Switching back to iOS 10.3.2 from the iOS 11 beta and having to go through my music library to download the tracks once again made me realize that my personal music collection isn’t as well sorted as it should be. I had never committed myself to using Apple Music as my one stop music solution, having dabbled across other streaming service providers in the past. However, I finally bit the bullet as I found it to be the most convenient option for accessing my entire collection on the iPhone.
I should add that switching to Apple Music for all your music needs isn’t the most seamless thing one can experience in the Apple ecosystem. One can also argue about the audio quality at 256 Kbps AAC, but that is subject to personal preference and doesn’t perturb me too much. So, what does the experience of jumping with both feet in to Apple Music entail?
1. Tagging your offline collection
Irrespective of whether you use Apple Music, it is always a great idea to properly tag and organize all your personal music files. In the past, I have used MediaMonkey and MusicBee on the basis of their interfaces and they just about got the job done.
However, I found MusicBrainz Picard to be the best solution when tagging en masse. The scraper managed to match nearly 95% of my collection. For the unmatched ones, you can manually search for similar files or lookup online using the browser. In my case, I couldn’t get the web tagging to work seamlessly, but that didn’t matter much as the built-in search worked just fine.
The best thing is that you can easily choose the fields to be updated, including the artwork. Manual editing of the most obscure tracks is also pretty straightforward, though it requires additional effort on one’s part. The benefit of this exercise is a well organized local collection that is easily accessible and recognizable across devices.
2. To the iCloud the music shall go
iTunes allows you to manually add up to 100,000 of your songs to the iCloud Music Library and access them on any device which accepts your Apple ID. The first thing you should know is that the files are converted to 256 Kbps AAC irrespective of your audio quality, something that may not be entirely desirable. Secondly, the upload process just doesn’t work the way it should.
On Windows, I had multiple upload failures which was not easily detectable on iTunes since it didn’t explicitly prompt about it. The failures are evident on rummaging through the ‘Recently Added’ list and finding out the ones with the “exclamation cloud” icons. I managed to re-upload some of these after multiple attempts, even as there was no obvious reason for the upload failure to begin with. Moreover, the synchronization on the iPhone manifested itself only when I toggled the ‘iCloud Music Library’ option from the Settings. Even then, there were a few files which hadn’t uploaded to the cloud, evident by them being greyed out on the iPhone.
This entire process was certainly an exercise in frustration, but unfortunately the worst was yet to come.
3. iTunes Match – When reality doesn’t meet expectations
Apple Music matches each uploaded track on the basis of its fingerprint and replaces it with an equivalent track from its catalogue. The point to keep in mind though is that all these replacement files are loaded with DRM that lock the files to your account and subscription. In my case, I have certain old tracks of suspect quality, so I didn’t mind this exercise as I had a backup of my original files. Ideally, it is a good solution to ensuring consistent audio quality and would have been acceptable if it worked as it should, except that it doesn’t.
The most egregious aspect is that the replacement track, although the same in name, can end up being a vastly different variant. I had many of my edits and remixes being replaced by completely unrelated versions which is infuriating to say the least. This meant combing through the collection once again and finding the right variant. How a 3-minute track can be replaced by a 7-minute extended version when in fact the original 3-minute variant is present on Apple Music is simply beyond me.
As you can determine by the above description, shifting your entire music collection to Apple Music isn’t for the faint hearted. Apparently, Apple will allow FLAC to be used as well from the iCloud Drive which would be another disjointed process added to the mix. If you care for your music like I do, you might think it worthwhile to invest a substantial amount of time in this process, otherwise I can’t really recommend it.
While accessibility and affordability are prime drivers for subscribing to such services, the flip side is that the more you use it for music discovery, the more you lock yourself in. You limit your exposure to music within the selected ecosystem and there is no easy means to migrate to another service. A time shall come when, for better or for worse, you shall no longer have an offline music library and you wouldn’t have to worry about uploading and conversion at all. But whether it makes your music experience any richer is highly debatable.
