With Apple Music, What Happens to iTunes?

Posted by Kirhat | Monday, July 06, 2015 | | 0 comments »

Apple Music and iTunes
Every Apple product user should know by now that Apple Music offers a lot of cool features from streaming music to an online radio station. However, CNET.com also claim that the new application is also creating some headaches for loyal iTunes users.

A few days ago, Apple launched iOS 8.4, which turned on Apple Music, a new service that offers streaming music with playlists curated by "music experts," a 24/7 radio station called Beats 1 and a social feature called Connect that puts together musicians and their fans.

Free for the first three months, the service will eventually costs US$ 9.99 per month for an individual plan and US$ 14.99 for a shared family plan.

Apple Music is the company's latest strategy for bringing in more users to the Apple ecosystem. By offering its own music streaming service for iOS devices, Apple hopes to sell more iPhones and iPads. Selling more iOS devices means more users who will buy items from iTunes and potentially other Apple products and services.

Apple already had around 800 million iTunes subscribers, all of which are keyed into that huge ecosystem. Also, other music streaming services, such as Spotify and Rdio, have proven a popular way for users to satisfy their music cravings, and Apple doesn't want to get left behind in that market. But Apple Music and iOS 8.4 have introduced a couple of obstacles for iTunes users that may sour people on the new service.

Prior to iOS 8.4, a feature called Home Sharing allowed users to share your central iTunes library across their home network with other computers and with iOS devices. Home Sharing was a simple way to access an entire library of iTunes music and videos from any iOS device.

With the new version of iOS, Apple has disabled Home Sharing, at least as far as the ability to share music. Home Sharing still fully works from computer to computer and on Apple TV, and it still lets users share videos. It's only music that they can no longer share to their iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch.

In the release notes to the iOS 8.4 beta notes, Home Sharing was listed under known issues as "not currently available," according to AppleInsider. That may be a sign that the feature will return at some point. But why would Apple kill Home Sharing in the first place, even temporarily?

Another problem is that with iOS 8.4 and iTunes 12.2, Apple introduced a new option called iCloud Music Library. Similar to iTunes Match, iCloud Music Library matches and stores your local iTunes content in the cloud so you can access your music and other files from anywhere. It also allows for offline listening. But some users are complaining that iCloud Music Library is wreaking havoc with their local iTunes libraries.

In some cases, iCloud Music Library is applying the wrong album art to certain albums. In other cases, playlists are being removed. And in more serious cases, entire songs are being moved to the wrong albums or being deleted entirely. And the problems are especially frustrating to iTunes users who've spent years building and organizing their libraries with certain songs, playlists and album art.

Problems are expected with any new service. But Apple needs to address these issues, and soon. Otherwise, the company may find that people currently enrolled in the free three-month trial for Apple Music may give up on the service once the trial has ended.

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