I’ve been a subscriber to rdio for a couple of years, streaming music isn’t anything new to me. So I was very interested to check out Apple’s implementation.
Here’s my take after using it for the last couple of days.
The Good
Playlists:
The curated playlists are feature I didn’t expect to use much, but I’ve spent more time listening to these than anything else. Apple is doing a great job of both selecting playlists I’d be interested in based on my music preferences and selecting tracks.
The only weird thing is that the playlist seem to skew heavily towards older music. I’m not sure why this might be, I don’t typically listen to a lot of old music.
Library:
The selection of available artist and albums is comparable to rdio. I have yet to look for something I couldn’t find.
Streaming Tech:
Apple is doing a much better job of varying the stream based on available bandwidth. We have a few mobile internet dead zones near our place that always trip up rdio, Apple Music has not had any problems in these zones.
Apple Music also seems to be doing a good job of buffering. There is no delay in switching to the next track.
The Bad
Desktop Client Does Not Work:
I can’t get Apple Music to work in iTunes, period.
App UI:
Rdio has a really great mobile app. Apple, not so much. I find it really confusing and hard to use. More on this in a future post (maybe).
Beats 1:
Beats1 plays the ultra poppy music you’d expect a beats wearing teenager to eat up. It’s not for me.
3 replies on “48 hours with Apple Music”
Under the bad: It doesn’t remember where you left off from device to device. Rdio is great for this. And yeah, desktop version sucks. Instead of making it work within the iTunes framework, maybe they should have just developed a decent standalone.
You’re right. I totally forgot about that.
I’m leaning towards sticking with rdio at this point, but Apple has 3 months to win me over.
I am thinking the very same thing. One other issue keeping me from switching: Apple Music is not compatible with Sonos speakers. Both Apple and Sonos say it will be “by the end of 2015.” That sounds like more than 3 months to me.
I wanted to write a post like this, but it would be the exact same post. Thanks for beating me to it.