Apple Music

[bryant]

I’ve bought into the Apple ecosystem, so obviously.

In the interests of testing the scope of music available, I travelled back to the best music critic on the Internet, glenn mcdonald. His final formal music review post is an eloquent exploration of the best music of 2012, ranging from Taylor Swift to European avant garde death metal. It finishes up with a Ylvis song, years before you wondered what the fox says. Bona fides enough.

He has 123 songs on his list. At the time, he constructed playlists on both Spotify and Rdio. Spotify had 93 songs; Rdio had 94. My Apple Music playlist has 96. Pretty much no difference.

It’s seven hours of great music, by the by.

Mirrored from Population: One.

Comments

[kodi]

I'm pretty sure Google comes in at 99, although 4 of those are on the wrong album. The misses seemed to be mostly artists that Google was very unfamiliar with, but I was surprised at how many bonus tracks were missing. I suppose that makes sense.

[bryant]

Yah, bonus tracks were a problem. Also singles. Also obscure European metal bands.

What was the user experience of making the playlist like? That was pretty quick.

[kodi]

It worked well, once I realized that I should just be editing the URL rather than typing in the search box, but there were little things that just made it maddening. It was about 4 seconds to complete each search (and a bonus 4 seconds of waiting if you typed directly in the search box, as it completed its search on the first word you typed), and then scroll past the matching artists and albums to get to the list of songs, where generally the song I was looking for was listed first if Google had it at all. Then just drag it to the playlist. But man, those 4 seconds!

[kodi]

Crap. And NOW I realize that Google actually understands "by" as a keyword. So "animal life by shearwater" shows me only the album and song list, but "animal life shearwater" also makes me scroll past the artist.

Oh! And one other thing that made it all much smoother - I was doing this with two monitors right next to each other. So I had the list full screen on one monitor, and Google Music full screen on the other.

[kodi]

(Since I was just changing the URL, I experimented just now with trying to open each search in a different tab, but that's frustrating in a different way because each tab has to "load my library," which takes a while. Might still be worth it to just open them all up and then walk away, assuming it doesn't just crash Chrome.)