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by andrewzah 2333 days ago
Some annoying things about apple music:

* I can't easily see the songs that I liked while listening to a station or in general. Spotify saves these under "liked songs" and "liked from radio". going through these later at my leisure and adding them to relevant playlists is much nicer than making me add each song to a playlist as I listen to it.

* there's no good web ui like spotify. beta.music.apple.com has existed for a while[0] but is buggy and randomly stops playing, forcing a refresh. I can't edit playlists other than adding songs to them. I use linux so I would have to use wine, which is not preferable.

* spotify has 5 daily new mixes based on the genres/artists I listened to. apple music has 3 weekly playlists, updated on friday, and one is just a rehash of what I listened to: "Favorites Mix", "Chill Mix", "New Mix". If I can't have daily updates, I'd rather have it update on mondays...

compare those to my spotify mixes: #1: japanese/foreign music. #2: bill evans, cannonball adderly-esque jazz. #3: david bowie and rush. etc.. these are actually compelling based on my mood that day.

* on the music app homepage, the recently added music section takes up way too much space with only 2 album pictures per row.

* when I play a song, album, or playlist, it repeats forever instead of stopping or suggesting similar music like spotify.

* the radio tab is garbage, showing me genres and artists I never listen to. I don't care about "Top 100 songs", as should be evident from the songs I listen to and save. spotify's homepage recommendations always felt they were kinda close or at least attempting to take my preferences into account. apple's recommendations are just whatever is new in the (mainstream) music world, which is almost always irrelevant to me.

* the music app's UX in general is bad, it's quite clunky compared to spotify's app.

* spotify's app detects when you're driving and shows a simplistic interface with huge buttons. all music apps should do this.

* translation of foreign song titles is very annoying when I can speak the language. I understand why apple and youtube do this, but please give us the option to disable it for specific languages or in general. My phone is in Korean anyway.

Positives of the apple music app:

* the lyrics viewer is much better in my opinion. I hardly used this in spotify's app, but I often enable it in apple's app.

* apple's music selection is very good. I only had one instance of not being able to find a song that I had on spotify, and that was a relatively new japanese album.

I keep apple music because my family uses the homepod daily in the kitchen, and my mom is used to the app now on our shared plan. Plus it would be a pain to re-make my playlists again. But if I can find a way to have siri integration with spotify on the homepod, I would switch back in a heartbeat.

I'm disappointed because apple has the money and talent to pull off a really good music app, and they push out something mediocre, as if they don't really care that much. I hate apple's new UX choices in general as they seem to be made for older people with bad vision. (this wouldn't be bad if it were an accessibility option like font size. as it is, having few things take up so much space is annoying.)

[0]: https://beta.music.apple.com