Tag Archives: apple music

A few weeks ago, Apple made an abrupt announcement that Spatial Audio and Dolby Atmos were coming to Apple Music. I think the significance of Spatial Audio was lost on most people for a variety of reasons. However, any of us who own the company’s AirPods Max headphones and have watched a movie with Atmos and already experienced Spatial Audio audio could tell you that it was potentially a big deal for music, as well.

The unfortunate thing is that Apple also decided to bring up lossless audio in the same announcement as Spatial Audio without giving everyone the full details of how it works and what hardware it takes to listen. The confusion and frustration over Lossless and its lack of compatibility with Apple’s mobile devices and the AirPods Max ended up burying the lede to some degree.

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Apple News

Nobody Self-Owns Quite Like Apple Marketing

May 17, 2021 James Rogers 2 Comments

I’m sure most of you reading this have heard, but Apple announced that Spatial Audio and Dolby Atmos are coming to Apple Music in June. They will be made available to artists to enhance their music, but existing tracks will have to be updated to support them. Apple is also bringing lossless audio to their entire Apple Music catalog.

The additional charge to Apple Music subscribers for these new features? A big, fat $0. Considering that other services charge extra for such features, this is big move by Apple, and one that should be quite effective in bringing in new subscribers.

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Apple Services

Apple is About to Enter a New Stage in their Services Push- Subscription Bundles

August 19, 2020 James Rogers 1 Comment

Just before the drama of Epic Games’ PR stunt and ensuing lawsuits and insanity, rumors started to roll that Apple was preparing to release multiple subscription bundles to add value to their current services business. You can find Mark Gurman’s original story at Bloomberg here. That sounds like a smart play for Apple, and one that has been widely predicted by myself and many other Apple fans and tech bloggers over the last three or four years.

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Apple Watch

Pandora Adds Independent Streaming to their Apple Watch App

February 15, 2020 James Rogers

A lot of Apple Watch fans wanted an always-on display and got their wish last year with the Series 5. Others want sleep tracking. Some want a slimmer design without losing any battery life. While I am good with all of the above, what I really want to see next is independence for the Apple Watch. In my opinion, de-coupling the Watch from the iPhone for setup and basic operation is the last major step in the platform’s evolution.

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Apple News

Apple News+ Needs Some TLC

February 8, 2020 James Rogers

We’ve been here before. iCloud had its struggles all the way back to MobileMe before finally finding its footing recently. The Apple Maps app itself was fine from the beginning, but the stitched together maps and second-hand POIs were rough until Apple put in the work themselves. Apple Music’s content was good, but the interface was a flat-out mess when it was rolled out. Conversely, Apple News was just bad all the way through when it was released. Despite all the rough beginnings and growing pains, though, it’s good that Apple stuck with all of the above and made them all into strong services and apps in the long run.

I keep thinking Apple will learn from their previous false starts, but that doesn’t seem to be the case, as Apple News+ has taken the same path iCloud, Maps, Music and News before it. News+ has easily been the poorest received of all of Apple’s new paid service offerings and it culminated with the head of the service leaving the company this week.

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Apple News

Apple New Year’s Resolutions

January 4, 2020 James Rogers

Another year has ended and a new one has begun. In the time honored tradition of marking the beginning of a another trip around the sun, it’s time to make some New Year’s Resolutions. However, rather than make them for myself this year, I’m going to set my mind to thinking of some for Apple in 2020.

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Apple Music

Apple Music Has a New Home on the Web

September 5, 2019 James Rogers

Developers and site owners have been able to use functionality from Apple to host features of Apple Music on the web for a little while now. I wrote about Musish few months ago as an example of this. Unfortunately, this isn’t quite the same thing as the real thing. As of today, knockoffs are no longer necessary, as Apple’s music streaming service now has a new home on the net. Just visit https://beta.music.apple.com to see what Apple Music looks like without an app.

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Apple News

The End of an Era: Apple is Preparing to Break Up iTunes

April 12, 2019 James Rogers

According to both noted developer Steve Troughton-Smith and Guilherme Rambo of 9to5Mac, both of whom are known for spelunking through iOS and macOS betas for all kinds of goodies, iTunes is about to get busted up. Considering the mass market success of the iPod went hand-in-hand with the arrival of iTunes, this is pretty big news.

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App Store, Apple Music, Apple News

Apple Hits Back at Spotify in Pointed Press Release

March 15, 2019 James Rogers

Apple doesn’t always respond immediately to situations where they are attacked or criticized. They don’t usually make pointed public responses, either. However, Tim Cook and company have made an exception in the case of Spotify, releasing a detailed and aggressively worded press release that not only answers each of their competitor’s complaints, but also takes shots for them for some of their own recent activities.

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Apple Music, Apple News

Apple’s iCloud Outage Shows They Still Have Plenty of Work to Do in Services

March 14, 2019 James Rogers

From mid morning until around 3 PM EST on Thursday, most of Apple’s iCloud services, including Mail, Calendar, and Find My iPhone were offline in some regions. Apple wasn’t the only company with cloud service outages this week, but yesterday’s major iCloud outage couldn’t have come at a worse time for the company.

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Apple Music, Apple News, General

Spotify Cries to the EU that Apple is Bullying Them, but is Really Just After More Money

March 13, 2019 James Rogers

Spotify has decided that running to the EU and crying in public on their blog (which I refuse to link here. If you want to see it, use Google) is the best course of action to protect themselves from the big, bad Apple. In case you can’t tell, I do not care for their arguments or any that currently relate to Apple and anti-trust laws as they stand today. As you can also probably tell, I won’t be voting for Elizabeth Warren in 2020, either. I’ll have more on her insanity in a future post.

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