Spotify - high quality, legal, free, streaming music.

[Mandryka]

The Applemusic app will let me add to the end of a queue - amazingly the Spotify app wouldn't and it was annoying.

Applemusic seems to want to start off with low volumes always, I can see why, but I feel as though I'm being nannied. This may be due to a setting called "sound check" - will investigate.

[Spotted Horses]

Sound check adjust the volume of each track to have the same loudness, definitely inappropriate in classical listening. I keep the volume within Apple Music at maximum, but when I listen with Apple bluetooth headphones there is a tendency to initialize the device volume at a nominal level when the device reconnects.

One micro-annoyance is that in the newest release you can't press "next" when you are at the end of you playlist (presumably because there is no next track). Before it exhibited the typical behavior or stopping with a clear list if you pressed next while the last track was on.

My main complaint with Apple Music is that when the first track from an album is started there is typical a buffering glitch about two seconds in. I have to work around it by starting a different track then starting the track I want a fraction of a second later.

One nice thing about Apple Music paired with Apple Heaphones or earbuds is Spatial Audio. It can work with Dolby Atmos (which I never use) but I find it can be useful with crude early stereo recordings which have excessive stereo separation. It tends to act like a more subtle version of cross-feed, which produces more natural stereo imaging with headphones.

[Mandryka]

Applemusic has some booklets, but not as many as Qobuz (didn't have the booklet for Albert Cano Smit's AoF, for example.)

Applemusic shows some album art as moving gifs (Smit AoF - I hate it!)

Had to turn off automatic airplay and handoff (whatever that is) to try to stop annoying automatic airplay prompts.

Applemusic had the Corboz Goudimel recording - Spotify didn't.

[AnotherSpin]

[...]
Applemusic had the Corboz Goudamel recording - Spotify didn't.

Qobuz has it too.

[aukhawk]

I wasn't aware, from the thread title, that this was a space for venting about how awful Spotify is.  Perhaps my sense of irony needs adjustment.

For my own part, I have been using Spotify for over 10 years, free at first and then as a 'premium' subscriber, and have nothing but positives to say about the service.  As someone interested in Jazz as well as all forms of Classical, I think the library is second to none, and I have never had any complaints about the sound quality. 
The search is admittedly 'unusual' but once you get you head around a few quirks it is simple enough to find your way around.

The sharp practice that Kark complains of is very regrettable but IMHO this sort of thing is common to almast every service provider I have ever dealt with recently.  Water provider, broadband, phone network, you name it, they all want to take your money and give as little as they can in return.  That's life - opting out is an enviable luxury.

[San Antone]

I wasn't aware, from the thread title, that this was a space for venting about how awful Spotify is.  Perhaps my sense of irony needs adjustment.

For my own part, I have been using Spotify for over 10 years, free at first and then as a 'premium' subscriber, and have nothing but positives to say about the service.  As someone interested in Jazz as well as all forms of Classical, I think the library is second to none, and I have never had any complaints about the sound quality. 
The search is admittedly 'unusual' but once you get you head around a few quirks it is simple enough to find your way around.

The sharp practice that Kark complains of is very regrettable but IMHO this sort of thing is common to almast every service provider I have ever dealt with recently.  Water provider, broadband, phone network, you name it, they all want to take your money and give as little as they can in return.  That's life - opting out is an enviable luxury.

Yeah.  I have been a Spotify subscriber for a long time, too. I've tried other services, but they never seem to be as good.  Apple Music came closest, and I still have about 175,000 tracks in my iTunes library, so I thought it would be best - but it started glitching and threw up an error message when I tried to create new playlists (which are how I listen to streaming services). 

I searched to see if others had found a solution but although many people had the same error, Apple provided no solution.  So, I am back to Spotify full time.

All other services lacked the same deep catalog (Spotify usually had something Apple didn't), and/or price for service.

Since I listen to all kinds of music (much less than 50% of my listening is classical) a streaming service devoted to classical is not suitable. I tried Qoboz, Idagio, Naxos, Presto and others I can't remember. Presto with classical and jazz was not for me since their jazz catalog was very thin, IMO.

I find the audio quality of the Premium service to be as good as I can tell from CDs, of course my 74 year old ears may not be able to tell the difference.  Either way, Spotify Premium is 100% satisfactory.

I just read an article on RIAA's website that 89% of music is digital, 84% streamed and the other 5% downloads.  Nowadays vinyl purchases are twice what CD purchases are - but physical media owns a fraction of the music market.

[Mandryka]

The Applemusic app will let me add to the end of a queue - amazingly the Spotify app wouldn't and it was annoying.

But Applemusic will not let me add whole albums to the end of a queue - only single tracks.