{"id":50428,"date":"2023-12-12T09:01:29","date_gmt":"2023-12-12T17:01:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/?p=50428"},"modified":"2023-12-12T09:01:29","modified_gmt":"2023-12-12T17:01:29","slug":"apple-music-grumbling","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/2023\/12\/12\/apple-music-grumbling\/","title":{"rendered":"Apple Music Grumbling"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class='__iawmlf-post-loop-links' style='display:none;' data-iawmlf-post-links='[]'><\/div>\n<p>(That&#8217;s both &#8220;the Apple Music service&#8221; and &#8220;using Apple devices to listen to music&#8221;, to be clear.)<\/p>\n<p>For all the things Apple does well that I like and appreciate, and that keep me as a customer, some things absolutely drive me up the wall.<\/p>\n<p>I have a big music collection, so I&#8217;m particular about how I keep things arranged on my computers and my iPhone. I have a bunch of custom smart playlists, keep my phone set to only sync certain playlists, and do <em>not<\/em> automatically sync my entire library. I simply have too much music to do that, and I don&#8217;t want to have to scroll through every playlist to find one of the few that I use on my phone.<\/p>\n<p>Because of this, for a long time, I avoided Apple Music. (For other reasons too, including that I am particular about my metadata and have spent ridiculous numbers of hours making sure it&#8217;s correct, and Apple has a particularly annoying habit of overwriting user-defined metadata if you give it full access to the on-device library.) I finally signed up a few years back when the Apple One collection of services hit a good cost\/usefulness ratio. It has come in handy (particularly for my wife), but I make sure to keep the &#8220;sync library&#8221; setting turned off, so that I know that <em>I&#8217;m<\/em> the only one managing the music on my phone.<\/p>\n<p>For a long time, this worked fine. 95% of my phone-based listening was from my on-device library; the 5% of the time that I actually used Apple Music (I like their &#8220;Get Up!&#8221; playlist when I&#8217;m making breakfast in the morning, and will sometimes pop on their &#8220;Chill Mix&#8221; or a downtempo or trip-hop station as background music when I&#8217;m reading or relaxing before bed) was a nice way to get a mix of stuff I knew and stuff I was unfamiliar with. I&#8217;ve found some good new (or new to me) tunes that way as well, so even when it&#8217;s only a small part of my listening, Apple Music has been helping with music discovery as well.<\/p>\n<p>So this was working. When I listened to Apple Music and heard something I liked, I&#8217;d &#8220;favorite&#8221; it. This would both help to train Apple Music so it would find more stuff I liked, and allowed me to go back and find the things I liked so that I could then go back and actually buy the full tracks or albums from the iTunes Store. As someone who doesn&#8217;t trust streaming services and regularly purchases the media that I enjoy so that I know I have a copy and don&#8217;t have to worry about it magically disappearing when licensing agreements change (I want to <em>own<\/em> my media, not rent it while being told I&#8217;m buying it), this seems like exactly the kind of use that Apple and the studios and artists would want. Streaming, like radio, is a way to find new things that I then go and spend more money to own (and send a more reasonable number of pennies back to the artists).<\/p>\n<p>Unfortunately, for some reason, they&#8217;ve made an obnoxious change with iOS 17. Now, every time I try to &#8220;favorite&#8221; a song, I&#8217;m told that I <em>have<\/em> to turn on the &#8220;sync library&#8221; setting. Apparently, Apple no longer really considers your Apple Music library and your on-device library to be separate things. The first time this happened, not realizing what would happen, I made the mistake of turning on the &#8220;sync library&#8221; setting, and while I could then favorite tracks in Apple Music, it also <em>completely<\/em> screwed up what was on my phone. I had <em>every<\/em> playlist that I have on my computer on my phone instead of just the ones that I manually select, but for some reason, they were all empty, and therefore useless. There was still a lot of music on the phone in the &#8220;Downloaded&#8221; list, but the playlists didn&#8217;t show anything, and it was incredibly difficult to figure out what was actually on my phone and what was in the cloud somewhere without digging through that &#8220;Downloads&#8221; list. That got disabled again after a couple days of trying to figure out a way to make it work.<\/p>\n<p>I really don&#8217;t understand this change, and why Apple Music can no longer learn about my tastes without completely screwing up the systems I&#8217;ve had working for years for keeping just the music I want on my phone. But the end result is that Apple Music is now far less useful to me than it has been, and I&#8217;m less likely to use it (but, of course, Apple&#8217;s unlikely to care, because I&#8217;m just going to keep paying for it as part of the Apple One subscription&#8230;).<\/p>\n<p>Apple does a lot well. But I really wish they&#8217;d put a little (well&#8230;a lot) more thought behind the entire music experience, especially for people like me with large libraries that we&#8217;ve put a lot of effort into sorting, tweaking metadata, and generally futzing with to make sure they&#8217;re set up just as we like.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>That&#8217;s both &#8216;the Apple Music service&#8217; and &#8216;using Apple devices to listen to music&#8217;, to be clear. Apple changed something with iOS 17 and made Apple Music less useful for me, and I&#8217;m ranting about it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2039],"tags":[5824],"class_list":["post-50428","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-apple","tag-apple-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50428","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=50428"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50428\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=50428"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=50428"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=50428"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}