this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2024
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Apple's Music app (formerly itunes) is only playing half of the tracks of a recently downloaded album. It then inexplicably skips to (or through) the next songs similarly.

Is it possible this is an anti-piracy measure? Interestingly, the labelled source appears to be 'web' so I'm wondering if the app somehow detects that it's an illicit source.

The problem does not occur in VLC or with other downloaded albums (although I recall something similar happening with Itunes many years ago on a different computer and/or OS so I can only assume the problem is not me and the actual file or app).

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[–] [email protected] 42 points 7 months ago (2 children)

No, it’s just a bug. Apple Music likes to just kinda randomly fuck up and stop playing an album. Especially with streaming. Even legit Apple Music the streaming service will do this shit from time to time. It’s almost flawlessly on iPhone but sucks balls on Mac OS and Windows.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 7 months ago

VLC to the rescue!

[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 months ago (1 children)

It's funny because I only see stupid bugs on Apple and people still thinks it's premium material. It's buggy shit (bad UIX), expensive as shit.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 7 months ago (1 children)

It being premium doesn't have anything to do with quality. It's about aesthetic and exclusivity

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago (1 children)

What?... Premium is just like a tier, quality, aesthetic and exclusivity can be on premium tier perfectly, I don't know what you want to say with that.

Apple users are ignorant and buys Apple products lied by marketing thinking they're getting premium products, quality, aesthetic or exclusivity, whatever, but Apple tries to make them feel like a premium product while it's basically trash and worse than a Windows.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 7 months ago (1 children)

That may have been true in the past but these days Windows is bloated trash and has been for a while. I jumped ship when I started getting ads on my lock screen.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago (2 children)

You can remove that, if you are good with Windows you can clean up that pretty much. The problem with Apple is their UI bugged, stupid bugs and lack of decent UI like grid Windows and more features that just Windows has by default, and KDE has even much more. Pretty stupid to pay for an Apple.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

Unfortunately we live in a timeline where both are true. Windows is bloated trash (that can be tweaked), Mac is a buggy mess with a lack of grid windows (which can also be tweaked).

I really don’t think anyone can generally say that one is better than the other anymore. It really comes down to the individual use case.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

So glad you all agreed that you should use Linux instead :)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago

if you are good with Windows

Problem is, most people aren't. Most people don't even know about O&O ShutUp 10, and if they did, it wouldn't work anymore

[–] [email protected] 26 points 7 months ago (1 children)

No but Apple Music will identify tracks that you have added from your own collection, and on other devices will download their version instead of the file you supposedly uploaded, even if your original version was higher quality.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago

Google Music did this back in the day, I lost versions of tracks that I couldn't find anywhere again, infuriating.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 7 months ago

Interesting world we live in

Proprietary software users: Ah, my apple music is fucked up, Spotify charged me twice, Netflix blocked me when I was traveling, I paid for this app on iOS $10 and it's barely working

Other users: I press a button and my jellyseer asks *arr to download all episodes of a show I want to watch, when i start watching my hass dims the lights, and I'm private, secure, and at the same time the show is being shared to a lot of other people for free

[–] [email protected] 8 points 7 months ago

As an aside, I fucking hate that I can't uninstall this shit on my work Mac. I use another media player and when it's open the media keys work fine but if I forget to open and and hit play that cursed thing just looms on the screen to remind me that I can't get rid of it.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 7 months ago

If you pirated the album, presumably it is free of any DRM. In this case the most that itunes could infer is that you didn't buy it from the itunes store, which isn't the same thing as inferring that you pirated it. So it's safe to assume whatever you're experiencing isn't an antipiracy measure, but either a bug or some issue with the album rip you downloaded. Without knowing the source I'd lean toward the latter, because lossy transcodes, bad rips and bad tags are commonplace in many places where pirated music is available.

[–] zinderic 3 points 7 months ago

This happens to me too sometimes. It usually fixes itself up when I clean the cache and remove all downloaded songs so it can update them.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

No it's a long standing bug that showed up around 2021 where songs were inexplicably stopping after 15s. Some thought account issues, some thought Apple Music was down, etc. etc.

I have them on select files. Stuff that I added to my library way back when that is matched. Some that are uploaded do the same.

Then there is also the long standing bug where Apple Music just stops playing. For whatever reason it doesn't load the song. You try and it just won't, forcing you to skip to the next song. It's insufferable and shows up in waves now and then.

You can get around some of the stalls by downloading the song to your device. It will play just fine then. It's not anti-piracy, Apple doesn't do shit like that. If they had proof of anything, they'd ban your account indefinitely and move on.

AM is not a good service I'm sorry to say. Yes the song quality is amazing and the recommendations are decent, but playing things, it's always been super super twitchy. Like if you look at it sideways it stops playing. I've been on it for 6 years. This is kind of known in the AM community.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Weird, is it possible that it's streaming a high quality version, but since you didn't pay, it just plays half of it? I haven't used apple stuff in years, so I'm too familiar with it anymore.

What happens when it stops playing, tho? Does it fail, stop or just go to the next song?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

It skips through songs every song half way through.

I downloaded a flac version of the album and converted it to m4a - works fine now. Weird.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

Pretty sure it’s a long time bug where it dislikes how some songs are encoded. Never figured out exactly what causes it, but yeah trying another encoding can help

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

I recently had the same issue in the Apple Music Android app

[–] [email protected] -4 points 7 months ago (3 children)

Switch to Android and use Soundbound to download songs from Spotify. I won't recommend the player since I would be downvoted to hell, but my personal favorite is Samsung Music.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago

I won’t recommend the player since I would be downvoted to hell

You shouldn't care about downvotes.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

Samsung music.. Can somebody show them the door?

(Kidding, kidding, who cares, i upvoted👍)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

I'm the outlier, as in I use Apple Music on Android. It has an app that works for me, options for lossless, some fun radio stations, and no podcasts or audiobooks popping up on the home page. Downloads work fine for me, but I did have that skipping bug OP described in a version 6 months ago.

All in all, I'm pretty happy with it, ignoring of course that streaming as a business isn't all that great.

Edit: Also, why not pirate outright, instead of violating the ToS of a company that has your billing info? I mean, they probably won't do anything, but at that point, just getting the albums as flac somewhere seams more sensible to me.