Back in the long-ago time of the early 2000s, Apple consciously made the iPod simpler and better to use than any other MP3 music player of the day. It worked out well. Now iPods are all but forgotten, and often it seems that so is this idea of simplicity. While rival MP3 players were complicated just because they were bad, Apple's offerings have become complicated primarily because they do so much.
Nonetheless, you're now at the stage where Apple Music will unexpectedly play you a live version of a track you own the original CD of. That's after your iPhone has asked if you want to merge your music, and you've no way to know what that actually means. We're at the stage where Apple Music appears to do exactly what iTunes Match does, only it doesn't. We can, each of us, now stomp up some cash and pay for our entire families to use all of Apple's music library, except it isn't really all, and we have limits on how many devices we can each use at once.
Last Monday, Pointers covered a whole other area of Apple and music, with details of
how to use iTunes to listen to Internet radio. Then on
Wednesday, we deep-dived into the blurry waters where Internet radio meets Beats 1, and other Apple "radio station" options. Now we're taking one step further up the diving board and looking down across the entire thing. This is Apple and music, all in one place.
You and you alone
Let's start with you, and say that you've got a Mac in front of you, plus a pile of CDs to your side. Go crazy. Rip the lot, if the law in your area allows that -- and if you can get your hands on a CD drive. We could go into political issues here, but you bought the CDs, you're going to rip them so that you can listen to them now on your computer. Your CD Walkman is now in the Smithsonian.
If it is just you, a Mac, and a shiny disc collection, then you could stop right there and just enjoy what you've got. Yet we know record collectors, and we know they can't stop at however many thousands of CDs they own. Plus, we know the allure of being able to buy or stream music on a whim. Also, we might spend a lot of time under our headphones, but we know full well that music exists to be appreciated by all. At once. Shared in the sense of an experience, not shared in terms of piracy.
Before we get to that, though, the next step to it is adding an iPhone, iPod or iPad into your life. Now you have a device that is capable of playing music very well, and you've got a music collection on your Mac. You can copy all your music from the Mac, and if you do that over a wire then it's fast, plus the Mac will backup your device on the way. If you do it wirelessly, it's slower but more convenient. Especially as you may have an awful lot more music on your Mac than you can fit on your iOS device, or perhaps want to.
In this case, picking the music you want to listen to outside your office is a matter of selection, and copying then later regretting that you left that one track off, what were you thinking? Fortunately, you can probably buy that track direct from the iTunes Store, and thereby make Apple happy. Apple gets some cash, you get the music, everybody wins and yes, you're buying some music that you already own, but you've done that before. Vinyl begat tapes, tapes begat CD, CDs begat online buying, online buying begat streaming -- and now some of you are now back to buying vinyl records.
Once you've bought a song from the iTunes Store on your iPhone, say, then it's available to you on your Mac and iOS devices. It's the idea that you don't have to think, you just have to pay. It works, except it gets complicated because of authorization.
You and sharing with family
You've got iTunes so you've got an iTunes library and it's all yours to do with as you want –– except when it isn't. Always any CD you ripped is open season compared to anything you bought from iTunes. The issue is that your iTunes library can only be played someone who is authorized to. That means anyone you've said is okay, typically someone in your family, but also yourself if you have several devices.
This limit does not apply to your personal iOS devices, you can have six iPads and four iPhones if you want and they can all play from your iTunes Library. You can also stream your iTunes library over the local network to others, and authorize up to five other people to copy your iTunes library wholesale onto their Macs and thus iOS devices if they wish (they won't -- you have weird tastes in music). There's also Family Sharing, which consolidates this, but sticks one person (you) with the bill for all purchases made under that shared account, so be sure to make this clear to the cat, or the kids, or the spouse.
Over the years, we've also hit bugs where iTunes has asked us to authorize a computer we're using –– and it's the same computer we've had for years, the same computer we've sung along to all summer. Authorization is just a pain, and if it makes sense because nobody wants your music taken and played everywhere without any recompense to the artists, it feels as if this is a hangover from the earliest days of iTunes.
Originally, music labels only agreed to iTunes because it was Apple, and nobody cared what Apple did -- this is a long time ago, remember -- and if there were limits. They were really serious limits: music had to be protected, and if it weren't, if someone got around it, then Apple had only a few weeks to fix the problem or risk losing entire record labels. Over time, the labels expanded to more platforms, and people
including Steve Jobs made a persuasive case for why individual tracks shouldn't be overtly protected. So now we don't have digital rights management (DRM) constraints, but we retain this authorization one.
We might add that authorization limits may be slightly different if you're outside the US. We should also note that it is still important to de-authorize the computer in iTunes if you sell or give it away without thoroughly erasing it (which you should do for other security reasons).
Apple Music wherever you go
One other thing that has changed a lot since the start of the iTunes Store: we now have other ways of storing music we want to listen to. Previously, no matter how you did it, you either selected music in advance to load up your iOS device, or you bought from iTunes Store on the way. Now you can listen to more or less whatever you want, wherever you are, and all you need is to know the difference between two services.
Wednesday's Pointers included details of one of them, iTunes Match, but it's the difference between that and Apple Music that you particularly need to be clear about. It's a fine difference, so fine that when Apple Music was announced, iTunes Match users were worrying that this service would go away. Knowing the difference helps when you're making that decision over whether to agree to merging your music or not.
If you buy iTunes Match -- it's a subscription service costing $25/year -- then every scrap of music from your Mac's iTunes library is copied up to Apple's servers. That was every scrap up to 25,000 songs, and now that's increasing to be every scrap up to 100,000 songs. It's all copied up, unless Apple recognizes either that you bought the track from the iTunes Store. It spots when you own a track it already has on it Store so rather than copying yours, it just gives you that.
This is in all ways a good thing, because you will often find that the copy on the Store is better than yours. If you ripped that CD back in the earliest days of when that was possible, the Store's version will be much higher quality. Otherwise, what you get stored in iTunes Match is whatever you have on your Mac, and the benefit is that this means you can listen to it all anywhere you like. Go travelling across the world and listen to all 100,000 tracks on the way, if you've got either good enough Wi-Fi or a careless attitude to your data costs.
The thing with iTunes Match is that it's your music wherever you are. There are issues to do with the quality; it only stores music that iTunes can play, so if you avidly collect high bitrate tracks in some format like FLAC then you'll have some gaps in your travelling library.
But there's one thing I don't understand, Inspector
All of which is fair enough, and at first iTunes Match made absolute sense -- or at least if the service was useful to you, you recognized it and could tell whether it was worth the money or not. We thought that $25 per year for all of your music, nearly, and anywhere you want, almost, was a bargain. Until Apple Music came along.
Put iTunes Match out of your head for a moment, and pretend that there is only Apple Music. If you subscribe to it, then you get access to the 30 million-plus tracks held in the iTunes Store – or near enough. There are exceptions, but in principle the Store is yours to listen to all you like. You do, though, already have music on your Mac, and it would be nice to have access to that too. Plus, it would be good to be able to download music from the Store to listen to when you're offline. Apple allows for both of these with the same function. It's that "merging music" feature.
The first time you tell Apple Music that you want to keep
Dar Williams's Emerald album on your device, it will ask you that question about merging music first. Say no, and it won't save Williams' work to your iPhone. At first it was sensible to say no, because there is just not enough information in that dialog box to understand what your choices really mean. Also, people initially reported a lot of problems when they said yes. Now those problems are gone, or at least far less common, and we've seen what the yes answer does.
Say yes to merging music, and Apple combines the music you already have on your Mac or iPhone to all the music you don't. If you have a track on your Mac that is available in the Store, whether you bought it there or not, Apple Music makes that available to you wherever you are. It also makes your playlists available to you: so if you've spent ages curating that perfect mood mix on your Mac, then it's automatically right there on your iPhone too.
That's definitely a very good thing, and a very appealing one, but it doesn't half sound like iTunes Match. You can see why Match subscribers wondered what was going to happen to their service. Yet it's not the same, and the difference is significant. With Apple Music, the only tracks from your Mac's library that are made available to you are ones that are also available in the Store. If you ripped a rare spoken word CD, iTunes Match would upload it and make it available; Apple Music wouldn't even notice it.
So the two are different, and there are people who use both services: iTunes Match for their personal collection, and Apple Music for exploring new music. There's little in your iPhone's Apple Music app to make this clear, but once you know it, it makes sense -- except when it doesn't.
Apple Music does this same thing as iTunes Match in that it will effectively give you a higher-quality copy of a track whenever it can. Only, we've found that it makes curious substitutions: we have playlists that are different on our iPhones because Apple Music has given us a higher-quality copy of a track, and got it wrong. Only a little wrong: we might have the original recording, and Apple Music gives us a live version. Same song, just live. That's rather jarring, and it's perplexing, since we can go to the Store and see the original recording right there.
Also, we said there were exceptions to what music you can download. Try Texas's album
The Conversation: you can't listen to the title track for some rights issue. Yet you can listen to the single of it.
That's not an Apple thing, it's a consequence of complex rights issues that would take a book of Pointers to unfathomed depths if we even understood it. Yet the effect is that it adds to the complexity of Apple Music: you think you can get any piece of music anywhere you are, but you can't. Not all music, not always.
-- William Gallagher (
@WGallagher)
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