Nearly two decades later, have we made any progress? iTunes honestly confounds me. And it seems like the Spotify UI is deliberately trying to prevent me from finding the music I want to listen to.
Over on Android Google play can't stream reliably unless 5 bars of signal, but can't even give any buffer settings. In the real world it's simply shit and unusable unless you like a random length silence at least every 5 mins. Other apps figured out buffering a decade ago.
I don't think it got better past Winamp.
They’ve been slowly stripping things out of iTunes into their own applications for years, and no recent Apple services use the iTunes branding (Apple Music, for example). I give it a couple of years before it’s replaced and left in the “Other” folder in /Applications
Ugh, just give me back the iOS 5 music app.
It's sad because I know there are far better interfaces, but the reality of streaming means your media is locked behind an inferior product.
I found a similar issue watching NHL games on nhl.tv and eventually found a script online to download the raw files and build an mkv out of them - no more buffering, can work around region restrictions with a vpn, and play it anywhere I want (like offline on a plane)... but it just seems so unnecessary to have to go through all that.
You're right about the downside of streaming. I used to use Amazon until they killed their Cloud Music capability earlier this year, and I switched over to Google. Both services provide a lot of value, but in both cases my number 1 request would be to somehow allow third-party apps to access the cloud because the built-in apps are pretty awful.
I honestly don't know how the app could be made any simpler.
It's an app for listening to music. You get a search box and a list of music you've saved. What more concept is there to get?
(Also, given that many millions of us actually use Apple Music, describing these tabs as "just ads" is incorrect. They're tabs that do things. I'd agree that those tabs should be hidden by default if you're not an Apple Music subscriber, though.)
Very (intentionally) bare-bones by default but it can be configured/extended to be amazing.
It can handle thousands songs in a playlist and supports a lot of audio formats, perhaps the most of audio players out there. You even have queue if you wish.