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Apple Music is the last library focused music service

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Re: Apple Music is the last library focused music service

#171
post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

isn't "sort name" exactly what you're looking for? I would assume it's the title of the track (or file) but with "the" and the like stripped out.

Yes, it's the title - but not the filename. WAV/PCM files don't have metadata. There is no id3/tag data. They do not have a "title" nor do they have anything else. That's a problem if your music library predates iTunes and iDevices.

Your WAV files don't have metadata, but WAV absolutely supports metadata.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WAV

> WAV files can be tagged with metadata in the INFO chunk. In addition, WAV files can embed any kind of metadata, including but not limited to Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP) data[25] or ID3 tags[26] in extra chunks.

That aside: why are you using WAV when there are mature, open lossless compression formats like FLAC?

FLAC is supported in iOS since v11, in Android since Honeycomb, and I'm able to listen to FLAC on a Mac running the now-ancient High Sierra release via the finder's quicklook, or iTunes. I don't think I installed a plugin, but I could be wrong.

Re: Apple Music is the last library focused music service

#172
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you can't do this on iOS. Even if you could get a phone with a large enough SDcard, natively ... transfering that much to the phone would be prohibitively painful. And one might be tempted to go through that once, but to go through it every time you get a new phone would drive you mad. I have a 500GB card in my android and have 70% of my digital collection on it. I, also, make the card the primary destination for my…

> you can't do this on iOS I beg your pardon? First of all, a nitpick: > Even if you could get a phone with a large enough SDcard, natively ...iPhones don't use SD cards for storage. They never have. They have internal flash storage. - With that out of the way: I have a 10,000 song collection that I sync to my iPhone. It's only about 60GB of music. iPhones come with up to 512GB of internal storage, and there's an opt…

> I have a 10,000 song collection that I sync to my iPhone. It's only about 60GB of music.

How exactly do you sync to your phone? I've been using an iPhone for the last 3 or 4 years and I entirely gave up on the concept of having my own music on my iPhone as I used to do on Android.

First issue: I have to deal with iTunes to sync and organize my music on my iPhone. I still haven't drink the full kool-aid of apple and thus still use windows as my personal PC. I refuse to use iTunes, I have a powerful pc that can run the latest games and this absolute piece of crap of a software still manage to freeze syncing large quantities of files.

Second issue: I have tons of FLACs that I need to convert to whatever the hell iOS wants as the default file AAC, ALAC, I can't even remember. So now I have to duplicate my music library to fit iOS / Everybody else.

Third issue: My ridiculously expensive iPhone still manage to transfer files using USB 2.0 speeds. Whereas my 4(?) years old android had USB-C and happily managed to transfer my entire library in no time.

Sorry for the rant but this issue is my biggest regret from buying an iPhone.

Re: Apple Music is the last library focused music service

#173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi, I was trying to explain that in the blog post too, in Apple Music your own added songs are uploaded and act as any other streaming song and I think it’s pretty amazing, also the fact that your song now has all the inherited features like Siri/Spotlight search!

I don't use Apple music myself, but I've heard that it doesn't actually use your songs but uses song name matching which sometimes gives you censored versions of explicit songs. Is this true? I remember when I used Google Play Music and it kept the AOL sound in "my" copy of a certain Tatu song, so that was definitely streaming the uploaded song.

It does that if it can match them, and uploads them if it can't. Downloads on other devices might be 256 kbps AAC either way, so not a backup service.

You cannot officially force an upload, but I would expect there to be some kind of hack for it. If I remember correctly, calling the album "Red Album (sorejan's Version)" actually does the trick.

Re: Apple Music is the last library focused music service

#174
post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Play was ideal because I could upload any of my own music and it was part of my library, accessible anywhere in the world. Does any service like that still exist? I'm stuck with Spotify, which lacks dozens and dozens of albums that are important to me, and it won't let me upload them myself.

Spotify is actually the only one of the big 3 (Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music) that doesn't have a cloud music locker feature, and it's basically the entire reason I can't use it. However, both YouTube Music and Apple Music treat your uploaded stuff as second-class citizens to the stuff streamed from their music collection. Which is one of the biggest reasons I miss GPM, since it was much better for that. YouTub…

In what way are they second class? I actually feel the opposite way, because I can use only uploaded/matched tracks in apps like Djay, Capo or GarageBand.

Re: Apple Music is the last library focused music service

#175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s exactly what Apple Music does, and the article even mentioned. I switched from GPM to Apple Music and not Spotify because I have a lot of tracks that don’t exist on streaming services. I can have playlists consisting of apple Music songs and my own songs, and get full Siri integration, play on HomePods etc

Hmm around 18-24 months ago I gave Apple Music a try but found there were TONS of tracks from my personal library that the service would not play. Perhaps they’ve improved things since then? I went all-in using Plex as a personal media server since then and while the UI isn’t as nice, it lets me steam my personal library anywhere from any device.

You may have chosen not to subscribe to iTunes Match which is the feature which gives you access to Apple's servers to host all your songs instead of keeping them strictly local. At least that is how I understand it.

Re: Apple Music is the last library focused music service

#176

I run Plex (with plexamp) and buy music from: - Basecamp - Direct artist websites - 7digital - HDTracks Almost everything I've bought (tens of albums) are FLAC and sound great. I also feel great supporting artists better than my Spotify subscription is able to.

I can't praise Plex enough. Life changing. I've accumulated so much media over the years it was becoming a hassle to manage.

Re: Apple Music is the last library focused music service

#177
post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Help me understand how filename is useful in a way that other metadata doesn’t already cover, please.

"Help me understand how filename is useful in a way that other metadata doesn’t already cover, please." If your "music library" is post-iTunes then it isn't that useful - you have compressed media files with metadata embedded in them. However if your music library is older than itunes and consists of lossless WAV/PCM files there is no metadata . There is only the filename.

> However if your music library is older than itunes and consists of lossless WAV/PCM files there is no metadata. There is only the filename.

So putting your music on an iPhone isn't impossible. It just means that you would have to take the time to add metadata to the existing files (and possibly first converting them to a lossless format that supports metadata--I'm guessing PCM does not).

Re: Apple Music is the last library focused music service

#178

Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, Google Music or whatever now is called. I tried them all. They are all the same to me. There is one big thing that all these streaming services are missing: *METADATA* Give me all the album by this label, all the songs produced by X or all the songs where in Y plays drums. All the albums recorded at some studio in the year Z. With tools like this I will spend years (and whatever money) on…

I would love to see more of this.

Since this is the "did you know Apple Music actually..." thread: You can at least browse by record label nowadays and it's pretty nice.

Re: Apple Music is the last library focused music service

#179

Google Play Music was extremely album-focused, but their move over to YouTube Music has basically scrapped that. GPM even let you modify the metadata for albums; I had used this to strip out things like "(2020 Remaster Special Gold Edition)" from album names, and to cut "bonus" tracks off of albums (nothing as fun as playing an album and then getting a two hour long spoken word interview with Quincy Jones), and final…

Google Play was ideal because I could upload any of my own music and it was part of my library, accessible anywhere in the world. Does any service like that still exist? I'm stuck with Spotify, which lacks dozens and dozens of albums that are important to me, and it won't let me upload them myself.

You can still upload your own music to Youtube Music. The UI sucks (you have to use entirely separate search boxes to search for uploaded vs. Youtube tracks, and AFAIK you can't edit metadata without downloading and re-uploading files) but it gets the job done.

Re: Apple Music is the last library focused music service

#180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the features of "iTunes Match" are included in Apple Music as long as you have "Sync Library" turned on. For a while there was a subtle difference in that music uploaded to Apple Music would have DRM applied to it, and iTunes Match would not, but this is no longer the case.

Is DRM applied to iTunes Match too now? That's unfortunate.

No. Just drag a matched track out of the music app or import it in various iOS apps, it's a DRM free AAC file.
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