A Few Days Into Apple Music

I moved off Spotify this week, and this one's been a long time coming. I wrote about the ads and the lost control getting to me back last September – said at the end of it that I could see the breaking point from where I was standing, just hadn't reached it yet. Took the better part of a year, but I got there.

Funnily enough I didn't end up where that post assumed I would. At the time I was talking myself into local files, Plex or Jellyfin, ripping a library and owning the thing outright. I didn't do any of that. I went and picked another streaming service instead, which is a slightly embarrassing outcome given how much of that post was about not wanting to trade one set of problems for another. A few days in, though, I don't think I've done that. So here's where it's actually landed.

The Move Itself

The transfer from my Spotify liked songs was about as painless as I was expecting it not to be. I dragged years of saved tracks across and the overwhelming majority just turned up, matched correctly, sitting in my library like they'd always been there. A handful didn't make the trip – a few odd tracks Apple's catalogue apparently doesn't have under the same name, or doesn't have at all – and I've been picking through those manually as I notice the gaps rather than sitting down and auditing the whole thing in one go. Not a big deal. Just the occasional moment of reaching for a song and finding it isn't there.

The Thing That's Actually Annoying Me

The one bit that's genuinely bothered me is remote control between devices. On Spotify, if something's playing on one device I can grab another one and take over playback without thinking about it – pause it from my phone, hand it to the laptop, whatever. Apple Music doesn't do that the same way. There's no live sync of what's playing where, so switching devices mid-listen means actually stopping and starting again rather than just picking up the thread. It's a small thing on paper and a genuinely irritating one in practice, because I do that hand-off more often than I realised until it stopped working the way I expected.

The switch also broke my scrobbling, which I hadn't accounted for. LastFM just stopped picking anything up partway through, no warning, nothing to fix on my end – it simply decided it was done. I ended up on Bailey's Piper instance instead, which scrobbles straight from Apple Music to Teal. Working better than LastFM ever did, if I'm honest, and it took about five minutes to sort once I actually asked. Thank you, Bailey.

There's something faintly ridiculous about the actual route this takes, once I stopped to think about it – a song plays on Apple Music, gets scrobbled by Bailey's Piper instance, and gets saved directly to my own PDS. On the Mac mini. On my desk. I switched services to get away from one company's infrastructure and the scrobbles still found their way home.

That still leaves the gap from before Piper was set up, though – about a week's worth of listening that never made it anywhere. I'm downloading my Spotify data export now so I can run it through Malachite and backfill the missing scrobbles properly, rather than just letting a week of history sit there as a hole in the record. Built the tool for exactly this kind of situation, and it's not even the first time I've had to use it on myself.

What's Actually Good

Everything else has been better than I expected, and a few things are better than what I left behind.

Having it properly native across every Apple device I own is the obvious one – it's just there on the phone, the laptop, and the Mac mini on my desk, with none of the slight lag or weirdness I remember from Spotify's desktop app. It feels like an app that was actually built for the hardware rather than one that's tolerated on it.

Automix has been the real surprise. Apple's doing proper DJ-style blending between tracks rather than a hard cut or a fade, and it's the kind of feature I didn't know I wanted until I heard my library flow into itself properly for the first time. It turns a normal listening session into something closer to a set, which I wasn't expecting from a stock feature.

The personalised stations have also been genuinely good rather than the usual algorithmic guesswork. A few days in and they're already pulling from corners of my taste I wasn't expecting to get picked up on, rather than just looping the same twenty artists back at me.

The audio quality's the other thing I noticed almost immediately, before I'd even gone looking for it. Tracks I've heard hundreds of times on Spotify sound noticeably fuller here – more detail sitting in things I'd stopped paying attention to. Didn't expect that to be the part that actually jumped out at me first.

So Far, So Good

Four days in, and the only real complaint I've got is the device hand-off. Everything else on this list is either a non-issue or an actual improvement, and I haven't once reached for Spotify since I closed the app on it. Ask me again in a month.