Apple ‘On Schedule’ to Terminate Music Downloads by 2019 | Hacker News Reader

Apple ‘On Schedule’ to Terminate Music Downloads by 2019

digitalmusicnews.com

76 pointsjrochkind174 comments

Am I missing something? This appears to be some random site with a random source but all the comments here seem to be treating this as a real source.

> Apple has told DMN that no such phase-out plan exists. One source has repeatedly insisted that the plan not only exists, but that it is ‘on schedule,’ or even ahead of the original schedule.

Apple denied it when they first said it, and they deny it now. [0] But some anonymous source continues to say it, as of two years ago.

I'm not seeing why DMN should be taken seriously.

[0] http://mashable.com/2016/05/12/apple-itunes-kill-downloads-m...

I think you've just described the internet as a whole :)

> "All of that is raising concerns about an overloaded iTunes, especially among Apple engineers who are increasingly frustrated with the platform."

How were they not frustrated before? I can't be the only person (engineer or civilian) who finds iTunes to be among the worst applications Apple's produced, and it's been that way for years.

Should be Corrected as : I can't be the only person (engineer or civilian) who finds iTunes to be among the worst applications ever been produced, and it's been that way for years.

Agree, was trying to come up with examples of worse software and failed.

"[I]ncreasingly frustrated" suggests they were frustrated before, and are more so now.

Fair point, for sure. Though if they've been paying attention, I'd expect them to be beyond mutiny at this point!

> Pulling out lower-performing formats, especially music downloads, helps to solve the issue.

Yeah, that's the problem with iTunes. The ability to play local music files really bogs it down. /sarcasm

I don't use iTunes, so I don't care if they do this as long as the vendors I do use (Amazon, Burning Shed, Bandcamp, etc.) continue to provide downloads.

I can't help feel like a customer stuck in a consumer's world sometimes. I love buying and supporting individual artists on Bandcamp.

Same, if this article is accurate, it would phase out the channel (iTunes store) that I use to buy singles & albums digitally. I don't buy music files from Amazon or Google, since the UX is better as an iPhone user with iTunes music store.

I use Spotify for general listening, but certain tracks, I'll buy on iTunes to have available offline (for what I thought was an indefinite period of time).

If you download the files to your laptop, you'll still have those files to keep and transfer between your devices. I bought most of my music on iTunes, then copied it across to my Android device via a microSD card.

(Incidentally, I'm still looking for a good Android music player for my offline files. Google Play Music works, but it isn't very elegant & it's hard to browse when you have lots of artists. I guess I'm wondering what the modern day Android equivalent of Winamp is.)

Poweramp [1] has a really nice UI (even with an ugly website) and properly refreshes when new music is added to the filesystem. I wrote some code [2] to rsync my music from iTunes to my Android phone over wifi as I got sick of all the buggy syncing solutions.

[1]: http://powerampapp.com/ [2]: https://github.com/jakecoppinger/android-itunes-rsync

I've been using Syncthing [0] for syncing music between all of my devices (Android phone included) for quite a while and it has always worked perfectly for me.

Curious if you also consider that one of those "buggy syncing solutions" you mentioned? And if so, what issues have you experienced with it?

[0] https://syncthing.net/

Try poweramp.

> I don't buy music files from Amazon or Google, since the UX is better as an iPhone user with iTunes music store.

Well, that and you can't buy music from Amazon or Google on an iPhone because neither wants to pay Apple their required cut.

Agree. All the music I buy online is through artist pages on Bandcamp, and maybe the occasional album from CDBaby.

The only problem I have with Bandcamp is that there are already some many good artists / music on Spotify. It's hard to take a stab at a more "amateur" market - it's not like we are running out of pro musicians to listen to. It's a shame because Bandcamp is actually pretty cool.

When Spotify takes the next step of their "incredible journey", I want to have more than memories of the great music I found. So I buy music on Bandcamp. And make backups.

But where is the Bandcamp player that competes with Spotify's web player? Bandcamp needs a better player that I can enjoy using all day & in which I can build playlists.

>>> and the grayed out collection becomes de minimis.

Ya, it's de minimus until my favorite tunes go away. You don't have to be a conspiracy nut to understand what is going on here. They don't want old music on their new devices. Me listening to an old MP3 of my favorite band is, to Apple (or google or anyone else) a waste. Every minute I;m listening to that I'm not listening to <<hip new pop song 12>> via a streaming service. No data to extract. No products to pitch. No data plan to top up. No need to link my car's stereo to the cell network.

We are free to listen to anything we want, so long as its on today's list of approved tracks. Just forget what you were listening to yesterday. Pretend it never existed, because it doesn't exist and never did. I cannot think of anything more antithetical to rock and roll than calling any music 'de minimus'.

My car's stereo plays mp3s. It plays them when I am in the mountains and out of cell range. It plays them when I am on the lower deck of a car ferry. It plays them when my phone is dead and I don't have a charger. It plays them regardless of what boarder I cross. It will play anything I ask regardless of where it came from. And it won't tell anyone what I listen too alone in the car on my way to work. Nothing in Apple's walled garden shows that sort of loyalty.

The world is being fractured right now into too many individual groups. It used to be that if you strayed to far from the opinions of your peers, you would be isolated, and forced to come back to the center. This restricted freedom, but allowed for unity and made for a stronger, more cohesive and well adjusted population.

Nowadays, there is no center. No matter where your individual preferences lead you, there is a group on the internet to validate them. With everyone pursuing different goals and interests, there is no center anymore. This leads to disharmony and chaos.

By Apple controlling what you listen to and when, they are attempting to help society. If you, me, and everyone else was excited about the new Miley Cyrus album, think of how much more together we'd be as a whole. We'd have something in common with our physical neighbors, something to talk about and share. Being part of a collective, IRL, is far better than the poor substitute of some Reddit group.

In the end, what Apple is doing is helping people. And, I for one, can't see how anyone can so readily dismiss what they are doing as bad, simply because they limit the functionality of their products a little bit.

If that's what you call helping, I don't want any part of it. I prefer not to be force fed garbage by Apple or anyone else. Why would society need a center that's formed of mediocre--at best--culture? Why shouldn't people be able to have their own opinions that are different from those of their "peers". Sorry, what you describe is rather nauseating and disgusting. If this is what Apple does, the less of it society gets exposed to, the better. This isn't helping--it's controlling. I'm not sure you understand what "helping" means at all.

>>> If you, me, and everyone else was excited about the new Miley Cyrus album, think of how much more together we'd be as a whole.

The day I'm excited by the latest Miley album is the day I hang up my uniform.

If true, quite shocking for Apple's music's monetization ability. I would consider it a falling from grace since they were "trailblazers" and changed the industry with the iPod.

>The iPod is a line of portable media players and multi-purpose pocket computers[2] designed and marketed by Apple Inc. The first version was released on October 23, 2001, about 8 1⁄2 months after the Macintosh version of iTunes was released. As of July 27, 2017, only the iPod Touch remains in production.[3](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod)

Music sales have been dying for a while though and turns out , a Apple was apart of it.

>Since the introduction the iTunes Music Store on April 28, 2003, music sales have plummeted in the United States -- from $11.8 billion in 2003 to $7.1 billion last year(2013), according to the Recording Industry Association of America. (http://money.cnn.com/2013/04/25/technology/itunes-music-decl...)

Yeah sure but streaming is where it's at now, and Apple have a piece of that pie. So I don't know why it's a fall from grace. They know which way the wind is blowing.

https://www.ft.com/content/94c5cdb0-4a26-11e7-a3f4-c742b9791...

> Streaming revenues will rise 37 per cent to $9.1bn in 2017, PwC estimates, while sales of physical formats will drop 10 per cent to $7.7bn

Letting Spotify, rather than Apple themselves, cannibalize music download sales was stupid.

Also, it's the end of one of Apple's moats: your previous purchases. Spotify works on any device. I will say that Spotify is pretty shit on Android, but that's just laziness on their part. (Issues I've had, all on stock Nexus or HTC android phones: crashing. Muting google maps. Not pausing when disconnecting headphones. My laptop and phone fighting over who controls the playlist. Playlist corruption. Their Android team is, at best, C players. And lazy ones. Every time I get suckered into letting Spotify update there's a new bug.)

Music hasn't been an Apple "moat" for the iPhone since shortly after it was introduced. Apple started selling DRM Fred music that you could play anywhere by 2009.

So this is just a rumor with anyonymous source reported by a single site?

So what happens to all these albums we've bought on the iTunes Store? Despite the money we've poured in, we are on the same level than the next kid who just joined the Apple Music streaming service last month? That will push people to reconsider their loyalty to the company and their service.

Nothing AFAIK; they’re plain old AAC files. Apple eliminated FairPlay DRM on its iTunes Store purchases ages ago.

My guess to what the GP is asking is if the files will still be downloadable from Apple even if they are not selling the tracks anymore. My reading of the article, makes the answer to that question vague, saying:

“But you can always go back and listen to the downloads, they always will work,”

Does that mean if you still have the files, they will work (which is obviously the case) or does that mean they are available to download at anytime once bought from Apple, but will not be available to be purchased in the future...

The re-download feature is actually relatively new (though my hazy memory is thinking it's probably more like 10 years old now...)

it will be interesting if apple removes downloaded media from itunes on the iphone. at that point I'm not sure how much value these would have.

Well I guess I have to go back to buying CDs, then?

I will always want to own my music collection.

Or vinyls :)

I keep catching iTunes use over 1GB of memory without even playing any music.

Additionally, playing and managing the music you OWN is becoming harder and harder with each release. I’m sure they’ll kill this feature eventually.

I really wish we could have a different Model. I dont really like Streaming Music because I am not owning the Music at all, I am merely getting some access to it. And many times Music Label decide they stop providing access on the Platform, that means some parts of my music collection are gone.

I really wish we could have a hybrid approach. For the same price per month, I can only listen to the same song maximum of 15 times a month, and it gives me some credit to buy music. And those Credit are accumulative.

Seems like it should be technically feasible to capture the bits of a streamed song. Are there rogue players that can divert the content to a file?

I would hope that such a solution doesn't just rip the PCM. If the source isn't lossless and you do it that way, you'll likely be encoding lossy twice.

PCM is a legacy format, not terribly advanced (poor encoding for space used) and very vulnerable to faults. Hacked Pandora (Unlimited skips, no ads, thumbs upping a song prompts to save it, runs on Android) saves all music files as whatever format Pandora sent them as, with no transcoding.

What they were asking was whether the files would be saved before being decoded to raw audio samples (i.e. PCM data) or if they'd be captured during decoding.

PCM isn't "a legacy format". It's the stream of data as it exists right before hitting the DAC.

Ah, I'm not terribly familiar with DACs, I mainly see PCM in phones for audio files and paging applications, which seems really silly considering these phones support much more efficient codecs like Opus.

PCM is uncompressed audio. I'm not sure what you mean by "legacy" or "vulnerable to faults" but every decoder you are using is spitting out PCM for handing it to the sound card.

What I'm saying is you want something like what you describe as "hacked pandora" to get the bits before decoding.

Otherwise you're doing the audio equivalent of JPEG -> BMP -> JPEG (to make a visual metaphor).

Hacked Pandora is a thing, and it just grabs the initial file, no transcoding. http://www.apktron.com/2016/02/pandora-69-unlimited-skips-no...

On the Mac, Audio Hijack does a good job of recording whatever is playing through your computer. It's useful for recording Skype calls for podcasts, for instance.

https://rogueamoeba.com/audiohijack/

Soundflower can divert audio: https://github.com/mattingalls/Soundflower/releases/

iTunes will happily stream Apple Music to an AirPlay device, and AirPlay is unencrypted ALAC.

Alternatively simply play through a digital audio output and capture it that way.

>Alternatively simply play through a digital audio output and capture it that way.

You have no way of knowing what the data's original quality is at, and its introducing artifacts from analog output back into a digital form, which is then outputted to analog again. Its an option, sure, but its like saying "get all your music on youtube."

They are suggesting going digital-out (on the source) to digital-in. No analog.

But as pointed out Audio Hijack does the same thing virtually with a kernel extension.

You misunderstood. I said digital capturing the digital audio output.

  >and AirPlay is unencrypted ALAC.

That won't last. And with the removal of the headphone jack, we lose our last analog (and unencrypted) path for capturing audio.

The dongle works.

headphone jacks give a pretty crisp signal :)

You have a headphone jack on your phone? My computer still has one, but not for long I assume.

Don't most of the jackless phones have an external DAC dongle or something? Audio jack on a computer is something I've just assumed for...almost 25 years, at this point. I guess I'll have to remember to start keeping an eye out for it, make sure it's still there next time I need a new machine.

I'm almost sure that Apple still sells more music than movies and almost certainly tv shows. If they have kept those, I doubt they will discontinue music sells. It's not like it costs a lot to support.

Perhaps their contracts with the labels start expiring in the 2019-2021 timeframe?

Source?

Well no direct source but if Apple is going to discontinue sells of music because of declines, then they would also do the same for movies.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/apples-itunes-falls-short-in-ba...

And what do you think would be the totally addressable market of selling tv shows when you can get almost any broadcast tv network show on demand a day after it airs through your cable company for free and a week after it airs for free from the websites/apps of AbC, NBC, CBS, and FOX.

You can get any TV show on demand the next morning from the CW whether or not you have a subscription.

If you have cable and miss a show it's available usually the next day on demand either from the cable company or by signing in using your cable credentials from the individual cable providers apps.

Then take into account that almost everyone has a device that they can buy and play digital music on in the optimal method. How many people who want to buy video digitally and would prefer to watch it on a TV have an AppleTV?

AppleTV is far from the most popular settop box and it's the only way that you can watch content on a TV (besides connecting your iPhone with a $70 gadget). Both Google Play and Amazon work on the most popular set top box - the roku.

What are they planning to do when you have no connection?

You can also download your content so that you can listen to or watch it when you're not connected to the Internet.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204839

TL;DR: Unsubstantiated clickbait.

I terminated music downloads in about 2009 - right about when Spotify came out.

I do frequently use the offline playlists feature, however.

And...I've never used Spotify. I've used Pandora a few times. But generally, if it's music I'm willing to pay to listen to, I want to pay once, and either download the tracks or rip the disk. Stick the files where I need 'em.

How do you tolerate 192kbps?

Really?

- how do you 'tolerate' driving over less than perfectly flat roads?

- how do you 'tolerate' looking through a window which was cleaned more than half an hour ago?

- how do you 'tolerate' using last year's PC?

- how do you 'tolerate' linving in less than a full democracy?

- how do you 'tolerate' ... well, anything 'less than perfect'?

192 Kbps is perfectly usable for most occasions. You're not going to hear the difference while listening in a car, using a pair of 'less than perfect' headphones, in a noisy environment. If you want to listen to music with high dynamic variations in ideal listening conditions you might want to use something better but that's about it.

In all of those cases I have no choice.

I do, however, have a choice for listening using high-end system while most headphones and cars make no difference in fidelity.

Then there is problem of fragmentation. Far from all artists use same network, so you'll end up paying for multiple services to get the same thing.

There is no fragmentation if you insist on getting downloadable content. Storage is cheap, get your own server and stuff it with your music. Install a streaming server (something like Subsonic/Madsonic/etc comes to mind, mpd also works when configured correctly) and point your devices at it.

Spotify's high quality streaming mode (enabled in settings) is actually 320kbps.

Apparently they've been testing a lossless mode for some users recently, too. I haven't seen it available to me in the UK yet, however.

Isn't 192 considered transparent?

So you still download music then.

Tomorrow I cancel Apple music and start using Bandcamp more. Something I've been meaning to do for a long time and this pushes me over the edge.

Bandcamp needs an app where I can listen and buy with one click.

I don't understand how that follows from the story. Can you explain your thinking here?

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