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Comment by hprotagonist | Hacker News Reader

I have very few complaints about apple music, and most of them are because I regard the Atomic Unit Of Music to be the studio album.

1. No Tool. :(

2. No easy way to reorder search results to be album first.

3. Date of original album release is buried.

4. Hard to filter by "studio album" vs "live album" vs "compilation album" vs "greatest hits album".

5. Siri can't help; "play me the third album by the rolling stones" doesn't help, and neither do i have a voice-controlled "tell me what the album names by X are and let me pick one" interface.

My impression is that no streaming service does these things.

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If you are a Tool fan (as I am) then you most likely own their albums already: why not simply add them to iTunes and allow it to upload them to your iCloud Music Library? This will only need to be done once and then those albums are available on all of your devices, as if they were available natively in Apple Music. You can even delete it from your hard drive on the system you originally uploaded from and now you don't need to use the space any longer.

Discussion about music? You'll always see a Tool fan.

(Am a Tool fan. Have ripped all albums to Apple Music. Everything else is Spotify).

This is just a bit of useless pedantry, but wouldn't the album be more like the "molecule of music", with the song being the atom?

(That would make verse, chorus, bridge and refrain the "quarks of music", I guess.)

I assume OP means atomic in the “indivisible” sense, and so it doesn’t make sense to search for or listen to specific songs, etc, not in the “compositional” sense.

yes, i did — but i’m pedantic too, so no worries!

I have just one complaint, and it's the Siri integration. I was having a frustrating day and I like a playlist called something like "chill" or "just chill" or "relax" or something like that... so I ask Siri to play relaxing music. Can't find it. Siri, play chill music. Can't find it. Siri, play chill playlist. You don't have a playlist called chill. Siri play calming music. Now playing Daft Punk "I Feel It Coming".

Everything else, eh the only good music UX was Zune, and Microsoft being Microsoft couldn't appreciate a good thing. But not having best-in-breed Siri integration is unacceptable and Siri is literally the only reason I use Apple Music. Now I'm re-thinking it.

I just said: "Hey Siri, play my Chill Mix playlist" and it played just that.

But I also tried a few variations, and you're right: it is not fuzzy AT ALL. If I use literally any other word in that sentence, it doesn't work.

On iTunes I see Chill Radio, Spa Radio, Down Tempo Radio and Electronic Radio which is pretty slow. I don't have Siri but maybe you should ask for one of those.

The point is Siri should have just a tiny bit of fuzziness so I don't have to say the exact right words. If I say "play classic rock" she does. If I say "play 80s music" she does. Not playing chill music when I ask breaks that expectation.

It's kind of ironic, Zune was the only Microsoft product I enjoyed and recommended without question. Yet, they killed the thing

What killed it was it was too little too late. It came out November 2006 - right before the iPhone. By the time they introduced an answer to the iPod Touch. The App Store has been out for a year.

Sales killed it really

What do you mean by it doesn't have a tool?

I do think a lot of these services should do more to prioritise the canonical version of a track. When I search for a popular track I don't want to see an ocean of compilations before the original album it came from.

He means the band Tool. And yes, it is a shame their music isn’t on Apple Music.

Not on Google Play music either.

Not on Spotify either.

Or Amazon Prime Music/Unlimited.

This is the other problem with streaming services.

"tens of millions" of songs still leaves out some glaring omissions for a lot of people.

Tool is a band.

Has the UX gotten better? I tried it back when it first came out for the free 3 month trial and I went back to paying for spotify because it was so horrible.

Apple Music was a pretty roughly grafted-on experience to the iOS music app when it first debuted, but the version that came out with iOS 10 was a massive improvement, leapfrogging Spotify in my opinion. Spotify, ironically, has been moving in the opposite direction.

Well that being said, Spotify was working really hard in the meantime on making their UX worse than ever before. They came a long way since 2009 (back then it was actually pretty good). A few more years of this innovation and it might get even worse than iTunes.

Every time I launch Spotify on my iPad, I’m stupefied that they regressed from their excellent, scrolling pane-based tablet UI to a blown-up phone layout. If it weren’t for Discover Weekly, I would have switched to Apple Music long ago.

I dumped tablets a long time ago, since no one seems to be willing to make good tablet apps, instead of just scaling up their phone apps.

Tablets had their time, but they're just junk now. Netbooks/ultrabooks have 10+ hours battery life now, and can run an actual full-featured OS, with actual applications.

Wow, given how user-hostile the Spotify interface is, that's pretty damning of Apple's efforts.

I use spotify despite its interface.

It’s still horrible for me.

Agreed on the albums thing. I'll subscribe to any service that does this properly.

Yeah, spotify lets you view just albums in search results, but fails your other points.

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