![]() Being that I do this about twice a year, it’s become more of a nuisance to get Spotify ready for daily use. When you have playlists that are 1,000s of songs deep, the time involved in getting the whole playlist synced for offline playback requires you to babysit Spotify for hours every time you restore your device. If the application isn’t actively playing music or open and left open then syncing stops. While Spotify has background syncing, it isn’t able to truly run in the background. For commuters like me offline sync isn’t a nicety, it’s a requirement. I have a two hour commute via The “L” most days of the week and am underground for about half of the trip. Outside of the one library to rule them all, Apple Music fulfills two nuanced features that are hugely important to me. With Apple Music all of this music is intertwined with the streaming component of the service and provide a fully rounded music library. This leads me to use the native Music application on my iOS device to access a range of music from The Paper Raincoat to Girl Talk to Taylor Swift (yes, really) who famously pulled her music from Spotify last year. While Spotify’s desktop application allows you to intermingle your local music files with the the Spotify offering, the mobile applications don’t. While Spotify isn’t nearly as fragmented as Google Voice has become, the announcement of Apple Music prompted me to dust off iTunes on my iMac and I realized how much of my personal music library isn’t a part of Spotify’s catalog and how much of it I miss having in my music rotation. Google Voice continues to be cumbersome to use on mobile if you’re not on Android where it’s services are integrated into the OS and might not keep me around much longer. Google hasn’t helped the situation as they continue to phase Google Voice out and roll these features into Hangouts which has a lackluster interface that’s shoved into GMail almost as an afterthought on the desktop. Since moving to Chicago and starting to work with a new team I’ve had more hurdles than ever before explaining how to get ahold of me between my carrier issued (or burner as it’s lovingly referred to by my coworkers) phone number and my Google Voice Number. Currently I use Hangouts to manage the handful of phone calls that I make and to text with my friends and family that don’t use iMessage. I’ve been a Google Voice user since the service launched in 2009 and have gone through many iterations of how I use it on iOS including jailbreaking my phone to integrate it with the native Phone and Messages applications. Until 3 weeks ago the only Apple apps on my home screen were Messages, Safari and Settings as seen above. Here’s my impressions after a week with the service.įor the majority of my time using an iPhone I’ve had a home screen that primarily consists of apps Apple didn’t create. With that said, I’ve switched to Apple Music for a multitude of reasons and with some changes to my music workflow. It’s one of the few apps I use daily and it’s lead me to discover some really terrific artists just like the iTMS had done for me as a teenager. Fast forward to today and I’ve become a Spotify addict. The convenience was as important as the music library to me at that point. I’d been running Subsonic to have always-on access to my music library on my iPhone but it was fiddly and required me to maintain it which, as any nerd knows, takes way more time than you think. When I first heard about Spotify in 2011 I thought “That makes total sense.” after my brain processed the idea of having millions of songs instantly accessible in my pocket at one monthly cost. 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. 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. ![]() ![]() It was exhilarating to have the vast landscape of music available to download on my iBook G4 using my Treo 650’s Edge connection with the tethering that I wasn’t supposed to be able to access. I spent over $500 that summer building the foundation of my music library and discovering new artists. 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 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 was only a year into working in IT and realizing that I could seriously pursue this as a career. I can distinctly remember the summer of 2003.
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