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Apple Music on Track to Overtake Spotify in U.S. Subscribers

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Re: Apple Music on Track to Overtake Spotify in U.S. Subscribers

#181

Post by yoz-y »

ck425 wrote: post #174
yeahdef wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another perspective: I am less concerned with music discovery or seamless device hand-offs. I know what I want to listen to. As a former club DJ, I accrued a large amount of records that are simply unavailable via streaming networks. I recently starting ripping a lot of those vinyl records to mp3. I have tried spotify, google play music, and Apple Music. Apple Music is the clear winner when it comes to the importing,…

Didn't Apple have major issues with overwriting and syncing up imported music?

They had. There was a problem when Apple Music would try too aggressively to pull in songs from their library if it had the same name/artist. But this has been fixed some time ago (by doing fingerprinting properly)

Re: Apple Music on Track to Overtake Spotify in U.S. Subscribers

#182

Post by qwerty456127 »

BTW why won't some business fairness commission attack Apple for using their cellphone market domination to thwart competition and promote other products of their own like iMusic (e.g. the way they did with Microsoft when MS started shipping Internet Explorer built in Windows systems)?

Re: Apple Music on Track to Overtake Spotify in U.S. Subscribers

#183

Post by thirdsun »

yeahdef wrote: post #155
thirdsun wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you rip your collection to a lossy format like MP3? Sure, you're probably going to explain how you don't hear a difference which is fair, but a lossless format like FLAC or ALAC (recommended if you're in the Apple eco system) has other advantages besides superior audio quality. It allows you to convert to any other format, including MP3, at a later point. Storage is cheap these days and there's really no ex…

Fair reasoning from the archival master standpoint. I share a lot of what I rip with other DJ friends. If I sent them a FLAC or ALAC file, they would respond "what the hell is this? how do i listen to this?". mp3 is ubiquitous and 320 kbps does the trick for me. I hope I don't feel that sting of regret you mention, but my gut feeling is that I will not. I still have the records themselves on the shelf which should la…

I highly doubt that any of your friends use a player that can't play FLAC or ALAC - any decent player does these days.

And if you really need the occassional lossy copy it's trivial to quickly create one with XLD or similar tools.

I'm sorry if I sound more upset by this than I should be, but ripping an entire record collection is a time intensive task and you're cutting corners on an issue that doesn't save you any effort, but might actually cause more someday.

Re: Apple Music on Track to Overtake Spotify in U.S. Subscribers

#184

Post by tomduncalf »

yeahdef wrote: post #125
sanjeetsuhag wrote: post #10

Honestly, I can't imagine switching to Apple Music. Speaking as a guy who owns an iPhone and a Mac. I love being able to smoothly control playback from any device. I love how seamless the experience is, I've only tried the Apple Music Trial when it first came out and I can't see any possible reason to switch to it now. Spotify is excellent for music discovery, and I love the top songs and everything. It's perfect. It…

Another perspective: I am less concerned with music discovery or seamless device hand-offs. I know what I want to listen to. As a former club DJ, I accrued a large amount of records that are simply unavailable via streaming networks. I recently starting ripping a lot of those vinyl records to mp3. I have tried spotify, google play music, and Apple Music. Apple Music is the clear winner when it comes to the importing,…

I really like this aspect of Apple Music, and I wish Spotify would do the same. I too have a lot of music which is not available in their catalogue, that I'd love to have available in the same cloud service that I use for the rest of my listening.

However, iTunes Match's file size/length limit (200mb/2 hours) means that I can't upload many of the DJ mixes I'd like to have in the cloud. That and the fact that I love Spotify's recommendations means that I end up using Spotify most of the time, but have all my mp3s uploaded to Google Play. Works OK, but I'd rather have them all in one place!

Re: Apple Music on Track to Overtake Spotify in U.S. Subscribers

#185

Post by thirdsun »

ScottBurson wrote: post #158
yeahdef wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair reasoning from the archival master standpoint. I share a lot of what I rip with other DJ friends. If I sent them a FLAC or ALAC file, they would respond "what the hell is this? how do i listen to this?". mp3 is ubiquitous and 320 kbps does the trick for me. I hope I don't feel that sting of regret you mention, but my gut feeling is that I will not. I still have the records themselves on the shelf which should la…

When I ripped my LP collection I first saved each recording out as FLAC (16 bits @ 48kHz), then re-exported it as VBR MP3. Audacity (a Mac recording app) makes this easy. I keep the FLAC files on my home server for future use (or for when 1TB microSD cards become cheap :-).

While it's not cheap I recently got a 1TB external SSD ( http://www.samsung.com/semiconductor/minisite/ssd/product/po... ) in order to be able to take my whole lossless collection with me if I need to (in addition to the NAS at home). Admittedly, music doesn't need an SSD drive but I won't buy any spinning drives these days. Plus, this thing is incredibly small, robust, bus-powered and very performant. Great product.

Re: Apple Music on Track to Overtake Spotify in U.S. Subscribers

#186

Post by rahoulb »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #182

BTW why won't some business fairness commission attack Apple for using their cellphone market domination to thwart competition and promote other products of their own like iMusic (e.g. the way they did with Microsoft when MS started shipping Internet Explorer built in Windows systems)?

Don't get me wrong - as I've stated elsewhere on here, I don't like Apple Music and it annoys me greatly.

But Apple Music is only usable with an optional subscription payment and can easily be uninstalled (pseudo-uninstalled) from an iPhone. It does integrate with Siri, which other music services cannot do, and it streams music on the Apple Watch, which other music services cannot (or will not) do. But it's not essential to the function of the phone. And the iPhone has a 30-40% market share or less on unit sales (depending on where you are).

MS was punished for including Internet Explorer for free and then tying it into the innards of the OS so it could not be removed. And Windows had an 80-90% market share at the time.

Re: Apple Music on Track to Overtake Spotify in U.S. Subscribers

#187

Post by bkor »

rahoulb wrote: post #139

I tried Apple Music for 6 months, and spent that time diligently training it to my tastes. My latest "favourites mix" had 12 songs that I had to mark as "dislike" after all that training. Likewise the "for you"playlists are garbage - just because I like a couple of songs by guitar bands doesn't mean I want to listen to hours and hours of them. Apple Music on Apple Watch 3 is amazing - leaving a phone at home is stran…

> But, for me, the big advantage of Spotify is I don't always need to think about what I want to listen to

I haven't tried Apple Music but I do listen to Spotify. What is highly dislike is that it's so terrible about suggesting or playing songs. I don't think it's good at all. Further, the shuffle doesn't seem to shuffle well enough (often seems to play in a similar order).

I'm terrible at knowing artists, song names, etc. I've noticed people liking Spotify often know the names or various artists plus create their own playlists. I think it's all terrible.

Same for e.g. listening to songs. I might be in the mood for some salsa songs. Spotify will have me listen to Salsa songs for hours on end. It should be way smarter. Some slow songs, then some quicker.. but not too sudden, etc.

I don't want to pay for Spotify because of this. It's terrible in song selection IMO.

Re: Apple Music on Track to Overtake Spotify in U.S. Subscribers

#188

Post by Broken_Hippo »

bkor wrote: post #187
rahoulb wrote: post #139

I tried Apple Music for 6 months, and spent that time diligently training it to my tastes. My latest "favourites mix" had 12 songs that I had to mark as "dislike" after all that training. Likewise the "for you"playlists are garbage - just because I like a couple of songs by guitar bands doesn't mean I want to listen to hours and hours of them. Apple Music on Apple Watch 3 is amazing - leaving a phone at home is stran…

> But, for me, the big advantage of Spotify is I don't always need to think about what I want to listen to I haven't tried Apple Music but I do listen to Spotify. What is highly dislike is that it's so terrible about suggesting or playing songs. I don't think it's good at all. Further, the shuffle doesn't seem to shuffle well enough (often seems to play in a similar order). I'm terrible at knowing artists, song names…

"I don't want to pay for Spotify because of this. It's terrible in song selection IMO"

I'm the opposite. I know their song suggestion can leave something to be desired, as it is obviously based on your recent listening instead of suggesting from your entire playlist suggestion. But then again, that also gives me ways to tweak it by simply sampling a variety of music during the week - which I do when I'm searching for new songs. I rarely know band/song names, and can still find music.

Their song selection is generally good for folks that are sometimes listening to odd music. One of my favorite artists has less than 55k plays on the most popular song - and they suggest this sort of thing to me instead of continually suggesting "popular" music.

The most jarring thing (to me) was the ads, which were solved by paying a small fee each month. Bonus points for downloads.

Re: Apple Music on Track to Overtake Spotify in U.S. Subscribers

#189

Post by bpanon »

bkor wrote: post #187
rahoulb wrote: post #139

I tried Apple Music for 6 months, and spent that time diligently training it to my tastes. My latest "favourites mix" had 12 songs that I had to mark as "dislike" after all that training. Likewise the "for you"playlists are garbage - just because I like a couple of songs by guitar bands doesn't mean I want to listen to hours and hours of them. Apple Music on Apple Watch 3 is amazing - leaving a phone at home is stran…

> But, for me, the big advantage of Spotify is I don't always need to think about what I want to listen to I haven't tried Apple Music but I do listen to Spotify. What is highly dislike is that it's so terrible about suggesting or playing songs. I don't think it's good at all. Further, the shuffle doesn't seem to shuffle well enough (often seems to play in a similar order). I'm terrible at knowing artists, song names…

Google Play is great at this. But I prefer Spotify's UI and apps on my devices.

Re: Apple Music on Track to Overtake Spotify in U.S. Subscribers

#190

Post by freddie_mercury »

slezyr wrote: post #175
freddie_mercury wrote: post #62

Spotify (after years) still doesn't exist in the country I live in. Google Play (after years) still doesn't exist in the country I live in. Apple Music has been available from day one. They also have country-specific pricing, instead of expecting the right price for Americans to be the right price for a developing country.

Try Deezer it might also work in your country

Deezer costs twice as much as Apple Music in my country.

Like so many web services they set a price for Americans and then think it will work for other countries with very different income levels.

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