They can have all the data of my truly exciting life that they want, I'm sure it will take them far. But it does piss me off when my music disappears. I'm sure apple knows a few things about you
And Apple doesn't comprehensively collect your personal data.
The only reason Google would collect data on my listening habits would be to advertise music that it thinks I'd be interested in. Which is kind of what I want an app like this to do anyway, and Google are very good at recommendation analytics.
Not a good criticism of Google in this instance.
You're forgetting... YOU are not Google's customer, you are its product.
Google fattens you up and pokes you with a stick now and then, and all you can think of is, "Free food."
Google works on both operating systems and syncs well between both. Google will upload your personal music library for free. And Google doesn't randomly delete your playlists.
The post was going fine but throwing in zingers like your last sentence isn't helpful. Things like that get in the way of good discussions here, tending to quickly drag a thread off into the weeds.
EDIT: ... and so it goes. Based on the last few posts it's officially a bash-fest now with little pertinency to the topic. Oh well, chalk up another opportunity lost ...
I've been struggling with iTunes and Apple Music mightily over the past few weeks so I'm probably leaning a bit heavily on the negatives ... but here goes...
I wish I could sit beside one of Apple's UX designers for the iTunes/Apple Music product for a few hours and walk them them through the many ways their product is utterly frustrating and heinous for some very basic functions that should "just work." At some point I'd probably feel compelled to slap the Apple person silly - so it's probably best to remain separated by great distances.
Question to Apple: Is there some reason why iTunes cannot reliably sync music between itself and iDevices? I get the feeling that Apple thinks the Whole World has an always-connected super high speed connection to iCloud and happily streams one song at a time to their devices. Guess what Apple, I bought 64 GB and 128 GB devices for a reason. I want to have 10k+ songs of reasonable fidelity sitting right there on my devices, all of the time, and especially when I'm getting ready to board a 10-hour flight and will have limited Internet access for two weeks. My music better not stop playing when the Internet connection dries up.
This seems like a simple request, but for some reason iTunes tries its damnedest to try to force me to use THEIR model of how I should be using my devices. You'd figure that this should just work, but once you have logged into your iTunes account, turned on Apple Music, and if you're a glutton for self-abuse, turned on iTunes Match iTunes just starts crapping all over itself and just getting the damn songs downloaded to the device is ridiculously unreliable.
Yes Apple, I fully expect that I should be able to select 10,000+ songs from My Music and hit Sync and you will faithfully sync each and every one of those songs to my device without any errors and with all of the artwork and metadata intact. Does this ever happen? Hell no, it'll crap all over itself after a few hundred songs and put my iPhone 6+ (128 GB) into a zombie state where I have to reboot the device. This is from a quad core i7 iMac with 32 GB of RAM, so don't blame the host. iTunes has quite simply turned into a big steaming pile of bloated crap that can't do anything reliably anymore. Maybe the iTunes engineers are hoping everyone gets coerced into the single streaming file model so they don't have to deal with complexities greater than 1. Either fix it already or rewrite the thing.
On the other hand, Apple Music shows great promise and there are times when it really shines. But the fact that Apple Music is an add-on to iTunes and the fact that iTunes is such a steaming pile, it's getting really really hard to like the combination that putting anything on top of the existing pile brings. The same goes for iTunes Match, when it works it is great, but more often than not you end up with two or three copies of every song on an album on your iDevice. Nothing like listening to an album and hearing the same song play three times in a row. You think to yourself, "could anyone at Apple be so damn stupid that they would think that such behavior is acceptable?" I don't know what's happening to the dehydrated brains of the Apple engineers working on iTunes, but some things are so obviously wrong and broken that I cannot fathom how they could let it ooze out the door to customers.
No matter how badly Apple treats me as a customer, as evidenced by their willingness to allow the current iTunes abomination with all its tacked-on shaky features like Apple Music and iTunes Match out the door, it's highly unlikely that I'd ever leave them behind for the likes of Google or Microsoft. I don't trust Google and I already suffer enough at Microsoft's hand. I'm betting on Tim Cook and his team doing the right thing and fixing the sinking ship that is iTunes today. They have too much riding on Music to let the bloated mass of iTunes draw it to the bottom. But it's getting dangerously close to capsizing and I really hope that Apple is going to do something very soon to not just fix it - but reimagine iTunes from the core. iTunes could turn into Apple's iTitanic if they don't get their act together very soon.
While I'm at it, what's it been, like 3 or 4 years since iCloud arrived and MobileMe was put to death? Is there some reason why after all of these years that former MobileMe customers STILL cannot get their MobileMe/iCloud accounts merged with their iTunes/Apple Store accounts? Really? Maybe leave one one thousandth of a shiny new feature for the next release and fix this stupid problem. What could possibly be keeping the worlds greatest innovator from doing a little bit of housekeeping for a change?
The post was going fine but throwing in zingers like your last sentence isn't helpful. Things like that get in the way of good discussions here, tending to quickly drag a thread off into the weeds.
Unless of course it's true. Oh well, I guess shame on those who speak of their personal experiences.
I've been struggling with iTunes and Apple Music mightily over the past few weeks so I'm probably leaning a bit heavily on the negatives ... but here goes...
I wish I could sit beside one of Apple's UX designers for the iTunes/Apple Music product for a few hours and walk them them through the many ways their product is utterly frustrating and heinous for some very basic functions that should "just work." At some point I'd probably feel compelled to slap the Apple person silly - so it's probably best to remain separated by great distances.
Question to Apple: Is there some reason why iTunes cannot reliably sync music between itself and iDevices? I get the feeling that Apple thinks the Whole World has an always-connected super high speed connection to iCloud and happily streams one song at a time to their devices. Guess what Apple, I bought 64 GB and 128 GB devices for a reason. I want to have 10k+ songs of reasonable fidelity sitting right there on my devices, all of the time, and especially when I'm getting ready to board a 10-hour flight and will have limited Internet access for two weeks. My music better not stop playing when the Internet connection dries up.
This seems like a simple request, but for some reason iTunes tries its damnedest to try to force me to use THEIR model of how I should be using my devices. You'd figure that this should just work, but once you have logged into your iTunes account, turned on Apple Music, and if you're a glutton for self-abuse, turned on iTunes Match iTunes just starts crapping all over itself and just getting the damn songs downloaded to the device is ridiculously unreliable.
Yes Apple, I fully expect that I should be able to select 10,000+ songs from My Music and hit Sync and you will faithfully sync each and every one of those songs to my device without any errors and with all of the artwork and metadata intact. Does this ever happen? Hell no, it'll crap all over itself after a few hundred songs and put my iPhone 6+ (128 GB) into a zombie state where I have to reboot the device. This is from a quad core i7 iMac with 32 GB of RAM, so don't blame the host. iTunes has quite simply turned into a big steaming pile of bloated crap that can't do anything reliably anymore. Maybe the iTunes engineers are hoping everyone gets coerced into the single streaming file model so they don't have to deal with complexities greater than 1. Either fix it already or rewrite the thing.
On the other hand, Apple Music shows great promise and there are times when it really shines. But the fact that Apple Music is an add-on to iTunes and the fact that iTunes is such a steaming pile, it's getting really really hard to like the combination that putting anything on top of the existing pile brings. The same goes for iTunes Match, when it works it is great, but more often than not you end up with two or three copies of every song on an album on your iDevice. Nothing like listening to an album and hearing the same song play three times in a row. You think to yourself, "could anyone at Apple be so damn stupid that they would think that such behavior is acceptable?" I don't know what's happening to the dehydrated brains of the Apple engineers working on iTunes, but some things are so obviously wrong and broken that I cannot fathom how they could let it ooze out the door to customers.
No matter how badly Apple treats me as a customer, as evidenced by their willingness to allow the current iTunes abomination with all its tacked-on shaky features like Apple Music and iTunes Match out the door, it's highly unlikely that I'd ever leave them behind for the likes of Google or Microsoft. I don't trust Google and I already suffer enough at Microsoft's hand. I'm betting on Tim Cook and his team doing the right thing and fixing the sinking ship that is iTunes today. They have too much riding on Music to let the bloated mass of iTunes draw it to the bottom. But it's getting dangerously close to capsizing and I really hope that Apple is going to do something very soon to not just fix it - but reimagine iTunes from the core. iTunes could turn into Apple's iTitanic if they don't get their act together very soon.
While I'm at it, what's it been, like 3 or 4 years since iCloud arrived and MobileMe was put to death? Is there some reason why after all of these years that former MobileMe customers STILL cannot get their MobileMe/iCloud accounts merged with their iTunes/Apple Store accounts? Really? Maybe leave one one thousandth of a shiny new feature for the next release and fix this stupid problem. What could possibly be keeping the worlds greatest innovator from doing a little bit of housekeeping for a change?
I tried both for about a month, and I have to say I liked Google's interface better. It's much more streamlined and easier to navigate than the complex, messy UI that Apple has created. I like that Google will upload my music to Google Play Music at no charge, while I have to pay for Apple to do it for me with iTunes Match. At the very least, if someone is paying for an Apple Music subscription, Apple should include iTunes Match for free. Although some may argue that you should be able to find most of the music you want through Apple Music, so why pay for Match? With all that said, though, I'm not sure I want to pay $9.99 a month for either. Ad supported radio is probably good enough for me.
Are we using the same app/service, doesn't seem like it!
I'm currently using both. Both services have their advantages. As it stands at the moment I don't think I will pay for Apple Music after the trial is over.
I think a lot of it comes down to basic personal preference and how you use each service.
It's interesting to read comments which are entirely naive to Google's collection of analytics, the idea that it's just for music curation is laughable. That's not how Google works at all: Every interaction you have with a Google service is amalgamated into your one universal profile.
From a music service it would be when and where you're using the service as the most important information (such as to glean who you were with and what you were doing) and advertise to you with time or geographical awareness (e.g. lunch time). The business of music: genres, artists and so on are secondary information. The purpose of Google services are to provide advertisers with fine-control of how they advertise to you.
I'm not particularly interested in Google having a good idea directly or via analytics where I am located, for how long or who I might be with. I frequently find value in my privacy. It's not paranoia, it's simply being tired of advertisers, advertisers are not aware of how much advertising you receive in conglomerate, nor do they care how annoying they are.
It's interesting to read comments which are entirely naive to Google's collection of analytics, the idea that it's just for music curation is laughable. That's not how Google works at all: Every interaction you have with a Google service is amalgamated into your one universal profile.
From a music service it would be when and where you're using the service as the most important information (such as to glean who you were with and what you were doing) and advertise to you with time or geographical awareness (e.g. lunch time). The business of music: genres, artists and so on are secondary information. The purpose of Google services are to provide advertisers with fine-control of how they advertise to you.
I'm not particularly interested in Google having a good idea directly or via analytics where I am located, for how long or who I might be with. I frequently find value in my privacy. It's not paranoia, it's simply being tired of advertisers, advertisers are not aware of how much advertising you receive in conglomerate, nor do they care how annoying they are.
Have you looked at the trackers and analytics on the websites that you visit?
?
What is Google collecting from their Music app that Apple isn't from theirs? Seriously...
You are aware that Apple has an interest in monetising their user base (called "selling you" around here) and does. It would be refreshing to have an honest on-topic discussion of competing services once in awhile without the distraction of but... but... GOOGLE!
Yeah I know, it's not a big part of their business so it's OK. It doesn't require a fortune teller to know where this thread is heading.
That's more than a heap disingenuous, there are huge differences in how Apple markets data to advertisers, and ads to its user base.
From a base user perspective, Google ads are annoying and plastered anywhere they can squeeze them. Apple's are classy and low profile by comparison.
And yes when an advertising company (remember ads are annoying) pretends to be a tech company, people into tech, tend to resent it.
*Also, I'm just generally creeped out by that chinless Brin freak and Page's dead eyes. Those are the kinda guys you'd expect to see peeking into windows at night... oh wait never mind.
It's interesting to read comments which are entirely naive to Google's collection of analytics, the idea that it's just for music curation is laughable. That's not how Google works at all: Every interaction you have with a Google service is amalgamated into your one universal profile.
From a music service it would be when and where you're using the service as the most important information (such as to glean who you were with and what you were doing) and advertise to you with time or geographical awareness (e.g. lunch time). The business of music: genres, artists and so on are secondary information. The purpose of Google services are to provide advertisers with fine-control of how they advertise to you.
I'm not particularly interested in Google having a good idea directly or via analytics where I am located, for how long or who I might be with. I frequently find value in my privacy. It's not paranoia, it's simply being tired of advertisers, advertisers are not aware of how much advertising you receive in conglomerate, nor do they care how annoying they are.
Exactly. It's all predicated on the theory that highly targeted advertising works better than traditional mass advertising. There's no good way to prove this, but my suspicion is that it's bs.
I think people naturally learn to pick the berries and ignore the leaves, meaning that they pay very little attention to ads unless they like the product or are entertained by the ad itself. That's a sophisticated human process that varies greatly, targeted analytics can't really penetrate that very far. Google wants advertisers to believe that personally collected data trumps this and somehow has better insight. I call shenanigans. It's the same false assumption this Aaron Barr clown made in thinking his analytics would yield gold -http://www.wired.com/2011/02/anonymous/
Google Music is very focused, better designed, and far superior in almost all aspects. Apple should have bought Rdio instead of Beats. Rdio is probably the best streaming service with great social features, but their mobile apps are awful on Android and iOS. If Google were to add playlist sharing and recommendations decoupled from Google , then they will be the one to beat.
There are just a few key things that need to be fixed ASAP.
Going on a road trip, I made a playlist and hit "Make available offline" on the playlist. It proceeded to do something that looked like downloading each song. As soon as I was outside data range, it became clear that none of the songs were actually available offline.
So at a Starbucks with wifi, I tried it again. Make playlist available offline. It showed downloading activity for each song. Once it was done, I jumped in the car and headed off. But the songs still weren't downloaded.
Next stop with wifi, I hit "make available offline" on each song individually. This actually worked.
Apple Music was rushed out before all functionality had a chance to be tested. The fact that it has so many screens and features makes this a tough task. Hopefully they're able to sort it all out ASAP.
This isn’t a very good comparison. The reviewer states his biases in the fact that he’s entrenched on Apple’s platform. A true “Feature” article would have a comparison and include both strengths and weakness of both platforms in more depth that a Feature should go into. This is more of a cursory preview or cherry picked things (looking up a few bands you listen to isn’t statistically significant. Look up a few hundred, and you might be able to give us a +/- of 5%~10%). Most could have figured out on their own, so just take the “Feature” off the post and we are good.
Google & Apple are now the 800 pound gorillas duking it out everywhere they can. I’m not sure if this is good or bad, but what I do know is that Apple has less interest in selling me as a product for advertisers than Google. Apple has been more proactive to protect individual privacy—a review of past articles on all the major tech news sites will bear this out. Sure each has made mis-steps, each one is good at it’s area of expertise (Google: Search and Advertising; Apple at Hardware & Software) and neither are perfect in those either. It might be beneficial for consumers in the long run since competition keeps prices down and encourages new features to stay competitive.
What it all comes down to is preference, and maybe selection for some.
Neither one of these are really for me because I’m spoiled by lossless audio (some of which is not available on either platform), and I can hear lossy compression artifacts in more complex music on my equipment at lower bitrates these stream at. I make due, and can’t always tell: if I am listening on my phone over a cheap pair of headphones/speakers I can’t hear the higher rate compression because the distortion in the sound system eclipses the distortion of the mp3s/AACs. Until streaming is offered lossless I probably won’t listen very long due to ear fatigue. I do listen to Bandcamp a bit (for free), and it is lossy. Since it’s their goal is for me to buy the music they don’t pimp my ears out to advertisers either specifically targeting (like G) or in bulk demos (like A), and they offer better quality, just not the curated lists or algorithms and 24/7 radio streaming. So, for my money—or lack of money—Bandcamp is the best discovery tool, and I am willing to “work” to find good content. Bandcamp also offers a lot of lesser known content (some very goo, some very bad), and you can stream other people’s collections or your collect & wish list in their app or on their site. While the buying isn’t as seamless, it does offer ALAC & FLAC upon purchase, which is a much better value than what most online music services offer.
(Oh I should note that I am a professionally trained audio engineer before people start piling on about how there’s no way I can hear that stuff. Try an A/B on good equipment loud and I think anyone that is actually listening without hearing damage can hear lossy fall apart.)
I've been leaning a bit heavily on the negatives ... ...
iTunes/Apple Music product frustrating and heinous. I feel compelled to slap.
iTunes damnedest force me to use Apple Music, abuse, crapping all over itself and just damn songs ridiculously unreliable.
Yes errors? Hell no, crap all over zombie state big steaming pile of bloated crap fix it already steaming pile, so damn stupid dehydrated brains obviously wrong and broken.
No matter abomination shaky features. I don't trust Google. I'm betting something very iTitanic.
Comments
They can have all the data of my truly exciting life that they want, I'm sure it will take them far. But it does piss me off when my music disappears. I'm sure apple knows a few things about you
Just use your imagination when facts won't do.
You're forgetting... YOU are not Google's customer, you are its product.
Google fattens you up and pokes you with a stick now and then, and all you can think of is, "Free food."
EDIT: ... and so it goes. Based on the last few posts it's officially a bash-fest now with little pertinency to the topic. Oh well, chalk up another opportunity lost ...
I wish I could sit beside one of Apple's UX designers for the iTunes/Apple Music product for a few hours and walk them them through the many ways their product is utterly frustrating and heinous for some very basic functions that should "just work." At some point I'd probably feel compelled to slap the Apple person silly - so it's probably best to remain separated by great distances.
Question to Apple: Is there some reason why iTunes cannot reliably sync music between itself and iDevices? I get the feeling that Apple thinks the Whole World has an always-connected super high speed connection to iCloud and happily streams one song at a time to their devices. Guess what Apple, I bought 64 GB and 128 GB devices for a reason. I want to have 10k+ songs of reasonable fidelity sitting right there on my devices, all of the time, and especially when I'm getting ready to board a 10-hour flight and will have limited Internet access for two weeks. My music better not stop playing when the Internet connection dries up.
This seems like a simple request, but for some reason iTunes tries its damnedest to try to force me to use THEIR model of how I should be using my devices. You'd figure that this should just work, but once you have logged into your iTunes account, turned on Apple Music, and if you're a glutton for self-abuse, turned on iTunes Match iTunes just starts crapping all over itself and just getting the damn songs downloaded to the device is ridiculously unreliable.
Yes Apple, I fully expect that I should be able to select 10,000+ songs from My Music and hit Sync and you will faithfully sync each and every one of those songs to my device without any errors and with all of the artwork and metadata intact. Does this ever happen? Hell no, it'll crap all over itself after a few hundred songs and put my iPhone 6+ (128 GB) into a zombie state where I have to reboot the device. This is from a quad core i7 iMac with 32 GB of RAM, so don't blame the host. iTunes has quite simply turned into a big steaming pile of bloated crap that can't do anything reliably anymore. Maybe the iTunes engineers are hoping everyone gets coerced into the single streaming file model so they don't have to deal with complexities greater than 1. Either fix it already or rewrite the thing.
On the other hand, Apple Music shows great promise and there are times when it really shines. But the fact that Apple Music is an add-on to iTunes and the fact that iTunes is such a steaming pile, it's getting really really hard to like the combination that putting anything on top of the existing pile brings. The same goes for iTunes Match, when it works it is great, but more often than not you end up with two or three copies of every song on an album on your iDevice. Nothing like listening to an album and hearing the same song play three times in a row. You think to yourself, "could anyone at Apple be so damn stupid that they would think that such behavior is acceptable?" I don't know what's happening to the dehydrated brains of the Apple engineers working on iTunes, but some things are so obviously wrong and broken that I cannot fathom how they could let it ooze out the door to customers.
No matter how badly Apple treats me as a customer, as evidenced by their willingness to allow the current iTunes abomination with all its tacked-on shaky features like Apple Music and iTunes Match out the door, it's highly unlikely that I'd ever leave them behind for the likes of Google or Microsoft. I don't trust Google and I already suffer enough at Microsoft's hand. I'm betting on Tim Cook and his team doing the right thing and fixing the sinking ship that is iTunes today. They have too much riding on Music to let the bloated mass of iTunes draw it to the bottom. But it's getting dangerously close to capsizing and I really hope that Apple is going to do something very soon to not just fix it - but reimagine iTunes from the core. iTunes could turn into Apple's iTitanic if they don't get their act together very soon.
While I'm at it, what's it been, like 3 or 4 years since iCloud arrived and MobileMe was put to death? Is there some reason why after all of these years that former MobileMe customers STILL cannot get their MobileMe/iCloud accounts merged with their iTunes/Apple Store accounts? Really? Maybe leave one one thousandth of a shiny new feature for the next release and fix this stupid problem. What could possibly be keeping the worlds greatest innovator from doing a little bit of housekeeping for a change?
The post was going fine but throwing in zingers like your last sentence isn't helpful. Things like that get in the way of good discussions here, tending to quickly drag a thread off into the weeds.
Unless of course it's true. Oh well, I guess shame on those who speak of their personal experiences.
I've been struggling with iTunes and Apple Music mightily over the past few weeks so I'm probably leaning a bit heavily on the negatives ... but here goes...
I wish I could sit beside one of Apple's UX designers for the iTunes/Apple Music product for a few hours and walk them them through the many ways their product is utterly frustrating and heinous for some very basic functions that should "just work." At some point I'd probably feel compelled to slap the Apple person silly - so it's probably best to remain separated by great distances.
Question to Apple: Is there some reason why iTunes cannot reliably sync music between itself and iDevices? I get the feeling that Apple thinks the Whole World has an always-connected super high speed connection to iCloud and happily streams one song at a time to their devices. Guess what Apple, I bought 64 GB and 128 GB devices for a reason. I want to have 10k+ songs of reasonable fidelity sitting right there on my devices, all of the time, and especially when I'm getting ready to board a 10-hour flight and will have limited Internet access for two weeks. My music better not stop playing when the Internet connection dries up.
This seems like a simple request, but for some reason iTunes tries its damnedest to try to force me to use THEIR model of how I should be using my devices. You'd figure that this should just work, but once you have logged into your iTunes account, turned on Apple Music, and if you're a glutton for self-abuse, turned on iTunes Match iTunes just starts crapping all over itself and just getting the damn songs downloaded to the device is ridiculously unreliable.
Yes Apple, I fully expect that I should be able to select 10,000+ songs from My Music and hit Sync and you will faithfully sync each and every one of those songs to my device without any errors and with all of the artwork and metadata intact. Does this ever happen? Hell no, it'll crap all over itself after a few hundred songs and put my iPhone 6+ (128 GB) into a zombie state where I have to reboot the device. This is from a quad core i7 iMac with 32 GB of RAM, so don't blame the host. iTunes has quite simply turned into a big steaming pile of bloated crap that can't do anything reliably anymore. Maybe the iTunes engineers are hoping everyone gets coerced into the single streaming file model so they don't have to deal with complexities greater than 1. Either fix it already or rewrite the thing.
On the other hand, Apple Music shows great promise and there are times when it really shines. But the fact that Apple Music is an add-on to iTunes and the fact that iTunes is such a steaming pile, it's getting really really hard to like the combination that putting anything on top of the existing pile brings. The same goes for iTunes Match, when it works it is great, but more often than not you end up with two or three copies of every song on an album on your iDevice. Nothing like listening to an album and hearing the same song play three times in a row. You think to yourself, "could anyone at Apple be so damn stupid that they would think that such behavior is acceptable?" I don't know what's happening to the dehydrated brains of the Apple engineers working on iTunes, but some things are so obviously wrong and broken that I cannot fathom how they could let it ooze out the door to customers.
No matter how badly Apple treats me as a customer, as evidenced by their willingness to allow the current iTunes abomination with all its tacked-on shaky features like Apple Music and iTunes Match out the door, it's highly unlikely that I'd ever leave them behind for the likes of Google or Microsoft. I don't trust Google and I already suffer enough at Microsoft's hand. I'm betting on Tim Cook and his team doing the right thing and fixing the sinking ship that is iTunes today. They have too much riding on Music to let the bloated mass of iTunes draw it to the bottom. But it's getting dangerously close to capsizing and I really hope that Apple is going to do something very soon to not just fix it - but reimagine iTunes from the core. iTunes could turn into Apple's iTitanic if they don't get their act together very soon.
While I'm at it, what's it been, like 3 or 4 years since iCloud arrived and MobileMe was put to death? Is there some reason why after all of these years that former MobileMe customers STILL cannot get their MobileMe/iCloud accounts merged with their iTunes/Apple Store accounts? Really? Maybe leave one one thousandth of a shiny new feature for the next release and fix this stupid problem. What could possibly be keeping the worlds greatest innovator from doing a little bit of housekeeping for a change?
+1,000,000.
I tried both for about a month, and I have to say I liked Google's interface better. It's much more streamlined and easier to navigate than the complex, messy UI that Apple has created. I like that Google will upload my music to Google Play Music at no charge, while I have to pay for Apple to do it for me with iTunes Match. At the very least, if someone is paying for an Apple Music subscription, Apple should include iTunes Match for free. Although some may argue that you should be able to find most of the music you want through Apple Music, so why pay for Match? With all that said, though, I'm not sure I want to pay $9.99 a month for either. Ad supported radio is probably good enough for me.
Are we using the same app/service, doesn't seem like it!
I'm currently using both. Both services have their advantages. As it stands at the moment I don't think I will pay for Apple Music after the trial is over.
I think a lot of it comes down to basic personal preference and how you use each service.
It's interesting to read comments which are entirely naive to Google's collection of analytics, the idea that it's just for music curation is laughable. That's not how Google works at all: Every interaction you have with a Google service is amalgamated into your one universal profile.
From a music service it would be when and where you're using the service as the most important information (such as to glean who you were with and what you were doing) and advertise to you with time or geographical awareness (e.g. lunch time). The business of music: genres, artists and so on are secondary information. The purpose of Google services are to provide advertisers with fine-control of how they advertise to you.
I'm not particularly interested in Google having a good idea directly or via analytics where I am located, for how long or who I might be with. I frequently find value in my privacy. It's not paranoia, it's simply being tired of advertisers, advertisers are not aware of how much advertising you receive in conglomerate, nor do they care how annoying they are.
It's interesting to read comments which are entirely naive to Google's collection of analytics, the idea that it's just for music curation is laughable. That's not how Google works at all: Every interaction you have with a Google service is amalgamated into your one universal profile.
From a music service it would be when and where you're using the service as the most important information (such as to glean who you were with and what you were doing) and advertise to you with time or geographical awareness (e.g. lunch time). The business of music: genres, artists and so on are secondary information. The purpose of Google services are to provide advertisers with fine-control of how they advertise to you.
I'm not particularly interested in Google having a good idea directly or via analytics where I am located, for how long or who I might be with. I frequently find value in my privacy. It's not paranoia, it's simply being tired of advertisers, advertisers are not aware of how much advertising you receive in conglomerate, nor do they care how annoying they are.
Have you looked at the trackers and analytics on the websites that you visit?
That's more than a heap disingenuous, there are huge differences in how Apple markets data to advertisers, and ads to its user base.
From a base user perspective, Google ads are annoying and plastered anywhere they can squeeze them. Apple's are classy and low profile by comparison.
And yes when an advertising company (remember ads are annoying) pretends to be a tech company, people into tech, tend to resent it.
*Also, I'm just generally creeped out by that chinless Brin freak and Page's dead eyes. Those are the kinda guys you'd expect to see peeking into windows at night... oh wait never mind.
Neither does Apple music, but I guess it is fun to say that.
Exactly. It's all predicated on the theory that highly targeted advertising works better than traditional mass advertising. There's no good way to prove this, but my suspicion is that it's bs.
I think people naturally learn to pick the berries and ignore the leaves, meaning that they pay very little attention to ads unless they like the product or are entertained by the ad itself. That's a sophisticated human process that varies greatly, targeted analytics can't really penetrate that very far. Google wants advertisers to believe that personally collected data trumps this and somehow has better insight. I call shenanigans. It's the same false assumption this Aaron Barr clown made in thinking his analytics would yield gold -http://www.wired.com/2011/02/anonymous/
Going on a road trip, I made a playlist and hit "Make available offline" on the playlist. It proceeded to do something that looked like downloading each song. As soon as I was outside data range, it became clear that none of the songs were actually available offline.
So at a Starbucks with wifi, I tried it again. Make playlist available offline. It showed downloading activity for each song. Once it was done, I jumped in the car and headed off. But the songs still weren't downloaded.
Next stop with wifi, I hit "make available offline" on each song individually. This actually worked.
Apple Music was rushed out before all functionality had a chance to be tested. The fact that it has so many screens and features makes this a tough task. Hopefully they're able to sort it all out ASAP.
This isn’t a very good comparison. The reviewer states his biases in the fact that he’s entrenched on Apple’s platform. A true “Feature” article would have a comparison and include both strengths and weakness of both platforms in more depth that a Feature should go into. This is more of a cursory preview or cherry picked things (looking up a few bands you listen to isn’t statistically significant. Look up a few hundred, and you might be able to give us a +/- of 5%~10%). Most could have figured out on their own, so just take the “Feature” off the post and we are good.
Google & Apple are now the 800 pound gorillas duking it out everywhere they can. I’m not sure if this is good or bad, but what I do know is that Apple has less interest in selling me as a product for advertisers than Google. Apple has been more proactive to protect individual privacy—a review of past articles on all the major tech news sites will bear this out. Sure each has made mis-steps, each one is good at it’s area of expertise (Google: Search and Advertising; Apple at Hardware & Software) and neither are perfect in those either. It might be beneficial for consumers in the long run since competition keeps prices down and encourages new features to stay competitive.
What it all comes down to is preference, and maybe selection for some.
Neither one of these are really for me because I’m spoiled by lossless audio (some of which is not available on either platform), and I can hear lossy compression artifacts in more complex music on my equipment at lower bitrates these stream at. I make due, and can’t always tell: if I am listening on my phone over a cheap pair of headphones/speakers I can’t hear the higher rate compression because the distortion in the sound system eclipses the distortion of the mp3s/AACs. Until streaming is offered lossless I probably won’t listen very long due to ear fatigue. I do listen to Bandcamp a bit (for free), and it is lossy. Since it’s their goal is for me to buy the music they don’t pimp my ears out to advertisers either specifically targeting (like G) or in bulk demos (like A), and they offer better quality, just not the curated lists or algorithms and 24/7 radio streaming. So, for my money—or lack of money—Bandcamp is the best discovery tool, and I am willing to “work” to find good content. Bandcamp also offers a lot of lesser known content (some very goo, some very bad), and you can stream other people’s collections or your collect & wish list in their app or on their site. While the buying isn’t as seamless, it does offer ALAC & FLAC upon purchase, which is a much better value than what most online music services offer.
(Oh I should note that I am a professionally trained audio engineer before people start piling on about how there’s no way I can hear that stuff. Try an A/B on good equipment loud and I think anyone that is actually listening without hearing damage can hear lossy fall apart.)