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Beefboof

macrumors newbie
Feb 4, 2024
1
2
What moron wrote this. Spotify has "Advanced music discovery algorithm". Lol wut. They've always been worst in class when in comes to recommendations. Playing a random radio channel in general gives me more music that I like than playing any of the Spotify recommendations and they always get stuck in a local minima. Spotify's algorithms are not designed to give good recommendations, but to recommend whatever crap pays the most.
 

one more

macrumors 601
Aug 6, 2015
4,542
5,713
Earth
I ditched both Spotify and Apple Music, and YouTube Music, because all of their interfaces are missing basic features like searching in a playlist.

The current AM version allows you to search within a playlist by going to the top of the playlist and pulling it down, which reveals the search window, hidden otherwise. 🖐️
 
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jimimac71

macrumors 6502a
Sep 21, 2019
503
205
California
I don’t listen to a lot of music, but prefer Spotify for free.
The ads are brief but frequent.
I also don’t care for being stuck in any one ecosystem.
One day I will go Linux.
The Spotify app on Windows has an EQ. Others don’t.
I do prefer the radio style where the music is selected for me.
Accuradio works in a browser, has some ads, otherwise free.
 

WiscoNicky

macrumors regular
Mar 22, 2006
106
59
Wisco
I've tried Apple Music several times through free trials, and always come to the same conclusion. Many Apple apps in general have been buggy and half baked for half a decade now. Apple Music is no exception. Songs have been slow to begin playing, the UI is clunky, no Spotify connect type function, and frankly, I feel apple doesn't deserve any more of my money than I'm already "forced" to give them (ex.: 2TB iCloud storage plan, of which I use about 300 GB - unreasonably prices storage and RAM upgrades).

I've been an Apple user and fan since the mid 80s, and am likely not actually going anywhere anytime soon, but I have seriously considered switching to android/windows with my future purchases, due to Apple not investing back into their loyal customer base. MacOS is so full of bugs that I make it a practice to stay two versions behind. A lot of shaking my head these days.

Due to the aforementioned, and Spotify's features that apple lacks, it's Spotify for the win.
 

P-DogNC

macrumors regular
Sep 8, 2016
121
212
North Carolina
Without a doubt, the #1 feature keeping me on Spotify is spotify connect.

I have several Alexa speakers and love the ability to control playback *without* giving up the audio connection on my phone. I can easily then use my phone to playback audio whatsapp messages, take an ad-hoc video with the camera, etc. because Alexa is connecting independently to Spotify and my phone is just a remote control, not a bluetooth or airplay broadcaster....
Yes, but HomePods sound great, whereas Alexa speakers sound like crap. Why would you want a feature that enables the convenience of connecting to something that sounds like tin cans?
 
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zakiu

macrumors newbie
Jul 8, 2011
6
1
I canceled my Apple Music subscription for 3 months while on vacation to save some money and when I re-activated it they had deleted all of my playlists and everything I saved to my library. Absolute trash service and no excuse for that level of indifference towards users and stupidity. Deal breaker and I'll never subscribe again.
 

whitby

macrumors 6502
Dec 13, 2007
303
324
Austin, TX
If you imported your personal CDs in their original AIFF format into Apple’s Music library you do NOT want to sign up for Apple’s Music subscription as it will complete destroy your existing library. Apple’s Music will replace the files in your library with Apple’s files which typically are compressed. Music will also misread some of the metadata in your files and consequently delete songs, duplicate others, change song titles, and worse. I experienced this first hand and Apple’s technical support recommended that I rebuild my music library and not sign up for Music.

There’s another wrinkle in this as well. I recently tried to sync my CD music files to my iPhone and iPad. It was a complete disaster. Apple Music randomly split albums into several separate albums. Apple tech support told me they were surprised I was able to share any CD files with my iOS devices. I was told that most CDs lack the DRM file structure Apple Music requires and that is why files can not typically be added to iOS devices. I was told the ONLY way to transfer CD quality files to an iOS device was to subscribe to Apple Music streaming service.
This is surprising as iTunes Match does precisely what you want and is available for a yearly subscription of $24 or so. Apple Music does the same thing but is considerably more expensive and is primarily a streaming service. There is a lot of confusion out there concerning iTunes Match and Apple Music and whether you need both, but I suspect you can use Apple Music to provide the ability to share all your own music across all Apple devices which is the only service iTunes Match provides and thus makes iTunes Match redundant but if all you want to do is share your own music then iTunes Match is a more cost effective solution. I have both since I do not trust Apple Music.
 

AppleFan735

macrumors regular
Oct 9, 2021
125
254
Apple’s approach to services just suck in general. Here’s how I would rate Apple:

Hardware: A/A+
Software: B (trending down)
Services: D

Apple for some reason is in the mindset that human-curated and hand-picked is better than ML/algorithmic approach which was false 10 years ago, is even more false today and will increasingly continue to be false every day from now until the end of times. The approach doesn’t ****ing scale. The localization in Europe is non-existent. The discoverability is garbage.
 

NagasakiGG

macrumors regular
Sep 20, 2017
221
254
Just buy a Spotify subscription via Turkey. It costs for a family subscription roughly 20USD per year. After 25hours, you can move your Turkish Spotify account to your home country and enjoy the full catalogue for the rest 364 days. Idk how people really justify themselves to pay the full USD/EUR price
 

dankron

macrumors member
Jul 12, 2010
60
59
I have both, but my go-to is by far Spotify, I even have FreeYourMusic to sync my playlists across, but Spotify UI is heaps better, not to mention suggestions is 99% spot on.

The only time I use Apple Music is with Home pod and still gives me the ***** when I as: "Play something I Like" and 80% of what it plays, it's something I hate... Apple has a lot of catching up to when it comes to music. If Spotify integrated nicely with home pod I'd be happy to ditch Apple Music for good.
 

iBreatheApple

macrumors 68030
Sep 3, 2011
2,959
1,054
Florida
my opinion after having both for a while and intermittently taking Apple up on the “here’s a few more months free” offers… For daily music consumption and music discovery, Spotify is far superior. Down to the personalization, radios with very accurate “similar” music to the song you used, playlists, etc. I think Apple Music Sing is awesome and I love that they offer higher quality music with Spatial Audio and Dolby atmos. But there is no competition if you are big into discovering new music/artists. I am almost an audiophile and I’d still take Spotify over Apple Music. The “create a station from this song” radio feature from Apple isn’t just subpar, it really sucks in my experience. I often think “why in the world would you place this on this station?”
 

apr

macrumors newbie
Jul 14, 2020
26
21
(edit: In the mean time I ditched apple music and switched to youtube premium which has youtube music bundled. Youtube premium offer more for the same money, and finally no hip-hop...)

Apple music family plan is cheaper than spotify family plan in my country (16% less), that is the only reason I stick with it.

Anyway apple music is total crap:
- always recommends hip-hop music. There is no escape from this, hip-hop is always in front of you. I've never listened hip-hop music.
- it doesn't care what you like, the recommendations are useless
- it really hates classical music (classical music app is only for iphone, no desktop variant)
- removes songs because of licensing issues.
- worst UI ever designed
- one of my family member using the free tier spotify instead of apple music...
 
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txscott

macrumors regular
Oct 17, 2012
187
423
always recommends hip-hop music
If it hips or hops I'm not listening to it. It took months of concentrated effort disliking songs and artists to break Apple Music of that habit.
 

MNWildFan

macrumors regular
Jun 26, 2013
226
194
Minnesota, USA
The first point is just downright incorrect.

The only thing Spotify is missing for their library is a songs tab, but they maliciously removed that as people were using it to keep all their songs downloaded to avoid using data and extra battery (how dare they!).
Yup, I couldn't help but roll my eyes a little when I saw that they mentioned no real library for Spotify, as there actually is

Sure, it may not be as elegant of an experience compared to Apple Music, but it is there

When you go to an album, or playlist, you have the option to add those to a library, but if you want individual songs in your library, that's when you have to simply add the song to your liked songs
 

MNWildFan

macrumors regular
Jun 26, 2013
226
194
Minnesota, USA
we can ask Siri to play anything on Spotify.
Yes, while that is true, last I checked you can only do that right on your iPhone/iPad or via CarPlay

If you try to do that on a HomePod, Siri will just downright not let you do so

All this being said though, I don't know how recently this happened, but for those like me that subscribe to SiriusXM, you can say something like "Hey Siri/Siri, play station [insert name of SXM station here] from SiriusXM" and then it'll play that right from your iPhone on HomePod

The fact that Apple is still downright refusing to allow Spotify to work on the HomePod despite allowing YouTube Music to work with them is just downright infurating
 

mellonseed

macrumors newbie
Feb 3, 2024
3
3
If you imported your personal CDs in their original AIFF format into Apple’s Music library you do NOT want to sign up for Apple’s Music subscription as it will complete destroy your existing library. Apple’s Music will replace the files in your library with Apple’s files which typically are compressed. Music will also misread some of the metadata in your files and consequently delete songs, duplicate others, change song titles, and worse. I experienced this first hand and Apple’s technical support recommended that I rebuild my music library and not sign up for Music.

There’s another wrinkle in this as well. I recently tried to sync my CD music files to my iPhone and iPad. It was a complete disaster. Apple Music randomly split albums into several separate albums. Apple tech support told me they were surprised I was able to share any CD files with my iOS devices. I was told that most CDs lack the DRM file structure Apple Music requires and that is why files can not typically be added to iOS devices. I was told the ONLY way to transfer CD quality files to an iOS device was to subscribe to Apple Music streaming service.
I had similar issue and what I did is to use ALAC rather than AIFF. ALAC supports metadata like AAC while it’s lossless too (like ZIP). I filled ALL metadata and album cover manually using Metadatics app, for ALL albums imported to Apple Music Library, for now it’s working well. And after matching or uploading, I wound never touch Remove Download option as it will remove my local file.
 
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progx

macrumors 6502a
Oct 3, 2003
778
888
Pennsylvania
I was a diehard Spotify user but Spotify annoyed me to the point I wont ever buy a subscription from them again. Wanted to cancel my subscription for a few months, the final month every time I opened the app while listening to music a "your subscription is expiring" popup came up.

Spotify was the first music streaming service I used. I remember cancelling it in annoyance after a year, then Apple announced it was going to iTunes Match for $25 per year. It was a no-brainer then, especially when Jobs announced that people prefer streaming what they owned (at the time), it made sense to go this direction.
And I mean like EVERY SINGLE TIME. Couldnt even change songs without the popup....
And no it wasnt a bug, was like that for months, lots of people complaining online.
Ended up not even using Spotify that month while still having to pay for it.
So Apple for the win, never going back.
I transitioned to Apple Music about 2-3 years fully when I was satisfied with the service and canceled iTunes Match. Whenever I want to go find something new, it's either try Apple Music or search Bandcamp for me.
 
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pianophile

Contributor
Sep 2, 2002
132
97
Midwest
Since I have a lot of “locally” stored music (now uploaded to the cloud), available to stream on all my devices...
What do you use to play these back? I'd love to play my local files on all devices, but have heard bad things about iTunes Match.
 

SpringKid

macrumors 6502
May 17, 2019
401
900
What do you use to play these back? I'd love to play my local files on all devices, but have heard bad things about iTunes Match.
I have my Apple Music subscription and use the Apple Music app with Sync Library enabled. All my local music files on my iMac are then automatically uploaded, I don’t need to do anything else. I don‘t even need to keep the files locally if I don’t want to when they have been uploaded, although Apple don’t recommend considering this service as a backup service (they basically don’t guarantee the cloud storage to be persistent). If you have deleted something locally, you can however choose to download it back to your local storage.

 
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pianophile

Contributor
Sep 2, 2002
132
97
Midwest
All my local music files on my iMac are then automatically uploaded, I don’t need to do anything else.
Don't some of your local files get replaced with "similar" tracks, e.g. your locally curated live tracks with more common ones? I think I heard that that can happen when you son your library with Apple. That scared me off years ago.
 

SpringKid

macrumors 6502
May 17, 2019
401
900
Don't some of your local files get replaced with "similar" tracks, e.g. your locally curated live tracks with more common ones? I think I heard that that can happen when you son your library with Apple. That scared me off years ago.
Oh, nothing like that has ever happened to me at least. But all (most) my local music is simply things not available on AM at all. However, I do know for sure that some albums that I have ripped from CD that also exists on AM have not been replaced, and they are even basically the same release.

So all the songs in my library have one of these Cloud Statuses:

Matched, Purchased, Uploaded or Apple Music.

One would think that Matched here means "uploaded and matched/replaced", but that is for sure not the case. Even tracks that I have made myself, pre-masters not even released, shows up in this category and the same file I uploaded can be downloaded to my local storage. To be honest, I'm not even sure what "matched" means here.

Edit: Well... Now I'm even more confused. When I download some tracks with Cloud Status "Matched", I get a proper local m4a file that I can open for example in an audio editor. I do think it has been replaced, though, as I get an m4a file that I'm pretty certain originally was an mp3 that I uploaded. However, other tracks with the same status, I get a file inside an Apple Music folder in my Media folder instead, with file type "HLS Media" (HTTP Live Streaming).

So I guess files are in fact replaced after all, I have just never noticed it. 🤔

Thanks for asking about this, now I need to rethink how I manage local files and make sure I actually keep stuff locally after it has been uploaded.
 
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jxfo

macrumors newbie
Nov 22, 2018
21
33
Sweden
Apple Music over Spotify all day. It's better for music discovery, has way better audio quality, better design (Spotify is incredibly ugly), no podcast/audiobook bloat, decent library management features, allows for metadata editing and pays artists more.

It's not perfect and still needs improvement but compared to Spotify it's much better. Especially in combination with apps like Marvis.

I used Spotify from the beta in 2007 and switched to AM in 2015. I sometimes go back and test out whatever new features Spotify has but every time it's a reminder of how much better AM is.
 

salutcemoi

macrumors regular
Nov 10, 2021
229
161
I've tried Apple Music twice (2nd time was a couple of months, thanks Shazaam free trial) and each tie I went running back to Spotify
 
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