Adding music doesn't work as expected, lost access to 4,700 songs after turning off the service
I gave up on streaming music when I searched for the FFIX OST on Spotify and didn't get a result back. I'm sure it works for most people, but half my shit is videogame soundtracks, 1/3 is hiphop mixtape, and the rest is a mix of Bandcamp albums and singles. I.e. none of that shit is on Spotify, Apple Music, etc. etc. etc. I do use Songza for "mood-based playlists" though, since those are my favorite when I'm working.
If it isn't my shit when I'm working, it's somafm. This is the advantage Google Music has - it can build me a playlist out of music I own... and unlike iTunes, it doesn't give me that "I can't figure out your music because it isn't Lady GaGa" shit. I have yet to find a song so obscure that Google doesn't know what to do with it, while I'd say iTunes Genius fails out three quarters of the time.
Genius has always been trash for me too. On the other hand google gave me this Dilla produced playlist: https://play.google.com/music/listen?u=0#/wst/st/69a08df1-20ca-3751-b86a-7a8ccf76e1b0 This is the kind of stuff Google really does great and Apple etc sucks at. "Oh you like xyz? Here is xyz + ikj" Apple spotify and others seem to be more on board with the "Oh you like xyz? How about some Taylor Swift? or $OTHER ARTIST WERE PUSHING THIS MONTH" Like you said those ambient tracks are great too. I dislike that I need to use Chrome for google music though (because you have to use Flash with firefox for some god forsaken reason. )
Um. Can we get a thread started about video game soundtracks? I love SIM City and Final Fantasy for getting work done. Please share your favs.
Man, Apple is really good at building phones and software for it, but it seems like they're dreadful at anything music related. I haven't had the disprivilege of using Apple Music, but I've lost many a nights sleep over iTunes. I remember using it a long time ago, like pre original iPod Touch time, and everything actually worked pretty decently. Updates weren't horrible. iTunes was snappy and did a lot of useful things. It was so good, in fact, that my family didn't even own an Apple product until many years after we started using iTunes. We mainly used it to buy music and to burn and write CDs. It was great. Over time, it started getting worse. Updates started becoming frequent, so much that every time I loaded the thing, there would be an update waiting for me. iTunes started to become less responsive. It used to be a little sluggish when starting up, but it got to the point that I could almost make a sandwich before the thing would load. I had an MP3 player, but eventually upgraded to an iPod, which was a mistake, because now I was forced to use iTunes. In reality, adding a couple of songs should have taken a few minutes at most, but Apple was having none of that. I had to open it, wait for it to load, tell the thing "No, I don't want to download an update", search through the clunky (Slow computer didn't help at all) iTunes store, find and buy the right song, then go through and drag the songs onto the iPod (which was nice and simple. I know I could have synced it, but it was a family account , so that was too complex for my 8 year old brain). It wasn't preferable or fast, but it still worked good enough that it was a minor issue. Eventually, I upgraded to an iPod touch, then an iPhone, and the problems got worse. I was finally old enough to buy my own music, so I set up my own account. I figured, since my computer had the songs already purchased and downloaded, then I could simply get away with adding the files to my library and then putting them on my phone. iTunes noticed and gave me an "Aww, hell no." It would tell me that I didn't own that music and needed to choose between the libraries. For the rest of my ownership of Apple products, my two accounts fought over each other over the rights to my device. If I didn't pay enough attention when adding music, one account would take over and nuke most of the music on my device. Every now and then, I'd do a sync and come back to like 20 songs on my phone, because the old account somehow did something to delete the rest. If I had one account, everything would have been fine, but having, like, 5 songs from another account was enough to make adding a couple of songs from the computer a nightmare. That's doing it manually. Every now and then, I'd get defaulted back to some setting that would just delete everything off my phone or add back a bunch of apps that I deleted. I never really sat down and figured all the settings out, because I didn't want to get intimate with iTunes - I just wanted to sync some damn music to my phone.
I don't usually get up this early. This vitriol is just what I needed to wake me up. This is exactly why I moved to Google Play. I burned my $400 worth of iTunes to discs and never looked back. Shit system and terrible user interface.
Every song I acquired from a source other than purchasing on iTunes (about 95%) deleted itself from my iPhone last week. I can't even put new tracks on my iPhone anymore. At this point, it looks like a total system restore is in my phone's future if I want to gain back functionality, I've tried everything, spent hours looking for work-arounds. Fucking dismal piece of software. Edit: I never used Song Match, Apple Music, iCloud shit, nothing. This shit just has a mind of its own.
All my settings are toggled to manual control. My iPhone's library is built of 500 tracks manually selected out of 2000 in my library. I refused to update my iTunes and iOS versions, because I have had this exact same problem after doing so previously, on my old phone. But I wasn't given a choice. At some point, my computer snuck in an iTunes update, with Apple claiming that no further OSX updates could be administered without iTunes "upgrading" to the latest version either. And generally, every iTunes update is bad news. There's been too much of my time spent managing music when it should have been simple. Even having a library of 500 songs that I update weekly with ~15 new songs is now too much to ask. Ugh, I'm bitching about Apple products on Hubski, I'm going to sleep soon. But most importantly, good to hear from you, 8bit. Keep hanging in there. I hope things are well, but judging from how fucked Boulder's YikYak scene was... well, I lost more faith in our generation, and then deleted that app.
we had a massive outpouring of disgusting yaks like this around the same time. in DC. on a "progressive" college campus. ugly stuff.
It was the racism combined with a constant onslaught of desperate appeals from males to females for sex that killed it for me. It seemed anti-intellectual, in general, apart from some witty remarks getting popular. "Fuqbois" is the relevant term, thank you for introducing it to me.
ay u a girl? kik??? it's mostly recycled shit from tumblr and celebrity twitters. my "favorite" interaction to date was a guy who said i was a nazi because i was socialist because national socialism = socialism??? then i hit him with the "you just called a jew a nazi" and that was the end of my sadomasochistic yik yaking for the night.
Niiice. I've really been struggling with a superiority complex lately. I guess that's what it is. Just been feeling like people are unfathomably stoopid, in general. YikYak was an obvious contributer to this mentality, so it had to go. Hubski, on the other hand, needs more of my attention, because this community is remarkably uplifting.sadomasochistic yik yaking
The first time I was in Boulder, it was spring break, I hit the CU weight room, and I was like "hey, there's a good mix of ethnic groups represented." Then I remembered it was spring break, and all the locals go home. And Colorado is still incredibly white. The next time I was in town, it was white bro city. I showed up at the gym with my coworker and ex-coworker, we're each of totally different races, and we all lifted together. As you may have guessed, my interactions with CU students are 99% limited to the rec. center :(. Spent all my time on East Campus, away from most everyone. Beautiful campus, scenery and facilities are A++, but the homeless problem, cost of living, and general ignorance of the majority is a serious issue. Sadly, the YikYak scene reflects the populace relatively well, especially in that age demographic. So beyond a shadow of a doubt, I can confirm that you've never bullshitted anyone about how bad it can be there. Oh P.S. there's 'roids all up in that gym, Jesus.
My complaints about Google play: - often fails to find the next song... when I'm running on the beach under scant service (through T-mobile, even) - tries to get me to try their pussilanimous streaming stations rather than the album I'm looking for... at first. - occasionally locks up while seeking new media... while running and also tracking via MapMyRun. But you know what? I've got 200GB backed up to their cloud... for free. I can stream any piece of it on demand... for free. And when I tell it to make an instant mix off of a song, it will no-shit pick things from the same year off the same label as well as being in the same genre and mood. Which is saying a lot, because my genres are arbitrary. It's definitely worth more than what I'm paying for it, which is nothing. Unfortunately their paid version isn't particularly compelling as I still have more weird albums than they do. But hey - I have a 64GB phone and I have yet to load music on it, despite listening to music all day at times.
Same. Google Play offers a music cloud surface thats pretty much unbeatable to apple's. Their streaming sucks though.
so frustrating... iTunes the application used to be pretty great. And by used to be - I'm talking about 2001ish when it was a super fast, super responsive app that cataloged my music, ripped CDs, burned CDs, in such a low overhead way that it made me smile. Then they introduced the store which I hate and still refuse to use. And now this... ugh. Get back to making solid hardware, OS, and applications. Stop trying to be a music service. BLERGH.
Right. You liked the era when your music database was an .xml file that typically ran under 1k per album. Back before they started "extending" it. I have a computer pretty much dedicated to running iTunes, Plex and Transmission. Of those three, iTunes is definitely the heavyweight. Why? 25,000 songs, 210GB, 40MB XML file. Which is actually a stunning improvement - the XML file for iTunes 10 was over 250MB with virtually the same library. Here's the reality: Apple makes their money selling iPhones. 70% of revenue, 82% of profit come from iPhones. iPhones need streaming music. That's just the way the world is going. Far better to serve your songs from a central server than try and make that mac they wish you hadn't bought sync across a cloud service they've been studiously fucking up since 2005. And since they couldn't buy Spotify, they bought Beats because at least they recognized that they had exactly zero cloud competence and this way any foibles can be blamed on their recently acquired whipping boy. The other important thing to consider is all that music they sold you? They'll never make money off it ever again. It's all about new customers and you know what? The 18-24 year olds that are likely to buy into this never really torrented. Streaming is all they know. "matching" is not compelling for them. Apple doesn't want to tell you that they don't value you at all as a customer and, as far as they're concerned, you can twist in the wind. But that's the reality.
So I've been an avid Spotify Premium fan for a while now, and I love it. It is not without its flaws and quirks, but I'm erally quite happy with it. I'm about 3 weeks into the 3 month trial on Apple music, and I have to say that their UX kinda sucks comparatively. If Spotify didn't exist I think I would dig it, but this isn't the reality. 3 weeks in, I have not figured out how to jump directly to the album of the song I'm listening to currently so I can skip around to other tracks (who in the world listens to entire songs especially as they tail out?). It's a pretty core behavior and I have tried mightily to figure it out but come up empty. On the other hand, Apple Music's auto generated playlists have been fairly fantastic. Rather than make me want to leave Spotify, Apple Music surprisingly makes me content to leave my other favorite music app, Songza, which is a app choc full of curated playlists based on activity, genre, decade, or time of day. It's seriously awesome, and makes listening to algorithm-driven apps like Pandora feel like nails on chalk-board by comparison. So yeah, since Apple Music I think I've opened that app up twice when it used to be every day. I like the size of the catalog as well compared to Spotify. I think the biggest knock against Apple music is the fact that it isn't laser focused like Spotify. Spotify is there to do one thing and one thing only. Apple Music is there to do that, plus integrate with all of the legacy iTunes cruft, as well as try and sell you stuff. The 'New' button at the bottom is entirely not needed. If Apple is concerned with funneling user attention to new releases/artists, they can do this by including those tracks into the various generated playlists. I've discovered an untold number of new artists on Songza this way (and I would then jump into Spotify, find them, and add to a playlist...Apple Music could work well like this). The 'radio' button and the 'connect' button where you 'follow' artists are also cruft in my view. The personalized suggested playlists that pop up in the 'for you' section are far better than any of the generic 'radio' stations under that tab. I'm going to keep at it. At the core, it's a massive catalog of music to stream and the service isn't terrible so far.
I like Apple Music better than Spotify for one reason: I can get into the interface and listen to locally saved music even when I have no service. Spotify takes me to the Browse interface by default and then complains there is no connection. I run through some no-service zones, and if I need to change my playlist mid-run, the music stops and will not start again until I get back home, This really throws off my momentum, to where I am noticeably slower when Spotify refuses to let me play locally saved music offline. On Apple Music, I can always fall back on iTunes. On that note, does anyone remember the days when apps used to work even on an EDGE connection, pre-3G? When YouTube and Google Maps would load on EDGE? It was slow, but it loaded... Spotify, Google Maps, and a ton of other apps that should know better refuse to load even on 3G or a spotty 4G connection. I don't have LTE everywhere I go. I miss 2005.
I've heard complaints against Spotify's library, but I've petty much only found really fairly obscure stuff to not really be there (excluding T Swift's infamous exodus). My main complaint with Spotify is their terrible autogenerated playlists. Other than that it's definitely the main place I listen to music and has effectively ended my music piracy.
Spotify lacks large portions of influential artist output. Last time I used it they didn't have three albums in a row I was looking for. I uninstalled it in a fit of pique. I would never pay money for a service that doesn't carry albums I want to hear when they are available digitally from Amazon.
They do, it's connected with having Prime. But a lot of their music that's available for download isn't for streaming. I checked them out recently and was disappointed.
Honestly around 75% of the time Pandora's playlists are actually pretty good. It'll never be as good as an actual human curated list (one of the best parts of Spotify is how many there are). I honestly haven't given Apple Music a shot. Long ago I realized that Apple only cares about experience on anything that's not a Mac.
Maybe it's my taste in music, but I stopped listening to Pandora years ago, before there was even a viable alternative because of how stale it sounded. No deep cuts, a lot of repetition, and the discovery engine was just terrible. I know I don't speak for everybody though.
No, I definitely agree with you. I stopped using Pandora something like a decade ago, but at my fiancée's work they have a business account so she got reacquainted with it and it's definitely better as far as algorithmic playlists go. Still can't compare to a curated list, but definitely better.
To be honest, we're running out of cheap, legal alternatives for music because the big musics (labels, Vevo, so on) want more money. On the one hand, we got Youtube which got it's arms bound in a deal with Vevo, forcing it to shut down Streamus because they could find no way that would not ruin the app AND show Vevo-sponsored ads. Then we got iTunes, Spotify, Pandora and other streaming services that are getting shit all over with legal stuff, forcing them to add measures to their software that slow down and change functionality for the worse because apparently we're not supposed to share anymore. Then there's the paid streaming which can get expensive to some people. And THEN there's the DRM-ladden stores that won't allow you to have songs (which are themselves equipped with DRM) from two accounts because that would encourage sharing, and who wants that. And finally, there's the small independents store (like CD Baby) that give us what we want: high-quality music at the price of the artist, DRM-free. Except that, of course, none of the music a lot of people want (which are owned by big labels - because the big labels own, or at least aim to own, all the popular music ever since what, the '60s?), so we're stuck short. And then the bigwigs wonder why people illegally download songs from torrents or other sources...
If you have concrete monetary damages, you can sue them you know. It's not just "the computer doesn't work." Yes, they likely have some clause somewhere like "you can't sue us if we break stuff" but that clause has absolutely zero legal effect, it's just to scare people.
It gets really really annoying. Some songs that I've manually added from my mac won't play on my phone, and some songs I try to play are actually other tracks, despite being added from apple's servers directly. I would love it if it worked - I was excited about the prospect of switching from Spotify because I could upload my own songs (i.e. The Beatles library). But I think I have to switch back because Spotify, despite its limitations, at least consistently works.