I’ve been on a tear lately about Apple Music and how it doesn’t work properly. I know there are a lot of people that are very happy with the service, and I’m really happy for those people.
However, there are a lot of people, me included that have had significant problems over the last few months. The update today is supposed to fix a lot of the bugs in the app. Basic things like being able to download music for offline listening—a feature that has never worked properly.
I believe in Apple and the message the company delivers about its products, which is why I’m so hard on Apple Music—it hasn’t lived up to Apple’s standards of a quality application or service.
I’m going to test the iOS updates a little more over the next couple of days, but I spent some time with the Apple TV update and there’s still some problems.
Maybe these problems are only happening for me, I don’t know. See if this happens for you:
If you seed a song and make a radio station in Apple Music and come to a song you don’t like; go to the top of the screen and press the button to bring up the menu; tap “Never Play This Song”; The next song will start playing; Don’t move down to the song, keep the cursor on the circle and press it again; Apple Music has no idea what song is playing. It’s been like that from the beginning for me.
For example, I was listening to Robert Plant:
When I followed the steps above, I get this. Apple Music thinks I’m listening to Peter Frampton.
It happens every time. I tried it again listening to a Boston song:
And I get this:
Here is something else to try.
Add a song to Apple Music on Apple TV and then go to that artist and album. You should see one song; press play and when the big album appears on the screen press and go to the circle on top of the screen; press it and go to the album page.
Apple Music thinks—or at least suggests—you have the entire album in your music, even though you only have one song. Tap on the checkmark in Apple Music and a menu will appear that says “Remove from My Music.” I can press that 100 times and nothing happens. The song remains in my library.
There are other things, but I’ll stop there for today. I hope these are only issues that I have, but we’ll see.
Never even considered trying Apple Music. How long has it been since Apple software consistently worked right? Two years?
Do you know what I want to see in 2016 for the Mac and iPhone? Point releases. Skip a year of new OS versions and just fix what they have. They’ll never do it, just like they’ll never solve the problem of reaching the top row of icons on a big phone by filling them from bottom to top, but the clockwork, “Ready or not, here it comes,” update cycle is killing IOS and OS X.
Yeah and if we didn’t get new version of software everyone would be saying Apple no longer innovates and companies x, y and z are out innovating Apple. iOS 9 and El Cap we essentially point releases.
So you’re saying that Apple cares more about people thinking that they’re innovating than actually turning out quality products. That may be true, but that’s kind of the problem I’m talking about.
Point releases that worked less well than what they replaced. That’s not how it’s supposed to work.
I just airplay most times to my AppleTV, rather than messing with the interface. The Apple Music interface in iOS has been improved some.. I’m fairly happy with it, with exception to it’s ‘random’ related choices with Radio.
Love St. Vincents mixtape delivery service for basic discovery.
But when I do my own Classic Christmas station, instead of the built in one, it’s all over picking non-christmas music based on my selection.. They REALLY need to fix that.
I’m not as hardcore though, I only have a few thousand songs.. small compared to what many have.. I’ve been eating up the all you can eat thats part of the $10/mo service and downloading like crazy on my iPad/iPhone though.. I’ve discovered more music that I want many times over since I got a subscription than I ever did with Pandora.
I agree with orc; a lot was made about how iOS 9 and “El Cap” were supposed to be like Snow Leopard (which was amazing, btw–it actually did free up space and make my machine run better back in the day), but it turns out they actually broke a lot of stuff :-/ Speaking of point releases, OS X 10.11.2 was released today… The second big patch in, what? 2 months?
I can confirm the first problem, when I hit it it brought up the first song that played in the station. Haven’t tried the second one because I haven’t enabled iCloud Music Library.
Jim, so far have not been able to reproduce that. I’m still on the previous version of tvOS though. I’ll try again after updating
Sloppy, sloppy, just plain sloppy. Apple’s new programmers must be rejects from Microsoft’s past downsizing. No integrity, nor ownership of these oversights.
I’d rather they not release than release half-baked software.
The best feature of Apple Music is the curated content that enables one to discover new music. Jim, your ability to learn anything new about music clearly ossified in the mid 70’s, so Apple Music isn’t for you. Your instincts are correct: stay away.
That’s how the fashion business works, which is where Apple seems to be looking for direction these days.
I need to clarify something. You say if you add a song, then Apple Music says you have the entire album and not just that one song. However, isn’t that the way Apple Music is supposed to work? It shows you everything you can possibly listen to, so if you select a song shouldn’t it show the entire album or at least have an option to show that? Is there a setting in TVOS to only show what is in your personal library, whether theya re actual added files or Apple Music downloads that would disappear should you cancel the service? (I seem to remember reading about such a setting.)
Apologies for not being able to check this out myself. I’m not an Apple Music subscriber, although I’m considering it or iTunes Match once I figure out if either of those is a good option for my wife and I to combine our music collections more easily.
I’ve tried to reproduce this and I can’t. On my end, those tracks and others all work fine. I’m using Apple Music with iTunes Match enabled.
Can we talk about the elephant in the room?
Jim’s taste in music.
(I kid, I kid.
I grew up on Classic Rock, and I do actually like it.)
I find that the people to blame for buggy, half-baked software, in a corporate environment, are management.
And possibly QA, but if it’s a QA problem it’s really a management problem for not staffing/funding/prioritizing QA.
Programmers can’t fix bugs QA doesn’t detect before release.
thats always worked properly for me.
so much hand-wringing nonsense.
iOS 9 and El Cap didnt break crap on my devices. 2 iphones, 2 ipads, 3 macs. no. problems.
it isnt half-baked software. its still great software, but a few things have changed:
1) the capabilities (demands) of the software is much higher
2) there are a lot more users now. meaning more use case scenarios, especially concerning #1.
3) theres a lot more hand-wringing on sites trying to get clicks. this gets amplified in forums due to #2
this. thats my main use case — discovering new stuff.
tvOS had this annoying bug from the beginning – You can add music to iCML but you can’t remove them once added. Need to use the Mac or iOS devices to remove.