from Hacker News

Apple Music is the last library focused music service

by erdaltoprak on 12/1/21, 6:21 PM with 238 comments

• by andrewla on 12/1/21, 8:09 PM

  Google Play Music was extremely album-focused, but their move over to YouTube Music has basically scrapped that.

  GPM even let you modify the metadata for albums; I had used this to strip out things like "(2020 Remaster Special Gold Edition)" from album names, and to cut "bonus" tracks off of albums (nothing as fun as playing an album and then getting a two hour long spoken word interview with Quincy Jones), and finally to reorganize my classical music so that the artist was the composer and the orchestra/performer name was just munged into the album title (obviously deeper nesting would have been better, but this worked well).

  Now with YTM even browsing by artist is nearly impossible, and when you do, it doesn't display the albums by that artist that you've added to your collection, it just displays everything, so there's no real way to avoid seeing 20 copies of the same album remastered at different times mixed in with "pop rock of the 90s" collections. It's just dreadful.

  All I want is a music service that lets me access an unlimited virtual store and bring whatever content I want and organize it recursively by tags (i.e. when I navigate to "artist" it presents me with the ability to narrow my search by "composer" or "album" or whatever). I stick with YTM mostly because it came with free ad-free YouTube. There is no public API to talk to the service, though, so I can't even build my own frontend (although there are numerous hacks, most of which involve checking your plaintext password into a git repository, which of course means compromising your gmail account which is essentially the end of the world).

• by achairapart on 12/1/21, 8:30 PM

  Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, Google Music or whatever now is called. I tried them all. They are all the same to me.

  There is one big thing that all these streaming services are missing: *METADATA*

  Give me all the album by this label, all the songs produced by X or all the songs where in Y plays drums. All the albums recorded at some studio in the year Z. With tools like this I will spend years (and whatever money) on your service. They will give me unexplored ways to find and listen to new music, totally new meaningful relationships!

  Heck, 9 times out of 10 even the album year is all wrong with these services! (I know, all these "remastered" editions from the labels don't help at all).

  And they don't even need to build those datasets, they are already there, just ask (or buy out) discogs.com!

• by whywhywhywhy on 12/1/21, 8:01 PM

  The product referred to as "Apple Music" isn't library focused. The app now known as Music and the service known as "iTunes Match" is.

  Apple Music is the music as a service subscription that keeps pushing adverts in app and keeps turning itself back on even if you're not subscribed and have turned it off.

• by gglitch on 12/1/21, 7:52 PM

  Music-as-a-Service is fantastic as a convenience, and I too have discovered a lot of great music this way, but (a) I all the time want to listen to a record and find it missing from their catalogs; and (b) as with so much else on the web, I'm so over the constant minor psychological drag of knowing that my interactions are being tracked, logged, and gamed.

• by jimt1234 on 12/2/21, 2:07 AM

  Recently, I found a bunch of mp3 files on an old flash-drive. I copied them to my laptop and played them. After using music services (Pandora, Amazon, Spotify, Google Play, YT Music, etc.), I found the experience to be amazing. I forgot what responsiveness was like when listening to music. I pressed "Next" and, instantly, the next song started playing; no short, but annoying delay. I scrolled through songs to my favorite part, and once again, no delays. There were no commercials. No terrible "suggestions". I didn't feel like someone was watching my every click, every song choice. It was just music, like the good old days of 2009. :)

• by peatmoss on 12/1/21, 10:56 PM

  Apple is also the only service to get gapless playback right, near as I can tell. Since adding lossless (I care less about "high-res" or "spatial"), they are far and away my favorite.

  EDIT: In case anyone is wondering why gapless playback is important, the entire genre of classical music pretty much demands it. Also, anyone who listens to popular music where one track seamlessly leads into another will know how frustrating it is to not be able to stream an album as the artist intended it to be heard.

• by krrishd on 12/1/21, 8:10 PM

  - Custom Music Artworks

  - Custom Artists / Producer / Lyrics description

  - Custom rules to ignore songs on random selection

  - Custom rules to select equalizer per song

  - Folder based navigation

  - Smart Folder based playlists

  - Uploading your music to the cloud and streaming them as any other song

  Nails my reasoning for having stuck to it all this time as well. way easier to include my own (un-published) music, mixtapes/etc that never made it to streaming but that I have mp3s for, album art that I want to swap out, etc.

  I do fear that these might all be incidental features and they eventually re-orient to mimic Spotify's approach more closely.

• by blindmute on 12/2/21, 1:41 AM

  Downloading flac audio files and syncing them to wherever has been working fine for the last 15+N years. I've never felt the need to subscribe to any music service. All the less so if you want a 'library-focused' experience. My method doesn't have shitty UI downgrades, it doesn't remove albums randomly, it doesn't play ads, it doesn't collect my data, it doesn't have compatibility issues, it doesn't have downtime, it doesn't require internet connection, you have full control over all aspects.

• by orobinson on 12/1/21, 8:00 PM

  This is exactly why I started using Apple Music. Some of my music collection isn’t on streaming platforms but Apple Music let’s me host it and stream it in a library right alongside music I don’t “own”.

  I also generally like the paradigm of being able to collect streamed music into a library so I can come back to things again and again. Back when I last used Spotify around 2015 I used the starred playlist to do this but it was no substitute for just being able to see a collection of albums. I’m not sure if Spotify’s UX around having a “library” of music had improved since then.

• by victorbstan on 12/1/21, 8:26 PM

  This is why I find it extremely irritating when non apple users can’t understand why I use apple stuff. On many levels, not just music, they offer things others don’t.

• by fossuser on 12/1/21, 8:44 PM

  There's something sad to me about the verge article that's linked inside of the hn post (https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-direc...)

  There's often a trope that young people are good with computers, but I think this is mostly false. Here some (maybe significant percentage) of college freshman don't know how to save a file?

• by hasbot on 12/1/21, 8:58 PM

  I keep a copy of my entire music library on my phone and don't use any music service at all. I have over 13,000 songs across over 1200 albums and 500 artists. I don't need to find any more music; there's plenty of good songs in my library that I haven't fully absorbed yet.

• by rsync on 12/1/21, 8:49 PM

  Apple Music is library focused if you have very simple requirements and if your "library" was created, or coincident with, the iTunes ecosystem.

  The OP notes "Folder based navigation" and "... Folder based playlists" but note the use of the word "folder" and not "directory".

  Take a look at this dialog box:

  https://www.tech-recipes.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/itun...

  ... and note all of the fine-grained ways to sort by ... but also note that the most basic attribute of all (filename) is missing.

  I am not sure for whom iTunes and its interface is optimized for but I do know that any sane way I could imagine of moving my music onto an iPhone is totally impossible.

• by tshaddox on 12/1/21, 10:57 PM

  Apple Music isn't as library-focused as I would like it to be. Or perhaps the better term for what I'm talking about is "album-focused." I hate that when I add a playlist to my library, every single track in that playlist causes its album to show up in the Albums list and that artist to show up in the Artists list. This makes the Artists list essentially useless for browsing, because there are hundreds of artists that I've never heard of because they had a single track in some playlist that I added to my library. I can understand why it works this way, but boy is it frustrating. I would love to have a manually-curated set of albums (viewable by album name or by artist) totally separate from the ability to add playlists to my library.

• by shmerl on 12/1/21, 7:55 PM

  I prefer to buy, not rent music. Bandcamp is good for it and they sell FLAC. This is also fitting comparison to cassettes library a lot more than Apple Music where it's not your library, but Apple's.

  Other stores like 7digital are also good.

• by jjcon on 12/1/21, 8:45 PM

  I ripped my Apple Music library and switched to Plex (listening via plexamp - also looked at Jellyfin with finamp) because I thought Apple music was pushing music completely outside of my tastes (and particularly American centric) and was becoming too antagonistic to personalization and libraries.

  I think I prefer finding music and musicians 'the hard way'. When you have 'everything' the urge to find new things disappears at least in my opinion. I now buy a lot of music, mostly on bandcamp and I even subscribe to a few artists monthly. I find this experience far more rewarding but to each there own.

• by nixpulvis on 12/1/21, 10:01 PM

  "Add to Library" is a joke, there's nothing stopping them from deleting things at will. Sometimes they stay around but wont play, other times the magically disappear forever.

  It's insanity producing.

• by LeoPanthera on 12/1/21, 8:13 PM

  I use Plex to stream my local music library. The "Plexamp" client player is, well, buggy as hell, but it mostly works, and will transcode on the fly if it needs to.

  As a bonus it works for videos too.

• by jfrunyon on 12/1/21, 11:18 PM

  As TFA mentions: Plex is a wonderful service, if obtaining your own music isn't a problem for you. It's actually gotten a lot better since the days when the UI would become unresponsive with a mere few thousand songs. And Plexamp's radio features are great, as is the Tidal integration for those songs that I don't yet have locally. I have mine configured to prefer local tags over Plex's data, and I tag/organize everything with MusicBrainz Picard to ensure accuracy.

• by lolsal on 12/1/21, 7:45 PM

  The more I use a streaming music service like Spotify, the more new music I find, but the shorter my musical memory becomes.

• by mediocregopher on 12/1/21, 10:28 PM

  Until they're not anymore. Let's get off this stupid ride, we don't need big centralized services to tell us how to consume the content we're ostensibly paying for.

  Navidrome on a home server, hooked up to a big ol hardrive, ultrasonic on your phone connected to navidrome (offlining supported), support artists you really like by buying their shit off bandcamp, rip everything else cause let's be honest these artists aren't seeing stream money anyway.

  People will gripe and complain about how much "work" it is to maintain these things, but let's be real: every single person in here has at least one friend who'd be willing to host something like this for them. What it comes down to is that we're in the habit of relying on big tech companies rather than the folks around us. But habits can be broken.

• by taylodl on 12/1/21, 8:55 PM

  Having recently upgraded to Catalina (I've been running Mojave for quite some time now!) I somehow completely missed the boat that iTunes is gone and has been replaced with Music. Apparently the functionality of iTunes has been split between Finder (sync iPhone, rip CDs) and Music.

  Music had all my iTunes purchases (good), but none of my albums I'd legally ripped from my CDs. Long story short, I had to import the library. At least all the music is there and I can play everything. The frustrating thing is some of the album artwork has been lost - even though they're there in the library that was imported!

  On my iPhone I use a music player called Plum. I love it. I wish something similar existed for MacOS.

• by newfonewhodis on 12/1/21, 11:31 PM

  I run Plex (with plexamp) and buy music from:

  - Basecamp

  - Direct artist websites

  - 7digital

  - HDTracks

  Almost everything I've bought (tens of albums) are FLAC and sound great. I also feel great supporting artists better than my Spotify subscription is able to.

• by Demcox on 12/1/21, 10:05 PM

  Had been a die-hard Spotify user since it launced but was so aggrevated with podcasts being presented using the same method behind foie gras.

  Apple Music stood out as the obvious choice (iPhone and OSX user) and I have not looked back since I migrated last summer. Their way of structuring also made more intuitive sense - can't really pin point why.

  Also, a really nice plus that AM offers true lossless for free (yes, I have proper external equipment for listning and not just AirPods Pro lol).

• by verisimilitude on 12/1/21, 10:33 PM

  Since I don't listen to much music on my phone, I've actually taken in a step further: my Apple Music local library music files are stored in a .sparsebundle on my NAS. I wrote a little Obj-C app to automatically mount and unmount that sparsebundle when I open and close Apple Music (née iTunes) on MacOS. This prevents the sparsebundle from becoming corrupted, as they tend to do.

  Then, I use that same little Obj-C app to detect when I'm away from home and open a VPN connection to my NAS's network. So, wherever I am, I can stream music on my laptop from my local library.

  After doing this for a few years instead of paying for Apple Music, it has already saved the cost of the NAS and its hard drives.

• by oxplot on 12/2/21, 7:10 AM

  I salute all companies/services that have made managing music a thing of the past (Apple is up there as the catalyst back in early 2000s). For next to nothing, I can listen to any song ever recorded without having to worry about where to keep them, back them up, etc.

  I used to have a 3K song collection in FLAC which I had curated and spent a gazzilion $$$ on. I `rm -Rf`ed it in a heartbeat when Apple introduced lossless streaming.

  I have learnt that maintaining a music library (even on a cloud service) is an absolute, utter waste of time. YMMV.

• by wanderer_ on 12/2/21, 1:44 AM

  For me, having a local music library is doubly as important because I am often out of reliable cell service. I usually rip CDs to my iPhone, but as of yet I have avoided paying for any music services. I generally prefer to own my music rather than rely on pulling it down from somebody's server, not to mention that streaming audio uses significant battery on a mobile device.

  I use YT music when I have reliable internet and I want to listen to something I don't own.

• by alliao on 12/1/21, 10:18 PM

  I'm in my late 30s and nostalgic listening have taken up most of my listening time. turning into my dad basically. zero regrets though.

• by miiiiiike on 12/2/21, 5:51 AM

  Apple Music is close to perfect. When you find the right Apple Music 1 show and show playlist for you it’s incredible.

  I wish there was an API so I could write a DJ bot that would allow my Discord to queue and play tracks in an audio channel.

• by daigoba66 on 12/1/21, 9:53 PM

  It was a sad day when Rdio was bought by Pandora and shutdown. They were the best.

• by supernovae on 12/1/21, 10:38 PM

  I wish apple music would directly support Sonos Streaming, i'd switch over from Spotify in a heartbeat if they did Sonos direct like Spotify does.

  Not switching everything to apple play..

• by baby on 12/2/21, 2:00 AM

  I did some research a while ago, and there was basically only Apple Music combined with iTunes Match that could work for me: lots of music in my library already.

• by tehnub on 12/1/21, 9:00 PM

  >Uploading your music to the cloud and streaming them as any other song

  This is the reason I switched from Spotify to Apple Music. It’s just such a convenient feature.

• by mixmastamyk on 12/1/21, 9:03 PM

  I don't think any of these things play my flacs either. Never been enamored of monthly payments as well so am unsurprisingly not a fan.

• by hammock on 12/1/21, 7:55 PM

  Is there a library-focused video streaming service?

• by burnte on 12/1/21, 9:53 PM

  Amazon Music has a library too.

• by Shadonototra on 12/1/21, 10:19 PM

  no it's not, they are all the same

  is OP trying to pump his portfolio? that's what he meant by "library focused"?

• by crawsome on 12/1/21, 11:11 PM

  Plex is a great local service for a library focused approach.

• by cuddlybacon on 12/1/21, 7:25 PM

  > This article explains how students do not follow the same organization paradigm based on folders and local file management. This could be, in part, attributed to the new ways young students learn, which is on online first operating systems or tablets, where by default, the local system is hidden and also where everything is done through applications.

  For me it was because I realized that the time I spent doing this had exactly zero benefit. At least to me.

  This quote comes off as somewhat elitist. If someone hasn't developed the same workflow as you, that doesn't mean they are less informed or skilled.