It's been called over-complicated, it's been called confusing, but it's also been called the place where you keep all your music by nearly everyone in the civilized world. That last has now changed: it's the place you get to almost all the music ever created in the history of the world, and then some. Okay, maybe no,t but we had -- hang on, let's check -- 9,692 songs yesterday and today we have (counts on fingers) 30,000,000, give or take the Beatles. The new iTunes 12.2 for Mac brings some minor changes, and one massive one with the introduction of Apple Music to OS X.
We can't stop listening to it. If you want the short version of the following, we have one concern and one question, otherwise the entire thing is just excellent. True, we didn't hate iTunes before: as much as we understood the criticisms, we rather grew up with iTunes, so its complex number of features came to us one by one. Some of them went away again too, most noticeably Ping, and we rather rolled with all because it had all our music, and that was great.
Stop (in the name of love)! We have this moment realized how to describe what's good about iTunes 12, including Apple Music. Yesterday we had this library of music, right, and today we have these millions more. It is exactly like what happened when the Internet came along. Now you can't remember what in the world you actually did with your Mac or PC before the Internet, it seems impossible that they were useful for anything. That's how we feel this minute about Apple Music: how did we do without this in iTunes?
Purely to stretch an analogy to breaking point, there are plenty of streaming music services like Spotify out there, but there were also plenty of online information services like CompuServe back in the day. That was once unassailable, and today it and AOL and a few others do still exist, but you wouldn't recognize them.
There is suddenly the very strong chance that the same drop from unmissable to unmissed is going to happen to Spotify -- or at least the smaller services that are similar to Spotify -- and we so very much hope that isn't true. It is early days for iTunes 12, and extremely early days for Apple Music, so we'll see -- but so far we love Apple Music, and we like iTunes 12.
Not that it came without any confusion. Aside from the problems people had on launch day when they couldn't get it at all, we found a snag when we opened it for the first time. Naturally, iTunes 12 opens with a page pushing the Apple Music service, but we already signed up for that on our iPhones, so we clicked the button that said
"Already a member?" .
Under that is a button saying
Go to My Music, so we tried that and we went to our existing iTunes Library -- and the option to join Apple Music appeared to vanish from the available buttons. Gone. Erased. You can only get it back and also get the option to sign in to Apple Music again from the Account menu, where it usually shows you Apple Music and iTunes Match.
We clicked on
Already a member?, and zilch. To make a long story survivable, it was an issue with Apple IDs. Excellent: another case where multiple IDs are a problem. Our Macs had, quite reasonably, logged us in with one Apple ID, but we'd signed up for Apple Music on our iPhones with another. Once we'd signed out and signed back in with that iOS account we use, everything worked.
It didn't look like it did, though, and that's a good thing. Both now we have successfully signed up and back when we were pressing
Go to your music, it is an excellent thing that Apple doesn't ram this service down your throat at every opportunity. We'd maybe like a slightly more prominent or consistent way in, but we prefer the calm Apple approach to the kind of track-to-track advertising you might possibly expect from other vendors.
Consequently even when signed in to Apple Music -- and you stay signed in, it's only eejits like us with multiple iTunes accounts who'll ever want to actively sign out again -- you can work iTunes the way you always did. You get the same odd question about merging your music that the iOS Apple Music apps have, but we're getting used to this now; if Apple asks to merge your music, you say Yes.
Otherwise, your music is where it was, you get to it the same way you did, all is the same. Except for along the top of the app the line with My Music, Playlists and so on now has For You, which is Apple Music's idea of what you like (and it's doing well: as soon as we signed in, it started offering us music related to what we'd been listening to overnight on our iPads.) Then there's New, which is how you get to all the new music. There's Radio, which is your route to Beats 1 and also Internet radio. There's Connect, what Apple is crossing fingers will successfully connect artists and audiences. Last, and sticking out far from the action now, is iTunes Store. That's where you used to buy music. Used to.
It will be For You and New that you now go to most. For what it's worth, we've spent more time in New because that's where you start searches for anything you fancy. Type what you like into the regular iTunes bar, and it finds it whether that track is in your library or off in Apple's. Searching is quick, loading the track details and album art is quick, sometimes the starting to play music is a touch slow. We're putting that down to our Internet connection, but it's been more noticeable in iTunes than anything else we've been using.
There's also another odd issue that's probably connection-related: we can be playing an album in order when it just ... stops. It could be, and probably is, that the next track just hasn't loaded, but we can click on something else, an entirely different album, and that will then load.
We're currently down a rabbit hole through this search, by the way, with our adoration for the verve, vigour and just damn-right-too anthem Bitch by Meredith Brooks caused us to find it in a collection of 1997 hits. You wouldn't believe what else came out that year. The Spice Girls got a swift skip from us, but listening to Natalie Imbruglia's hit led us off down her albums, then a stray brain cell reminded us that we think we've got all of Tanita Tikaram's discography, but we'd best check.
On and on it goes, one swift typed search leading to another, one related list leading to another album and another artist, on and on it goes, with hours upon hours of music that we are enjoying immeasurably.
We said we had one question and one concern. It's really two questions and two concerns; we're curious about some things and we find we care a lot about them both. First, can we please, please have Siri on Macs? As tremendous as we're finding iTunes 12, nothing we've used before compares to the ability we've now got with our iPhones to say "hey, Siri, play some Dar Williams." Finally we are living in the 21st century, and jetpacks and teleportation are, we feel sure, just around the corner.
Second, we have to wonder what will happen in three months' time when the free Apple Music trial will finish. That's more a question for Apple Music and our bank accounts than it is to do with iTunes 12, but if we don't subscribe, iTunes 12 is going to seem mighty empty come October.
iTunes 12.2.0 requires OS X 10.10.4, and is free. Get it through your Mac's Software Update if you haven't already -- and if you have, go dive into Apple Music. You've nothing to lose for the next three months, and the service is so good it could even turn around anyone who's previously disliked iTunes.
Who is iTunes 12.2.0 for:
Us. Is it for you too? Brilliant.
Who is iTunes 12.2.0 not for:
There are officially better and more straightforward music player apps, and if at this moment we don't care, you may well be a fan of one of those.
-- William Gallagher (
@WGallagher)
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