Jul
28
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MC20150728.mp3 [49.1MB 01:42:40 64kbps]
A podcast about all things Macintosh. For Mac geeks, by Mac geeks. Episode 535. This week, a special Three Amigos episode by listener request. I’m joined by David Sparks (MacSparky), Ken Ray (Mac OS Ken) and Victor Cajiao (Artechulate) and we chat about our thoughts on and experiences with Apple Music.
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I’m probably one of the small minority that primarily listen to classical music rather than pop or rock. One of the major problems with Classical Music in iTunes is that the Metadata is often unhelpful. Classical works (symphonies, suites, sonatas) etc contain multiple movements, and there can be multiple works on a single Album (possibly by different composers), the meta data if not done carefully can be very confused. In many cases the “song title” is very incomplete, just giving the speed indication for the movement (e.g. II Allegro) with no indication of the work. Often the info only contains the Album Title but not the composer for the specific item which is a problem where there are works by multiple composers in an album. Many classical music users of iTunes end up completely re-entering meta data to get iTunes to work in a good way with classical music. I’ve done this for my main library (on an old MacMini) and probably won’t upgrade on that machine for a long time to avoid any danger with Apple Music messing up the metadata. (Obviously it is well backed up!)
I have enabled Apple Music on my other machines and my iPod Touch and generally prefer it to Spotify (which I have tried in the past including the premium trial), although I think this is simply because of the ease of use. Other than the issues about metadata, Apple Music has a pretty comprehensive classical collection including the vast majority of recommended recordings including some which are difficult to buy on CD. At the moment Apple Music lacks the third party play lists for classical music that Spotify has. (For example various classical music magazines and organisations publish regular playlists in Spotify.).
I don’t know whether any other classical music listeners might want to chime in on this?
In all the discussion of streaming services there is always some comment along the lines of “Why is it not catching on faster?” While I am sure Apple has thought on this I have to believe some of it that people with unlimited data (or very large data plans) are a distinct minority. My partner and I share 1 GB of data per month (and we have never gone over it) and since I can find no consistent information on how much data streaming music consumes I have to believe that any streaming service would chew through our monthly data very quickly. Since I most often listen to music while on the road this, along with often traveling through areas that do not even have a 3G signal, much less LTE, has kept me from considering any type of streaming service.