Rant: More Thoughts on Apple Music
Rant: More Thoughts on Apple Music
There's no such thing as a perfect music streaming service.
I’m two months into using Apple Music and admittedly a lot has changed. A lot of my opinions have changed as well. Some for the better, some for the worse.
For complete transparency, I had a full article drafted about a month ago that I’ve since yeeted into space. I felt like 30 days was not enough time. Plus, I’m sort of glad I didn’t post an update back then because I’ve learned a lot and didn’t want to dogfood the same talking points (although, there may be some overlap here).
So without further ado, here are mye thoughts on Apple Music after using the service for two months.
Dolby Atmos Music
I have a whole separate article about this topic so I’ll try not to get too in-depth here. I’m a firm believer in the technology. Yes, there are still some albums that sound like absolute dog shit, but it’s not all bad.
Great Atmos mixes sound really good, even on 2.1 or headphone systems (if you have the extra steps to turn up the music). In general, Atmos mixes have a better sense of space and dynamic range (read: most atmos masters aren’t compressed to hell, with their volumes cranked to hell).
But with that comes with the reality that, especially with Bluetooth headphones, you don’t have enough steps to match the volume from stereo. That’s fine when it comes to speakers and home theater setups that have a ton of volume headspace. But if you’re like me and listen to music at around 70-75 dB normally with stereo, you might have a tough time getting a volume match with Atmos music on AirPods Pro. But this is easily solvable, especially in the digital music (Bluetooth, USB, SPDIF, COAX, etc.) world where a simple firmware update can detect/match your volume when jumping between stereo and atmos mixes (without destroying dynamic range).
I think it’s a double-edged sword. Atmos music is great and I think you should listen to it whenever you can, but it just doesn’t have the adoption. Nobody wants to constantly adjust the volume of their headphones as they swap between stereo and Atmos mixes. I didn’t live through the mono to stereo transition, but I presume it was a similar experience. The variability in quality (not absolute, but mastering, leveling, etc.) is a big one as well.
With that all said, I still stand by Atmos music. It’s the future of music and, just like the move from mono to stereo mixing, for every 100 great Atmos mixes, there’ll be 10-20 bad ones. Hopefully, that number decreases as there are some really fantastic albums mixed in Atmos out there. It’s going to be a very slow burn.
Library & Consistency
What’ll more than likely get me to stay is Apple’s library. Sure, certain services have exclusives (such as Spotify Singles, and iTunes/Apple Music Festival/At Home), but Apple has a stronger library beyond that. In my own personal library alone, there are a few hundred tracks that aren’t available on Tidal, Qobuz, or even Spotify. But it’s available in Apple Music’s streaming catalog.
The other big part of Apple’s pie is its feature consistency. Because, feature-for-feature, Tidal has most of what Apple offers, but the support just isn’t there. On Apple Music, lyrics are available for a large majority of songs, animated artwork isn’t even close. Apple is magnitudes ahead. Pre-add/save? Forget it. I don’t remember the last time I was able to pre-save a new release on Tidal, let alone it actually working. Apple and Spotify are also insanely good at ensuring new releases are playable as the clock strikes 12AM ET. Tidal and others are usually 15-30 minutes behind.
Don’t get me started on devices that aren’t a phone, tablet, or computer. Apple Music’s desktop app is bad, sure. But specifically in the case of Tidal, their TV and smartwatch apps are terrible. Smart speaker support is hit or miss, and feature availability among the speakers they do support is inconsistent. On the TV, it’s nearly impossible to find Dolby Atmos albums and tracks.
Being a tech company, you’d sure hope Apple has apps for the TV, watch, and smart speakers. In those regards, Apple Music is great. Barebones? Sure. But it gets the job done. The biggest upside to Apple’s watch app is being able to search the entire Apple Music catalog on your wrist. Spotify and Tidal’s smartwatch apps don’t allow this.
A Customizable Interface
One of my biggest gripes with Apple Music’s interface is how it forces everyone to have the same layout. Music is very personal to the user. Some people will hop on and hit shuffle in the songs view, others will head straight to playlists and nothing else, and some will always navigate to listen now for recommendations. Or, you’re like me and are a mix of everything and would kill for some customizability.
The Apple Music UI tries too hard. There’s too much going on. The Listen Now tab is blasphemy. It forces a certain layout, that may or may not change the next time you visit this tab. If it were up to me, personalized new releases would be up top, with all of the curated playlists underneath. Similarly, I think Listen Now and Browse should be combined into a single Home tab.
In the Now Playing view, everyone is forced to have the same lyrics, AirPlay, and queue button at the bottom. Every other feature is hidden behind the overloaded ellipses button. Credits, add to library, view album. All of it is an additional tap. Again, if it were up to me, I would trade the AirPlay and queue buttons for credits and add/remove from library.
Some may argue, "Why not just use a third-party app if you hate Apple’s first-party app instead?" Well, kind reader, Apple locks certain features to its first-party app. Lyrics, animated artwork, and credits, for example, cannot be accessed within a third-party app. If it were up to me, I would be using Marvis Pro 24/7. It’s as flexible as can be for a third-party Apple Music client.
I’ve found myself discovering new music less because of the cluttered UI. All I want is a carousel of albums from artists I follow and mix in some new artists here and there. Tidal, on the other hand, shows a great mix of not only new albums but a list of new tracks.
Algorithmic Shuffle Is Garbage
One of the very first things I noticed switching to Apple Music is how bad its shuffle "algorithm" is. I suppose that’s the problem. It’s an algorithm. I miss the days where when you hit shuffle, it would generate an actually random list of songs and play it. It didn’t matter if you had a repeat artist or a few songs from the same album play back to back, it was actually random.
Apple’s shuffle is very much backed by some sort of algorithm that must be checking for songs you play very frequently and a recently added bias. In the first month of using Apple Music, of my nearly 7K tracks, it only managed to play around 600 songs. And I play music 8 hours a day, 6 days a week. Since abandoning Apple’s shuffle for Marvis’ shuffle, I’ve gone from 600 songs with at least one play to 2500 songs in just a month.
Please, for the love of everything, let me have a true shuffle option. For now, I’ll rely on Marvis to shuffle my library with its custom sort options.
Favorites
This is single-handedly the feature that got me to come back to Apple Music after two years. Every other music streaming service on the planet has it implemented in one way or another, and Apple is late to the party.
In terms of sort, I love it. I like to keep the favorites sort on for albums and artists 24/7. Those are reserved for albums I love top to bottom and artists I absolutely love. I also love the fact that you can one-tap add an album to your library without having to favorite it, unlike most other platforms.
My main problem is that when you try and search, it only searches your favorites. Similar to how Apple added a toggle to add favorited tracks to your library, I would love a filter option that only shows your favorites by default but allows you to search your entire library without having to disable the favorites filter.
Apple Music on HomePod Is A Buggy Mess
Believe it or not, I had a better experience using Roon via AirPlay on the HomePod than I’ve had with Apple Music. Bugs galore. I hate everything about it.
Starting from the top, I have Dolby Atmos/Spatial Audio disabled through Apple’s Home app for Apple Music (I have a single, mono HomePod), and yet the HomePod still plays Apple Music content in Atmos (poorly, I might add). (UPDATE: After months of trying to troubleshoot this, I finally found a Reddit thread that fixes this problem. You won’t believe how I fixed this problem.)
HomePod is also supposed to allow you to seamlessly switch from one HomePod to a HomePod in another room. This has worked exactly once since I switched back to Apple Music two months ago. The other 99 times, it says it does it and the HomePod crashes and neither HomePod can recall what was playing originally. Fantastic.
Roon, of course, has its own multi-room system. It’s not perfect either, but it worked 99% of the time, including moving audio between HomePods and other devices on the network.
Extended Metadata
Look, I’ll be the first to say that Apple’s credits feature is fantastic. I love looking through production credits and whatnot. But the actual metadata from the service needs a complete rework from the bottom up.
For one, credits are nice but it’s currently static. You go into credits, you see a name and you tap it... nothing. It doesn’t do a damn thing. You should be able to tap on a name and see other music they’ve had their hand in.
I believe I mentioned this in my original rant about Apple Music, and it’s still an annoyance today. On Apple Music, it’s not Gretta Ray, Maisie Peters, and Caroline Penell. It’s Gretta Ray, Maisie Peters, & Caroline Penell as a single listing. Tapping the artist’s name is also inconsistent. Sometimes it takes you to the first artist listed, or more often than not, it brings you to a custom page with all the artists listed, with only the one track listed. At the very least, it should do what most other services do, and bring up a menu to let you select the artist you want. There are also songs that have the featured artist listed in the title, and not in the artist field.
The same could be said about genres as well. Apple Music only lets you insert one genre to define a track. We live in the age of experimental and multi-genre music.
Apple Music needs to support multi-tagging in general. Most albums released today likely fall under multiple genres.
Bugs
Was Apple Music always this bad with bugs? I mentioned it in my original post, but the situation hasn’t improved. I’m still getting sporadic skips in the middle of tracks and issues with playback starting.
There also seem to be a ton of bugs regarding the new favorites feature. The biggest problem I’m running into is with favorites syncing across devices. I’ll favorite an album or artist on one device, but it seemingly never shows up on other devices.
I’m also running into bugs with local files where album art on anything but the Mac that originally had the local file has a super low-resolution version of the album artwork. And despite OS updates, I’m still running into the Use Listening History bug where my play counts aren’t being updated. Therefore, my Last.fm scrobbles aren’t processing correctly.
While I appreciate auto-sample rate switching on iOS/iPadOS (please bring it to the Mac), I very occasionally get an audio dropout as the OS is late to switching the sample rate. This one is super rare, but I figured it’s worth mentioning.
Crappy Algorithms
The hardest thing so far going from Qobuz/Tidal to Apple Music is the lack of decent album recommendations. Both of those services prioritize album listening, therefore recommending albums from both new artists and ones already in your library.
I can confidently say that my new discoveries took a nose dive since switching to Apple Music. The service’s algorithms are so generic. I’m mainly a pop listener, and even then I feel the algorithms are pretty bland and uninteresting.
The algorithms are so bad, in fact, that I’ve resorted back to Tidal to look for new music. I can totally see why my music library went stale when I stuck with Apple Music from 2015-2019 (for context, my music library has grown 4x since leaving Apple Music in late 2019).
Thankfully, Apple is rumored to beef up its AI game next year, and music is a category they’re delving into.
Local Files
At this point, I strongly believe Apple doesn’t actually want to support local files and it’s a bygone of an era where people synced music over the cable. The feature is old, antiquated, and is missing support for key features such as being part of your Apple Music replay, lossless support, and Dolby Atmos music support.
At least for the latter two, there are hacky workarounds that make it work. Lossless local files will require you to turn off your cloud library on your iOS device, which will let you sync those files over the cable. After you’re done syncing, you can turn on cloud library again and both your local files and Apple Music’s library will be available to stream losslessly. Of course, that also means these lossless local files won’t be playable on Apple TV, HomePod, or Android. Since those devices can’t sync to Finder/iTunes.
Dolby Atmos local files require significantly more work (and I’d say it’s not worth it in most cases). There’s zero documentation from Apple on this, but Apple’s cloud library does support multi-channel audio, up to a certain point. After scouring the web, I’ve discovered a few things. Apple Music’s cloud library supports 5.1 audio (so, not 7.1 or Atmos), but not uncompressed. Apple Music will flat out not accept uncompressed multichannel audio.
As you may or may not know, you need much more than 256 kbps for multichannel audio to sound decent to most ears. I’m not saying you need lossless audio (those file sizes are huge), but Apple Music does technically support 768 kbps for 5.1 audio. That’s still better than nothing. And unlike lossless local files, Apple will actually upload that 768 kbps multichannel audio to the cloud. No transcoding. However, to get there, you likely had to compress the audio file to get Apple Music to accept it already.
For both of these use cases, I understand Apple not allowing lossless uploads for free. They take up significantly more space in the cloud. And unlike Apple’s own catalog, these files are single-use and are tied to the specific user. Apple Music’s cloud library doesn’t count towards your iCloud storage. I think there’s a simple solution here that’ll make everyone happy. Let users upload lossless and Atmos files to Apple Music’s cloud library, but require that it count towards your iCloud storage. Most users (just like the Lossless audio toggle) will keep this off. But for those who want it, it’s at least there. I know there are a non-0 number of people out there that would switch to Apple Music in a heartbeat if this were an option.
As for Apple Music replay, there’s no workaround. Hence why I think Apple should natively support Last.fm. Because I’m able to see my entire listening history with cool stats (albeit not in a great UI, and it’s not available year round) across all the big streaming services (and on services such as Roon and Plex, that support local files).
Conclusion
To quote the great Taylor Allison Swift, Apple Music is truly Death By A Thousand Cuts. It seemingly has all the parts to the puzzle, but nobody’s put all the parts together. Apple has long been designing for the mainstream consumer. But being an audio enthusiast, I genuinely hate how much I love Apple Music as a service.
On one hand, Apple’s attention to detail and scale means that they have features that no other streaming platform has. On the other hand, I’m having to find workarounds that might break or not work tomorrow. My biggest draw is still local file support. It’s why I’m so critical of the feature. Outside of Roon, none of the music streaming services offer anywhere near a hybrid library solution.
For example, right now I currently disable cloud sync and manually sync my local files over the wire via Finder on the Mac to enable access to my lossless local files. Or the fact that my "desk" setup for music consists of running audio over USB to both my headphone DAC and receiver since there’s no support for lossless streaming over AirPlay or auto sample rate switching on the Mac app (even LosslessSwitcher can’t reliably change the sample rate of local files).
While I can understand Apple designs its products for the mainstream and its own ecosystem, I really do hope that Apple adds additional APIs so that third-party Apple Music applications are able to offer excellent experiences without having to constantly jump back and forth between it and Apple’s own app. That extends to streamers as well — I would kill for native lossless compatibility with my various music streamers (c’mon, even Amazon Music supports them), all of which are currently operating in USB mode (wired, obviously) for Apple Music.
Yet, I’ll more than likely stick with Apple Music for everything else. The beat-by-beat lyrics, animated artwork, single listing for both Lossless and Atmos, pre-add, and vast third-party app support that makes using Apple Music even bearable.
The sad truth is that there’s no "perfect" music streaming service. In a perfect world, both Spotify and Apple Music would cater to the minuscule audiophile market. Apple threw us a bone with its halfhearted launch of lossless audio, and Spotify promised it was coming nearly four years ago now. Though, Spotify doesn’t support a hybrid library and made the terrible decision to mix in podcasts and audiobooks into its app.
Though, Spotify Connect is very tempting.