mrmondo

A bit high level but here’s my list of pros:

- I’ve found a lot less missing tracks / albums, especially for more underground / lesser known artists I had real problems with this on Spotify.

- Significantly less bandwidth usage compared to Spotify.

- Unified interface to my music library (1.2TB~) and streaming / downloadable music on both the desktop and phone.

- The ability to have my own music uploaded as part of my library and available on all desktops/laptops and my phone.

- Apple Music data is unmetered on my mobile provider (I average around 8GB/mo of mobile music streaming on my phone)

- The Music app on my phone is /really/ good at figuring out what music/playlists/albums to sync (prefetch if you will) onto my phone, I set the data limit (to 128GB) and it just figures it out nicely, often when I go to listen to a new album from an artist I follow / like - its already there for me (note: I believe this is opt-in functionality)

What I don’t like about Apple Music / think needs to improve:

- Playlists, They’re not as nice or as fast to manage as on Spotify but at least tracks don’t go missing randomly.

- Artist/Album workflow performance, at times it still feels very ‘webframe’ (if that makes sense?) when browsing artists and their albums, the UI latency really annoys me and I liken it to the feeling that JavaScript ‘apps’ give you.

If a service came along that truly had the TV and films I wanted with a preference for 4K content, I’d happily pay $40-$60AUD a month for it.

Right now I subscribe to:

  - Netflix
  - Stan
  - Apple Music
  - Usenet related services
  - Audible
  - Plex Premium
  - Getflix content unblocking services

  - Pandora (cancelled as they’re leaving Aus)
  - Amazon Prime video (cancelled as they have hardly any content and a terrible interface)
  - Spotify (cancelled as I prefer Apple Music)
  - Last.FM streaming (cancelled when the service went EOL)
  - Several private trackers (avoid BT now)

This is purely out of interest, our storage performs at around 2-4M random 4K read IOP/s per node and I was wondering (just for fun) how it might look thrown a good I/O crunch task like this.

  - My RSS feeds (I use feedly for this)
  - HN
  - Twitter
  - Fastmail
  - GitLab

When I get to work tomorrow I’ll be trying this out (knowing it’s in beta) for XMPP / Jabber, if it doesn’t already support OTR encryption - that’d be a killer feature. A big problem I see is that a lot of places want to or do run internal XMPP/Jabber because they have engineers working that don’t want to / can’t run ‘enterprise’ rubbish like Skype or those of us that are sick of JavaScript heavy SaaS apps like slack - but then you’ll have a few managers or project managers that still run Windows likely for excel or out of habit etc... and they have to use Pidgin - which while it works across a lot of IM systems - is very awkward and ugly as anything, so it gives the better protocols a bad name, on Mac there’s Adium which is a pretty decent multi-IM client but has stagnated somewhat. So a clean, easy to use, stable and well performing chat client that supports XMPP/Jabber with MUC and OTR would be an absolute killer.

For those that aren’t familiar with Australian vs New Zealand ascents - they’re /very/ different despite how close the countries are physically located to each other. When spoken New Zealand English has more of a British / South African - ‘rounder’ sound, where Australian is generally (especially as you move north or west up the country) more nasal and closer to American English with more emphasis on E rather than O if that makes sense.