Apple Music Software

I love Apple Music, I use it literally everyday! But there’s always something wrong when it comes to the UI. Album covers won’t load, I’ll add a song to my playlist and it won’t actually add it, it’ll sometimes take a second to skip/play/pause songs, etc. The service is great but the UI is lacking the usual quality Apple gives most of its other apps. Like most of these problems have been around for a long time now without ever getting fixed. Once Apple fixes these problems and new ones stop popping up as often as they do I’ll give Apple Music 5 stars.

Has all the music you could want, a slick design, and basic features but it still feels like Apple Music is just checking the boxes for a basic music player. There are no real stand-out features separating it from the competition. Using it day-to-day it is easy to see the glaring flaws that keep it in second place. There is a song queueing system, but it isn’t practical in use. The way it is handed by competitors and by the Mac music app, where there is a play next and a play later and both are played before the rest of the playlist, is the ideal way to handle this feature. And when you do add music to up next or the library there’s a huge obstructive pop-up for each and every song. Dolby Atmos is also overly hyped and mostly just a gimmick that does not improve the vast majority of songs. They sound better on stereo since that is how they were originally mixed. Maybe this will change in the future when songs are truly mixed in Amos, but for now the feature stays off for me. The real redeeming quality of Apple Music is its integration with iOS. It’s great to use with the Apple Watch and during workouts. The live album artwork is also gorgeous, but it doesn’t show up in the library tab! TL;DR: Apple Music mostly checks boxes. There are the beginnings of what could be stand-out features, but most of the implementation is lackluster.

Need the ability to pin playlists Needs a better handoff between devices. A button to press inside the app to select the device you want to stream from and it takes over from that point in a song (like the rival service offers) instead of having to fiddle with control center and get harassed about another device already playing music. I’m fully updated on iOS and some songs are still stopping at the 15 second mark (the timer keeps moving, but there’s no audio). Tried force quitting and restarting the app, deleted all downloads and re-downloaded, issue persists. New Music recommendations (for me) are not good. No matter how many times I dislike a song, it or something similar is constantly recommended to me. I make sure to love the songs I really enjoy to get better recommendations, but it still seems like random things are offered to me. I’ve used Apple Music since it was released and it’s like the service has no idea what I like even though I like or dislike everything I listen to. Related to dislikes, we need to be able to dislike an artist (like on the green competitor… “I don’t like this artist”). It does look nice though. And besides the occasional song pausing that I mentioned earlier, it works pretty well.