Spotify is excellent for music discovery, and I love the top songs and everything. It's perfect. It's the kind of software I wish I could make someday.
Since Apple music's family service wasn't compatible with how we use our devices, we cancelled Apple Music and got a family account on Spotify instead. When Apple Music expired it wiped all the playlists we had in iTunes including ones I created years before Apple Music was ever a thing and not even containing any music from Apple Music.
I'm thinking of also dumping iCloud, but I really like the automatic backing up of all our photos to all of our devices. Heck, at this point I would switch to Android as well if it weren't for the years of apps I've purchased for Apple and don't want to buy again.
Here's how to get back to where you were, if you want to use separate iCloud accounts.
1. On your device create create a Shared photo album. 2. Share it with your wife using her new iCloud ID 3. Select the photos that you wan to share (basically all of them initially) 4. Tap Share > iCloud Photo Sharing 5. Select the shared album.
From then on, you and your wife share all photos you want to share to to that Album.
Same thing works with shared Calendars, Notes, To-do list etc.
If you share an iCloud account across multiple people you will find yourself fighting the system all the time
Adding my own experiences with iTunes-wiped devices and music-collections...
The only consistent thing with Apple and music/services is them accidentally wiping or deleting your data from both your devices and their services.
Applied this consistently, it's clearly a design decision.
What kind of company designs things to behave this way? Really?
Perhaps the design decision assumes the separation is due to a divorce? In that case, keeping them separate is a reasonable decision since neither party would want to be forced to endure further shared memories on any device.
The one thing you probably want to avoid is regretting your choice and ripping your collection again because you opted for the lesser format on the first try.
And if you really need the occassional lossy copy it's trivial to quickly create one with XLD or similar tools.
I'm sorry if I sound more upset by this than I should be, but ripping an entire record collection is a time intensive task and you're cutting corners on an issue that doesn't save you any effort, but might actually cause more someday.
It had taken me ages to build up in the first place and fixing it afterwards was a painstaking manual labour which took weeks and weeks and weeks.
Needless to say, I won't allow another Apple music-product near any of my files ever again.
Edit: This thread brings back memories. I can't tell how many times iTunes have formatted or deleted all music on my iPods and iPhones over the years, forcing me to re-copy or re-sync everything. Again
I really, really, really won't let Apple touch my music-files ever. So much wasted time....
However, iTunes Match's file size/length limit (200mb/2 hours) means that I can't upload many of the DJ mixes I'd like to have in the cloud. That and the fact that I love Spotify's recommendations means that I end up using Spotify most of the time, but have all my mp3s uploaded to Google Play. Works OK, but I'd rather have them all in one place!
Many people subscribe to Spotify even if they also subscribe to Prime because Spotify has more music. Apple Music is one step further.
Publishing to a streaming service isn't always a good deal for small acts. It's important for independent musicians that some music listeners are willing to buy directly from them to decrease their margin. In addition, even some larger bands, Tool being a prime example, are absent from streaming services. I'm concerned with how much power streaming services will have as they consume a lager and larger part of the music industry. It creates a new cultural gatekeeper, and the internet is best when is removes cultural gatekeeper.
- IT doesn't block it at work(it blocks spotify)
- I don't have to install anything
- I don't see ads on youtube
- it has all of my music that came from CDs backed up to it
- I regularly discover new music through their Radio feature so long as the artist/song isn't super popular
The surving players in the market are uninspired in comparison :(
"Playback Paused Because Your Account Is Being Used in Another Location"
I have a Google Music Family Plan ("up to 10 devices each"). But it simply doesn't work, I cannot even play both YouTube and Google Music on the same account, let alone playback on multiple devices.
We have a few Google Home Minis and a Google Home. They were initially all set up using the same Google Account (with the Google Music Family Plan), that meant music could only play on one device throughout the whole house and computers would be blocked if any Google Home started music playback.
The only workaround is to create a new Google Account per device, then hook it into your family group which will receive your family plan. I now have four additional completely useless Google Accounts just so I can play back music in different rooms or use YouTube and Google Music at the same time.
Netflix is the only service which gets multi-device right.
It's pretty ridiculous.
It happened to me with several hundred PDFs of sheet music from IMSLP that I was storing on iBooks. I couldn't work out where they had gone or why they were wiped. I switched to GoodReader and painstakingly had to rebuild the entire collection.
Apple is not just an expensive cloud service provider, they're an untrustworthy one.
These problems have been going of for years. Apple just doesn't invest enough to fix the problem.
I wouldn't call them useless. With Google's propensity for algorithmicaly-determined account suspension it's probably wise to have dedicated accounts for each combination of ( person / device ) * ( Google service ).
Certainly I would encourage anyone with a reliance on G-Mail to create separate accounts for other services.
Not that I give a good goddamn, but, I just realized I'd always assumed it probably was, but have never bothered to check.
I don't use Apple music because I'm not willing to commit to a single-platform service.
Your other concerns aren't made any better though.
What do you mean by "single-platform service"? Apple Music is available for Windows (via iTunes) and Android (via a dedicated app)
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.apple.andr...
Something similar to: http://www.idownloadblog.com/2015/09/17/move-to-ios-android-...
I think >99% of Android users don't fall into that camp if they're even interested in iOS vs Android in the first place, don't get me wrong. But that <1% should seek professional help IMHO.
[1] https://thomas.vanhoutte.be/miniblog/spotify-data-consumptio...
I use iTunes 10.6.3, and sync using USB to an iPod.
Yes, it uses a lot of disk space. But no network admin can take it away from me. I don't get adverts.
Discovering new music is more challenging, but I've found that talking to friends, or seeing what bands they Like on Facebook is more efficient at finding music I really enjoy instead of trusting some algorithm.
You had us sold here.
How can a future challenger to Spotify compete in such am environment? etc
Note that their new one plans are excluded because one plans are already "unlimited".
https://support.t-mobile.com/docs/DOC-24291
Also states this.
>You can add up to 50,000 songs to Google Play Music from your personal music collection using Google Play Music for Chrome or Music Manager (up to 300MB per song). Once you've added your music, you can listen to it through the Google Play Music app and on your computer.
Syncing to device offline is fine but Google music often seems to crap out streaming between songs on Android and iOS and I'm stuck skipping tracks or having to restart playing.
Never had issues with Spotify, plex, tidal, or Pandora in this regard.
I can't think of a reason justifying this.
In comparison, Spotify usually fixes reported content errors within a week or two, and they're started a thing called Line-In, where users can directly submit edits to content information. The edits are obviously still vetted, but it speeds up the process significantly.
Full disclosure I say this as someone who doesn't pay for their service, so I don't know how it is if you do, but if you shuffle play an artist- it will automatically play suggested songs. This makes 0 sense to me. I specifically wanted to listen to that artist and if I wanted suggestions why wouldn't it simply have an additional button for suggestion songs in addition to shuffling songs by the artist?
I've run into this as well, Apple Music seems to have much wider coverage than Spotify, even when it comes to fairly mainstream 'indie' labels. Both services have big holes in their catalogs, though, and sometimes when deep diving into particular artists or labels, I find YouTube more likely to have rarer albums and such (usually recorded from vinyl by some kind soul).
Google must, Apple is not under the same pressure to reciprocate.
Google is an online services company with incidental hardware, Apple Music is a hardware company with incidental online services. Google's primary concern with it's hardware is driving online services. Apple's primary concern with online services is driving it's hardware ecosystem. So, sure, Google has no problem embracing other hardware platforms for it's online services, but Apple has a lot less interest in that.
IMO - Pandora > Apple Music > Spotify for discovery at least.
Then again I like that Apple Music throws me a curveball occasionally, it’s usually something I wouldn’t expect but quite like.
Which, to me, is the point. YMMV ofc.
And the app plays in the background on your phone. Working out, whatever, you have any video/music production at your disposal.
The background playback feature is the only thing I would like, but I think it is a really shitty decision to have such a fundamental feature as a paid one, therefore, I won't pay for it.