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Comment by DannyPage | Hacker News Reader

A big focus is (rightly) on rural areas, but mobile internet packet loss can also a big issue in cities or places where there are a lot of users. It's very frustrating to be technically online, but effectively offline. An example: Using Spotify on a subway works terribly until you go into Airplane mode, and then it suddenly works correctly with your offline music.

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When Apple did their disastrous Apple Music transition, I was in the habit of daily recreation that involved driving in areas without mobile access.

All of a sudden one day, I was cut off from all my music, by the creators of the iPod!

I switched away from Apple Music and will never return. 15 years of extensive usage of iTunes, and now I will never trust Apple with my music needs again. I'm sure they don't care, or consider the move a good tradeoff for their user base, but it's the most user hostile thing I've ever experienced in two decades on Apple platforms.

Did the "download" option in Apple Music not work? Or was that not available when they first launched the new app?

The OP already had the music downloaded to his device. When apple switched to the streaming service they deleted all that… you still technically owned the music, but now it had to be streamed. I also don’t recall if they started with an offline feature.

I never ran into this. I've never switched to to their streaming service and still use the iTunes app on my phone, which lets you download.

Yeah but many albums are only available via streaming, not for purchasing outright.

When media companies refuse to sell me something, I take it as permission to sail the high seas for it

Well my library was essentially destroyed by their actions. Albums that I own and ripped my damn self now have holes in them — all the wildly popular tracks on many of my albums are gone. The metadata still shows the track but it won’t play. The artwork I carefully curated was overwritten with unrelated junk albums, often $0.99 compilations that you might’ve found in a bargain bin 20 years ago. Even the data I created myself Apple felt zero issue with overwriting it themselves.

Oh and all my lossless got shit on.

Fuck me I guess??

Mine just magically worked the whole time. In fact just last week I noticed I still had CD scratch artefacts in one of my tunes on Apple Music which I must have ripped 20-25 years ago (and went and redownloaded it from Apple instead).

The magic was that you had to have iTunes Match or manually sync. Years later, few people remember or are still shaking their fist and babbling over U2.

Apple didn’t communicate that well and many folks lost stuff, particularly if they are picky about recordings.

All of the CD collection stuff has degraded everywhere as the databases of tracks have been passed around to various overlords.

As someone who didn't have an iPhone during that switch (haven't since 2014), what happened to music that isn't in Apple Music? Streaming services are famously incomplete databases.

If you have iTunes Match, it syncs to the cloud for $25/year. (https://support.apple.com/en-us/108935)

Otherwise, you sync with iTunes/Music.app or manage outside of Apple like we did from 2000 till whenever match came out.

My wife had an extensive collection of recordings that aren’t available on Apple Music and never will be, and they’ve flawlessly synced since Match came out like 20 years ago.

I think the complaints about album are 100% legit. But a lot of the lost data/miscategorized albums are likely more related to old farts like me forgetting that many of my “CD rips” may have fallen off the Napster truck 30 years ago.

Apple when it comes to purchased music has been pretty awesome to its customers. (Apple Music… meh) Buying songs has been a sideshow for what… a decade? Unlike many providers, it’s all still there humming away. Every person involved is long retired, it’s still alive.

It did have that at launch, but the transition was very confusing. There was (is?) an "iTunes Match" thing to replicate your personal mp3s in the cloud rather than uploading them. It was a real mess.

There was a random smattering of songs from my library on my device, but not according to anything I regularly listened to.

I couldn't be bothered to spend time manually selecting stuff to download back then. It was offensive to even ask that spend 30 minutes manually correcting a completely unnecessary mistake on their part. And this was during a really really bad time in interface, with the flat ui idiocy all the rage, and when people were abandoning all UI standards that gave any affordances at all.

If I'm going to go and correct Apple's mistake, I may as well switch to another vendor and do it. Which is what I did. I'm now on Spotify to this day, even though it has many of the problems as Appple Music. At least Spotify had fewer bugs at the time, and they hadn't deleted music off my device.

Good riddance and I'll never go back to Apple Music.

At least when I last tried the android version of the Apple Music app, when you're technically but not reliably connected to the Internet (captive portal, crappy signal quality, etc), operations like play/next track/previous track would hang for 60 seconds before the UI responded

Yeah you need to navigate to “Library -> Downloaded Music” and play from there. Otherwise it will try and phone home.

Forget internet: just sync.

Add music on macOS, and on your phone. Then sync.

RESULT: one overwrites the other, regardless of any settings.

You no longer have the audio you formerly owned.

In 2025 I have a dedicated pixel5 with no SIM card that is nothing but an mp3 player.

It has nothing installed but VLC.

Life is too short to deal with the ridiculous interoperability of (simple music files) and (any modern computing platform).

What is the function of parentheses here?

Think of them as variables - a stand in for any given file format or modern operating system.

The language itself gets that across without the parenthesis, literally what was said.

Some people like the clarity of dividing up sentences to avoid any possible misinterpretation.

The parentheses eliminate this alternative interpretation:

> Life is too short to deal with (the ridiculous interoperability of simple music files) and (any modern computing platform).

There's a whole cottage industry of Android powered digital music players. They usually skimp on things like screen quality and compute power, but add things like microSD slots, physical transport controls, and high quality DAC & amp hardware. It's gotten very competitive in recent years.

I sometimes look at these and daydream about owning one, then I slap myself and just put music on my phone. My hearing is just not that great these days, I doubt I could hear the difference.

Where would one get these MP3 files? Not everything is on Bandcamp and torrenting everything feels like a part time job, but maybe I just have too much music I like.

I still remember spending days inside during summers as a kid, downloading, cataloging and tagging MP3 files while others were probably experiencing life haha.

But I do long for the days where I could just press 'play' and I would hear music, without waiting for Spotify's Electron crap to finish loading its 'optimistic UI', declining 10 cookie popups and agreeing to upload the soul of my unborn kids to Daniel Ek's private cloud.

> Where would one get these MP3 files? Not everything is on Bandcamp

A lot of music is still available for sale, if not through Bandcamp then through stores like Qobuz[1]. Sometimes I have to look around for a bit to find a store that sells what I'm looking for, but I can usually find it on Bandcamp or there. Occasionally it's not for sale, in which case I don't feel bad about torrenting or downloading from YouTube, but that's rare.

[1]: https://www.qobuz.com/shop

A USB CD reader costs $20-30 and will probably also read and write DVDs.

Software using libparanoia and lame or ffmpeg is free. The very first time you use it, you might spend 30 minutes figuring things out. It generally takes 3-8 minutes to rip and encode a full CD these days.

The market for CDs and used CDs is quite open. $10-15 for an album is quite common. For those not aware, an album is usually 8-20 songs, so roughly the same $0.99 price as for individual tracks -- but without DRM, and with physical backup.

An awful lot of artists have their own shops; frequently, if you buy the CD from there, you also get a digital copy in WAV, FLAC or MP3 immediately.

I make my music library available as a read-only NFS export in my house network, and remotely via various bits of software to members of my family.

The big digital music stores are DRM-free these days (iTunes and Amazon both are). There's also Qobuz if you want to avoid the tech giants (though most of your money ends up going to record labels, so does it really matter?).

> All of a sudden one day, I was cut off from all my music, by the creators of the iPod!

iCloud: $1000 in Apple's pocket

This a million times. Spotify on the subway is infinitely frustrating until you go into airplane mode.

Ideally, apps shouldn't detect if you have internet and then act differently. They should pull up your cached/offline data immediately and then update/sync as attempted connections return results.

The model where you have offline data but you can't even see your playlists because it wants to update them first because it thinks you have internet is maddening.

Caching for the user experience seems to be not a thing anymore.

Back button in my browser for a static page redownloads it and the accompanying however many MB of framework...

Now I open links in new tabs always.

Oh, one of the learned behaviors to compensate for stupid tech, along with e.g. obsessively copying a long comment lest the page decides to reload tO sHoW nEw cOnTenT while I'm typing.

(FB Lite "app" - as well as mobile FB site - are notorious offenders there)

I think around 2015, when "mobile-first" became super popular, in the rush to market people just forgot that a network is a network, and you have to actually handle broken connections. Which is ironic because mobile networks are where you really need to plan for all the usual network edge cases, unlike wired networks where the edge cases are far less common.

Very good point. We had several power outages lasting a few hours lately. (One was just last night.) Every time this happens, my phone's mobile data is totally unusable because the whole neighborhood switches over from scrolling facebook (et all) on their wifi to scrolling facebook on mobile.

I can (and do) find things around the house that don't depend on a screen, but it's annoying to know that I don't really have much of a backup way to access the internet if the power is out for an extended period of time. (Short of plunking down for an inverter generator or UPS I suppose.)

If your ISP is available during a power outage (as they should be) a UPS that only powers a WiFi router could be quite small/cheap.

Or you could use a Raspberry Pi or similar and a USB WiFi adapter (make sure it supports AP mode) and a battery bank, for an "emergency" battery-operated WiFi router that you'd only use during power outages.

EDIT: Unless your ISP's CPE (modem/whatever) runs on 5 volts, you'd need more than just a USB power bank to keep things going. Maybe a cheap amazon boost converter could get you the extra voltage option.

FWIW the routers I have owned over the last few years have been 12V @ 1A.

I run my router + my RPi server off-grid with ~1kWh of usable (lead-acid) battery capacity.

So with those and my laptop's battery, I sailed into our last couple of minor daytime power cuts without even noticing. Sounds of commotion from neighbours alerted me that something was up!

Cable internet (HFC) might not work in power outages (depending on the network design) because often the optical nodes and amplifiers out in the streets are often not battery backed.

Cellular, FTTH and DSL do usually have battery backup though so should continue to work with a UPS.

It's deeply ironic how awfully designed the NYT games app is for offline use given many people use it on the subway. Some puzzles will cache, others won't. They only cache after you manually open them.

I'm on fiber at home and my ISP did a backend update which is dropping packets specifically on IPv6 for some reason. Most sites are unusable and other software isn't handling it very well (e.g. android) with frequent "no internet" popups.

The only thing worse than no internet is one bar of signal.

Spotify deals with degraded connections absolutely horrendously (on iOs anyway).

If I have a podcast already downloaded, but I am on an iffy connection, Spotify will block me from getting to that podcast view while it tries to load the podcast view from the web instead of using downloaded data.

I frequently put my phone in airplane mode to force spotify into offline mode to get content to play.

100% this, I am almost always on 5G or LTE but in some areas in my city it seems like not even a webpage will load on either. In this case, using any apps is useless and google/kagi search feels like it takes too long to find something basic.

Also subways, and people with cheap data plans that get throttled after 1GB. Google maps regularly says "no results found" because the connection times out.

I’ve found Google Maps to be one of the worst offenders, often getting in a pickle when my phone is switching between 4G and 5G. What’s frustrating is that the state it gets in is irrecoverable: the only thing that works then is force-quitting, then reopening the app.

Speaking of Airplanes, I also frequently have issues with apps and websites when using in-flight wifi due to the high latency and packet loss. Incidentally, Spotify is one of said apps, which often means I need to manually set it to offline mode to get it to work.

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