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Apple Music Web Client

325 points| aplusplus | 6 years ago |beta.music.apple.com | reply

205 comments

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[+] craze3|6 years ago|reply
Wow, us Apple Music users have been waiting for this forever! For anyone who's curious about how this product developed:

- April 2016: Apple releases Apple Music API

- December 2018: A third-party Apple Music web player is launched on Product Hunt: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/playapplemusic-com (Created by https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=shivdhar)

- January 2019: Another third-party alternative, Musish, launches on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18940407

- Now: Apple finally launches their own official player!

Makes sense with Spotify being so popular on web...

[+] lainwashere|6 years ago|reply
This is great, no longer trying to get iTunes working in wine on linux, just play the music straight from the browser, and if you want a native app, Windows and MacOS has iTunes, no electron non-sense.
[+] dzonga|6 years ago|reply
seems they're using Ember.js . Reason I love spotify so much is that it's available on the web, no need to be downloading native apps everywhere. Always bet on the web. also good to see, another web property using Ember. As a react dev, competition is healthy
[+] TimTheTinker|6 years ago|reply
That’s not surprising. Ember was forked from SproutCore which was designed to mimic the Cocoa API.

Ember’s model/view binding and event model still closely resembles Cocoa’s, as far as I know.

[+] nobleach|6 years ago|reply
I love React, but when I saw Tom Dale demo GlimmerVM, I thought to myself, now HERE is something truly new and exciting(in that context - there's nothing new about bytecode). I watch the progress with great enthusiasm.
[+] vonseel|6 years ago|reply
I’m surprised. I haven’t heard anything about Ember in years. Not since 2013 or so.
[+] ksec|6 years ago|reply
Does any one know if they are still using Ruby Rails for Apple Music's backend?
[+] new_here|6 years ago|reply
Interesting to see Apple starting to move into the web app product space (aside from iCloud, of course). Must say though that performance feels a bit sluggish (esp. hover states) on a Macbook Pro (tested in Firefox, Chrome and Safari).

Results of a Lighthouse audit (London): https://www.dropbox.com/s/jaf3gmgo0tpanba/Screenshot%202019-...

[+] RootReducer|6 years ago|reply
Very cool! I've loved Apple Music ever since I was able to upload my library using Match, and I feel like its recommendations are getting better and better. Nice to have this in a pinned tab.
[+] trillic|6 years ago|reply
Uses 50MB less memory as the sole tab in Firefox than iTunes does on my Mac. Easy decision to switch for normal playback purposes.
[+] bb123|6 years ago|reply
Is 50MB that important? I would just use whatever provides you with the best experience (whichever that may be).
[+] RandallBrown|6 years ago|reply
This was the reason I chose Spotify over Apple music all those years ago.

Any reason to prefer Apple Music over Spotify? Spotify's recommendations have been absolutely stellar for me over the years and I have a lot of playlists and stuff "locking" me in.

[+] atombender|6 years ago|reply
Apple has long had a much better experience when it comes to offline use and private media.

With iCloud, tracks you add to your library are automatically uploaded to Apple's cloud and become available on all devices. That helps a lot because you don't have to resort to using some other player for that those obscure albums that aren't streaming anywhere. After all, while Apple and Spotify have a lot of music, there are still many holes in their inventories.

Apple has always been much nicer about offline track availability. Just click the download icon and the tracks will stay on your device. Spotify has had this feature, but it's been flaky. After Apple Music launched, they eventually added a "Download" toggle to albums, but only in the mobile app (it's there for playlists in the desktop app, for some reason).

Spotify has a 10,000 song limit that applies to adding (or "liking" as it's now called) to your library. You can keep more in playlists, but you can't "like" more than 10,000 songs, which is crazy. It's not a lot of songs. My jazz collection alone is more than that. Apple's limit is 100,000, as far as I can tell.

[+] actuator|6 years ago|reply
Without even going into the merits of Spotify's playlists as you mentioned, one reason I would personally prefer Spotify over Apple Music even if we assume rest of the things equal would be to support a small player(compared to Apple). Apple, a company already well entrenched in so many fields controlling one more is something I would not prefer to see. They already are at a huge advantage in even controlling this market as owning iOS and iTunes makes it very easy for them to push their service.
[+] hellcow|6 years ago|reply
For the privacy-minded, Apple Music doesn't notify Facebook each time you open the app. Spotify does.
[+] ValentineC|6 years ago|reply
> Any reason to prefer Apple Music over Spotify?

The ability to upload one's library [1] is huge — I believe both Spotify and Apple Music still aren't very good with video game music.

[1] iCloud Music Library: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204926

[+] Marsymars|6 years ago|reply
> Any reason to prefer Apple Music over Spotify?

For my use, all the major streaming platforms are broadly equivalent in functionality, so I go with the cheapest one. That was Amazon Music when I had Prime, which I haven't renewed. Spotify is about 50% more expensive than Apple Music in my location, so I'll likely be going with Apple Music when my Amazon subscription expires.

[+] Rebelgecko|6 years ago|reply
Apple Music's offline playback has bugs but it is less broken than Spotify's (although unlike Spotify you can't automatically download all your songs, you have to do some hacky workaround where you create a smart playlist of all of your songs and then download that playlist every time you get a new song)
[+] mcintyre1994|6 years ago|reply
> Any reason to prefer Apple Music over Spotify?

I imagine this is more Apple’s doing than Spotify’s, but last I tried I couldn’t put Spotify music on my Apple Watch to use untethered. I run with my Apple Watch, Bluetooth headphones and no phone, and being able to do that is worth choosing Apple Music for me.

Also no Facebook SDK if you care about that, there was the recent article here about how that pings Facebook with identifiers on app launch even if you’re not using any of its functionality yourself.

[+] geraltofrivia|6 years ago|reply
sigh

In offline mode, the app is basically useless. No way to browse through the artist's whose songs I've saved up. Gets worse -

Say I want to listen to a particular album. I type the name of the album. I do not get a result of the album which I can go to, and play start to end. I do get, however, random songs from the album which if I'm lucky, and remember the sequence in which they appear on the album, I can manually add to the queue and listen to.

The artist tab doesn't work. The album tab doesn't work. These are online only tabs which include things like "New releases", "Fans also like", "Performing Livr" etc.

------

Even when I'm connected to the net ( at home), there is no way to see all the artists whose songs I've added to my library. There is no library.

Songs you can "like", artists you can "follow". When i follow an artist, and click on him, I don't see the albums I've added to my library/liked.

------

tl,dr: It's a UX clusterfuck. They took something which works and fucked it up ad infinitum. I've switched to Apple music, which is undoubtedly bad in terms of recommendations, but at least it lets me listen to the stuff I know I like.

[+] kweinber|6 years ago|reply
You can choose to filter explicit songs for your kids in Apple Music.
[+] ryanianian|6 years ago|reply
Whatever. I was really hoping to see some improvements to the music-organization and display aspects here but it looks like they just re-implemented the weird parts of iTunes using html5.

For example: It drives me crazy how Apple Music emphasizes the idea that "Recently Added" is only grouped by albums. I don't add whole albums to my library, I add individual songs. I want to play all the songs I've recently added because hey it's new music I like. Why can't I get an auto-updating playlist of all the songs I've recently added? None of the cloud-based Apple platforms support smart-playlists and the "Recently Added" section only lets you play songs from an individual album from which you may have only added a single song.

It's super weird. - Apple music seems to really push you into either whole albums or the overly-generic editor-curated playlists.

[+] bendavis381|6 years ago|reply
On iOS: Library -> Songs -> Sort by recently added
[+] MapleWalnut|6 years ago|reply
You can create a genius (or maybe it’s called smart) playlist in iTunes that is ordered by recently added. It does exactly what you need.
[+] Marsymars|6 years ago|reply
I'd guess the people using Apple music mostly use it in an album-based manner. Hell, my music listening is almost entirely discography-based, I listen to everything an artist has produced chronologically before moving to the next artist that I'm in the mood for.
[+] flixic|6 years ago|reply
Very nice to see them provide a dark CSS theme via prefers-color-scheme, following system preference.
[+] mikewhy|6 years ago|reply
It appears even Apple themselves do not bother with using the overflow scrolling CSS that iOS needs.
[+] derefr|6 years ago|reply
Why would a web client be polished for the one platform that has absolutely no need for it?
[+] erikig|6 years ago|reply
Finally. Live web clients are great - it makes it easier to reverse engineer, scrape data and build add-ons. Kudos!
[+] saagarjha|6 years ago|reply
I don’t know…personally, Apple’s native apps are easier for me to reverse engineer than most minified obfuscated JavaScript. Then again, I’m not a web developer.
[+] tptacek|6 years ago|reply
Can't link directly to a personal playlist (even if it's "published" to Apple's weird social network) for someone not already logged in (they just get the Apple Music landing page). So close! They're so smart, they'll figure this out some day!
[+] wyclif|6 years ago|reply
Right, and that's one of the reasons why I use Spotify and won't use Apple Music.
[+] dewey|6 years ago|reply
Now that there’s one more platform where Apple Music is available it would be really great if we could have the playback queue synced between them. I don’t want to recreate my listening queue I every time I’m changing my device.
[+] chrischen|6 years ago|reply
I’m curious what framework Apple uses for web now. Last I checked (a week ago) icloud.com is still implemented with SproutCore.
[+] kevin2r|6 years ago|reply
Looks like Ember for the most part. Look at the code, it's not minified, yet...
[+] jpgvm|6 years ago|reply
This is implemented using Ember which is the spiritual successor to SproutCore
[+] spankalee|6 years ago|reply
Looks like a combination of Ember and web components.
[+] t-writescode|6 years ago|reply
This is very interesting. I'm using PiHole; and, it seems that when I click that link, I'm sent to the Chinese version of the Apple site and there's no beta. Very strange!

I'm experiencing this issue in Firefox, where I have all my regular ad-blocking, and an incognito window in Chrome, where I don't have any of it.

Anyone else seeing this?

[+] bwip|6 years ago|reply
Ah, nice! I was an early Beats Music subscriber and really lamented the eventual loss of the web interface.
[+] president|6 years ago|reply
As much as I commend them for creating a web client for their music service, the UI looks like it was designed by an amateur. Can't really put my finger on it but it's something to do with the content alignment, the gradients used. I would have expected better from Apple.
[+] mlthoughts2018|6 years ago|reply
I’m so sad that most consumers want to pay for things like this or Spotify.

I only buy digital albums, almost always from Bandcamp or bespoke band-specific sites, or Amazon if there’s no other choice.

Always just a straight download of mp3 or ogg formats, backed up and accessible in cloud storage.

I use VLC player on all my devices, and syncing music with the VLC wifi download tool is so extremely easy and simple.

I have all the music I could ever possibly want, easily accessible on all devices and easy to sync on all devices, no internet connection needed, no monthly charge or user account, no ads, can transfer it all to any new devices I get with no vendor lock-in.

I just can’t believe the populace was suckered into music streaming instead of music owning. So sad.

[+] eof|6 years ago|reply
I recently switched to a windows machine from Mac at work, and brought in iTunes to listen to Apple Music. It’s really as bad as I remember.

Really great timing on this for me.

[+] copperx|6 years ago|reply
Has anyone noticed this? On the native apps, when you click on an album, the most popular songs have a star icon next to them. I like that. The third party web apps that consume the Apple Music API don't have the feature, but I thought Apple's official web app would have it, but they don't!

I hope they add this feature to the app (and API!).