Apple Music is the most buggy and annoying software I use • Hacker News Board

Re: Apple Music is the most buggy and annoying software I use

#81

Post by dash2 » Sat, Jun 04, 2022, 1:31 PM UTC

matheusmoreira wrote: post #62

ysleepy wrote: post #15

The one thing that sours the entire experience for me is that songs take like 5-15s to start playing when selecting one that isn't super popular. This happens on my ipad, mac, android phone. It feels like some server is spinning up a hard drive to stream it. Apart from that, why the hell is the title and artist only shown in one line that starts scolling instead of showing multiple lines if it doesn't fit, at least i…

These streaming platforms are so bad. We had better software in the 90s and 00s. These trillion dollar corporations can't beat literally decades old technology. The only reason these little services even exist in the first place is to satisfy the whims of copyright monopolists. How many more steps backwards must this industry take before they're satisfied?

>These streaming platforms are so bad. We had better software in the 90s and 00s.

You are sitting in a chair in the sky.

I can play any music I want right now for a £10/month fee. In the 90s I was buying CDs with five good songs and five filler for £15. In the 2000s I was finding stuff that I could pirate, downloading it, and playing it on my beige desktop computer because there was no such thing as a smartphone.

Re: Apple Music is the most buggy and annoying software I use

#82

Post by ninth_ant » Sat, Jun 04, 2022, 1:35 PM UTC

pschuegr wrote: post #72

ninth_ant wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re re-treading an old line of argument that doesn’t make sense anymore especially in this context. Apple has identified services as an area they went to grow. Music is an ongoing subscription service, with plenty of competition. If they want to retain or grow their paying subscribers Apple needs to improve their software with the same attention to quality they devote to hardware.

They need to improve their software to the point that the quality/price/convenience of Apple Music is more attractive than quality/price/convenience of the alternative. Since Apple Music is basically pre-installed and you get it as part of Apple One or whatever, there is a quality gap that they can accept and still grow the service. And they will, it's just basic economics. If anybody knows of a software company that…

No need to argue with a straw man, I’m not saying they should invest in software quality for altruistic or philosophical purposes.

Apple Music is a paid subscription service. Maybe they can coast on the momentum of their preinstalls and make some money, like you said.

But I’d argue, as someone who has used both apple music and Spotify in the past, that Apple is leaving money on the table by having a shoddy software component to their music service. When a superior service is equally priced and just a few taps away, they will certainly lose some percentage of paying customers.

Re: Apple Music is the most buggy and annoying software I use

#83

Post by thefz » Sat, Jun 04, 2022, 1:35 PM UTC

I won't touch Apple* anything with a stick, but that had me laughing:

    Here are some suggestions for Apple to improve Apple Music on macOS:

    Fix the bugs, and make navigation fast!

Like programmers weave a magic wand around and bugs magically fix themselves. Why can't you make navigation fast?

Re: Apple Music is the most buggy and annoying software I use

#84

Post by dawnerd » Sat, Jun 04, 2022, 1:36 PM UTC

drawkbox wrote: post #4

I like Apple Music because it integrates well with the Apple line. More importantly though it is one of the highest paying per stream to artists [1]. Streaming needs to be much more lucrative for artists and consumer choice helps that. It is nice to be able to buy the music as well if you want to support. Being part of Apple One is huge as well. The latest music streaming royalty rates are as follows. PLATFORM ROYALT…

Tidal is pretty great and worth a shot. Their recommendations are about as good as Spotify and they don’t try to shove podcasts into your ears.

Re: Apple Music is the most buggy and annoying software I use

#85

Post by mikhailt » Sat, Jun 04, 2022, 1:36 PM UTC

For folks on Windows/Linux that want to use Apple Music but not the web player, try Cider (https://github.com/ciderapp/Cider).

Yes, it is Electron but Apple did use webviews in their macOS AM app as well before they switched back to native earlier this year; which still isn't that great.

Ironically, Cider works better than the Apple's web app as well; it doesn't skip or get stuck once in a while. It just works for what I need.

(In case other asks, Windows/Linux is more of a work/secondary platform, and iPhone is the main device most of the time. That's why I'd use Apple Music despite having the other platforms).

Re: Apple Music is the most buggy and annoying software I use

#86

Post by psyc » Sat, Jun 04, 2022, 1:39 PM UTC

I find the web interface completely unusable. It's hard to pinpoint why it's terrible. It's just bad at every step of normal use, and sluggish as something slow.

I only have two problems with the ios app, but they're annoying enough. One is making you find a button to transition to a second screen to get to basic play controls, then find another button-like thing (even now I can't tell you off the top of my head where it is) to get back. I do not understand why the "play a song" interface needs multiple pages.

The other thing is that once every few hours I get the popup: "song isn't authorized" and I have to click around on shit until the app remembers that yes it actually is authorized because I pay $10 a month for it to be. I'd like to hear the UX rationale for showing a message which to 99.9% of their users just means "We're not going to play your song right now, for no particular reason except that computers don't work in general" and to the rest means "We're not going to play this song right now, even though we probably could if we were less paranoid, or better software engineers, which is an us problem but we'd rather make it a you problem"

Re: Apple Music is the most buggy and annoying software I use

#87

Post by ccouzens » Sat, Jun 04, 2022, 1:43 PM UTC

antihero wrote: post #71

plonk wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I like Apple Music because it integrates well with the Apple line. Is there a need to integrate with anything? All I need is to play music. Spotify is as integrated into macOS and iOS as Apple Music. > More importantly though it is one of the highest paying per stream to artists [1]. Streaming needs to be much more lucrative for artists and consumer choice helps that. Too bad they are shooting themselves in the foo…

It is highly useful having you AppleTV playing music and this to show up on your iPhone lock screen

My phone does that on the lock screen too, but it works it out from sampling sound, so it "integrates" with everything from someone's AppleTV to an Alexa.

Re: Apple Music is the most buggy and annoying software I use

#88

Post by midislack » Sat, Jun 04, 2022, 1:45 PM UTC

wfhordie wrote: post #51

eloisius wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That higher royalty isn’t because of altruism. It’s probably a factor of licensing volume.

Comments like this one are a real puzzler to me. Why does it matter that the higher royalty is not out of altruism? It’s money! Money doesn’t care. More money for artists is good. You can’t buy a cheeseburger with altruism. I guess I’m just not sure what sort of “gotcha” this is supposed to be. The beauty of incentive alignment is that you don’t have to waste your time trying to discern nebulous motivations of large…

No post body was provided.

Re: Apple Music is the most buggy and annoying software I use

#89

Post by Lendal » Sat, Jun 04, 2022, 1:47 PM UTC

nsgi wrote: post #75

drawkbox wrote: post #4

I like Apple Music because it integrates well with the Apple line. More importantly though it is one of the highest paying per stream to artists [1]. Streaming needs to be much more lucrative for artists and consumer choice helps that. It is nice to be able to buy the music as well if you want to support. Being part of Apple One is huge as well. The latest music streaming royalty rates are as follows. PLATFORM ROYALT…

So if you don't like Apple Music just use another service but listen to more music?

Ha! Thanks for this idea. When I was on Spotify I already was listening to more music anyway, because Spotify just has more music on it period. I switched to Apple Music (family reasons), but half of what I used to listen to on Spotify isn't found on Apple Music. Apple has more money than Spotify, so why do all these problems persist for years and years?

Re: Apple Music is the most buggy and annoying software I use

#90

Post by ripply » Sat, Jun 04, 2022, 1:51 PM UTC

If you sync your library, it will wipe all your custom likes/dislikes for songs you sync manually via iTunes as well as wipe your smart playlists (blank them - until you sync your device to your computer again)

Therefore Apple Music is literally unusable if you have a large library of songs not on iTunes (like indie electronic stuff) and don’t want iTunes to identify them and switch them to Apple Music songs.