped CDs and Linn Records downloads from the app, until only my 9000-odd iTunes purchases remained. Only when this process was complete, did I actually join Apple Music.
The iCloud music library started up as soon as the subscription activated and began its cursed upload and match process. It stopped after around two minutes, which was encouraging.
Looking at my local library I searched for files modified 10/10/2016 and found nothing had been touched, modified, fooked about with or buggered up. SUCCESS! My original stuff including all my ripped CDs and copies of iTunes purchases, were well and truly walled off from the iCloud marauder and accessible via the Swinsian app, whilst my original iTunes purchases were still within iTunes and available, plus I now had all the great Apple Music facilities, only this time there were no nasty surprises ready to bite me on the arse.

[Cressy Snr]

The question I have is why the hell didn't they make Apple Music a seperate app in the first place, instead of producing a half-baked attempt to integrate it with iTunes users' existing ripped CD libraries? They could have avoided all this end user frustration and bad feeling with a bit more thought at the beginning.
Using Apple Music via the Music App on my AppleTV 4 is a superb experience. The recommendations are spot on for my tastes and I'm discovering new stuff left, right and centre. The new AM interface they brought in with TVOS10, iOS10 and the MacOS Sierra update is so much better and easier to navigate it's unreal. Shame it took them a year to sort out the mess it was.
Taking steps to protect my ripped CD library from it's clutches was something I shouldn't have had to do and for all I know my library could have been perfectly safe, but I wasn't prepared to take that chance. OK there are superior subscription services available that allow hi-res streaming as opposed to the 256K AAC streams Apple uses, but frankly I dont care, the sound quality is indistinguishable from CD and good enough for me. If I want to listen to my copied iTunes purchases and my ripped CDs and make playlists, mixing them all together, I'll use the Swinsian app. If I need hi-res, I'll listen to my vinyl.

Anyway I'm loving what Apple music is doing. It can now be used as it is meant to be used. Downloading tracks/albums for offline listening and mixing AM derived stuff in with iTunes purchases as playlists is now viable, and there are no worries about my painstakingly assembled ripped CD library being messed about with. Larvely!