Apple Music First Impressions

AsSiMiLaTeD

Anyone else trying it out? I've been using it for the last couple days and really like it, I've already been turned on to some great albums I'd have not found otherwise. I've tested MOG, Spotify, Beats and Tidal...and prefer Apple Music to all of them. Although some of the other options out there do certain things better (Tidal has lossless flac sound quality, Spotify has a better 'social' network and integration with your friends) I like this service the best overall.

It's not perfect, but surprisingly good for a service that's so fully featured from a company who has not had a great historical track record with social services like this. Thankfully they give us 3 months to try out the service for free, I imagine they'll need a good part of that time to get all the kinks worked out.

Here are a few thoughts, keep in mind this is only day 3 of using the service for me.

Sound Quality
This is still an audiophile forum so I'll get this out of the way first. For sound quality, Tidal is still the best option I've tried. The sound quality with Apple Music is good, but not on par with the lossless streaming offered by Tidal. In most applications you won't be able to hear the difference but if you listen on your main rig or sit down with a pair of good headphones you'll be able to pick out the differences.

Apple Music is technically a lower bit rate than Spotify (256 aac vs 320 mp3) but the sound quality is the same, and even better in some cases where Spotify doesn't have 320. AAC is a better encoder than MP3 so at the same bitrate AAC sounds better, so 256 AAC ends up sounding the same or better than what you get on Spotify. All these differences are negligible though, and can really only be heard on gear that would be better suited for Tidal anyway.

Human Curation
They use actual humans to do the curation for the service, so that's where your recommendations and suggested playlists come from. This is what Beats used as well and I prefer it to the computer algorithms used by the other guys. It tends to generate a playlist or set of music that 'feels' more like an album (even though it's not) vs just a random set of songs. However, whenever you introduce humans into the equation you always run the risk of someone trying to get too cute with the music selection.

For example, there's a playlist called "Study to 00s OST" which is SUPPOSED to be movie score highlights from the last decade. There are lots of great tracks on there and options that only a human would likely have picked that make the collection better. So while the collection is great overall, there's a significant flaw in the list. Of course Gladiator has to make an appearance on the list, but some idiot got too cute with his selection and chose 'Elysium' as the track to represent that album. It's a great track, but so is the whole album and there are several tracks on that album that are better. Had that selection been chosen by a computer it would have likely factored in things like play counts or user ratings on iTunes and would have ended up with one of the better tracks like "The Battle", "Barbarian Horde", or my personal favorite "Now We are Free" (which is like the best parts of Elysium but improved by 100%).

I'll still take human curation over a computer, but it's not perfect.

Discovering New Music
There are a few ways to do this, and in terms of mechanics of using it this is where Apple Music is basically the same as everything else out there. The backend that produces the results is different as described above, but how you use the tool is mostly the same. You can obviously search for artists to stream (but that is more searching than discovering
), or you can search for an artist you know and it'll recommend similar music.

When you search for an artist you'll also get the curated playlists related to that artists. So a search for Danny Elfman returns the OST playlist mentioned above, as well as others like an "Intro to Danny Elfman". This is especially helpful when you hear an artist somewhere like the radio (or Beats 1 Radio) and want to check out their music and are not sure where to start. So if you've been living under a rock the last 15 years and just heard Muse for the first time you can pull them up and get playlists like "Intro to Muse" and "Ultimate Muse Tracks" and if like them you can then pop in and stream any of their albums or dig into one of the other playlists like "Muse: Deep Cuts" or "Muse Live".

Finally, there's a "For You" section that's supposed to build recommendations for you based on your listening habits. That is a tool that will need some time to populate meaningful recommendations so I've ignored it so far.

Beats 1 Radio
I actually like this more than I thought I would, but you'll need a pretty high tolerance for lots of types of music to enjoy this because it's all over the place. I enjoy pretty much everything except country so this actually works for me, but just know at some point that you're very likely to hear Amy Winehouse, Eminem, Buena Vista Social Club and Jimi Hendrix back to back. The overall presentation and style is definitely more 'hip hop' or 'party' than I'm used to, but it's very upbeat and works for that station and intended purpose. There are three main (relatively famous) DJs that do a show that airs twice a day, and then a bunch of smaller DJs and request hours and such in between.

I like the fact that they have dedicated request hours, that's something I always loved doing and seems to be fading away in most commercial radio these days. It's also worth noting that the songs on this station are mostly censored, it seems to fall somewhere in between PG and PG-13 being closer to the latter.

There are no real ads to speak of, every once in a while you'll hear "Beats 1 Radio presented by American Express" or "Beats 1 Radio on in over 100 countries 24 hours a day" but that's the extent of it...there are no commercials.

I don't think I'll spend huge amounts of time listening to it, but is nice to have and will be part of my regular rotation for the near future at least.

Connect
There's this thing where you can 'follow' artists and you'll get updates that they post (notes, blogs, songs, videos, etc), kinda like a Tmblr or Twitter. It's too soon yet to tell how widely this will be adopted as it'll take some time for artists to get on board with this. I'm not sure that I'll ever use this feature but I'll reserve judgement until after we see how it develops.

Integration with Your Music
This is one of my favorite features and what really puts this service over the rest of the options for me. First off, it basically replaces iTunes Match (with some caveats around DRM that the labels imposed on Apple), so that means you get your own purchased music in the cloud that you can access from anywhere.

What's really cool though is how it integrates with your existing music collection, because you can add music you find or discover in Apple Music right in with your existing music collection. For example, right now I'm listening to the Bourne Ultimatum score from John Powell. I actually own three of his albums (which are the three Bourne soundtracks). Through Apple Music I discovered his soundtrack for the Italian Job (which is awesome by the way) and added it to my library and now it's right there in with the rest of my music.

Note that you can turn this off, I like having it all integrated but if you just want the streaming and no connection between that and your music just turn off "iCloud Music Library". You can also continue to use and manage iTunes Match separately from the Apple Music service.

(continued in next post)

AsSiMiLaTeD

Flaws but not Deal Breakers
Beats 1 Radio is advertised as 24 hour radio, but worth noting that it's not 100% live all the time as there are some replays. It's 'ON' all the time, but the shows from the main 3 DJs get played twice each day, I'm assuming in efforts to try and get those to where everyone around the world in different time zones can hear them. This isn't an issue to me, but people are already complaining about it and I suppose it could be annoying if you listen to that station 24 hours a day. So it's different from traditional radio in that it's not intended to be listened to continuously 24 hours a day, instead intending to be listened to in segments of 12 hours or less.

I actually think the interface is a bit awkward at first - where do you go to search for new artists, once I find an artist I'm interested in how do I save them to find again later, how the hell do I even access Apple Music, etc are all questions that I had when I first tried to use it. Like anything else, once you learn your way around it gets much easier, but you'll need to stick with it a few minutes to figure things out. MOG, on the other hand I knew how to use instantly, although to be fair it did much less than Apple Music.

All that integration with your library does come at a cost. Music that you have in your library will sometimes get re-tagged by iTunes, this has been very rare for me with this service and iTunes Match but can be annoying if you're as meticulous about tagging your music as I am. I have all my Eric Clapton stuff tagged with Eric Clapton as the artist, even albums with him and BB King or Steve Winwood still get tagged as just Eric Clapton as the artist. Apple may have those tagged differently, and if it does that's how they get inserted into my collection. There's really not a better way I can think of for them to do this without introducing more overhead and increased complexity for the user, but if you're as OCD about that stuff as I am this is something to consider. I've found that, while I'm opposed to this in principle, it hasn't actually changed or made more difficult the way I find music.

The larger issue with the integration is that, if you're like me and have a FLAC library, you now have both FLAC and compressed files integrated in to the same library. You can tell which tracks are which, but there's no way I see to just hide all the Apple Music tracks and show only your library. So if you want to hand someone the remote to your iTunes library and demo some gear they may end up choosing a lossless track, not ideal for demo sessions. As a workaround, you can create a separate libraries to manage this but that's not an elegant solutions. I'd like to see Apple add a simple way to filter out the 'Apple Music' stuff from your library.

Again, if that stuff bothers you more than it does me then you can turn off the integration if you like.

I think that covers it for now, I'm saure I'll find more things I like and things I don't and will post as those arise.

[Deleted User]

wow. Thanks!

WagnerRC

as always. Thank you

AsSiMiLaTeD

You may be right on the volume, but in terms of sound quality I find it better than Prime Music. I'm listening on a Mac through the DragonFly DAC feeding Focal desktop speakers though, haven't played with it much on my phone yet other than to make sure it works.

EndersShadow

"Star"d this post for a more in depth read tonight as I am curious about it but dont have time to do more than skim presently

rooftop59

I have amazon prime and use the music on occasion, but the big difference (as far as I understand) between amazon and the major players is that amazon's selection is paltry in comparison.

The real tipping point for me right now is still that spotify has the highest consistent sounds quality of the services that have apps for Squeezebox, so as Iong as I am using one of those I will likely stick with spotify.

But thanks for the review as always...

AsSiMiLaTeD

I'm not sure if you're wanting to compare Amazon Prime Music to Apple Music, but here are some thoughts comparing the two.

Music Selection
Amazon Prime lets you access music you've purchased and stream a collection of Prime music, but that collection is MUCH smaller than the other services out there. You're looking at around 1M songs in Amazon Prime vs ~30M in the other services like Spotify and Apple Music, plus whatever songs you own that don't fall into that collection of tracks. A million songs is a LOT, but it's also a LOT less than 30M. These aren't just numbers in the ether, they have a real world impact on the usability of the service.

There is LOTS of my own personal music collection that's out there on Apple Music and not available on Prime Music. For example Dream Theater, Porcupine Tree, Opeth, and Hans Zimmer are all in my top 5 artists and have a much smaller selection of albums available in Amazon Prime than in Apple Music. Dave Matthews Band is the only artist in my top 5 with a comprehensive collection in Amazon Prime. It's not just my weird music collection either, where the hell is QUEEN????

Amazon also has the radio functionality and playlists suggestions that the other apps have, but the playlists are simply not as good as what you get with Apple Music. That's partly due to the human curation Apple uses and partly due to the fact the the music selection on Amazon is much smaller. That's open for debate of course, but I doubt many people would disagree there.

The radio stations in Amazon are actually pretty good, I've not spent enough time there to judge their quality but seems like they're good.

User Interface
I actually don't like the interface with Amazon nearly as much. When I search for and then click the artist name in the results I'm taken to a page with all their songs, bucketed by albums. What I really want on that page though is just a list of their albums, I don't want to have to scroll down the list of all their songs to get to the album I want. I can go back to the main results page and go to the "Albums' section and see the list there, but a) that's clunky and b) that list is generated from my search and not necessarily a list of albums from that artist.

With Apple Music you search for an artist, click the artist name and then land on an artist page that has sections for songs, albums, and playlists and then I have the ability to create a station from that artist right there on the same screen.

UI is somewhat subjective, and there are probably things about Amazon that are better as well, but I can say that when using them both I found the Apple Music interface much better overall.

Advantages for Amazon
First, it's free if you have a Prime membership, otherwise it ends up being almost as much as the other services.
Second, as a tool to access your own music from anywhere it's actually a better option because there is no limit to how many songs you can upload so it's nice for people like me who have very large libraries. Apple caps you at 25,000 songs, Amazon is unlimited.

Advantages for Apple Music
Everything else

[Deleted User]

There have been some great reviews lately on CP, very thorough and informative. Keep up the good work.

vcwatkins

Thanks @AsSiMiLaTeD . I started my 3 months today but haven't tried anything beyond the initial setup..

mantis

Dude,
That was an excellent write up on something I'm trying out this weekend and for the next 3 months.
Thanks for taking the time to write that all out, it was actually very helpful.

Strong Bad

Great write up and review! I've been listening everyday to Apple Radio (jumped on board day 1) and I'm finding I love it. I'm flipping around between Beats 1 and specific music genres. I used to DJ in clubs years back and took a liking to House Music and extended dance. Much to my delight, I listen quite a bit to the House Music channel under Dance. Beats 1 Radio has some pretty entertaining programming as well.

Apple Music has sort of benefitted Polk in a way. I wound up moving my existing Polk Woodbourne to my bedroom and chill out with music till i'm falling asleep. I use Airplay from my iPad to the Woodbourne. Also ordered myself a second Woodbourne on Wednesday to put back in my dining room. The Woodbourne ROCKS! I'm not as critical of a listener as I was years back though, but the Woodbourne really stands above the other radios of it's type.

Back on topic though, thumbs up from me on Apple Radio!

engtaz

I still like Tidal better. The other problems is that the volume level of the radio stations is louder than the music categories. The radio stations also cut in and out,

AsSiMiLaTeD

What stations are cutting in and out for you? I've not yet had that issue on my end and I've tried most of the stations, and I have a relatively poor internet connection at 8mb down and 1mb up.

I also don't have the issue with radio being louder than my own music collection or the online catalog, but luckily that one is really easy to test. What I did is pull up five artists and their stations and test out the first couple songs in that station against the same song in my own collection and the online streaming catalog, and the volume is either the same of a touch quieter actually on the radio station. Any variability is very small and is still less that I'd get just by listening to my own collection.

The one exception is Beats 1 Radio, that volume is a little boosted but even then not by much, certainly no more than regular radio stations. The sound quality is not bad, but not quite as good as the rest of the stations and music catalog but it's also a live station being broadcast over the internet and it's as good or better than any other station like that I've tried elsewhere. It's hard to compare the sound quality on Beats 1 to the other services like Tidal and Spotify because...well they don't have anything to compare to.

AsSiMiLaTeD

One issue I do have with Apple Music is the inconsistency between the iOS versions and the Mac version running inside iTunes, but I'm assuming Apple will get those in sync at some point.

On the iPhone and iPad there's really cool functionality that allows you to go back to previous shows and view those playlists and then play right from there. For example, I was listening to Ebro the other day and there was a song I'd heard that I couldn't remember the name of so this morning I went back in and looked and found the song in the playlist and added the album to my library. It seems minor, but a very cool feature to have.

Well, I can't seem to figure out how to do that on the Mac. On iOS I just click on the Beats station and it takes me to a page with and lots of other cool stuff, on the Mac there appears to be no such screen inside iTunes.

I'm assuming they'll get it fixed because that lack of consistency isn't something they're really known for.

mantis

I've been using this for a while now and feel it's not as good as I was hoping.
So what I don't like about it is the way your music is intergraded. Yes you get your entire library but that in itself is my issue. I'm streaming more then using the hard drive on my phone which uses more data. I really like my own music that I put on my phone so I don't have to stream all the time when listening. Especially at work as I'm a service technician and I drive most of the day going between jobs. Sometimes these drives can be an hour or more so streaming all that time can really use up data. I have 2 kids and a wife who use data heavy, I was always the least user on the policy , now I'm creeping up there with my son who is the other least user.

I don't like how you can shuffle your music, you have to pick a song then find the shuffle symbol. Before in music before the upgrade you just pulled down when you got to songs and picked shuffle. I loved that especially when I work out at the gym by myself. I can rock all the music on my iPhone without having to stay within one of my built playlists.

It's not easy to navigate , it's the most different Apple has ever made to iPod, music and now Apple music. I'm learning it and excepting this is how it is now but I do miss the way it use to work, I really liked the last version. I wish Apple would have just used that platform and added the Apple Music to it but over time I will get use to it.

I do however like all the new music and I really Like Apple's Playlists. They are very well laid out and I have heard some really cool stuff.

I'm on the free trial for the 3 months so the more I use it the more I'll be able decide if I'm gonna keep using it or go back to Spotify which I think is very well laid out and super easy to use.

mantis

I'm still on the fence about this service. I'm pretty surprised on the interface as It's not very Apple like if you ask me. I don't think it would be Steve Jobs approved.

AsSiMiLaTeD

It seems simple enough to me, what about it is giving you issues?

The integration with your personal library is always gonna be tricky, I give them credit for even making the attempt. If you dont like it though you can turn it off as it's not a mandatory feature

mantis

I was in a basement and I just wanted to use my music that lives on my phone, when I lost Cell service and wasn't on the home network, I had no access to my music. I found that strange as it lives on my phone.

dejavu32

Great write-up!! I didn't try it yet but I'm going to in the next few days.

AsSiMiLaTeD

A few months in and I figured I'd do a quick update, but more just a heads up on the increase to the song limit for iTunes Match and Apple Music. They've increased the track limit from 25,000 to 100,000 which means I can now sync my entire library without having to do magic. This is actually a huge deal to people like me with a lot of tracks, should have been like this since day 1 but I'm happy now.

Most of my initial review still stands, though as expected Apple has fixed some of the UI issues on the Mac version of the iTunes integration. I mostly abandoned Beats 1 but still have a couple shows I do catch on replay, I'd say maybe a couple hours a week. Everything else like the curated playlists and music discovery still works very well for me, and is really the reason why I continue to pay for the service.

I have myself, my wife, and my parents all on my subscription and am paying $15 a month. I think my parents enjoy it the most since they have a very small music collection and now have access to everything they could ever want.

Ultimately I'm still not on board with online streaming as my primary means of consumption and probably never will be, I like owning local copies of my music and really just use Apple Music as a tool to help me discover new stuff to buy. But for audiophiles who are fine with streaming it's important to note that Tidal or Deezer are still the obviously better choices since they have higher fidelity, even if their selection or playlist curation aren't as good as what Apple has.

mantis

I'm waiting on the day Apple decides to stream in high rez or at least CD quality.

JohnObrain55

You can try MusConv. Transfer your tracks and playlists to Apple Music, Spotify, Google Music and more for free with MusConv tool

pitdogg2

Spam^^^^

Willow

JohnObrain55 wrote: »

You can try MusConv. Transfer your tracks and playlists to Apple Music, Spotify, Google Music and more for free with MusConv tool

OK, yes. But does it do the dishes? if not I'm out

mantis

I still have it since 2015 when I tried it out. I come to like it as I can find new music. I buy what I like still in CD and rip away but mostly been listening to music on Apple Music ( Yup even in it's not so excellent quality ). I use it around the house for cleaning and detailing the Truck. I use it for songs when I'm playing guitar in my basement. I have a full house system with Sonos and Multi channel amps. For serious listening I don't use it at all. It's come a long way since 2015 and I have no reason to not use it. I love it on the road. I use the hell out of it and so does the rest of my family.

dromunds

Loser reported