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Comment by boesboes | Hacker News Reader

This is what happens when you teach developers 'storage/hardware/compute is cheap' if you ask me. That plus the lack of interest in Apple Music development in general. (I cannot imagine that shitty music player received much love over the pas years. Still better then spotify though.)

Funny side note: I recently made it's frontend crash. Turns out it _is_ a JS frontend after all. I suspected as much because of how slow & slugish it is, but I got an actual JS error & it fell back to the old table interface

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> Still better then spotify though

Surely you are talking about different clients than I have on i/macOS? With Apple Music running on my MacBook, I couldn’t even control the player on the respective iOS app from the couch. It was insultingly trashy UX, and I’m deep, deep into apples ecosystem. My reaction was “what a joke, guess I have to use Spotify”.

Apple Music could lack 90% of Spotify’s features, but Spotify will never get me back to their awful desktop UI. It looks like it’s made for toddlers. Full screen on an artist page I don’t even see 5 songs because they have this stupid big banner section taking up 2/3 of the screen. Throw in their spamming of podcasts to me and the whole desktop experience is a mess. Apple Music has its issues but at least the UI is kind of ok. That’s how low Spotify has set the bar which is a shame because their UI was great for about a decade and then they just set it on fire.

Remember when Spotify made headlines last year for having a button to listen to an album in order? That's how low the bar is.

I switched to Apple Music as well. It's not perfect but at least it's not trying to shove Podcasts into my music.

Spotify also likes to complain about Apple being anti-competitive by locking them out of features, then when Apple does let 3rd party apps do things like Apple Watch offline background music playback, Spotify takes two and a half years to actually use it.

https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/01/05/pandora-releases-...

https://newsroom.spotify.com/2021-05-21/enjoy-more-ways-than...

Edit to add: AirPlay 2 from iOS 11.4 (May 2018) still not supported, so you can't do multi-room audio, only a single speaker at a time

> then when Apple does let 3rd party apps do things like Apple Watch offline background music playback

Entirely Apples fault, by the time they enabled the possibility of the feature it had become apparent that the Watch as a platform wasn't really worth focusing on so it's on the backburner now.

If that feature was possible day one, it would have happened. But instead Apple has this attitude of locking things out from 3rd parties and only moving when it starts to make their products look bad.

Offline music is really about fitness users, if you’re not a runner I can see how it looks useless. Anyone who wants it has switched off of Spotify by now, so at this point it probably doesn't matter if they ever get around to it.

Offline music is also useful for travel: airplanes, car trips with imperfect cell coverage, train tunnels, etc. Not a small use case at all.

Ah that's true, I just tend to use podcasts for all that. Which I suppose is also a Spotify issue now, what with them turning into a podcast company.

>Offline music is really about fitness users

Isn’t the entire concept of the device about fitness users? Seen as it failed to carve out any other niche.

More or less, I should have said runners. No need for offline music if you're weightlifting or sitting on an exercise bike. So it's a subset of the fitness userbase. But a big enough one that Spotify did eventually get this done.

But I sorta wonder if their main motivation was that it was a bad look to continue complaining about Apple not letting them make a watch app on their "Apple is cheating" timeline, while also choosing to not make a watch app. If they actually cared about doing it, why take so long?

Yes this is big, with Apple Music I much less frequently have anything promoted at me unless I’m specifically looking for it.

Apple doesn’t twiddle with its UI nearly as much as Spotify does which is nice too. It has its shortcomings, but the consistency means that workarounds stick.

Finally, Apple is surprisingly more permissive with Apple Music’s SDK than Spotify is, even allowing full streaming/playback capabilities (a capability Spotify removed from its SDKs several years ago), which means that there are now several alternative front ends for Apple Music available that can play music themselves — alternative Spotify front ends can only ever control the official Spotify app and Spotify Connect devices which is a real shame.

My favorite part of Apple Music has been the ability to share playlists through iMessage to my friends and family although I don't do that enough.

Then, I love the Essentials playlists, basically, if you search for any large enough artist they'll have a curated playlist always called Essentials which makes it easy to find. The curation is usually spot on although there's been one or two that felt like misses out of maybe fifteen or twenty that I've tried.

Finally, the Apple premium plan for 30 bucks a month, five members, 1TB online storage, Apple Music and TV (couldn't really care less about sharing my workouts or Arcade, but those are there too) is a pretty sweet deal for my family and I.

Dunno if Spotify or Tidal have things similar. And there is some funkiness around sharing occasionally as I'm not sure if my dad ever got access to Music, his account may have been in a weird state since he already had a subscription, unsure, will ask later.

My dad likes that for his own music that Apple doesn't have, if he imports it to his Music app on his computer, Apple will auto upload to the cloud so he can stream it from other devices. I haven't used this much but it sounds pretty neat.

> alternative Spotify front ends can only ever control the official Spotify app and Spotify Connect devices which is a real shame

I haven’t used Spotify for a long time since switching from Spotify Premium to Apple Music, but I know of a third party open source library that might be of interest to people who have Spotify Premium and would like to explore alternative frontends:

> librespot is an open source client library for Spotify. It enables applications to use Spotify's service to control and play music via various backends, and to act as a Spotify Connect receiver.

https://github.com/librespot-org/librespot

More details from same GitHub page:

> A sample program implementing a headless Spotify Connect receiver is provided. Once you've built librespot, run it using :

> target/release/librespot --name DEVICENAME

> The above is a minimal example. Here is a more fully fledged one:

> target/release/librespot -n "Librespot" -b 320 -c ./cache --enable-volume-normalisation --initial-volume 75 --device-type avr

> The above command will create a receiver named Librespot, with bitrate set to 320 kbps, initial volume at 75%, with volume normalisation enabled, and the device displayed in the app as an Audio/Video Receiver. A folder named cache will be created/used in the current directory, and be used to cache audio data and credentials.

librespot is a great project, but I haven’t used it to resurrect the native Spotify client I had been working on because it’s technically reverse engineered, which means users of my client risk having their accounts banned (however unlikely that may be).

The API/SDK seems pretty good. I found this great seemingly full featured client last week that I've been enjoying: https://github.com/ciderapp/Cider

It’s a bit odd, but Music on Mac and iTunes on Windows needs to be controlled through Remote[0]. I tested it now and it works fine. I agree that it’s a tad odd that remote control of the desktop version isn’t as integrated as it is for the Mac/Windows version.

[0]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/itunes-remote/id284417350

That's interesting to know, but just not going to fly with me. While I agree with the other commenters here that Spotifys Desktop-client is terrible, I don't miss any functionality and I don't want to use an additional app to control the music playing on the mac when spotify does it natively.

(That, and all my friends use spotify, too, so sharing/group sessions etc. work out of the box)

One of my reasons for dropping Spotify was their desktop client!

I believe they just fixed this (after how many years?) by moving Music.app away from webviews to native views in macOS 12.2. I wouldn't be surprised to still see a JavaScript error in there though, or maybe a Java error because it probably still runs on WebObjects.

If you're buying your storage from Apple it is not cheap!

> storage/hardware/compute is cheap

And this definitely isn't the case here. If you run out of space it usually means an entirely new device.

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