Apple Music Review
I have been using Apple Music since shortly after it became available. I have used it on an iPad Air, and on my PC. My smartphone uses Android and there is support for it so far. I have only used it at home, with a 60 Mbps internet connection.
Apple Music has a great selection. Still, there are clearly some restrictions, at least for Brazil, as some music will appear with a faded title and isn't available to play. That is not very common, though.
The playlists on For You are usually excellent, and a good portion are very relevant to what I like. In that aspect, the service is pretty good. The playlists on New tend to be good though, but they are clearly not as focused on what I like. Overall, this seems much better than my (relatively short) experience with Spotify.
The iPad app is, quite simply, spectacularly bad. It will crash again and again, and not while doing complex things - just returning to a playing music will sometimes crash it. Adding a music will crash it, starting to play a song... It is pretty impressive given how uncommon crashes are in the iPad. Looks like the app was very, very rushed.
Timeouts are quite annoying as many times I will tap to play a song, wait a few seconds and then it starts to play the next one. Music tends to start pretty fast.
When it works, it is very acceptable, even though I feel some batch choices have to be made one by one (such as adding to My Music a part of a playlist - there is a button for the whole playlist).
On the PC, you use iTunes. It works reasonably well. I miss the keyboard shortcuts I use for WinAmp, and the web style interface can be a little annoying. Funnily enough, music tends to take a while longer than in the iPad to start, even though the PC connection should be faster.
Overall, the service has everything it needs to be something I will pay for, except for a decent iPad app or any Android app. I'd think that the hard part would be the back end and signing up all those artists and labels, but looks like for Apple it was the other way around...
Apple Music has a great selection. Still, there are clearly some restrictions, at least for Brazil, as some music will appear with a faded title and isn't available to play. That is not very common, though.
The playlists on For You are usually excellent, and a good portion are very relevant to what I like. In that aspect, the service is pretty good. The playlists on New tend to be good though, but they are clearly not as focused on what I like. Overall, this seems much better than my (relatively short) experience with Spotify.
The iPad app is, quite simply, spectacularly bad. It will crash again and again, and not while doing complex things - just returning to a playing music will sometimes crash it. Adding a music will crash it, starting to play a song... It is pretty impressive given how uncommon crashes are in the iPad. Looks like the app was very, very rushed.
Timeouts are quite annoying as many times I will tap to play a song, wait a few seconds and then it starts to play the next one. Music tends to start pretty fast.
When it works, it is very acceptable, even though I feel some batch choices have to be made one by one (such as adding to My Music a part of a playlist - there is a button for the whole playlist).
On the PC, you use iTunes. It works reasonably well. I miss the keyboard shortcuts I use for WinAmp, and the web style interface can be a little annoying. Funnily enough, music tends to take a while longer than in the iPad to start, even though the PC connection should be faster.
Overall, the service has everything it needs to be something I will pay for, except for a decent iPad app or any Android app. I'd think that the hard part would be the back end and signing up all those artists and labels, but looks like for Apple it was the other way around...
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