For the most part, it shouldn’t be hard to work out that you’ll be pausing and playing items, but much of what you use to get around the interface isn’t explained, or then changes inexplicably.
You can heart songs, but if you turn one into a station using the not-quite-explained station icon, your heart changes to a star because (we think) Apple has kept an older system in play which relied on stars not hearts. And then if you’re in Beats 1 radio, you might lost the ability to heart songs altogether, even after you’ve just been able to, possibly because the song isn’t on the system, though because album art shows up, we’re not actually sure.
There’s always the option to send your song or station to a friend, but for some reason, you have two places to get this happening from, with the bottom left hand corner and the bottom right hand corner icons able to kick off the same mechanism.
Apple tends to be the king of interface design, making things easier for the masses, but while we get that complicated all-you-can-listen-to music systems aren’t easy to program, the Apple Music app feels like it’s being play-tested on the masses, while Apple fine tunes what works and what doesn’t.
We can live with the superfluous settings, too, and we’re already used to the design quibbles, but the bugs and catches with Apple Music will end up driving people away.
In fact, if you had asked us what we thought of Apple Music in its first and second month of delivery, this review would have turned out very different. It initially did, actually, and has been rewritten several times while the service went through changes, because initially, there were bugs, and bugs beyond bugs, not like what you normally expect out of Apple.
In the beginning — and by that we mean for the first couple of months — these bugs were everywhere. Crashes, inability to add favourites, the ability to add favourites but your hand was forced so you favourited everything, etc; you name it.
If there was a bug that could exist, Apple Music could fill the gap.
Our most frustrating bug occurred with playlists. You might have wanted to add a song to a playlist, and so you did, but it wasn’t there, so you waited. And you waited. And you waited and waited, and then it didn’t always turn up or sometimes did.
Fortunately, this bug has mostly been eradicated, and we’ve only seen a deviation of it in the past month, whereby you add a song to a playlist and it arrives, but then decides to disappear.
You still have a bug whereby you can’t add a song to a new playlist, and you’re forced to get out of the song, create a playlist in a separate playlist window, and then go back into the song so you can add that song to the new playlist, but one thing at a time.
Unfortunately, Apple’s playlist system in Apple Music isn’t guaranteed the way it is when you actually own your music, and there are other problems stemming from this, such as your playlists refusing to sync across devices, which appears to still be a bug for some people even in our office.
We jumped from an iPhone 6 to the iPhone 6S, and yet our playlists didn’t travel with us. Likewise, they didn’t travel with us to our iPad Air 2, and the music playlists we created on an iMac didn’t jump over to any other device, either. Yet, for some reason they were on a MacBook five days later.
In fact, that time issue of a full five days may have been what it had taken, because five days later, we found our devices finally had the playlists.
Well, the iPhone did anyway. Our iPad is still looking for them, even on the day this review was published.
But why had it taken five days of new syncing? Why — in a day and age that has to do with immediacy and the directness of the cloud — had it taken that long to synchronise?
You have to think that centralisation appears to be the problem with Apple Music, and this appears to go a little deeper than playlists that don’t line up, taking their sweet time to be delivered to your device.
For instance, we’ve already mentioned how you can favourite songs by adding a love heart to them, and this will influence how Apple Music delivers track and playlist suggestions to you, which is handy.
