I'm not where it fits into the timeline, but Apple has actually offered a rather obscure and limited way to use Apple Music in a browser for some time prior to the launch of the full web client.
There's no way to browse, or even launch it directly. You have to search, via Google or other, for an album, and follow the link to what always used to be the iTunes Preview page. You can still listen to the thirty-second previews on this page, but there's a sign-in link in the header that will, quite surprisingly, unlock full playback of the album without launching iTunes.
It's hardly the full Apple Music experience – all you get is the album you found and some related links at the bottom, with no access to your library or playlists – but it does work. I'm not really sure what purpose this functionality served, other than perhaps as a testbed for the actual web client, but it's still active for the time being.
This is used for sites such as Genius (lyrics aggregator/social commentary mix, still uses Apple Music I believe) to provide a snippet to browsers without a subscription.
Spotify has had it since 2008 and Google Play Music since 2011. Blows my mind that people have used this for so long without web support... Then again if you're stuck in the garden, you don't have much choice.
This is great, no longer trying to get iTunes working in wine on linux, just play the music straight from the browser, and if you want a native app, Windows and MacOS has iTunes, no electron non-sense.
Actually Apple Music in iTunes is just a web view that leaks like crazy, to the point of making iTunes slow to a crawl, if you're quickly navigating through artists and albums.
Not much better than Electron IMO. Apple Music in the browser seems like there isn't much hope of a truly native experience now.
I suspect this might be a problem with your installation - if you create a new MacOS user account for testing, does the problem persist? I don't recall Messages every beach-balling for me and I'm not exactly on new hardware.
So if you have problem that goes away with another user, the problem commonly lies in a corrupted preference related to the app, so you start hunting out the .plists for the application and moving them to the desktop before relaunching and seeing if the problem is fixed.
If not, then you start poking about in Application Support for the app.
After 9 years of Apple use, I have successfully made this method work one time (iMessages), and even then, it took a full system reboot after each file move to validate whether or not that had made a difference.
The whole process took the better part of a day. It was long, it was tedious, but at least I got there in the end. There was no paid-support story that would have done this for me, but hey ho, it all worked out. I can't imagine I'll ever have the time to go through that much effort again.
The same cant be said for my iMessage history on my iPhone, which has been lost repeatedly as the only solution was "don't restore from your backup".
The last time I saw support for it still there, the IM stuff would open in a separate, old-looking window from the Messages window. Basically, they kept the old code and just built a new version parallel to it, then eventually took out the old one.
The Podcasts and TV apps are native Catalyst (iPad apps on macOS) apps.
The Music app is still some sort of Frankenstein iTunes thing. The Library section views are native. The Apple Music section is still web. It is still slow compared to Spotify but much better compared to how it is in iTunes.
Is there an Apple Music API that let's you directly access the audio data (i.e. without going through the browser DRM controls)? From my quick look it seems they don't, unsurprisingly.
seems they're using Ember.js . Reason I love spotify so much is that it's available on the web, no need to be downloading native apps everywhere. Always bet on the web. also good to see, another web property using Ember. As a react dev, competition is healthy
Not exactly. Ember was originally “SproutCore 2.0” but the project goals diverged and a fork occurred (it was renamed “Amber” around that time, before a name clash was discovered and it acquired its current name “Ember”). Development on both continues concurrently today.
Incidentally, the latest major SproutCore version is 2.0.
I love React, but when I saw Tom Dale demo GlimmerVM, I thought to myself, now HERE is something truly new and exciting(in that context - there's nothing new about bytecode). I watch the progress with great enthusiasm.
alive and well with huge strides in the framework, better than ever. that said ember gets much less press than it's peers, partly due to not being backed by a major fang corp and historical perception.
I only remember Ember because it was so much more popular at the time (2013? Early 2014?) than Backbone, which I had just completed an application using, and Angular, which was relatively new to the scene. Ember looked like it was the next big thing. And then, I guess, React came around and everybody was hot on the heels of the next big thing.
Well, I tried Ember back in the day for one project and remember it being pretty hard to learn and quite fat in terms of file size. It was quite powerful when you were using it the way it was supposed to be used, but made your life pretty hard when you wanted to do things a bit simpler and the initial load times were horrible at the time.
I heard, that things got a lot better over the years, but I never tried it again. However, I still admire the very clear architecture they had with ember-data as it was very useful (e.g. for testing) and eliminated a lot of uncertainty regarding the API design.
Going strong since 2011, although Ember is aimed a lot more toward quiet business productivity.
What some see as constraints, others see as consistency. It's more typically seen in "dashboard apps" but it's also great when you need to quickly spin up a new site and don't want to have to configure anything. I know movie studios in LA that use it for those kinds of promo websites, because of the fast turn around time.
Another thing that is cool about Ember is the community-driven process- if you have a good idea for Ember and the energy to make it happen, it typically will happen. Makes you feel like you can make a difference if that's your thing.
This doesn't matter in practice - they could have freely used either to design the web client at no cost. If they wanted to take over development and go their own direction they just had to fork them.
Is there still patent uncertainty around React (or Angular)?
Otherwise, Im not sure why anyone outside HN would care about the optics of which front-end library was used.
Are you really saying you don’t understand why Apple might not want to use a framework created by their frenemies in Facebook and Google, especially given Apple’s focus on privacy and willingness to make an example of FB and Google for their comparatively lax privacy standards?
Sure, but how does any of that resonate with the general public?
"Apple is using Facebook's front-end code library" isnt exactly a gripping headline or tweet.
You can read the source code to either; its not as if theyre secretly embedding tracking into every React/Angular app.
Ok. I mean you can ask that to Tim Cook :) If not optics it’s about ego. Again, if Apple hates FB/Goog then why use their frameworks when there’s dozens of other alternatives.
Interesting to see Apple starting to move into the web app product space (aside from iCloud, of course). Must say though that performance feels a bit sluggish (esp. hover states) on a Macbook Pro (tested in Firefox, Chrome and Safari).
Not surprising as they are using Ember (one of the slowest front end frameworks), Moment (super heavy date library), and they don't even minify their code...
As you can see Ember 3.11.1 doesn't fare too well in either performance, startup metrics, or memory consumption. Glimmer does a bit better but that not much.
Very cool! I've loved Apple Music ever since I was able to upload my library using Match, and I feel like its recommendations are getting better and better. Nice to have this in a pinned tab.
He is either on a low powered device or overly focused on details. In my experience I have never needed to look at RAM usage on my 2017 16GB MBP, but sometimes I do check CPU usage just to see how hard that intense process is hitting the computer and when it finishes.
This was the reason I chose Spotify over Apple music all those years ago.
Any reason to prefer Apple Music over Spotify? Spotify's recommendations have been absolutely stellar for me over the years and I have a lot of playlists and stuff "locking" me in.
Apple has long had a much better experience when it comes to offline use and private media.
With iCloud, tracks you add to your library are automatically uploaded to Apple's cloud and become available on all devices. That helps a lot because you don't have to resort to using some other player for that those obscure albums that aren't streaming anywhere. After all, while Apple and Spotify have a lot of music, there are still many holes in their inventories.
Apple has always been much nicer about offline track availability. Just click the download icon and the tracks will stay on your device. Spotify has had this feature, but it's been flaky. After Apple Music launched, they eventually added a "Download" toggle to albums, but only in the mobile app (it's there for playlists in the desktop app, for some reason).
Spotify has a 10,000 song limit that applies to adding (or "liking" as it's now called) to your library. You can keep more in playlists, but you can't "like" more than 10,000 songs, which is crazy. It's not a lot of songs. My jazz collection alone is more than that. Apple's limit is 100,000, as far as I can tell.
Without even going into the merits of Spotify's playlists as you mentioned, one reason I would personally prefer Spotify over Apple Music even if we assume rest of the things equal would be to support a small player(compared to Apple). Apple, a company already well entrenched in so many fields controlling one more is something I would not prefer to see. They already are at a huge advantage in even controlling this market as owning iOS and iTunes makes it very easy for them to push their service.
Tell Apple, not me. I’d have written it myself already if such a thing were possible. Special VPNs can do this, or you can just carry a travel router, 4g modem, and usb battery pack velcroed to your ankle, and connect to it via WiFi, so that you can blackhole things via DNS or iptables.
I almost never use Spotify on my phone. The one exception is when I needed to handle the music for my wedding (piped it through some massive bluetooth speakers).
If you have a big collection of obscure/foreign music (video game music is a great example), then nothing beats Apple Music + iCloud Music Library and iTunes match.
You can use iTunes match to provide cloud-based high quality versions for music ripped from your CDs (or collected during your teenage Napster years).
Even better, being able to mix content from your iCloud Music Library and streamable content from Apple Music is a huge plus.
Does it touch my original files in any way? I have a huge selection of rare and obscure music not available via iTunes or any streaming service. Obviously I don't want any service to touch, modify or replace these or any of my more popular release. I'm wary about auto matching. Should I be?
Lossless files are stored as 256kbps AAC in their cloud. I believe lossy MP3s and AACs are uploaded as-is. (I'm glad that Apple is aware that transcoding is generally a bad thing.)
iTunes also doesn't upload files that don't have a minimum bitrate of 96kbps [1].
For my use, all the major streaming platforms are broadly equivalent in functionality, so I go with the cheapest one. That was Amazon Music when I had Prime, which I haven't renewed. Spotify is about 50% more expensive than Apple Music in my location, so I'll likely be going with Apple Music when my Amazon subscription expires.
Apple Music's offline playback has bugs but it is less broken than Spotify's (although unlike Spotify you can't automatically download all your songs, you have to do some hacky workaround where you create a smart playlist of all of your songs and then download that playlist every time you get a new song)
I imagine this is more Apple’s doing than Spotify’s, but last I tried I couldn’t put Spotify music on my Apple Watch to use untethered. I run with my Apple Watch, Bluetooth headphones and no phone, and being able to do that is worth choosing Apple Music for me.
Also no Facebook SDK if you care about that, there was the recent article here about how that pings Facebook with identifiers on app launch even if you’re not using any of its functionality yourself.
In offline mode, the app is basically useless.
No way to browse through the artist's whose songs I've saved up. Gets worse -
Say I want to listen to a particular album. I type the name of the album. I do not get a result of the album which I can go to, and play start to end. I do get, however, random songs from the album which if I'm lucky, and remember the sequence in which they appear on the album, I can manually add to the queue and listen to.
The artist tab doesn't work. The album tab doesn't work. These are online only tabs which include things like "New releases", "Fans also like", "Performing Livr" etc.
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Even when I'm connected to the net ( at home), there is no way to see all the artists whose songs I've added to my library.
There is no library.
Songs you can "like", artists you can "follow". When i follow an artist, and click on him, I don't see the albums I've added to my library/liked.
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tl,dr: It's a UX clusterfuck. They took something which works and fucked it up ad infinitum. I've switched to Apple music, which is undoubtedly bad in terms of recommendations, but at least it lets me listen to the stuff I know I like.
Spotify recently changed their Family plan to allow the main user to control the explicit lyrics filter. However, I'm not sure if that filter is on a per-person basis or across the whole family.
Whatever. I was really hoping to see some improvements to the music-organization and display aspects here but it looks like they just re-implemented the weird parts of iTunes using html5.
For example:
It drives me crazy how Apple Music emphasizes the idea that "Recently Added" is only grouped by albums. I don't add whole albums to my library, I add individual songs. I want to play all the songs I've recently added because hey it's new music I like. Why can't I get an auto-updating playlist of all the songs I've recently added? None of the cloud-based Apple platforms support smart-playlists and the "Recently Added" section only lets you play songs from an individual album from which you may have only added a single song.
It's super weird. - Apple music seems to really push you into either whole albums or the overly-generic editor-curated playlists.
Smart playlists are not displayed on cloud-based platforms (e.g. this webapp, sonos integrations, etc). I presume this is because they didn't want to implement the business-logic both on the server and on the native iTunes app.
I’ve never figured out why some Apple products are immensely well designed and some have basic aspects which don’t make sense and I guess it comes down to the people working on the products using them day to day or some exec who really uses an app day to day championing UX improvements.
Music in its current iteration seems driven by Apple’s need to become a services company and the music app which really last spoke to people internally was one in which your own music is portable, not a steaming music service.
I'd guess the people using Apple music mostly use it in an album-based manner. Hell, my music listening is almost entirely discography-based, I listen to everything an artist has produced chronologically before moving to the next artist that I'm in the mood for.
On iOS, it redirects to the native iTunes App. Even if you somehow manage to overcome that, its presence clearly indicates that iOS isn’t a supported target - at which point, assuming it’s intentionally broken as you describe for non-beta reasons (this is not necessarily true), using that CSS would potentially be wasteful and break non-iOS users!
I don’t know…personally, Apple’s native apps are easier for me to reverse engineer than most minified obfuscated JavaScript. Then again, I’m not a web developer.
Usually you only need to look at the requests anyway and there the web client is probably a bit nicer than iTunes with cert pinning if I remember correctly.
Can't link directly to a personal playlist (even if it's "published" to Apple's weird social network) for someone not already logged in (they just get the Apple Music landing page). So close! They're so smart, they'll figure this out some day!
I used to use them when they were MOG. Between becoming Beats (which I stuck to for awhile) and then Apple trying to wall garden them, I just ended up using Google Play Music.
Actually, this won't even let me sign in with my Apple ID. It accepts my username/password, and prompts me to "Try it now", but when I click that, I get a drop down telling me I need to open the Apple Music client. Bravo, Apple.
Now that there’s one more platform where Apple Music is available it would be really great if we could have the playback queue synced between them. I don’t want to recreate my listening queue I every time I’m changing my device.
Ember used to require jQuery but recently moved to removing it by default; users can opt-in if they still need it. Once the project moves to a later version of Ember I suspect the jQuery bit will drop off. (Who knows, though...)
Wappalyzer's results for example.com, a 1.3 KB static page with no JS or sub-requests, include eight JS frameworks and two web font providers. Its results for facebook.com include a web framework made by Yahoo and deprecated in 2014. It says Youtube is built on WordPress, and HN is a React app with custom fonts.
I was using the "Technology lookup" box on the homepage, testing with the extension I get only Nginx too. And Youtube seems right and example.com maybe right, though nothing at all for Facebook.
This is very interesting. I'm using PiHole; and, it seems that when I click that link, I'm sent to the Chinese version of the Apple site and there's no beta. Very strange!
I'm experiencing this issue in Firefox, where I have all my regular ad-blocking, and an incognito window in Chrome, where I don't have any of it.
As much as I commend them for creating a web client for their music service, the UI looks like it was designed by an amateur. Can't really put my finger on it but it's something to do with the content alignment, the gradients used. I would have expected better from Apple.
I’m so sad that most consumers want to pay for things like this or Spotify.
I only buy digital albums, almost always from Bandcamp or bespoke band-specific sites, or Amazon if there’s no other choice.
Always just a straight download of mp3 or ogg formats, backed up and accessible in cloud storage.
I use VLC player on all my devices, and syncing music with the VLC wifi download tool is so extremely easy and simple.
I have all the music I could ever possibly want, easily accessible on all devices and easy to sync on all devices, no internet connection needed, no monthly charge or user account, no ads, can transfer it all to any new devices I get with no vendor lock-in.
I just can’t believe the populace was suckered into music streaming instead of music owning. So sad.
I would have never discovered 99% of the music I listen to if I didn't use Spotify.
There are pros/cons to both sides of this argument. Many artists would not have a music career if it weren't for platforms like Spotify (mainly Spotify). Spotify put their music in people's ears. Spotify made people fans and now those fans buy tickets and go to their shows, so these bands are able to tour.
> “I would have never discovered 99% of the music I listen to if I didn't use Spotify.”
Can you take a step back and recognize this is weird and pathological. Music recommendations should come from experience, people, multiple sources. If a for-profit platform interested in extracting as much money from you as they can (let alone minimize their costs paid to artists) is responsible for 99% of what you believe you are choosing to consume... something’s pretty wrong.
Imagine saying, I wouldn’t have discovered 99% of the foods I like if not for my Blue Apron subscription...
Exactly. Spotify and Youtube links enable sharing music easily among friends. Friends send me messages "hey check out this" accompanied by a link directly to spotify. If we were still in the tape/CD age, this wouldn't be as easily possible.
The comment above specifically said 99% of the music they listen to was discovered by Spotify. That is replacing, not complementing. This is also the same model I see in friends or colleagues who use Spotify: it is their sole source of music or music recommendation.
I suppose their recommendation quality only goes up the more you use the platform. It is a damn good recommender. From Discover Weekly to similar features like "Artist/Song/Playlist Radio" that continue playing similar music after your playlist/album ends... the Spotify recommendation systems are probably the most successful, enhancing implementation of ML I can recall seeing in the wild. Certainly much better than YouTube which for months has been begging me to watch this "Pete Davidson Got Stuck Paying for Kid Cudi's Birthday Dinner..." video (I'm not a fan of either of those guys).
Maybe you should give it a try. Certainly can't hurt.
I also prefer to purchase albums to own in a format of my choosing and you sound like a jerk. Why do you feel the need to crap on things other people enjoy and don’t affect you?
Streaming isn’t available where there’s no internet connection, unless you just happen to have cached what you’re looking for. Whereas my entire music collection is available any time.
I also heavily dispute that Spotify, Apple, etc lead to better search or discovery.
> Whereas my entire music collection is available any time.
You carry your “easily accessible cloud storage” everywhere with you?
> I also heavily dispute that Spotify, Apple, etc lead to better search or discovery.
You don’t “dispute”. You “firmly believe”. As others already pointed out: I’d never have discovered as much music within my music tastes as I’ve done with Spotify.
There’s no chance in hell I could’ve stumbled on some indie band that is US-only while leaving in Sweden.
There are Swedish bands which are suddenly popular in Brasil and they go there on tours, which they never would’ve done without Spotify.
> “You carry your “easily accessible cloud storage” everywhere with you?”
Huh? I mean, first of all yes, I do. I have my whole music library in Dropbox, but that’s not related to what I’m saying.
I have my whole music library already cached on my phone, tablet, laptop, etc., and so can listen without an internet connection. This is in VLC, not any cloud storage (I just use that for backups only).
Well personally I'd rather have all the music I'll ever need right here with basically a few taps on my phone for a very small cost every month instead of having to buy and download every album/song I want (would be extremely expensive in my case), back them up in the cloud, sync them with all my devices etc.
This comes from someone with a collection of roughly 1500 12" vinlys, meaning from someone who actually owns his music.
Has anyone noticed this? On the native apps, when you click on an album, the most popular songs have a star icon next to them. I like that. The third party web apps that consume the Apple Music API don't have the feature, but I thought Apple's official web app would have it, but they don't!
I hope they add this feature to the app (and API!).
It’d be awesome if they did this next with their movie and TV stuff. I have a bunch of stuff purchased on iTunes that I can’t play on my TV (out of HDMI ports and TV stand space and no AirPlay solution for Android that I know of will work due to the DRM).
Really cool they’re starting to open this stuff up at least.
I used to use soundcloud which has a fairly large catalog of music if you have the paid version. I eventually canceled it because they had an annoying habit of replacing tracks with random remasters so something in your liked list could change to a different version that is much worse. These days I either use bandcamp or torrents.
Well Google is certainly trying their hardest to give Apple the upper hand by discontinuing Google Play Music in favor of YouTube Music. I don't know a single person who actually likes the new YouTube Music.
I get that semi-regularly; do you have strict content blocking + fingerprinters turned on in Firefox? IIRC that advertises that you're on FF ESR and a few sites deem that too old.
It's working fine on my Firefox on KDE Neon (which is just Ubuntu 18.04 plus extra packages) even with strict content blocking and first party isolation on. You need to make sure you have Widevine enabled.
Even though many providers now have end-to-end encryption with web interfaces for messaging, Apple has maintained that it can't be done securely. We shall see if they have changed their minds.
I’m really sad about the state of international music on youtube. Asian music is completely absent. Worse, all Chinese alternatives are blocked in the US.
Not really. I've never used Apple Music, but as far as I can tell, it has no real free tier (just song previews) and it has a long way to go if it wants to compete with Spotify's playlists.
For example, regional playlists. Apple Music just has "Top 100 {country}" which is just radio pop music. Compare that to Spotify's Explore -> {Mexico,Colombia,Arab,etc} -> all the different subgenres.
Spotify's free tier is a no-brainer. I've had to listen to so many Spotify ads at parties and get-togethers that it's clear nobody cares about them either. Unless I'm missing something, Apple Music is just offering a three-month free trial.
Also, even if Apple Music managed to be a Spotify clone, doesn't it only work on iOS/OSX?
In addition to the new web client, it has had an Android app for a while. It's also had a web API for years which allowed the unofficial musi.sh client to be created.
I don't have a strong preference either way, but I ultimately stayed on Apple (after switching to get 3mo trial). I can't stand ads (it's not that I mind the ads themselves so much as I don't like anything interrupting my music. I rarely use playlists of my own or the service's creation, I just want to have a high-quality library that I can expand at any time and store in the cloud.
The big issue is that it's tied to iOS versions rather that being its own app, as are Pages and GarageBand for example. iOS 13 brings some good improvements, but now we'll have to wait a year for more. Whereas the Spotify team is continuously maintaining and updating the app.
People actually use Google Music? Everyone I know who listens to music via Google-owned properties uses Youtube (free). Others use Spotify, Apple Music, and Pandora, in that order of popularity.
- April 2016: Apple releases Apple Music API
- December 2018: A third-party Apple Music web player is launched on Product Hunt: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/playapplemusic-com (Created by https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=shivdhar)
- January 2019: Another third-party alternative, Musish, launches on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18940407
- Now: Apple finally launches their own official player!
Makes sense with Spotify being so popular on web...