PSA: Apple Music fail

[KSRBEvans]

I'm a happy member of the Apple ecosystem, so when they announced Apple Music and its 3-month free offer, I gave it a try. I really liked the idea of being able to augment my music collection with Apple's catalog. And with the exception of Apple messing with some of my album artwork, I liked it a lot. When my free trial period expired, I bought the family plan ($14.99/month for 4).

I'm sure it's just a coincidence, but since actually putting $ down I've had multiple problems with it:

--Replacing some album versions of songs with live versions, and vice versa;
--Replacing some versions of songs with re-recordings or covers;
--Songs stopping in mid-song or not playing at all (probably streaming issues).

It's not an issue with every song, but it's enough of an issue (probably 5-10% of my music catalog) that if I can't find a way to correct it this weekend I'm going to cancel my membership and just go back to what I had before, which was mainly my iTunes catalog with a little Spotify on the side. So if you're thinking about Apple Music, just be aware that you may run into these known issues (http://www.loopinsight.com/2015/07/22/apple-music-is-a-nightmare-and-im-done-with-it/).

[PedroDaGr8]

I would say around 50% of the people that I know that tried Apple Music have gone back to Spotify and/or Pandora. The 50% that are staying, mostly are doing it either because 1) it is their first streaming program or 2) the family plan saves them a lot of money over spotify. I haven't heard ANYONE consider it better than Spotify.

[KSRBEvans]

^The thing I liked about it was I could pick an Apple Music song, add it to a playlist I'd already created in iTunes and it was there--pretty seamless.

But as an example, I've got "Free Fallin" off the Tom Petty "Full Moon Fever" CD in my iTunes catalog. And it's still there on my MacBook. But if I try to play that song on my iPhone through the Apple Music app, what I get instead is a live version that I don't want to hear. And apparently (https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7142385) Apple knows it's happening and has no plans to change it. That's a no-go.

[KSRBEvans]

After spending more hours than I care to admit on trying to make Apple Music work for me, I gave up on it this weekend. Cancelled Apple Music, turned off the odious iCloud Music Library (http://www.macworld.com/article/3019877/software/ask-the-itunes-guy-icloud-music-library-unwanted-downloads-apple-music-subscriptions-and-more.html) and went back to my plain ol' iTunes collection. The things I liked about Apple Music just ended up not outweighing the multiple kludges. (Plus now I have to go back in and rebuild a lot of the CD artwork and metadata that got messed up in the process.)

Apple just doesn't do cloud services very well. Never has, really. The combination of Apple hardware (I have a serious love affair with my iPhone 6s Plus) and Google/3rd party apps works best for me.

But now the Amazon Echo is starting to intrigue me....

[MickintheHam]

Not a fan of Apple's cloud services at all. Sorry to hear about Apple Music. I was considering the free 3 month offer. I would like to find a way to consolidate all the services I use into one provider. Alas, that is a pipe dream. I use Rhapsody. It does what I want it to do. I'm not sure about the value, though they seem to constantly be improving it. It works well with Sonos, but I think just about everything does.