8/3/2023 0 Comments Spotify music discoverySpotify leans much harder on algorithmic suggestions than Apple Music, but having a giant treasure trove of user listening data for so many years has allowed the service to fine-tune its music recommendation engine. Student plan: $6/month Best for music discovery: Spotify Voice plan: $5/month (only usable with Siri) There’s no free tier or annual family plan, either, and the individual plan is $1 more a month than some competitors. There’s (bafflingly) no way to see a list of your “loved” songs in the mobile app. While Apple Music has apps for Android, Windows and web browsers, the Windows app is only available in a buggy “preview” form as of this writing and there’s no lossless streaming in a browser. Booting those works into a separate app is somewhat cumbersome, though. If you enjoy classical music, Apple recently launched an Apple Music Classical app that’s dedicated to the genre and comes included with most Apple Music plans. Just note that you’re capped at 100,000 tracks that aren’t already available in the app. While your imported music won’t be available in lossless quality, being able to upload music at all is a great boon for those with big iTunes libraries. Creating playlists and downloading albums for offline listening is straightforward, and you can start a radio station from any song. You can reliably search for tracks by lyrics, and there’s a great lyrics view for impromptu karaoke sessions. All of this gives Apple Music an air of taste, something that can help you find music but prioritizes a personal touch.īeyond that, getting a simple view of your saved artists, albums, songs and playlists is uncomplicated. The main tabs often make room to highlight new buzzy releases, and you can find top charts for different countries and cities. There’s a regular rotation of shows that feature artist interviews and have a sort of pre-internet feel. Streaming radio stations are one of Apple Music’s biggest differentiators. The default search page holds several different genre tabs, each of which holds relevant playlists, music videos and a typically spot-on list of “essential albums.” Artist pages often spotlight a group’s most essential works alongside playlists of “deep cuts,” artists that likely inspired them, artists that were influenced by them and so on. Still, the service is littered with clever, editor-picked playlists. It’s not as great an emphasis as it used to be, and the home “Listen Now” tab can be a smorgasbord of hit-and-miss suggestions based on your recent listening history. In general, it emphasizes human curation more than peers like Spotify or YouTube Music. Relative to other music streaming services, Apple Music’s UI is perfectly serviceable. Spatial audio, on the other hand, is more of a fun gimmick: technologically impressive, yes, and sometimes genuinely immersive, but just as likely to make a record sound less natural. That said, even if the difference is subtle, a lossless file does sound better than a more compressed one, particularly in the way it draws out higher-frequency sounds from cymbals, strings and the like. You need a decent set of wired headphones and an external DAC (or a good speaker system) to take full advantage, and the upgrade isn’t so stark that non-enthusiasts will care. Lossless streaming isn’t a game-changer for most casual listeners. A significant number of albums are also available in Dolby Atmos surround sound mixes, or “spatial audio.” A smaller but still significant selection can stream at higher resolutions up to 24-bit/192kHz. It’s one of the few music streaming services that lets you upload your own music files and naturally it’s tightly integrated with Apple devices.Īpple Music’s ALAC files have a minimum resolution of 16-bit/44.1kHz, which is the same quality you’d hear from a CD. Its user interface doesn’t make it too hard to get to your music library and strikes a balance between useful algorithmic recommendations and smartly curated content from actual people. It has a library of more than 100 million songs, all of which are available in lossless streaming quality for no extra cost. No music streaming service is perfect, but for many, Apple Music should get the closest to covering all of the necessary bases.
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