Apple Music Web Client | Hacker News Reader

Apple Music Web Client

beta.music.apple.com

325 pointsaplusplus205 comments

Wow, us Apple Music users have been waiting for this forever! For anyone who's curious about how this product developed:

- April 2016: Apple releases Apple Music API

- December 2018: A third-party Apple Music web player is launched on Product Hunt: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/playapplemusic-com (Created by https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=shivdhar)

- January 2019: Another third-party alternative, Musish, launches on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18940407

- Now: Apple finally launches their own official player!

Makes sense with Spotify being so popular on web...

Hmmm. This ignores Apple acquiring Lala.com in '09.

I used to love LaLa. I was so annoyed when Apple killed it. Google Music eventually replaced it for me, but LaLa was truly ahead of its time

Spotify has had it since 2008 and Google Play Music since 2011. Blows my mind that people have used this for so long without web support... Then again if you're stuck in the garden, you don't have much choice.

Funnily enough, Macs do let you listen to music from your web browser, and don't force you to use iTunes.

I'm not where it fits into the timeline, but Apple has actually offered a rather obscure and limited way to use Apple Music in a browser for some time prior to the launch of the full web client.

There's no way to browse, or even launch it directly. You have to search, via Google or other, for an album, and follow the link to what always used to be the iTunes Preview page. You can still listen to the thirty-second previews on this page, but there's a sign-in link in the header that will, quite surprisingly, unlock full playback of the album without launching iTunes.

It's hardly the full Apple Music experience – all you get is the album you found and some related links at the bottom, with no access to your library or playlists – but it does work. I'm not really sure what purpose this functionality served, other than perhaps as a testbed for the actual web client, but it's still active for the time being.

This is used for sites such as Genius (lyrics aggregator/social commentary mix, still uses Apple Music I believe) to provide a snippet to browsers without a subscription.

This is great, no longer trying to get iTunes working in wine on linux, just play the music straight from the browser, and if you want a native app, Windows and MacOS has iTunes, no electron non-sense.

Actually Apple Music in iTunes is just a web view that leaks like crazy, to the point of making iTunes slow to a crawl, if you're quickly navigating through artists and albums.

Not much better than Electron IMO. Apple Music in the browser seems like there isn't much hope of a truly native experience now.

What about the new Music app coming in MacOS Catalina? Does it implements the views in html5?

I haven't tried Catalina yet. I really hope it isn't a web view. That would really defeat what I hoped they where doing by splitting iTunes up.

The Apple Music portion is a web view: wherever it crashes (which is quite often, sadly) it shows the JavaScript backtrace.

Terrible news. :(

The Podcasts and TV apps are native Catalyst (iPad apps on macOS) apps.

The Music app is still some sort of Frankenstein iTunes thing. The Library section views are native. The Apple Music section is still web. It is still slow compared to Spotify but much better compared to how it is in iTunes.

The iMessage app is also just a webview (at least up to 10.14).

Really? I thought it was based on old iChat application, since it used to support other IM providers.

Support for that was ripped out years ago.

I know support for those services is long gone, but I thought it was still based on the same code.

The last time I saw support for it still there, the IM stuff would open in a separate, old-looking window from the Messages window. Basically, they kept the old code and just built a new version parallel to it, then eventually took out the old one.

It’s still a web view in Catalina as well.

Only the bubbles, though. The text input field and the sidebar are standard Cocoa controls (at least that was the case when I last checked).

It's not as bad as a full web app

I get a beach ball All-the-time with Messages lasting 5-10 seconds. I struggle to imagine that anything it’s doing is that computationally intensive.

I suspect this might be a problem with your installation - if you create a new MacOS user account for testing, does the problem persist? I don't recall Messages every beach-balling for me and I'm not exactly on new hardware.

Tangentially, this appears to be the general (and usually, only) troubleshooting step you can do with Apple products.

Yes, creating a new user resolves the problem. Yes, resetting my device to factory settings without restoring from backup resolves the problem.

How do I resolve the problem without deleting my entire history?

So if you have problem that goes away with another user, the problem commonly lies in a corrupted preference related to the app, so you start hunting out the .plists for the application and moving them to the desktop before relaunching and seeing if the problem is fixed.

If not, then you start poking about in Application Support for the app.

After 9 years of Apple use, I have successfully made this method work one time (iMessages), and even then, it took a full system reboot after each file move to validate whether or not that had made a difference.

The whole process took the better part of a day. It was long, it was tedious, but at least I got there in the end. There was no paid-support story that would have done this for me, but hey ho, it all worked out. I can't imagine I'll ever have the time to go through that much effort again.

The same cant be said for my iMessage history on my iPhone, which has been lost repeatedly as the only solution was "don't restore from your backup".

Ah - I used to use it fairly frequently in the good old OS X 10.2-10.6 days - for various apps. Seemed to work fairly well.

Maybe someone will make a CLI for it like pianobar for Pandora.

https://github.com/PromyLOPh/pianobar

Is there an Apple Music API that let's you directly access the audio data (i.e. without going through the browser DRM controls)? From my quick look it seems they don't, unsurprisingly.

seems they're using Ember.js . Reason I love spotify so much is that it's available on the web, no need to be downloading native apps everywhere. Always bet on the web. also good to see, another web property using Ember. As a react dev, competition is healthy

I’m surprised. I haven’t heard anything about Ember in years. Not since 2013 or so.

I guess it is still a liked tool, I also read about Riot Games using it for the redone client of League of Legends.

https://technology.riotgames.com/news/architecture-league-cl...

Is it really that surprising given React is FB and Angular is Google?

> React is FB and Angular is Google

This doesn't matter in practice - they could have freely used either to design the web client at no cost. If they wanted to take over development and go their own direction they just had to fork them.

Of course in doesn’t matter in practice. It’s the optics.

Is there still patent uncertainty around React (or Angular)? Otherwise, Im not sure why anyone outside HN would care about the optics of which front-end library was used.

Are you really saying you don’t understand why Apple might not want to use a framework created by their frenemies in Facebook and Google, especially given Apple’s focus on privacy and willingness to make an example of FB and Google for their comparatively lax privacy standards?

Sure, but how does any of that resonate with the general public? "Apple is using Facebook's front-end code library" isnt exactly a gripping headline or tweet. You can read the source code to either; its not as if theyre secretly embedding tracking into every React/Angular app.

Ok. I mean you can ask that to Tim Cook :) If not optics it’s about ego. Again, if Apple hates FB/Goog then why use their frameworks when there’s dozens of other alternatives.

Apple’s iCloud has alternately used Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. That’s a bit more trusting than a front end web framework.

https://betanews.com/2018/02/26/apple-icloud-now-powered-by-...

Not that it matters but I interviewed for an Apple team that was using react. Something adjacent to iTunes if I remember correctly.

FWIW, Apple uses both for other projects.

I think every team at Apple uses what makes more sense for the project. The official SwiftUI docs and tutorials use Vue.js for example: https://developer.apple.com/tutorials/swiftui/creating-and-c...

alive and well with huge strides in the framework, better than ever. that said ember gets much less press than it's peers, partly due to not being backed by a major fang corp and historical perception.

https://blog.emberjs.com/2019/08/15/octane-release-plan.html

I only remember Ember because it was so much more popular at the time (2013? Early 2014?) than Backbone, which I had just completed an application using, and Angular, which was relatively new to the scene. Ember looked like it was the next big thing. And then, I guess, React came around and everybody was hot on the heels of the next big thing.

Well, I tried Ember back in the day for one project and remember it being pretty hard to learn and quite fat in terms of file size. It was quite powerful when you were using it the way it was supposed to be used, but made your life pretty hard when you wanted to do things a bit simpler and the initial load times were horrible at the time.

I heard, that things got a lot better over the years, but I never tried it again. However, I still admire the very clear architecture they had with ember-data as it was very useful (e.g. for testing) and eliminated a lot of uncertainty regarding the API design.

It's super easy to pick up for a weekend project, and the Discord community is active enough to find support when you have questions.

Going strong since 2011, although Ember is aimed a lot more toward quiet business productivity.

What some see as constraints, others see as consistency. It's more typically seen in "dashboard apps" but it's also great when you need to quickly spin up a new site and don't want to have to configure anything. I know movie studios in LA that use it for those kinds of promo websites, because of the fast turn around time.

Another thing that is cool about Ember is the community-driven process- if you have a good idea for Ember and the energy to make it happen, it typically will happen. Makes you feel like you can make a difference if that's your thing.

That’s not surprising. Ember was forked from SproutCore which was designed to mimic the Cocoa API.

Ember’s model/view binding and event model still closely resembles Cocoa’s, as far as I know.

Um, I thought Ember was SproutCore 2.0, so isn't this more of a rename rather than a fork?

Not exactly. Ember was originally “SproutCore 2.0” but the project goals diverged and a fork occurred (it was renamed “Amber” around that time, before a name clash was discovered and it acquired its current name “Ember”). Development on both continues concurrently today.

Incidentally, the latest major SproutCore version is 2.0.

Apparently even the Apple Music in iTunes tab was written in ember as well: https://twitter.com/geoffreyd/status/616848868391555072?s=21 (from 2015)

IIRC, the old Mac App Store was in ember too

Does any one know if they are still using Ruby Rails for Apple Music's backend?

For https://tools.applemusic.com/ yes. Not sure about https://beta.music.apple.com/

I love React, but when I saw Tom Dale demo GlimmerVM, I thought to myself, now HERE is something truly new and exciting(in that context - there's nothing new about bytecode). I watch the progress with great enthusiasm.

Interesting to see Apple starting to move into the web app product space (aside from iCloud, of course). Must say though that performance feels a bit sluggish (esp. hover states) on a Macbook Pro (tested in Firefox, Chrome and Safari).

Results of a Lighthouse audit (London): https://www.dropbox.com/s/jaf3gmgo0tpanba/Screenshot%202019-...

Are any of the iCloud web apps viable at all? Each time I've tried using them the performance has been terribly slow.

iCloud web apps have been completely abandoned. A bug with adding contact photos has existed for like 15 years.

Not surprising as they are using Ember (one of the slowest front end frameworks), Moment (super heavy date library), and they don't even minify their code...

https://js-cdn.music.apple.com/musickit/v2/components/musick...

> one of the slowest front end frameworks

What metric are you referring to here?

The JS frameworks benchmarks.

Here are the latest results: https://krausest.github.io/js-framework-benchmark/current.ht...

As you can see Ember 3.11.1 doesn't fare too well in either performance, startup metrics, or memory consumption. Glimmer does a bit better but that not much.

Ember itself isn't slow. There are plenty of sites that use it effectively. Most of the sluggishness is due to weird data loading patterns

Very cool! I've loved Apple Music ever since I was able to upload my library using Match, and I feel like its recommendations are getting better and better. Nice to have this in a pinned tab.

Uses 50MB less memory as the sole tab in Firefox than iTunes does on my Mac. Easy decision to switch for normal playback purposes.

Is 50MB that important? I would just use whatever provides you with the best experience (whichever that may be).

He is either on a low powered device or overly focused on details. In my experience I have never needed to look at RAM usage on my 2017 16GB MBP, but sometimes I do check CPU usage just to see how hard that intense process is hitting the computer and when it finishes.

Yes because I have a whole bunch of apps running at once over multiple screens and the extra 50MB per app adds up fast.

> Uses 50MB less memory as the sole tab in Firefox than iTunes does on my Mac.

Well that's because iTunes also includes Calendar, and Mail, and Safari... ;)

https://youtu.be/psL_5RIBqnY?t=6254

I wonder if it’s possible to trick iTunes into browsing the web. It is a web view, after all (or at least the store portion is).

Didn't know Apple ever actually made jokes at their own expense. :-)

This was the reason I chose Spotify over Apple music all those years ago.

Any reason to prefer Apple Music over Spotify? Spotify's recommendations have been absolutely stellar for me over the years and I have a lot of playlists and stuff "locking" me in.

For the privacy-minded, Apple Music doesn't notify Facebook each time you open the app. Spotify does.

> For the privacy-minded, Apple Music doesn't notify Facebook each time you open the app.

Isn't there a way to disconnect Facebook from one's Spotify account altogether?

I don't even have a Facebook account. That doesn't stop Facebook's SDK from phoning home every time Spotify is opened.

Is this on the web or on the backend - use an adblocker if not?

That's only if you login with Facebook to Spotify... Which isn't required.

No, you are mistaken. I have no Facebook account.

Spotify phones home to Facebook the moment the app is opened. This can be confirmed with a no-root firewall like Netguard on Android.

This is why Little Snitch is fantastic.

Especially on the phone where most people use Spotify. Oh wait...

I almost never use Spotify on my phone. The one exception is when I needed to handle the music for my wedding (piped it through some massive bluetooth speakers).

I think you must recognise that you're an outlier.

Tell Apple, not me. I’d have written it myself already if such a thing were possible. Special VPNs can do this, or you can just carry a travel router, 4g modem, and usb battery pack velcroed to your ankle, and connect to it via WiFi, so that you can blackhole things via DNS or iptables.

> Any reason to prefer Apple Music over Spotify?

The ability to upload one's library [1] is huge — I believe both Spotify and Apple Music still aren't very good with video game music.

[1] iCloud Music Library: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204926

If you have a big collection of obscure/foreign music (video game music is a great example), then nothing beats Apple Music + iCloud Music Library and iTunes match.

You can use iTunes match to provide cloud-based high quality versions for music ripped from your CDs (or collected during your teenage Napster years).

Even better, being able to mix content from your iCloud Music Library and streamable content from Apple Music is a huge plus.

Does it touch my original files in any way? I have a huge selection of rare and obscure music not available via iTunes or any streaming service. Obviously I don't want any service to touch, modify or replace these or any of my more popular release. I'm wary about auto matching. Should I be?

Apple Music without iTunes Match will upload it to iCloud and will make it available on your other devices. IIRC it'll convert it to 256 kbps AAC

Lossless files are stored as 256kbps AAC in their cloud. I believe lossy MP3s and AACs are uploaded as-is. (I'm glad that Apple is aware that transcoding is generally a bad thing.)

iTunes also doesn't upload files that don't have a minimum bitrate of 96kbps [1].

[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203564

Apple has long had a much better experience when it comes to offline use and private media.

With iCloud, tracks you add to your library are automatically uploaded to Apple's cloud and become available on all devices. That helps a lot because you don't have to resort to using some other player for that those obscure albums that aren't streaming anywhere. After all, while Apple and Spotify have a lot of music, there are still many holes in their inventories.

Apple has always been much nicer about offline track availability. Just click the download icon and the tracks will stay on your device. Spotify has had this feature, but it's been flaky. After Apple Music launched, they eventually added a "Download" toggle to albums, but only in the mobile app (it's there for playlists in the desktop app, for some reason).

Spotify has a 10,000 song limit that applies to adding (or "liking" as it's now called) to your library. You can keep more in playlists, but you can't "like" more than 10,000 songs, which is crazy. It's not a lot of songs. My jazz collection alone is more than that. Apple's limit is 100,000, as far as I can tell.

As I read your comment I'm listening to "I Learnt Some Jazz Today", haha!

And to bring your musing full circle, Apple used that in a recent AirPods ad: https://youtube.com/watch?v=yyNtm0LZiKc

Yes, and that's why I was listening to it! They have a playlist for music they use in ads https://music.apple.com/us/playlist/heard-in-apple-ads/pl.b2...

Without even going into the merits of Spotify's playlists as you mentioned, one reason I would personally prefer Spotify over Apple Music even if we assume rest of the things equal would be to support a small player(compared to Apple). Apple, a company already well entrenched in so many fields controlling one more is something I would not prefer to see. They already are at a huge advantage in even controlling this market as owning iOS and iTunes makes it very easy for them to push their service.

Apple Music's offline playback has bugs but it is less broken than Spotify's (although unlike Spotify you can't automatically download all your songs, you have to do some hacky workaround where you create a smart playlist of all of your songs and then download that playlist every time you get a new song)

You can choose to filter explicit songs for your kids in Apple Music.

Spotify recently changed their Family plan to allow the main user to control the explicit lyrics filter. However, I'm not sure if that filter is on a per-person basis or across the whole family.

> Any reason to prefer Apple Music over Spotify?

I imagine this is more Apple’s doing than Spotify’s, but last I tried I couldn’t put Spotify music on my Apple Watch to use untethered. I run with my Apple Watch, Bluetooth headphones and no phone, and being able to do that is worth choosing Apple Music for me.

Also no Facebook SDK if you care about that, there was the recent article here about how that pings Facebook with identifiers on app launch even if you’re not using any of its functionality yourself.

sigh

In offline mode, the app is basically useless. No way to browse through the artist's whose songs I've saved up. Gets worse -

Say I want to listen to a particular album. I type the name of the album. I do not get a result of the album which I can go to, and play start to end. I do get, however, random songs from the album which if I'm lucky, and remember the sequence in which they appear on the album, I can manually add to the queue and listen to.

The artist tab doesn't work. The album tab doesn't work. These are online only tabs which include things like "New releases", "Fans also like", "Performing Livr" etc.

------

Even when I'm connected to the net ( at home), there is no way to see all the artists whose songs I've added to my library. There is no library.

Songs you can "like", artists you can "follow". When i follow an artist, and click on him, I don't see the albums I've added to my library/liked.

------

tl,dr: It's a UX clusterfuck. They took something which works and fucked it up ad infinitum. I've switched to Apple music, which is undoubtedly bad in terms of recommendations, but at least it lets me listen to the stuff I know I like.

> Any reason to prefer Apple Music over Spotify?

For my use, all the major streaming platforms are broadly equivalent in functionality, so I go with the cheapest one. That was Amazon Music when I had Prime, which I haven't renewed. Spotify is about 50% more expensive than Apple Music in my location, so I'll likely be going with Apple Music when my Amazon subscription expires.

Whatever. I was really hoping to see some improvements to the music-organization and display aspects here but it looks like they just re-implemented the weird parts of iTunes using html5.

For example: It drives me crazy how Apple Music emphasizes the idea that "Recently Added" is only grouped by albums. I don't add whole albums to my library, I add individual songs. I want to play all the songs I've recently added because hey it's new music I like. Why can't I get an auto-updating playlist of all the songs I've recently added? None of the cloud-based Apple platforms support smart-playlists and the "Recently Added" section only lets you play songs from an individual album from which you may have only added a single song.

It's super weird. - Apple music seems to really push you into either whole albums or the overly-generic editor-curated playlists.

You can create a genius (or maybe it’s called smart) playlist in iTunes that is ordered by recently added. It does exactly what you need.

Smart playlists are not displayed on cloud-based platforms (e.g. this webapp, sonos integrations, etc). I presume this is because they didn't want to implement the business-logic both on the server and on the native iTunes app.

I’ve never figured out why some Apple products are immensely well designed and some have basic aspects which don’t make sense and I guess it comes down to the people working on the products using them day to day or some exec who really uses an app day to day championing UX improvements.

Music in its current iteration seems driven by Apple’s need to become a services company and the music app which really last spoke to people internally was one in which your own music is portable, not a steaming music service.

On iOS: Library -> Songs -> Sort by recently added

Unfortunately, it doesn't look like this option exists on Android. Maybe it's hiding with the setting to let me download all of my songs.

I'd guess the people using Apple music mostly use it in an album-based manner. Hell, my music listening is almost entirely discography-based, I listen to everything an artist has produced chronologically before moving to the next artist that I'm in the mood for.

Very nice to see them provide a dark CSS theme via prefers-color-scheme, following system preference.

Yes, future is now.

I would not be surprised if they have this because it’s used in the Music app.

It appears even Apple themselves do not bother with using the overflow scrolling CSS that iOS needs.

Why would a web client be polished for the one platform that has absolutely no need for it?

On my iOS device, the link takes me to the Music app. I have to go back to Safari to see the web interface.

That said, I don't see the overflow (iPhone XS).

On iOS, it redirects to the native iTunes App. Even if you somehow manage to overcome that, its presence clearly indicates that iOS isn’t a supported target - at which point, assuming it’s intentionally broken as you describe for non-beta reasons (this is not necessarily true), using that CSS would potentially be wasteful and break non-iOS users!

> its presence clearly indicates that iOS isn’t a supported target.

They added an "open in music" button to the hamburger menu, assumed only on iOS. So they obviously did something for iOS users.

Also agreed that this is pretty silly, people will of course just use the native app.

Overflow scrolling CSS is deprecated in iOS 13. All scrollable elements now get it by default.

This is true! Was going to mention that, but opted for more snark.

Finally. Live web clients are great - it makes it easier to reverse engineer, scrape data and build add-ons. Kudos!

I don’t know…personally, Apple’s native apps are easier for me to reverse engineer than most minified obfuscated JavaScript. Then again, I’m not a web developer.

Usually you only need to look at the requests anyway and there the web client is probably a bit nicer than iTunes with cert pinning if I remember correctly.

Can't link directly to a personal playlist (even if it's "published" to Apple's weird social network) for someone not already logged in (they just get the Apple Music landing page). So close! They're so smart, they'll figure this out some day!

Right, and that's one of the reasons why I use Spotify and won't use Apple Music.

Actually, this won't even let me sign in with my Apple ID. It accepts my username/password, and prompts me to "Try it now", but when I click that, I get a drop down telling me I need to open the Apple Music client. Bravo, Apple.

(It’s a beta.)

I used to use them when they were MOG. Between becoming Beats (which I stuck to for awhile) and then Apple trying to wall garden them, I just ended up using Google Play Music.

Now that there’s one more platform where Apple Music is available it would be really great if we could have the playback queue synced between them. I don’t want to recreate my listening queue I every time I’m changing my device.

I’m curious what framework Apple uses for web now. Last I checked (a week ago) icloud.com is still implemented with SproutCore.

Looks like Ember for the most part. Look at the code, it's not minified, yet...

It would be nice to save the code and upload it to github.com, is there a tool to make this automatically?

wget can do this, the --mirror option is probably a good start along with --page-requisite.

Indeed: https://js-cdn.music.apple.com/musickit/v2/components/musick...

That's weird. Ember minifies by default

This is implemented using Ember which is the spiritual successor to SproutCore

Looks like a combination of Ember and web components.

Yep and the web components are built with Stencil: http://stenciljs.com/

Ember, jQuery, Moment, and RequireJS.

https://imgur.com/DioXtwe

What extension is this?

UI Stack. Only for Chrome though.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ui-stack/ijagboogl...

Wappalyzer [1] is much better in my opinion.

And is available for both Chrome [2] and Firefox [3] as well as a Bookmarklet [4].

The extension that @pier25 is using seems to be available only on Google Chrome [5].

[1] https://www.wappalyzer.com/

[2] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/wappalyzer/gppongm...

[3] https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/wappalyzer/

[4] https://www.wappalyzer.com/download

[5] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ui-stack/ijagboogl...

Similar tools include WhatRuns [1] (Chrome only).

[1] https://www.whatruns.com/

Thanks, Wappalyzer looks pretty awesome.

Wappalyzer's results for example.com, a 1.3 KB static page with no JS or sub-requests, include eight JS frameworks and two web font providers. Its results for facebook.com include a web framework made by Yahoo and deprecated in 2014. It says Youtube is built on WordPress, and HN is a React app with custom fonts.

> HN is a React app with custom fonts

I only see that HN runs on NGinx.

I was using the "Technology lookup" box on the homepage, testing with the extension I get only Nginx too. And Youtube seems right and example.com maybe right, though nothing at all for Facebook.

Heavy stuff.

Ember used to require jQuery but recently moved to removing it by default; users can opt-in if they still need it. Once the project moves to a later version of Ember I suspect the jQuery bit will drop off. (Who knows, though...)

They also are using Stencil for many of their web components in the app, like the music video player. http://stenciljs.com

This is very interesting. I'm using PiHole; and, it seems that when I click that link, I'm sent to the Chinese version of the Apple site and there's no beta. Very strange!

I'm experiencing this issue in Firefox, where I have all my regular ad-blocking, and an incognito window in Chrome, where I don't have any of it.

Anyone else seeing this?

Ah, nice! I was an early Beats Music subscriber and really lamented the eventual loss of the web interface.

As much as I commend them for creating a web client for their music service, the UI looks like it was designed by an amateur. Can't really put my finger on it but it's something to do with the content alignment, the gradients used. I would have expected better from Apple.

I’m so sad that most consumers want to pay for things like this or Spotify.

I only buy digital albums, almost always from Bandcamp or bespoke band-specific sites, or Amazon if there’s no other choice.

Always just a straight download of mp3 or ogg formats, backed up and accessible in cloud storage.

I use VLC player on all my devices, and syncing music with the VLC wifi download tool is so extremely easy and simple.

I have all the music I could ever possibly want, easily accessible on all devices and easy to sync on all devices, no internet connection needed, no monthly charge or user account, no ads, can transfer it all to any new devices I get with no vendor lock-in.

I just can’t believe the populace was suckered into music streaming instead of music owning. So sad.

I also prefer to purchase albums to own in a format of my choosing and you sound like a jerk. Why do you feel the need to crap on things other people enjoy and don’t affect you?

Because streaming:

- is available almost anywhere: your phone, your car, your smart waffle maker.

- leads to much better music discovery through curated playlists, “discover weekly”s, radio stations based on songs/artists/genres

- you can instantly share your music and music tastes with friends, leading to even more music discovery

- many more other minor things (like creating playlists for parties etc.)

Streaming isn’t available where there’s no internet connection, unless you just happen to have cached what you’re looking for. Whereas my entire music collection is available any time.

I also heavily dispute that Spotify, Apple, etc lead to better search or discovery.

> Whereas my entire music collection is available any time.

You carry your “easily accessible cloud storage” everywhere with you?

> I also heavily dispute that Spotify, Apple, etc lead to better search or discovery.

You don’t “dispute”. You “firmly believe”. As others already pointed out: I’d never have discovered as much music within my music tastes as I’ve done with Spotify.

There’s no chance in hell I could’ve stumbled on some indie band that is US-only while leaving in Sweden.

There are Swedish bands which are suddenly popular in Brasil and they go there on tours, which they never would’ve done without Spotify.

Etc. etc.

> “You carry your “easily accessible cloud storage” everywhere with you?”

Huh? I mean, first of all yes, I do. I have my whole music library in Dropbox, but that’s not related to what I’m saying.

I have my whole music library already cached on my phone, tablet, laptop, etc., and so can listen without an internet connection. This is in VLC, not any cloud storage (I just use that for backups only).

I would be bankrupt if I bought all the albums I stream now.

Well personally I'd rather have all the music I'll ever need right here with basically a few taps on my phone for a very small cost every month instead of having to buy and download every album/song I want (would be extremely expensive in my case), back them up in the cloud, sync them with all my devices etc.

This comes from someone with a collection of roughly 1500 12" vinlys, meaning from someone who actually owns his music.

I would have never discovered 99% of the music I listen to if I didn't use Spotify.

There are pros/cons to both sides of this argument. Many artists would not have a music career if it weren't for platforms like Spotify (mainly Spotify). Spotify put their music in people's ears. Spotify made people fans and now those fans buy tickets and go to their shows, so these bands are able to tour.

There are pros/cons to both sides of this story.

> “I would have never discovered 99% of the music I listen to if I didn't use Spotify.”

Can you take a step back and recognize this is weird and pathological. Music recommendations should come from experience, people, multiple sources. If a for-profit platform interested in extracting as much money from you as they can (let alone minimize their costs paid to artists) is responsible for 99% of what you believe you are choosing to consume... something’s pretty wrong.

Imagine saying, I wouldn’t have discovered 99% of the foods I like if not for my Blue Apron subscription...

> Music recommendations should come from experience, people, multiple sources

Why do you assume streaming replaces all that? Streaming services immensely complement all that.

The comment above specifically said 99% of the music they listen to was discovered by Spotify. That is replacing, not complementing. This is also the same model I see in friends or colleagues who use Spotify: it is their sole source of music or music recommendation.

I suppose their recommendation quality only goes up the more you use the platform. It is a damn good recommender. From Discover Weekly to similar features like "Artist/Song/Playlist Radio" that continue playing similar music after your playlist/album ends... the Spotify recommendation systems are probably the most successful, enhancing implementation of ML I can recall seeing in the wild. Certainly much better than YouTube which for months has been begging me to watch this "Pete Davidson Got Stuck Paying for Kid Cudi's Birthday Dinner..." video (I'm not a fan of either of those guys).

Maybe you should give it a try. Certainly can't hurt.

Exactly. Spotify and Youtube links enable sharing music easily among friends. Friends send me messages "hey check out this" accompanied by a link directly to spotify. If we were still in the tape/CD age, this wouldn't be as easily possible.

I recently switched to a windows machine from Mac at work, and brought in iTunes to listen to Apple Music. It’s really as bad as I remember.

Really great timing on this for me.

Has anyone noticed this? On the native apps, when you click on an album, the most popular songs have a star icon next to them. I like that. The third party web apps that consume the Apple Music API don't have the feature, but I thought Apple's official web app would have it, but they don't!

I hope they add this feature to the app (and API!).

Nice!

Now, how about some cross-platform iCloud Drive love? huh?

You can access iCloud Drive on the web at iCloud.com

i want something a lot more like dropbox or gdrive which have native applications, preferably with command line interfaces.

iCloud for Windows includes Drive: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204283

If you are talking about Linux then you should be more explicit about that.

It’d be awesome if they did this next with their movie and TV stuff. I have a bunch of stuff purchased on iTunes that I can’t play on my TV (out of HDMI ports and TV stand space and no AirPlay solution for Android that I know of will work due to the DRM).

Really cool they’re starting to open this stuff up at least.

It's funny that the web app performs better than the desktop app.

Requires DRM to be turned on for it to work. No thanks.

Well, uh, yes. You really expected them to let you download an unencumbered copy of any song in the iTunes catalog?

Yes, I expect that a service I paid for does not include untrusted malware. Thankfully there are other streaming services which do not do this.

Could you name one please? (That has a comparable catalog to Spotify/Apple Music)

I used to use soundcloud which has a fairly large catalog of music if you have the paid version. I eventually canceled it because they had an annoying habit of replacing tracks with random remasters so something in your liked list could change to a different version that is much worse. These days I either use bandcamp or torrents.

The million dollar question: Which DRM?

The fact that Apple is using third-party DRM in a web app is news. Apple TV / iTunes videos never had a web app, and presumably DRM was a big factor.

Interesting that Beats 1 doesn't seem to be listed in the radio section. They hyped it so much and it has just faded away.

It's a beta, live radio is forthcoming apparently.

Apple finally comes out with something Spotify and Google have had for years... Good job.

Well Google is certainly trying their hardest to give Apple the upper hand by discontinuing Google Play Music in favor of YouTube Music. I don't know a single person who actually likes the new YouTube Music.

I ended up switching to Spotify as a result.

Does not work in Safari for me. When playing songs they simply don't start. Weird.

Says my Chrome and Firefox on Linux (ubuntu) not supported. :(

Interesting, I'm using Fx 68.0.2 on Solus without any issues.

I get that semi-regularly; do you have strict content blocking + fingerprinters turned on in Firefox? IIRC that advertises that you're on FF ESR and a few sites deem that too old.

It's working fine on my Firefox on KDE Neon (which is just Ubuntu 18.04 plus extra packages) even with strict content blocking and first party isolation on. You need to make sure you have Widevine enabled.

Messages beta should be along shortly! Fingers crossed.

Even though many providers now have end-to-end encryption with web interfaces for messaging, Apple has maintained that it can't be done securely. We shall see if they have changed their minds.

I’m really sad about the state of international music on youtube. Asian music is completely absent. Worse, all Chinese alternatives are blocked in the US.

wow... that took a long time to happen.

About time!

So much for https://musi.sh

I was using this on Ubuntu, works great, but I'd rather use something official.

RIP Spotify.

When Apple decides the mobile app for Music is worth their salt, then maybe. But until then Spotify will rule the market.

The big issue is that it's tied to iOS versions rather that being its own app, as are Pages and GarageBand for example. iOS 13 brings some good improvements, but now we'll have to wait a year for more. Whereas the Spotify team is continuously maintaining and updating the app.

> The big issue is that it's tied to iOS versions rather that being its own app, as are Pages and GarageBand for example.

Pages and GarageBand are released on a schedule that differs from Apple’s operating systems–they’re entirely separate.

Not really. I've never used Apple Music, but as far as I can tell, it has no real free tier (just song previews) and it has a long way to go if it wants to compete with Spotify's playlists.

For example, regional playlists. Apple Music just has "Top 100 {country}" which is just radio pop music. Compare that to Spotify's Explore -> {Mexico,Colombia,Arab,etc} -> all the different subgenres.

Spotify's free tier is a no-brainer. I've had to listen to so many Spotify ads at parties and get-togethers that it's clear nobody cares about them either. Unless I'm missing something, Apple Music is just offering a three-month free trial.

Also, even if Apple Music managed to be a Spotify clone, doesn't it only work on iOS/OSX?

> Also, even if Apple Music managed to be a Spotify clone, doesn't it only work on iOS/OSX?

Apple Music has been available on Android for a few years.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.apple.andr...

Although IME it doesn't have feature parity with the desktop or iOS versions

In addition to the new web client, it has had an Android app for a while. It's also had a web API for years which allowed the unofficial musi.sh client to be created.

I don't have a strong preference either way, but I ultimately stayed on Apple (after switching to get 3mo trial). I can't stand ads (it's not that I mind the ads themselves so much as I don't like anything interrupting my music. I rarely use playlists of my own or the service's creation, I just want to have a high-quality library that I can expand at any time and store in the cloud.

A mere web client isn’t going to spell the end for Spotify. Why would it?

So, Apple is launching an offering on par with Google's seven years later. Is that what we call innovation?

People actually use Google Music? Everyone I know who listens to music via Google-owned properties uses Youtube (free). Others use Spotify, Apple Music, and Pandora, in that order of popularity.

I do use Google Play Music. I have minor gripes but in general I like it. You can upload your music and sync it in all your devices.

Google is going to kill it and transfer its users/content/playlists to Youtube Music. Not sure what I'm going to do after that happens.

Can you point to anyone calling this innovative? It's just nice to have. Your comment is the only one on Hacker News with that word.

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