Category Archives: Music

Switching to Apple Music from Spotify

AppleMusicLogo It may seem fairly logical to use Apple Music if you’re already an iPhone or Mac user, but truth be told I had been using Spotify since before I had an iPhone or since others in my family were using either.

Pricing for family plans for both are very similarly priced, but realistically it’s a no brainer if more than one of your family use an iPhone or Mac as with Family Sharing you can share one subscription with up to 6 family members — but what makes this worth while is that Apple Music is just one of the subscription services that you can share.

If you have Apple TV+ or additional iCloud storage you want to share, you can do so, as well as others.

As well as music being of the highest streaming quality compared with others (Lossless 320kbps), the music catalogue is growing day by day and even some abstract smaller bands that I follow are now on there too.

To conclude, Spotify is great and I’ve used it for years. I was going to say if you’re on Android, you may as well continue to use it BUT you can get Apple Music for Android too!

Playing some vinyl

I have (had) wanted a new record player for a while now. I previously bought a vintage Akai unit on ebay but never found a cartridge for it so it was gathering dust. Luckily I now sold that back on ebay and someone has made good use of it by doing it up and selling it on.

For Christmas my girlfriend got me a nice new Sony record player, and some records (Humble Pie, AC/DC, Motorhead) so I have been geeking out about how to get them scrobbled to Last FM and how I can track them.

I have now registered for DisCogs – you can see the widget on this site now – and have done some further digging about how I can scrobble an analogue audio source.

The closest I have got is an app called ShazamScrobbler for Mac, but this will only work on newer versions of MacOS and would involve me having my laptop on and nearby whilst playing vinyl. I also found a Reddit thread with some further suggestions but some are outdated/no longer working: https://www.reddit.com/r/lastfm/comments/5zl9y3/how_to_scrobble_my_turntable/

Apple TV Review

Apple TV

I’ve now been using my Apple TV for four months. And so far it has been an absolute pleasure. I have previously used the “smart” feature of my Samsung Bluray player. This was okay, but not great and clunky and probably coded using Java or something else clunky.

Apple know how to do UI really well, and at the end of the day, you just want a nice and smooth and easy to use interface when watching TV. I get really grumpy when I see bad UI and for something you use to access and view catch-up TV and other video on demand such as YouTube, it’s all about the apps, number and availability of apps and quality of the apps and since tvOS has been released the Apple TV now has access to that too.

I’m a big Apple fan (if you hadn’t noticed), and to quote their UK site – https://www.apple.com/uk/tvos/ – “Apple TV keeps getting better and better“. And in my opinion it really does. It’s just great, really great.

Yes you can buy cheaper, but like all things, sometimes cheaper isn’t always better.

So far I have found a nice app called SlimLibrary which integrates nicely with Logitech Media Server (see HiFi) but I need to do a little bit more work to get that working.

The only negative I can think of at the top of my head is the fact it doesn’t have a dedicated audio out, an optical out, or co-ax so I can connect it and have a separate input for playing audio on my amp (me getting finicky). (Edit: in the time I wrote this I did a Google and found the following courtesy of iMore: http://www.imore.com/how-hook-fourth-generation-apple-tv-optical-audio-speakers)

Apple TV remote

This isn’t an extensive review, but you can find those elsewhere… this is more along the lines of I like it, I think it’s really cool, the remote lasts for 3 months on a single charge and uses the Lightning connector to recharge, and you should get one if you are considering a set top box!

Talking about the remote, the Siri function works really well for selecting what you want and is a really good substitute when typing passwords if you don’t mind saying them out loud. You can also use your iPhone or iPad as a remote which is neat.

Dedications:

Thanks to my girlfriend for this great gift 🙂