In Praise of Apple Music (Yes, the Mac App)
Apple Music has a poor reputation these days. I’m not talking about the music streaming service here, nor the iOS apps that share the same name. I’m talking about the 22 year old application formally known as iTunes. You see it’s the same application really, only with a new name and a fresh coat of paint. Squint a bit, or rather go to the Songs view and turn on Column Browser, and you will see it for what it really is. iTunes with slightly different icon and all of the video and podcast bloat removed.
Having been around since January 2001, in many places it really shows. When compared to more modern applications that come bundled with macOS, such as the nine-year old Photos app, and unlike Apple Music for iOS Apple Music for Mac retains many of it’s power user features and can be used to manage a local music library effectively, if that’s something you still want to do.
Apple Music retains most of the features from the heyday of iTunes
Yes, it does have many annoying bugs and could certainly do with some investment in the QA department. But thankfully it still has many ‘power user’ features that I admire, and I’m grateful for this. Apple Music is able to still, believe it on not, rip CDs to MP3 or AAC and will still fetch CD metadata from the venerable Gracenote CDDB service. This may sound arcane, but some music is only available on CD. (As a more general point, if you’re limiting your music discovery to what’s available on streaming services, you should definitely expand your horizons. Even the old iTunes Store has a much wider range, and streaming - especially Spotify, is notoriously bad for artists.) Once ‘ripped’, the songs are uploaded into iTunes Match and are available on all of my devices, including my Apple Watch. Apple Music also allows me manually select which albums I want to keep locally, unlike the Photos app. I can also see the status of both uploads and downloads, again unlike Photos. Best of all, I can manually remove local copy of songs stored in the cloud in order to free up space on my Mac. Yet again, such a basic function is not provided by Photos. In addition, I can easily backup my music collection using the Finder, and the data will travel across different filesystems (no special, Mac-only bundle files). Best of all, Apple Music is able to mostly, seamlessly meld my offline library, tracks synchronised via iTunes Match, and songs added from Apple's music subscription service into one seamless library. It even allows me to create a "Smart Playlist" which can catalog songs based on whether they are rented through Apple Music, or fully owned, as well as countless other criteria such as Genre, Artist, Play Count (which incidentally, includes plays from all of my other devices), File Size, File Type, Date Added, Last Played, Composer, Year Released, and even how many times I've skipped a song. Yes, I could create a playlist of my most skipped songs. How's that for a desert island disc?
So while it's not perfect, I'm glad Apple haven't released some half-arsed rewrite of Apple Music focused on flogging their subscription. iTunes lives on for now, if not in name, then in spirit.