Curated a fine collection of tunes and want to share it with others? Find out how to share an Apple Music playlist from your iPhone, iPad, Mac, or Android phone with your friends and family or post it to your blog or social media account.
A few days following the release of the iOS 9.2 software update for the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad with Apple Music improvements and other changes, Apple today posted a matching iTunes update for Macs running OS X El Capitan.
iTunes 12.3.2 makes it easier to browse classical songs on Apple Music with support for works, composers and performers.
Apple Music streaming will be coming to Sonos speakers on December 15, the company announced on Twitter this morning. Eddy Cue, Apple's Vice President of Internet Software and Services, said earlier this year that Apple Music support will launch before year-end.
The Apple Music beta has launched for Android devices, and is now available as a free download via the Google Play store. If you have a compatible Android device, you can click this link to be taken directly to the Apple Music page on Google Play.
The download, which is version 0.9.0 and comes in at 29MB, officially brings Apple Music and Beats 1 to Android devices for the first time. Keep in mind that this is still a beta version, which means that not everything from the iOS version is there.
Siri has apparently gained some new functionality for Apple TV, at least on the tvOS 9.1 beta. You can now direct the remote assistant to play any song or album directly from Apple Music, even if the song or album isn't in your library. Siri can even search for songs on Apple Music, play Play Beats 1 radio, and more.
This makes Siri a lot more useful on Apple TV, and means that you don't have to look at the interface to start playing a song that you want to hear. The lack of Siri integration for Apple Music has been a popular pain point for early adopters of 4th-generation Apple TV.
I'm running the 9.1 beta on my Apple TV. For the record, Siri search for music was said to come as an update early next year, so it's highly likely that this could be a beta-only feature. Other iDB staffers have tried to replicate this functionality on tvOS 9.0 boxes to no avail.
Watch our video that shows Siri integration for Apple Music on the Apple TV...
Facebook is announcing today a brand new feature called Music Stories, basically a new post format for Facebook that should make it easier to discover and share music from Spotify and Apple Music.
Now every time you share songs or albums shared from Spotify or Apple Music using Facebook's iPhone application, these links will automatically get turned into the new post format which lets others listen to 30-second previews while on Facebook.
As the new Apple TV is scheduled to hit Apple's retail stores tomorrow, first reviews are now in. Journalists who were given a chance to spend some quality time with review units are praising evolutionary improvements to the living room experience while highlighting untapped potential for the refreshed $149 device.
One of the common complaints focuses on Siri and its inability to search apps for the Apple TV in a dedicated App Store. In addition, reports are noting that users won't be able to search Apple Music with their voice at launch, the omission Apple claims will be addressed with a software update due at the beginning of next year.
Following the expiration of the inaugural three-month free trial at the end of September, Apple Music has convinced approximately 6.5 million users to stay with the service as paying subscribers and currently has 8.5 million more customers on three-month trials, said Apple CEO Tim Cook at the Wall Street Journal’s WSJ.D Live conference last night in Laguna Beach, California.
“The runway here is really good,” Cook said. By comparison, the leading subscription music service Spotify currently has more than 20 million paying customers.
On the other hand, Spotify's service has been on the market for a few years now, since 2008, so it is my personal opinion that Apple should be commended for getting a quarter of Spotify's subscriber base in just a few short months.
Following last month's iOS 9 release, Apple's failed to raise the song-matching limit to 100,000 tracks.
Eddy Cue, Senior Vice President of Internet Software and Services, said back in the summer that Apple was “working to” quadruple the scan-and-match song limit by iOS 9's release.
In an effort to clarify the situation, MacRumors reached out to Cue and got the definitive confirmation that the limit for matched Apple Music and iTunes Match libraries will raise from the current 25,000 tracks to 100,000 songs “before the end of the year.”
As of October 1, I am officially a paid subscriber to Apple Music. It is the first time in years that I've paid for streaming music. Because I like Apple Music so much, it makes it a little difficult to test music streaming apps without comparing them to what I think is the best version out there.
With SoundShare, you aren't streaming music as much as you are building friendships based on musical interests. Similar to a Twitter or Facebook feed, you can let others know what you are into. Today, we go hands-on with an app review of SoundShare.
As many of you guys know, I have an interesting taste in music. I like old-school R&B, a smattering of rap, love some 90's alternative, and am really into EDM. I grew up listening to the likes of Phil Collins, Olivia Newton John, The Police, Michael Jackson, Oasis, Run DMC, The Cranberries, The Fat Boys, Nirvana, and many others. Needless to say, my taste in music can be pretty random at times.
One of my guiltiest pleasures when it comes to music genres is without a doubt Japanese pop music. Actually, I no longer feel guilty about it at all, I downright love Japanese pop, or J-Pop as it's better known as. I've been listening to J-Pop since the late 90's, starting with the likes of Hikaru Utada, m-flo, Ayumi Hamasaki, and other, more obscure J-Pop artists.
One of the downsides to liking foreign music like J-Pop, is that it can be difficult to find. You'll find a smattering of it on services like Spotify, but it's usually music that has already been sold or localized for the States. Of course, one can always import a CD, but CDs are ridiculously expensive in Japan, so that's not really an option for me. Plus, who wants CDs nowadays anyway?
Streaming music is where it's at, and it presents the perfect opportunity for finding different types of music from other countries. I've found that Apple does a pretty good job with this already. I've been able to find music that I've never been able to find on other streaming services. That said, it's still painfully obvious that a large divide exists, and J-Pop and other foreign music is more or less hard to come by.
The thing is, the music is already there, it's just restricted to accounts for certain regions. But it is possible to get around these restrictions if you're willing to make some compromises...
Apple Music on iOS includes an option to stream your music at high bitrates over a mobile data network at all times. As you know, Apple Music defaults to high-quality streams on Wi-Fi.
With this toggle, you can control your cellular data usage by enabling or disabling high bitrates when streaming or downloading music over your carrier's cellular data network.