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Comment by jdillaaa | Hacker News Reader

May I ask why all of the effort to use Apple Music? Why not switch over to Spotify which has a ton more open libraries / APIs?

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Personally I don't use Spotify because the interface is hostile to people who prefer listening to full albums, and I don't want to support a monoculture if I have an alternative (not that Apple is some great panacea for artists, of course).

I listen to music that way too, but I'm toughing it out on Spotify still. I'm curious, how do you feel Apple Music's interface is better in that regard?

I was too late for rdio, but from what I hear it sounds like the music service I really want :/

Not OP: I really like how (especially on the mobile app) it's always pretty easy to see which albums each track is associated with no matter what direction I get to the Artist from. In Spotify, I have issues where from some directions, it just lists all of the songs that I have saved from an artist, ignoring the album information. It also will sometimes end up with the songs in alphabetical order, making it difficult to listen to the album. While there's always a way to end up seeing a view that I want, it usually ends up with me clicking though a bunch of links to get to the Artists default page, and on things like CarPlay, that's not really an option either making it more difficult.

That was one of my main reasons for switching to Rdio when it was out, and while I really liked Rdio for its UI, it definitely had enough bugs/delays in song starting that I ended up moving (reluctantly) back to Spotify until Apple Music was released. Now, with that handled along with cloud uploads of my local media (I buy a lot off of bandcamp), it feels like a much more whole offering. I wish social and discovery features were up to Spotify's levels, but I personally have moved away from those for various reasons anyway, so it's not as much of an issue for me as it is for users who really utilize those features.

Yeah, I have found Apple Music to be better than Spotify for the curation of music libraries.

> it just lists all of the songs that I have saved from an artist, ignoring the album information

AM definitely has Spotify beat here. Click an artist, see their albums, choose an album to listen to. All in one view. It seems so natural ... I wonder if this is because I learned to curate my music on iTunes, and it is just a habit?

But for music discovery, open development practices (this is the biggest reason I switched from AM to Spotify - knowing that no matter what kind of thing I want to hack together, Raspberry Pi connected to BT speaker connected to projector, I would be able connect Spotify to it somehow), and social music experience, I think Spotify has AM beat.

> AM definitely has Spotify beat here. Click an artist, see their albums, choose an album to listen to.

Maybe I am missing something, but it seems like the flow you describe is exactly how it works in Spotify. Here is an artist page with the album list prominently featured: https://i.imgur.com/wNAjoCa.png

Sorry, I was referring to your curated music library, not searching.

For example, in Spotify they just list all the tracks

https://i.imgur.com/Bse9J7z.jpg

In Apple Music, they list the albums, year, artwork, etc.

https://i.imgur.com/jyktt7R.jpg

I definitely prefer Apple's for browsing my current music.

A couple of reasons. The integration with my existing iTunes Library is fantastic, and also there have been enough albums / bands only on Apple Music (for whatever reason) for me to want to stick with it.

Considering how long Spotify has been dragging their feet on replacing the long-deprecated libspotify, I can’t agree that they’re the more open of the two options. I’ve been waiting to release a client project built on a messy hybrid of the Spotify REST API (for most functions) and libspotify (for playback) for years now and there’s still no hint of the replacement they’ve been promising.

Last I used libspotify on Linux it still worked, but yes, official support has been withdrawn. It was a hassle to get it working, so yeah it was far from perfect. I found no solutions at all for doing the same with Apple Music though. That has changed a bit recently it seems.

I have a few projects too that involve the hybrid of the REST API and the libraries, it is definitely not ideal (should all be through REST API IMO). I guess Spotify could do it all over the REST API (including playback, Spotify connect, etc.), and then the client would only need to pull in a library that handles content decryption because the API can't send back decrypted audio streams (copyright/pirating). DRM is likely the biggest reason why they haven't done this yet (thoughts?), but the previous solution sounds plausible.

https://github.com/librespot-org/librespot has been a very good replacement for libspotify, and is pretty actively developed. Spotify can of course break this at any minute but it seems unlikely that this would happen.

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