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Comment by purpleblue | Hacker News Reader

The Apple Music app is terrible, one of the worst on the market. I hate it, it is so clunky and borderline unusable.

The only thing I can say is that:

1. It has come a long way. iTunes really was a horrible piece of shit software for many years. It is much much much better now.

2. There isn't any viable alternatives. I don't care what people say, I've tried them all.

IMO there's two bigger issues that really prevent anyone from competing and improving the status quo:

a. You need to be friends with the music industry to be in this field, and to retain this friendship there's a lot of things you just can't do. Imagine if something like these flash widgets that you could embed in your website to stream your favorite playlists could still exist.

b. The Apple ecosystem is preventing a lot of people (I believe a majority of phones are iPhones in the US) from moving to competitors and improve competition.

I think Spotify does things a lot better and they fought the music industry a lot. These days everyone does it.

They also do multi device so much better. It take feels "Apple". If I'm playing music on my phone I can actually change the song on a third party client on my FreeBSD desktop which isn't supported by Spotify at all.

Spotify really does a lot of those things "you just can't do" and they aren't even big friends with the music industry (though I guess despite their initial battles they are now)

Last time I checked I couldn't upload all my MP3 libraries and then download it back easily, and I think I had some problem finding some Asian songs as well.

> 1. It has come a long way. iTunes really was a horrible piece of shit software for many years. It is much much much better now.

Speak for yourself. iTunes user interface was so much easier on the computer to use than the current mess that is the Music app on the computer. I'd love to get the old iTunes app back.

I loved the everything iTunes and never understood why people constantly complained about it. I knew exactly how I could get to anything.

Now, people got what they wished for: iTunes split into a million pieces, with every piece crappified in the process. Just yesterday Music automagically fetched some wrong album art for a track I added, and after adding the correct image, I couldn’t delete that wrong one for two minutes, until I suddenly could (I just kept pressing delete, god knows what was going on). Ugh.

I think itunes wasn't bad for music.

The problem was more that it was also managing files on your office, doing firmware updates and a whole load of unrelated crap.

And it still does all this on windows.. :/

It wasn't intended as a replacement for iTunes, it's a streaming service (iTunes was for music you wanted to own).

I think Apple Music turns 15 years old this year (released in iOS 1)...it hasn't come that far in all that time.

Which part? This isn't my experience at all...

Almost the entire thing. How about keyboards having an integrated pause play button but it only works for Apple Music if it’s the last responder in handling the event. On YouTube? Hijacked. Incoming phone call and you want to pause music? Nope, your Mac ANSWERS THE PHONE! I was finally fed up and installed a 3rd party app that forces pause play to only hit Apple Music.

I use my MBP through a USB-C dock with an external SSD attached and whenever Time Machine or CCC triggers a backup my audio starts skipping. Sure, that isn’t Apple Music’s fault, but it’s part of the ecosystem and that kind of performance should be considered when designing the system.

And then the UI. All web views with click delay.

I like exploring jazz and electronic genres but navigating and scrolling to start one sub-genre takes like 30 seconds. There’s no way to pin genres that you like or hide genres you don’t care about.

I feel like my collection of music from 2000s is gone, even though it was uploaded to the cloud or something … through some apple program 10 years ago. I still have the metadata of my collection but even that is just a facade.

Maybe it's generational because I seem to be around the same age as you and I also hated the way my music collection "disappeared" into Apple Music (and a whole host of other things I disliked, chief of which that it keeps giving options for things you almost never want or need while at the same time it's hard to just, y'know, find and play and tag the music you want)

Isn't the play button issue solved by the Touch Bar? (I don't know because I don't use Apple Music yet), but I'd assume so since:

I just started playing a Youtube video and a Spotify song, then clicked on the audio button in the Touch Bar and it looks like this, double clicking the icon opens the appropriate app (opened that through the Control Strip, enabled in the Keyboard settings): https://ibb.co/6Pr1V6x

Though I guess the point is moot since the Touch Bar seems to be being phased out, and also due to the existence of 3rd party apps...

The joke is that the only thing solved by the Touch Bar was satisfying product designer egos.

So, I think the pause/play button problem is almost unsolvable: I want the pause/play button to always pause whatever sound is currently playing and then resume it the next time I hit it. The issue is, though, I think doing this correctly in every situation becomes an exercise in telepathy.

Ugh, that dives me crazy - but it's not an Apple Music issue. It's a MBP issue.

I think it's what I like and why I chose Apple Music. It's so dated and oldschool, it's perfect to just enjoy full albums as I mainly do. I don't care about their playlist (They are awful) and the signal to noise ratio is way better than spotify.

That’s strange to me. I moved over from Spotify and expected QOL degradation that didn’t happen.

Sound quality is better, artist are getting pay more and I have more music available(Joanna newsom, skeemask)

The sound quality is better, and you have different music available. The app itself, though, is not that great. It's slow and inconsistent.

Moreover, if we're looking at the content itself, if you like some niche or more specific genres, you're out of luck. The music is there, but your only hope to find more of it is relying on public playlists created by the community.

I really do hope that Spotify nails it with its Hi-fi sub. The difference in sound quality is very noticeable to me.

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