When Apple Music launched nearly three months ago there was only one option to move libraries and playlists from Spotify or rdio and it was cumbersome and time constrained at best. Now that we’re nearing the end of the three month trial I’ve needed to embark on migrating my wife’s music from Spotify over to Apple Music so we can cancel Spotify. Her Spotify music library is pretty small at about 1,000 songs spread across 5 playlists but manually migrating them was not what I was looking to spend my weekend doing. Last night I checked to see if there were any new solutions to automate this and was pleasantly surprised to find an app simply called Move to Apple Music.
7-24-15 Update: Jim has mostly gotten the issue of the missing music sorted out. Unfortunately it required Apple intervening and explaining the process and even then it’s a mess to understand. There’s still a lot ahead to make Apple Music the mainstream product it should be.
Kirk McElhearn, writing about the lack of syncing of the Recently Played playlist between the Mac and iOS on Apple Music:
This is a huge mistake. If I’ve listened to some music through a playlist on Apple Music, I may want to go back and check what I heard, to listen to certain songs again, add them to my music library, or check out more music by some of the artists I heard. Especially if I’m listening on a mobile device and didn’t have time to note what I heard.
I can distinctly remember the summer of 2003. I was only a year into working in IT and realizing that I could seriously pursue this as a career. I was working two jobs, imaging Macs and performing various summer related tasks for my school district’s IT department during the day and serving up corn dogs, pizza and fried cheese on a stick (yes, really) at local fairs in the evenings and on weekends. I had just purchased my first iPod, the iTunes Music Store had recently launched and I was pouring a steady stream of my earnings into it. I spent over $500 that summer building the foundation of my music library and discovering new artists. It was exhilarating to have the vast landscape of music available to download on my iBook G4 using my Treo 650’s Edge connection[1] with the tethering that I wasn’t supposed to be able to access. That summer opened me up to a world that my protected upbringing had previously been able to easily divert by driving past the record store and turning K-Love up on the radio. Over the next eight years I’d spend hundreds of hours building my iTunes library to the nearly/merely 13,000 songs that have made the trek with me through a slew of computers and migrations. Then it all changed.
With Marco Arment’s piece on Apple losing the functional high ground gaining widespread visibility this week I find the timing of a recent fiasco with my iPad to be a perfect opportunity to throw in my two cents.
Are you planning to buy an iPhone from Craigslist or eBay? Here are a few ways to find out if that iPhone was stolen before you buy it. All you need is the serial number or IMEI number of the iPhone. The seller should be willing to provide this to you if you contact them.
The Apple Store may not be best place to purchase the iPhone if you’re looking for top dollar on your trade-in of an older iPhone or if you want to talk with your carrier about your plan before making a purchase. If you’re looking for the best chance to get an iPhone 6 (especially the iPhone 6 Plus) on launch day then the Apple Store is your best bet as they’re likely to get the bulk of the inventory. Apple is adding convenience to the buying process by adding a new reservation system in tandem with the iPhone 6 launch tomorrow.
Update: In the hours I’ve been using my Mac since I implemented this fix my machine has been running so much better. The Instant-On plug-in must be so deeply integrated with core pieces of OS X that it makes a dramatic difference in the way the system runs if the plug-in isn’t yet supported.
Having switched from a 2011 MacBook Air to the Retina MacBook Pro I can really appreciate this ingenious creation. I just hope it gets funded. If not you can buy one without the bells and whistles now at Shapeways.