Apple Music

 

The Amazon Music app was why I switched to Apple Music and Apple One. Specifically, the Amazon Music app on Apple TV. One of the common ways we listen to music at home is through the sound bar and speakers connected to our TVs. I was using the Amazon Music app connected to our Apple TV via HDMI as the interface. I thought this would provide a higher quality connection compared to bluetooth, and honestly it was just easier to access the content through the app on the TV versus connecting my phone to the speakers via bluetooth. The Amazon Music app on Apple TV drove me nuts, however, because it didn't display the quality of music that was streaming (even though the app for the phone and on the web clearly display this information), and that bothered me because I wanted to make sure I was streaming at the highest possible quality. The sound quality was fine, but I wanted to be sure of the streaming quality. Additionally, Amazon Music has at least some music videos but you can't access them on the Apple TV app, just the mobile app, which made no sense. Lastly, the TV app would commonly log you out, necessitating a 2-factor authentication process that honestly was just annoying. These three things, in addition to an overall desire to rely on Amazon less, made me switch from Amazon Music to Apple Music. I'm into the Apple ecosystem so deeply, that I thought it made more sense to go this route instead of Spotify, plus the price on Apple One made sense to me because of the Apple TV bundle as well as Apple News (more to come on this in a future post). Now that I've explained why I made the switch, let me tell you my thoughts on Apple Music after having used it for a few months.

The short story is that I like Apple Music a lot. The TV app has never logged me out. It allows me to go into settings and adjust streaming to lossless, and I can press an icon when songs are playing that confirm that they are streaming in lossless audio. This isn't done by default, which I find kind of odd, but nonetheless the option is there. The music videos are available on the TV app, and there are a lot of them. My only criticism on the videos is that the interface on accessing them could be improved. The mobile app is also better, in my opinion. It isn't littered with podcasts and audio books and other non-music features. It just has music, which I like. Amazon used to have a desktop app for Mac, which apparently they no longer support because when I got my new Mac last year I wasn't able to download it. I like that Apple Music has its own separate app on the desktop, primarily because it brings back one of my favorite features of desktop listening - the mini player. It's so nice to have a small, rectangular box in the corner of my widescreen monitor showing me what is playing and allowing me to pause or skip to the next song. I don't know that the music selection is better than Amazon Music, and in fact for some playlists I actually like Amazon better. But I think the apps and ways of accessing the songs is much better with Apple Music, and like having the comfort of knowing that it is streaming in lossless audio on the TV.