Apple Music utterly confuses me

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’m a long time iPhone owner (nearly 6 years), as well as a longtime iPod user prior to that.

What Apple has done to the music files on my devices with the roll out of Apple Music completely and totally baffles my mind. I can’t make sense of simple things anymore.

I updated my iOS software to allow me to use the free 3-month trial of Apple Music. I tired it for about a week, but found the playlists they gave me just weren’t songs I had interest in. I also found looking for music myself amongst all the content available was pretty cumbersome. So I used Apple music for a small bit and went back to my own content.

Well, it seems that when I enabled Apple Music, I also enabled all my iCloud music to be played. I have a LOT of music files residing out on iCloud. I generally only download a small portion to my device in order to save space. However, with my iPhone 6’s large storage capacity, that really isn’t a concern.

So I’ve been listening to my music as always, but noticed I started hearing older songs I own, stuff I know I hadn’t bothered to download to my phone. Huh, I thought. I guess my iPhone will stream that music and then save the file so if played again, it’s not again streaming it. And so I went about my happy way listening to my music.

Flash forward to last week and I get a text from AT&T that my data has surpassed 3.5 GB already. Yikes! Sitting here now, it has gone to 4.2 GB!

The only change is Apple Music, which I only used for a short time. So best I can tell, my iPhone was streaming me all my content??? (Note I haven’t used Pandora much at all this month, only a fraction of normal monthly usage.)

To combat that, I decided to turn off Apple Music and to disable iCloud on my iPhone.

Now I’m not seeing content I own and want to listen to.

Ok, there must be a way to permanently download that missing content from iCloud and onto my iPhone, right?

So far I can’t figure it out!

It used to be that I could go into settings on my iPhone and turn on “All” music, so that any music I owned, but that wasn’t currently downloaded onto the device, would appear in the music app and show an icon for download. I could then very easily manage which music files I actually wanted on my phone.

Now with the new Apple Music App, this option seems to have disappeared.

Well, ok. I’ll go to iTunes on my iPhone, then to Purchases and just grab what I want.

But no, that only shows files purchased from iTunes, not all my files purchased on CD and uploaded to iCloud via iTunes Match.

Long story short, if I enable iCloud on my iPhone, then that other content appears on my device.

But does that mean it only ever streams, using up data??? Because I don’t think those files actually physically reside on my device right now.

Sorry for the long winded post, but I’m pulling my hair out right now trying to figure this out. I really don’t understand what Apple has done to music. I don’t understand why it’s requiring so much data usage. I don’t know why I can’t download my content that was uploaded to iCloud by iTunes Match.

Any help?

2

Well this is interesting.

Not 2 hours after my OP, Apple released an update to Apple Music that solved my problem.

And I’m going to tell everyone it was because of the power of the SDMB!

3

Apple Music sucks ass, like many “improvements” Apple makes to perfectly functional software (iMovies, anyone?).

4

Yeah, this is the kind of story that scares me about trying things. I get the impression that making people scared to try products is somehow not an interesting consideration to the computer industry. Weird – airlines work on safety, and food companies take notice of health scares, but software still gets developed like people deciding they don’t care for an app is the worst that can happen.

5

I don’t have that update yet. Going to go look for it. I am seriously pissed off. I do not like Apple Music. No sir. Not at all. All of my playlists are busted at the moment. WTH were they thinking. Oh, I know. They want me to pay for access to something I used to get for free. And some of it is my own music at that.

I’m thinking there’s an opportunity for someone else to move into the music app space if Apple is going to be idiotic about this. I’ve got a serious quantity of music uploaded from CD. I do not want to use their cloud or their radio, which wasn’t even working today.

6

Spotify was much easier to use. The only reason I’m trying to stick with Apple music is because of the family plan option. Spotifys policy of only 1 device working at a time is incredibly restrictive because my kids use it too. Driving to work in the morning and not being able to listen to tunes because my daughter is listening while getting ready for school is aggravating.

7

How is data usage with Spotify?

I used to stream Pandora pretty frequently at work. It never seemed to have that great an impact on my data.

Then I do Apple Music and my data usage soars! From what I can tell so far, Apple Music was the only thing different that I used last month.

8

The update did not fix my playlists. All my music is still gone. I’m going to have to re-synch to my iTunes on the computer, assuming that process still works.

I’ll check out both Spotify and Pandora.

I’ve got all the music files from the CDs transferred up to RAID storage. It’s a large collection. I don’t particularly want to dick around with having to re-create the wheel, but it looks like Apple has busted a perfectly good system.