[ProfessorLayton]

Apple Music is by far the least polished Apple product I use on a regular basis (I'm on a family plan). There are so my UX problems with it I don't know where to start.

Biggest issues:

- Discoverability is awful. Playlists are ok, but heavily recommending entire albums is bizarre. Its like trying new foods by going to Costco. It would make more sense to select top picks from an artist.

- Extremely ungraceful handling of spotty cell coverage. Playback will abruptly stop to buffer, but the UI gives absolutely no feedback. The play/pause button just behaves as if I told it to stop, and is unresponsive to my input. This is especially terrible while driving, where playback can stop for other reasons (Like a bluetooth disconnect).

- Radio stations inexplicably play at lower volumes than the rest of the service. The radio tab is pretty much a giant banner for whatever Apple wants to push, instead of basing it around the user.

- Really buggy. It will arbitrarily skip to the next song in the middle of playback. Sometimes it will refuse to play a song in my library, and will move on to the next. No error, no feedback, nothing.

I could go on and on.

I really wish this was its own app on the App Store, so we could have some semblance of feedback. As well as regular bug fixes without waiting for the next iOS release.

[abalone]

The polish issue I see is mainly the visible seams between Apple Music, iTunes Store and your library. It's ugly that the search makes you choose a context. There should just be one simple profile for an artist. Show your favorited/"added" albums up top and everything else from them down below. Whether it's full tracks or just previews should just depend on whether you and/or they participate in Apple Music.

I also feel the UI could be simplified further by burying the concept of "downloading" somewhat akin to how iCloud Photo Library does it. It should just aim to handle 95% of cases via intelligent caching, like cache all your latest stuff and anything you recently put into a playlist. I know we on HN tend to be advanced users who love manual control but we could still do it via playlists. Get those download buttons out of the way for most folks.

I find discovery to be pretty good! The "My New Music Mix" is surprisingly decent for me. That is entirely track-based and it's probably my main way of discovering completely new music. I used to hate For You because it felt like browsing the 99 cent rental section of Blockbuster.. lots of old stuff that was maybe good, but I'm mainly interested in new music. But the New Music mix has changed my feeling.

[m_mueller]

I think you're missing an important point that GP made: Apple lately absolutely refuses to give you any kind of error or even status informations in its cloud products (Music, Photos, Notes, ...).

It's meant to just work like 'magic' - as if all wireless connections as well as the server and client software are nowadays so perfect that you'd never encounter error states anymore, and it's all so fast that you don't need progress information on anything. Right.

[kalleboo]

And in the one place they do give you status (iCloud Photo Library), it regularly shows completely bizarre numbers (I often see stuff like "Uploading 15 photos (369MB / 125MB)"

[micampe]

> Playlists are ok, but heavily recommending entire albums is bizarre. Its like trying new foods by going to Costco. It would make more sense to select top picks from an artist.

Strongly disagree. It’s probably a generational thing but I listen to music in albums, not in popular hits. This was by far the main reason I used to use Rdio instead of Spotify.

[ProfessorLayton]

I listen to entire albums too! But not from artists I've never heard of before, as is commonly the case in recommendations. It takes me a few listens from their singles to warm up to them, and then dig further into their discography.

"My New Music Mix" is updated 1x week for some inexplicable reason (I know Spotify does this too), while it seems to recommend albums programmatically based on likes/listening habits. Other playlists seem to be manually curated and recommended based on genre.

Understandably, there is just no way to expect manually curated playlists to cover everyone's personal tastes.

I believe it is possible to recommend songs/artists/albums without favoring one form of discoverability over the other as it is currently done.

[joecool1029]

Spotify does suggest albums (and singles, it makes no distinction, ugh). But yeah I use the Spotify Premium subscription to almost exclusively play albums.

EDIT: Discovery is terrible, the only sites that had excellent discovery was last.fm (butchered by CBS) and what.cd (nuked by law enforcement)

[lloeki]

Strangely the on that had the best discovery for me was Google Music. It just seemed to eerily read my mind and I stumbled on so many good titles that I love. Rarely did I need to skip any song during, say, a workout playlist.

As for the UI, I loved the Google Music one... when I was on Android. Now that I'm on iOS it's totally alien and just unusable because zero iOS conventions are respected, like I'm in a virtual machine, it's just frustrating. I find all of the other music platform UIs quite awkward and despite its flaws Apple Music is still the best for me.

Seems like we hit a wall and "all MUAs suck" just changed the M from "Mail" to "Music".

[conradfr]

There's a lot of things I don't like about Google Music UI but the artist page with the top 5 songs and the albums below works great for both getting a taste of a new artist and entire album listening.

[cmsimike]

I have been migrating away from Apple for my music needs lately. There are tons of reasons for me to want to get away. You named one: - Really buggy. It will arbitrarily skip to the next song in the middle of playback. Sometimes it will refuse to play a song in my library, and will move on to the next. No error, no feedback, nothing.

But what _really_ broke my music-listening back was Apple, in their "infinite" wisdom have been rating songs for me they think I'd like in my library (grey stars). As far as I can tell, there is no way for me to distinguish between my stars and the stars Apple adds, which means my playlist of songs that I've rated has now been ruined by Apple's "recommendation."

edit And, I want to be absolutely clear here - there are songs I'VE uploaded into Apple Music using iTunes music match sync whatever. Apple thinks they can tell me more about my music library, that I've purchased and cultivated over all these years, then I can.

For anyone interested, I am using: Very large NAS to store my music. Tagging music using Musicbrainz Picard. Multiple Kodi (formerly XBMC) front ends, all sharing the same music and video library via mysql.

[k-mcgrady]

>> But what _really_ broke my music-listening back was Apple, in their "infinite" wisdom have been rating songs for me they think I'd like in my library (grey stars). As far as I can tell, there is no way for me to distinguish between my stars and the stars Apple adds, which means my playlist of songs that I've rated has now been ruined by Apple's "recommendation."

A quick Google would have explained this for you. They are not 'rating your tracks'. With Apple Music you can 'love' tracks which then show a red heart next to them. The grey stars are shown next to tracks that are the most popular with all Apple Music users. So if you view an album, generally, the singles will have grey star next to them. Really useful when they recommend a new album and you want to listen to the best tracks before digging deeper.

[cmsimike]

I don't have the apple music service. I have itunes match sync whatever that uploads my music into the itunes cloud. Apple is assuming about my music. https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/67221/how-to-remov... This is my issue.

I am not going to go through all my albums and manually remove what Apple has screwed up. I'd rather migrate away to a system I 100% control.

[k-mcgrady]

Ok different issue. Still don't see how it's an issue. The estimates they provide are very obviously different from actual ratings. I don't see how they would confuse.

[cmsimike]

The grey stars get inserted into smart playlists created to include rated songs. I don't want to hear what apple thinks I'd like. I want to hear what I've rated highly.

[pawelkomarnicki]

For me this star was very confusing before I googled, but now I treat it as a cool "shortcut" to see the strongest song of the album/artist to quickly get my opinion :-)

[nawgszy]

I purchased (yes, purchased) an entire album that I can no longer download to my phone. It's an absolutely bizarre and offensive problem. I'll hit the "+add" button to put it in my library and it'll just make a loading icon and then promptly revert to "+add" again, with no feedback on why it failed.

It'd be one thing if I didn't literally own this album as much as one can legally own something digital, but my goodness this seems unjustifiable.

[gonehome]

Try adding each song individually.

I bought the beatles set before they were on spotify (huge mistake since they're not separated by actual album) and it was impossible to download the songs except for downloading each one individually.

Downloading by artist or album never worked.

[luigi23]

Totally agree. I have subscriptions in both services, Apple Music and Spotify. Im still wondering how its possible that Spotify managed to handle smooth buffering way more better than Apple. It works flawlessly, even when Im entering and leaving airplane mode during loading song. On Apple music, both on Mac and iPhone, it needs to prebuffer for few seconds and is laggy when I quickly skip songs. Just awful.

[ardit33]

Former Spotify engineer here.

The reason you see Spotify excelling in streaming performance is that Spotify has both some very smart people working both in Europe and NYC to make that happen and Spotify made mobile streaming performance (to feel like a local file playback) a number one priority.

Also apple's offering is a reaction to Spotify's success and it suffers the "sequel effect" where the me too product is not that good. Their previous model was track downloads.

Also it is not a Big Corp vs Startup, but more of a team in a Big Corp vs well funded Startup that is dedicated to that mission.

(I'd say Spotify is way past the startup stage so it is more of Big Corp doing many things vs Big Corp doing only one thing).

[agmcleod]

> - Extremely ungraceful handling of spotty cell coverage. Playback will abruptly stop to buffer, but the UI gives absolutely no feedback. The play/pause button just behaves as if I told it to stop, and is unresponsive to my input. This is especially terrible while driving, where playback can stop for other reasons (Like a bluetooth disconnect).

This seems to happen to me, even though I don't stream any music.

[ajanuary]

This happens to be across multiple audio players on iOS that are playing local content, which leads me to suspect there are issues with audio at the OS level, though can't be sure.

[cm2187]

I mostly listen to clasical music, operas, where the UI used by both amazon and apple just doesn't work. There are always 20 versions of an opera, so the quality of the recording matters a lot (so low quality samples aren't helpful). Apple usually only shows 100 results, so you get the tracks of one or two recording of the opera, you can't go further in the results. Track names often have the name of the opera and composer as a prefix and the rest is usually truncated by the UI which means you are presented with a long list of tracks with the same name. And amazon's windows music app is a complete disaster, with its unstructured hierarchy of screens where you never know how to get back to a screen, its screens flashing all the time, and the app was clearly not designed (or tested) to handle more than a few hundreds songs.

Digital music was one of the first usage of mass multimedia, at the end of the 90s. It is sad that the whole thing is still so clunky 20y later.

[markholmes]

The free trial at launch made me realize how much I take Spotify for granted. I see no reason to switch to Apple Music for the reasons you mentioned.

[epistasis]

The Apple Music app was so bad, both in UI and software quality, that I switched to Spotify.

I never would have tried a subscription service until my digital music player became so bad that subscriptions were better than my carefully curated library.

To Apple Music, I say never again.

[msoad]

> Apple Music is by far the least polished Apple product

I hear you don't have CarPlay!

[lostlogin]

My Apple TV has the suffix (100) after the discoveryD episode and still wont airplay. I vote airplay as the greatest horror.

[kranner]

Don't forget the dark pattern of requiring the user to sign in to iCloud Music Library for any kind of bookmarking (letting Apple index/upload their entire local collection).

[mvindahl]

Apple Music was never much of a problem for me, probably because I just dumped my curated MP3 collection on my phone to make it play in the car. Only piece of the UI that I interact with is the play button.

But the Podcast app, oh boy! This is an app that I actually use, and it's still incredibly confusing to me. Probably will be an enigma forever.

[H4CK3RM4N]

Overcast is a ton better, and you can export your Podcasts subscriptions through iTunes.

[mvindahl]

Thanks for the tip :) .. got it and it's slick

[vogt]

This UX problem list is nearly identical to the problem list for the iOS podcast app also. Especially the first two!

[masterleep]

It's actively designed to thwart the discovery and easy access to music, or so it seems.