Month: July 2015

Apple Watch Sales Coverage Plunges 90% in Accuracy ⇥ imore.com

Free up your RAM and CPU — it’s another iMore link. (Sorry.) You may have seen headlines today claiming that Apple Watch sales have “plunged 90%”. You may also recall Apple mentioning that they would not be releasing precise sales figures for the Watch. So how was this figure derived?

Well, turns out that a company called Slice tracks online shopping by filtering email accounts and parsing out tracking numbers and receipts. Then, they aggregate the data gleaned from these email accounts, do some math, and present it as research. And some dumbasses in the press gobble this stuff up.

Rene Ritchie does a great job of discrediting this ridiculous report.

Apple Music Is Integrated, but Not Intertwined ⇥ 9to5mac.com

Ben Lovejoy:

I gave my first impressions of Apple Music on day two, and my main disappointment remains: despite putting both owned and streamed music into a single app, there is absolutely no real integration between the two. All the evidence suggests that Apple Music has no awareness of my owned music.

After years of Genius submissions, Apple Music apparently can’t automatically figure out what I listen to. Shouldn’t this kind of thing “just work”?

Humans Curating Apps ⇥ mondaynote.com

Jean-Louis Gassée might be on to something:

If it’s a good idea to use human curators to navigate 30 million “songs”, how about applying human curation to help the customer find his or her way through the 1.5M apps in the Apple App Store? Apple bought Beats for $3B and spent a good chunk more to build its Music product. Why not take another look at the App Store jungle and make customers and developers even happier?

Between Genius, Near Me, and Explore, Apple has taken a lot of stabs at automating app suggestions. They also do have human curators creating featured app collections on the App Store. But a more regular rotation of apps — including surfacing some of the lesser-known apps — combined with a more tailored approach could be a huge boon to developers and users alike.

Disable Auto-Following Artists on Apple Music ⇥ twitter.com

By default, iTunes Connect auto-follows all the artists in your music library, regardless of how much you listen to them, whether they’re on a compilation, or whether you even want to see posts from them. For example, because of that whole U2 fiaso, you’re probably automatically following them, too. Turning that behaviour off is a little hidden, as Steven Troughton-Smith and Anthony F Waller found.

On a side note, my Connect section — a week after launch — has posts from these artists:

  • many from Trent Reznor
  • one from Aerosmith
  • a handful from Leon Bridges
  • a couple from U2 (though those should disappear now that I’ve unfollowed them)
  • one from Autolux
  • a few from Beck
  • a couple from the Boxer Rebellion
  • a few from the Strokes
  • one from the Black Keys
  • one from School of Seven Bells
  • a video from FKA Twigs used in the Apple Music promo

Compared to Ping, it’s not bad, but I also have over 2000 artists in my library. Connect is not necessarily a hive of activity yet (and maybe there’s a reason for that).

Update: Of course, it only auto-follows iTunes purchases, not all artists in your library.

Third-Party Accessories Sold in Apple Stores to Have Apple-Designed Packaging ⇥ 9to5mac.com

This, according to Mark Gurman:

Apple is looking to own yet another aspect of its product experience. The company is gearing up to revamp its third-party accessory selection across all of its retail stores by next week by reducing the amount of accessories available in stores to ones sold in packaging co-designed by Apple. Apple has been working with select third-party accessory makers over the past six months to redesign boxes so that the experience more closely matches the boxes of Apple’s own products.

[…] According to the memo, the packaging will be mostly white to match the Mac, iPhone, and Apple Watch boxes, while they will also include simpler fonts, new photography, higher-quality materials, and more consistent compatibility labeling.

This is a pretty bold way for Apple to flex their muscle on third parties. No longer is a really good product sufficient criteria for consideration in an Apple retail store; now, the company needs to be cool with handing over part of their marketing as well.

Plenty of accessory companies already attempt to ape Apple’s packaging already, though. If you’ve walked into an Apple Store lately, you must have noticed how many boxes are on the shelves with plain lettering and a product photo on a white background, covered in a semi-satin coating for a luxurious look. Through that lens, it’s almost beneficial for accessory companies to have this kind of access to Apple’s marketing team. Requiring better labelling of accessory compatibility is an obvious benefit to customers, too.

It’s pretty bold, though, for Apple to require accessory manufacturers to subject their packaging for their critique and revision. It’s not without precedent — with the exception of iPhones, plenty of cellular carriers repackage the phones they sell. It’s a big step, and I bet a lot of accessory makers are uneasy about this, so we’ll see how this plays out. It’s good business to be in an Apple retail store, and everyone knows it — especially Apple.

Update: Good stuff from Sebastiaan de With.

Comment Out ⇥ theverge.com

The Verge is turning off their comments by default. Nilay Patel explains:

What we’ve found lately is that the tone of our comments (and some of our commenters) is getting a little too aggressive and negative — a change that feels like it started with GamerGate and has steadily gotten worse ever since. It’s hard for us to do our best work in that environment, and it’s even harder for our staff to hang out with our audience and build the relationships that led to us having a great community in the first place.

I’d argue that Verge commenters have been needlessly negative since always, but that’s just my observation.

Patel promises that comments will be back later this year, so I’m not sure this is going to fix anything in the long term. They’re still leaving the discussion boards open, thereby simply burying the more toxic discussions a couple of clicks deeper. Why not make that change permanent, leaving the article pages without comments? Seems like it wins all around: the discussion remains, but it’s in a dedicated part of the site, making the stories feel less bloggy and more newsy.

Previously: Reuters, Recode, and Bloomberg all got rid of their comment sections, among others.

Instagram Images Are Now 1080 Pixels Square ⇥ theverge.com

Great news for users of iPhones 6 and high-res Android devices, which previously upscaled images from 640 pixels square. That size is still perfectly optimized for older iPhone models, though, so I’m curious about whether they’re sending different sizes of images to different devices. Instagram hasn’t released any information about the change beyond a tweet, but I’ve reached out to Mike Krieger and will update this if he responds.

Interestingly, while the 1080 pixel size seems perfectly optimized for the 1080 × 1920 pixel iPhone 6 Plus, that device typically upscales content to the 1242 pixel (414 point) rendering size it uses, then downscales to fit the actual display pixels. If you’re on an iPhone 6 Plus and you can think of a way to test whether this is the case, please let me know what you find.

Clarifying the Apple Music DRM Situation

My apologies to Serenity Caldwell, writing for iMore,1 for liberally quoting her piece here, but I have complaints. Not with Caldwell, but with what this piece means:

Just like with the company’s iTunes Match service, Apple Music allows you to upload the music you own on your Mac to iCloud; from there, you can stream and download it using your iCloud Music Library to your other devices.

Apple’s upload algorithm for Apple Music works in two parts. First, it scans your library for any tracks that also happen to be in Apple Music, and matches those together—so when you download a copy of your song on a different Mac, iPhone, or iPad, you’re getting the high-quality 256kbps version from the Apple Music catalog.

Then, any songs it can’t match, it uploads directly to iCloud; when you download a copy of those songs on a different device, you’re getting the same file you had on your Mac.

This all sounds exactly like iTunes Match, with one tiny exception:

… you’re getting the high-quality 256kbps version from the Apple Music catalog.

Not the iTunes catalogue — the Apple Music one. iTunes lacks DRM; Apple Music has DRM. That’s the difference: it’s subtle, and it’s poorly-explained. iCloud Music Library is a completely different pitch to that of iTunes Match and iCloud Photo Library, despite sounding similar, if not identical.

Here’s what Apple says about iTunes Match:

With iCloud, the music you buy from the iTunes Store automatically appears on all your devices. And for music you haven’t purchased from iTunes, iTunes Match is the perfect solution, letting you store your entire collection in iCloud — even music you’ve imported from CDs or purchased somewhere other than iTunes.

And for iCloud Photo Library:

iCloud Photo Library helps you make the most of the space available on each of your devices by automatically storing the original high-resolution photos and videos in iCloud and leaving behind the lightweight versions that are perfectly sized for each device — taking up only as much space as needed.

Reading between the lines, these pitches sound like Apple is saying “Hey, don’t worry about your ever-increasing media libraries taking up way too much space on all your devices. Leave it with us, and we’ll keep it safe.”

Here’s the pitch for Apple Music:

Your entire library lives in iCloud when you’re an Apple Music member. First, we identify all the tracks in your personal collection and compare them to the Apple Music library to see if we have copies. If we do, we make them instantly available in iCloud across all your devices. If you have music that’s not in the Apple Music library, we upload those songs from iTunes on your Mac or PC. And because it’s all stored in iCloud, it won’t take up any space on your devices.

Sounds pretty much the same, doesn’t it? And it has a similar name to iCloud Photo Library, so you’d expect it to behave in a similar way. But it does not. Caldwell, continued:

So what gets DRM? Any matched track you download to another device. It gets DRM because the file itself is coming directly from the Apple Music catalog, which, as we established above, has DRM on it.

Uploaded tracks that you re-download will never get DRM, because they’re not coming from the Apple Music catalog.

So: tracks that are matched to the gigantic Apple Music catalogue will have DRM applied when you download them again, whether that’s to your iOS device, or another Mac that doesn’t have the song in its local library. Apple will just store, locker style, tracks that you upload, like a live bootleg recording or something recorded by a local band that isn’t on Apple Music (or the Beatles). This is almost identical behaviour to that of iTunes Match, with the exception that tracks are being matched to the DRM-laden Apple Music catalogue, not the DRM-free iTunes catalogue.

So this makes sense:

That said: Do not upload all your tracks from iTunes to iCloud, then delete the local copy on your Mac. If you do that, you’re getting rid of your original, DRM-free copies. And you’re leaving yourself without a physical backup of your data, which I never, ever recommend.

It’s probably a bad idea to be without a local backup of your music, but that’s almost what it sounds like with iTunes Match: store everything in the cloud, and you’ll have it available any time you want. It isn’t as risky because the files are DRM-free, and are of a good enough quality (256 kbps AAC) that most people really won’t care that they’re not the “original” files.

Apple Music and iCloud Music Library are pitched so closely, and the nuanced differences are not explained very well. Yet, these differences are incredibly important to know, because a normal person could reasonably consider their library to be safely off their computer, readily accessible when it’s needed, and largely recoverable if they were to switch to a different service.

This is an article that Serenity Caldwell should not have had to write. Not because of some of the FUDdier articles around,2 but because Apple should be more clear about the difference between Apple Music and iTunes. I would bet actual money that Apple wanted to — in essence — add these features onto the existing iTunes library, but were prohibited from doing so by record labels.

The reality is more confusing than that, and Caldwell’s article helps clarify it somewhat, but I still feel a bit lost in an array of very similar products. If this sounded simple to you before reading Caldwell’s article or mine — two libraries of music with two similar matching products that behave in differing ways — you seem to be one of very few.

  1. I have my reservations about linking to this page — or, indeed, anything from Mobile Nations: depending on the ads on the page, I’m seeing over 2,000 errors and 80,000 warnings generated by the advertising and analytics scripts on the site. iMore’s site continues to be a wart on the web, and it’s barely tolerable that this hasn’t been fixed. ↥︎

  2. Thanks to Cult of Mac for reliably being the serious counterpart to Gizmodo while retaining similar journalistic integrity. ↥︎

iTunes Disconnect ⇥ betterelevation.com

Earlier this week, I asked what the new iTunes Connect features are like for artists. Dave Wiskus happens to be both a musician and a writer, and answers pretty much all of my questions in this post. In short, Connect sounds clunky and overwrought, and there’s this:

I can see no way to invite people to follow us on Connect. I can share the link. I can even tweet about it. Yet there’s no way to know how many followers we have, encourage people to follow us, or directly engage with anyone who hasn’t already purchased a song from us on iTunes. That feels broken.

Indeed, it does. Based on Wiskus’ documentation, it looks like it lacks the litheness of Twitter, the scale and engagement of Facebook, and the demo tape feel of SoundCloud. I don’t quite know what to make of it yet.

And then there’s this:

[Update: I got an email from Trent Reznor this afternoon. Apple is aware of the growing pains and is working to address them.]

Damn you, Dave.

Shining a New Spotlight on Spotlight ⇥ brooksreview.net

Like Ben Brooks, I switched over to Spotlight from my “power user” search utility — in my case, Alfred — shortly after Yosemite launched, and I haven’t looked back since. It’s grown up a lot, and feels way, way faster than it ever did previously. It’s pretty much exactly what I need. I do still have it mapped to Option-Space, though.

EU Plans to Ruin Net Neutrality ⇥ arstechnica.com

Glyn Moody, Ars Technica:

A two-tier Internet will be created in Europe as the result of a late-night “compromise” between the European Commission, European Parliament and the EU Council. The so-called “trilogue” meeting to reconcile the different positions of the three main EU institutions saw telecom companies gaining the right to offer “specialised services” on the Internet. These premium services will create a fast lane on the Internet and thus destroy net neutrality, which requires that equivalent traffic is treated in the same way.

Awful news. This sets a dangerous precedent for the rest of the world.

iCloud Music Library Woe ⇥ macobserver.com

A classic Apple cloud service launch. Have a backup.

Update: Reddit user OMGshNicholas (not me) says [sic]:

Apple music added the song “no better” by lorde into one of my playlists six million times. Now my iTunes crashes every time I open it. What. The. Fuck.

What the fuck, indeed.

DRM Is the Difference Between iTunes Match and iCloud Music Library ⇥ mcelhearn.com

Kirk McElhearn:

When you match and download files from iCloud Music Library (without having an iTunes Match subscription), however, you get files with DRM; the same kind of files you get when you download files from Apple Music for offline listening.

This means that if you’ve matched your library with Apple Music and iCloud Music Library, you need to keep backups of your original files. If not, you’ll end up with files that you can’t play without an Apple Music subscription.

This is a really confusing aspect of Apple Music. iCloud Music Library has the same 25,000-song restriction as iTunes Match and does pretty much the same thing, so I figured it would behave similarly. Because of this, I thought iTunes Match would be made redundant by iCloud Music Library and be discontinued.

It doesn’t behave the same way, though: iCloud Music Library serves DRM’d versions of your music back to you regardless of where you purchased or ripped it from. But you can still add a $25 per year iTunes Match subscription to your $10 per month Apple Music subscription and get the same DRM-free behaviour. Apple doesn’t explain this very well, and I wasn’t able to test it because my library exceeds the limit (for now). I think that I’ll just be streaming music for now, and not relying upon Apple Music quite yet.

Update: Marco Arment:

I bet iTunes Match gets Google Readered within a year. Don’t get too attached…

This would explain why the details are a little fuzzy. If Match is getting phased out, it might be less confusing when the differences are not fully explained. But for someone who understands the difference, it also feels deceptive, if unintentionally so.

Assorted Thoughts and Observations About Apple Music

It’s only been a day since Apple launched their newest streaming music service, so the thoughts I have about it are fairly preliminary and would probably comprise several shorter posts. For convenience, they’re here in a bulleted list.

  • Listening to Beats 1’s first hour of broadcasting was the most fun I’ve had with a radio station in a long time. It’s pretty clear that Zane Lowe is stoked about its launch, and his enthusiasm is infectious. The other main DJs — Ebdo Darden and Julie Adenuga — are equally exciting. Their energy makes the difference between listening to the playlist and listening to the radio.

  • Launching with a little-known band feels like it harkens back to the days when Apple could serve an artist their career on a silver platter simply by being in an iPod ad. Those days have faded somewhat, with the company opting for far bigger names to close out their events — U2, Foo Fighters, and Elvis Costello, to name a few.

    In fact, the first hour and a half of Beats 1’s broadcast was a great blend of big-name artists and lesser-known acts. Sure, there were tracks from Dr. Dre, AC/DC, and Eminem, but Lowe also played songs by Courtney Barnett, Day Wave, and Wolf Alice.

    I think Apple is very honest and genuine when they say that they love music. I don’t think it’s marketing spin or a way for them to try to acknowledge the iPod’s role in their current success. In addition to the business case, the amount of attention they’re putting into all of the different facets of Apple Music is a reflection of this love and passion for making music listening better.

  • As I alluded to above, the presence of an actual engaged DJ is what separates a playlist from a radio station. It’s what’s missing from most actual radio stations these days, and what works so well with Beats 1. Not only does it create excitement, it also offers some continuity, or at least an explanation of why different songs are being played. Ebdo Darden played Kanye West and Jay-Z’s “Otis”, and then chased it with “Try a Little Tenderness” by Otis Redding. Why? Because “Otis” sampled Otis in a big way, and hearing that connection is important for understanding its context in the song. It allows listeners a way to appreciate the artistry and creativity of both artists.

  • On the other hand, Beats 1 doesn’t depart that much from terrestrial radio in ways it could on the internet. There are still too many station idents (“You are listening to Beats 1”) and ad breaks (though way shorter than typical radio stations).

    There’s also no profanity or objectionable lyrics. I understand that Apple wants to keep this family-friendly, and that some people just don’t want to listen to profane lyrics, but it does feel a little jarring to listen to Dr. Dre’s classic “Let Me Ride” with a bunch of the lyrics reversed because they contain references to drugs and violence. It numbs the song of its intentional bite.

    There are ways of doing a split stream, so an explicit stream can be broadcast alongside a clean stream, both live. Art isn’t always clean and family-friendly, and I think Apple’s insistence that it should be neuters songs that use less savoury lyrics for artistic effect.

    Darden, for example, played Jay-Z’s classic “99 Problems”. With the last word removed, the line “rap critics say that he’s ‘Money, Cash, Hoes’” has less connection to the lines that follow, wherein he dismantles the notion that he only talks about wealth and women. Similarly, the storytelling in the infamous second verse is harder to follow when some of the more profane lyrics are removed.

    Or you could take Nine Inch Nails’ “Closer”, with the wonderfully crude chorus “I wanna fuck you like an animal”. Drop the protagonist’s spitting “fuck” and it becomes much weaker.

    You could argue that it’s the artists’ fault for including objectionable lyrics, but I think that there’s a valid case for profanity, and that “99 Problems” and “Closer” are accessible songs that make liberal use of it. Removing it from those songs — as with many, many others — neuters the artists’ intent.

  • All of the Beats hosts seem very excited that they’re broadcasting to 100 countries worldwide, 24/7. Did you know that they’re broadcasting to 100 countries worldwide, 24/7? Well they’re broadcasting to 100 countries worldwide, 24/7.

    Doing a worldwide live music station is a potential programming nightmare, though. When I was in high school, I worked in the sound booth for a local theatre company. One of the other technicians was a guy who used to work as a radio host, and he was telling me that the programming they had for different times of day was carefully controlled, particularly in the evening. Past midnight, internal policy dictated that the DJs couldn’t play anything by the Smiths, for example, because it would be just too depressing for anyone awake at that time of night.

    But it’s even simpler than that. When it’s 8:00 in Los Angeles, it’s 4:00 in London, and midnight in Tokyo. The music someone wants to listen to during their morning commute is probably different to the music they’d want to listen to during an afternoon commute or late-night partying.

    Understanding Beats 1’s role in your music listening is complicated. For some people, like those who get most of their new music from the radio already, it could be the first thing they put on in the morning and the last thing they listen to at night. But for someone like me, who more deliberately chooses music by my mood or time of day, it’s a little more like a place to go when I am more interested in simply having something to listen to. It’s complicated, and I’m not entirely sure what problem Apple is solving with this.

    It’s kind of cool, though, when I know that someone on the other side of the world is listening to the exact same thing that I am. It carries a buzz that’s kind of like the World Cup.

  • Having a library that’s a blend of my own, local tracks and those available through Apple Music is pretty much my ideal approach. It’s something that Spotify tried to do with its local library, but I’ve built my iTunes library over the past ten-plus years, and it’s more trouble than its worth to bring it over to Spotify. Now, though, that functionality is built-in.

  • I’m digging the new psychedelic colour scheme for the app icons on OS X and iOS. For real. I know it’s a bit garish, but it’s also fun and it doesn’t look ugly, I don’t think.

    If you wanted to read too much into it, you’d notice that it uses a similar magenta as the previous icons, plus some blue and some purple, both of which could be seen as representations of the two other aspects of the service, all blended together.

    But, as I said, that’s probably reading way too much into it.

  • Spotify, Rdio, and Pandora must have been dreading Apple’s entry into the streaming music business. By effectively bundling it into the built-in apps, it becomes almost a default choice. I know a few people who have already cancelled their Spotify subscriptions, and I might do just that too. I wonder how their user base will change, and whether they’ll sue on presumed antitrust grounds.

  • The Connect feature seems to be used far more than Ping was, but it also still feels overwrought and “heavy”, as least on my Mac. (I haven’t been able to try Connect on my iPhone yet because a new beta seed hasn’t been released.) It will be very interesting to see if artists actually continually post work-in-progress pieces, non-catalogue music, and those kinds of things. It isn’t like they haven’t been able to do that already, between YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. What compels them to post on Connect? Can an artist cross-post to other social services at the same time? If you know anything about the artist publishing tools for this, please get in touch.

  • The instrumental version of The Fragile is magnificent.

I have a lot more to say about Apple Music and all that it entails. It’s a big, comprehensive array of services and apps. More to come, I’m sure.

Apple Releases OS X 10.10.4 ⇥ daringfireball.net

John Gruber:

OS X 10.10.4 shipped today, and as expected based on the developer betas, Discoveryd is gone, replaced by an updated version of good old mDNSresponder. At WWDC, word on the street was that Apple closed over 300 radars with this move. Not dupes — 300 discrete radars.

Three hundred individual bugs fixed simply by reverting to mDNSresponder shows just how flaky discoveryd really was. Shocking.

Also in 10.10.4:

Fixes an issue where a website could prevent the user from navigating away by presenting repeated JavaScript alerts in Safari.

From the bottom of my radar #18927527, thank you.