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Comment by darthcircuit | Hacker News Reader

Anything is better than that dumpster fire. They changed the name but the ui is still straight out of the early 2000s. It’s an exercise in frustration to find the music you’re looking for, and if you subscribe to Apple Music, the radio suggestions rarely match what mood you set.

I was listening to some early 2000s alternative rock today and then randomly in the middle of my radio station it started playing a kids freeze dance song.

The best thing it has going for it is the lossless albums and native airplay casting. I got a free trial, but I’m not going to renew. I’d consider staying if they added native last.fm scrobbling, but even then I’m not sure.

I’m really bummed about the scrobbling because I lost several weeks of not a month of plays because my phone offloaded the scrobbler app and I didn’t notice. The official app for it on Mac says to use one or the other (macOS or iOS) because it will count twice.

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Feels like none of what you wrote is about how the native app compares to the app being discussed, Petrichor, which is an offline music organizer/player.

I have been using itunes/music to do that and it honestly works just fine. I have hundreds of playlists from over 10 years ago that still works. Finding specific playlist or music to play is pretty easy, especially with Alfred.

The longevity is the biggest concern to me when considering the third party apps. If it stops being maintained in the future I would be stuck and need to do the chore of moving them properly to another application. With the native app I am sure it will work for the next 20 years.

My big gripe with Music is that big butt-ugly modal ad they prompt you with if you're one of the billions of humans that don't pay for Apple Music: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/253368403

It's something I'd have expected out of Microsoft, but from Apple it's a particularly shitty gesture. A big warning sign to the user that "your" device hasn't been fully paid-off yet.

> The longevity is the biggest concern to me when considering the third party apps.

And that's why I had to stop using MacOS entirely. It's absurd for a culture of paid software to have such horrible runtime compatibility. Meanwhile on Windows, you don't ever buy software that stops working. Even Linux has largely circumvented it's own ABI woes with sandboxed packaging. MacOS's statically linked app framework has every advantage in pushing out support timelines as far as Apple wants - they just don't want to push it very far, sadly.

> They changed the name but the ui is still straight out of the early 2000s.

You’re unfair. iTunes’ UI was much better in 2003 than Music.app’s in 2025.

>the ui is still straight out of the early 2000s

There was a lot of great UI back then! None of it in iTunes, but still.

> Anything is better than that dumpster fire.

Nonsense, you could be using Spotify.

I’m going to try giving up on all of them and just growing my local collection monthly instead.

the best-selling point in Spotify for me is discovering/suggesting new music. Sadly, it's not possible to do that when hosting local music, at least for now.

I think Last.fm provides recommendations? And maybe ListenBrainz does, too.

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