Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

iOS 13's Music App Sucks

samuelstevens.me

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 261 posts

Re: iOS 13's Music App Sucks

#221

Post by nobleach »

atomwaffel wrote: post #136
nobleach wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had one of those really nice 100GB music libraries that I had been ripping from CDs since 1998. (and Napster/WinMX/Kazaa/Limewire-ing because... I was young, stupid and poor) I had meticulously been fixing ID3 tags, and putting them into the folder structure that made me happy. Then one day, I did a new Mac setup, and forgot to tick the box that said, "let me manage my library layout" and BAM. iTunes moved everythi…

I’ve recently moved away from Spotify and back to my own music library. I’m using beets[1] to manage my messy metadata and it does a pretty good job. You can probably tell it to leave your metadata alone and just sort things into folders for you. [1] https://beets.readthedocs.io/en/stable/

Even Apple's sorting did weird things though. I have an artist folder and then 3 folders underneath that one with the same album. Sometimes I have multiple artist folders. It's just a big mess. I do have an old 300GB drive with an earlier iteration of my music library on it. Sometimes I consider plugging that in and augmenting it. At least the folder structure was more palatable.

Re: iOS 13's Music App Sucks

#222

Post by nobleach »

72deluxe wrote: post #67
nobleach wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had one of those really nice 100GB music libraries that I had been ripping from CDs since 1998. (and Napster/WinMX/Kazaa/Limewire-ing because... I was young, stupid and poor) I had meticulously been fixing ID3 tags, and putting them into the folder structure that made me happy. Then one day, I did a new Mac setup, and forgot to tick the box that said, "let me manage my library layout" and BAM. iTunes moved everythi…

Surely that music library is important and cost you money? Why would you give your money to another service to listen to the same music again, that you already own? I ask this because I have about 900 albums on CD that I ripped and then stored away in the loft/under the stairs and could never envisage actually paying a streaming service to listen to stuff I actually have already bought. I mean, I have an iPod Classic…

The more frustrating problem, is that when I moved across country, I threw out my CD collection. A huge box full. I will always regret not just packing it with everything else. My thinking at the time was, "when am I ever going to put a disc in a CD-player ever again. I have all the 192~ish VBR rips!"

Re: iOS 13's Music App Sucks

#223

Post by Shebanator »

danShumway wrote: post #92
Shebanator wrote: post #55

As someone who worked on Google Play Music for many years, I'd like to point out that a lot of the UX criticisms here are really just personal preferences, and those preferences are based in very large part on the way you listen to music. Some people are "lean back" listeners who just want to put on a radio station of music they like and not fiddle with it. Others are expert curators who have tens of thousands of tra…

> It is pretty much impossible to build a music UX that optimizes for all three of these user types This is a good argument for not tying music subscriptions to a specific client -- ie, allowing 3rd-party clients that are optimized for my specific user-type to freely hook into and stream from my Google Play Music subscription via an official API. The Google Play Music client is not optimized for users like me. I'm su…

I have a rule of thumb I tell my friends when they ask me questions of the form "X is so lame, why can't GPM just do Y?". The answer, almost always, boils down to laws, regulations, and contracts. This is one of those times.

Re: iOS 13's Music App Sucks

#224

Post by photojosh »

samstevens wrote: post #23
oflannabhra wrote: post #8

I have an Apple Music subscription and use Apple Music (the app) daily. In this article, I hear a lot of "I". IMO, the big challenge with Apple Music is all the legacy that a) personal libraries, b) iTunes Match, and c) iTunes purchases all bring to the new streaming paradigm. Those are problems Apple has to solve, and can't just discard. Apple's customers have plowed tons of $$$ to "own" their libraries, and Apple i…

Author here; I agree that I'm not considering other users in my rants. I'm not a designer, and don't have solutions that would help everyone that Apple is targeting with this product. Part of the reason I'm unhappy with the options forced on me is the removal of my ability to customize the tabs. If Apple wants to push Radio, that's fine. Do I have to suffer navigational difficulties, when previously I could replace t…

> The actual act of dragging the songs is not very graceful at times--I'll fly by the next song in the list, or not move at all past the top of the screen.

I've had the same problem, but you actually spelling it out here prompted me to try something new... and it actually works! Hold the song you want to reposition in the queue with a thumb and scroll the queue with the index finger from the other hand.

I only learned this technique recently from an article on how to more easily reorganise your home screen. So much better than dragging to the edge of the screen.

I guess the UI generalisation to this: there should be two ways to drag: either by dragging the item itself, or by holding it in place and using the other hand to drag the background underneath it.

Re: iOS 13's Music App Sucks

#225

Post by frosted-flakes »

pwinnski wrote: post #183
Hamuko wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>all the legacy that a) personal libraries Since when did a personal library become legacy?

Since, oh, 2006? That's when Spotify launched. Legacy is, by definition, that which existed before. Unless you're starting your library right now, in the age of streaming, your library is legacy.

What if you don't do streaming? Then your personal library is not legacy, is it?

Re: iOS 13's Music App Sucks

#226

Post by stuaxo »

FridgeSeal wrote: post #206
lloeki wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The library management (with and without Apple Music), digital locker, and queue system are the three core features I can't move to another music app-slash-service. And I've tried all of them, many, many times. I especially find Spotify infuriating, the library is so completely unusable they might as well remove it and turn the app into a giant search box.

Spotify’s “stack-like” music queue is the most infuriating thing ever; god forbid I want to skip backwards and hear some songs again...

The worst feature about spotify is searching for a song to play, and then getting only songs with similar names until you do something else.

Re: iOS 13's Music App Sucks

#227

Post by accatyyc »

jschwartzi wrote: post #138
vlucas wrote: post #86

> First things first, why do I get a tab bar with 5 icons, and I only ever use 2 of them? I don’t care about “For You”, “Browse” and I certainly don’t give a rat’s ass about ”Radio”. You lost me on the opening sentence. I didn't even bother to read the rest of the article. I was expecting this to be based some some valid objective reasons why the app sucks, not personal preferences. I use Spotify, and have found the…

Actually the radio is the biggest gripe I have with Spotify. They globally aggregate everything you've ever liked, so if you have tastes in multiple genres it's basically impossible to get your indie rock stations to stop playing EG trance or house music without also telling Spotify that no you actually don't like the dance music you also play sometimes. The curated playlists are much better mainly because their radi…

How do you start the radio? If you start it from a song of the genre you want to listen to now, or a playlist containing mostly that genre, it won't mix in random stuff you've liked before. I get very nice mood/genre radios just by starting them from some song I liked currently.

Re: iOS 13's Music App Sucks

#228

Post by pb7 »

jedberg wrote: post #205
pb7 wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you’re describing is no longer iMessage and I would still say it works pretty well given the archaic technology involved. I don’t think contacting people on Signal via WhatsApp works too well either. How does Google’s offering handle this situation better?

iMessage suffers from the same interoperability problems that most Apple software does -- they don't really consider use cases that don't involve Apple. Hangouts for example understands how different carriers handle different types of data differently, and accounts for that when sending messages. So when you send to a group with different capabilities, it adjusts accordingly and automatically in the background.

What exactly is your issue with iMessage? Messages on iOS also automatically adjust to the participants' capabilities. Have you used iMessage recently? It degrades quite well. You can't backfill functionality that doesn't exist on SMS.

Re: iOS 13's Music App Sucks

#229

Post by KiDD »

otterley wrote: post #54
berdon wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're using an Apple product - Apple is known for their tailored and single-path UX that they don't simply expect their users to love, they also don't care when they don't. I'm not saying your complaints aren't valid or warranted - they're just not relevant to Apple unless their designers agree with you.

Apple does care about customer feedback, but by and large, they're not looking for it on HN or in random blogs. If you want to reach out to them, you can do so here: https://www.apple.com/feedback/

The feedback actually goes directly to the engineers that work with the product you are leaving feedback for. It works, I swear!

Re: iOS 13's Music App Sucks

#230

Post by ubercow13 »

barrowclift wrote: post #34

While I agree iOS 13’s Music.app is pretty shoddy in many respects, there’s plenty of alternatives other than Spotify that might better fit their requirements. (Marvis Pro, Soor, etc.) I consolidate the biggest players yearly in a review, which might be helpful for the author’s search: https://barrowclift.me/post/second-annual-ios-music-player-c...

Good page, I agree that Marvis is really excellent and is probably the single best reason to subscribe to Apple Music. It has a level of customisability kind of reminiscent of foobar2000, which is unusual for iOS apps, and at the same time it's the most visually smooth and polished of the lot (I also tried them all :)
Post reply on HN