[HN Gopher] The 0.5 MB of nothing in all Apple Music files (2020) ___________________________________________________________________ The 0.5 MB of nothing in all Apple Music files (2020) Author : mritzmann Score : 330 points Date : 2022-04-07 11:17 UTC (11 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.ctrl.blog) (TXT) w3m dump (www.ctrl.blog) | nayuki wrote: | I worked with the FLAC format and it also recommends padding to | make it easier to edit metadata. I think libflac reserves 4 KB by | default. | | > PADDING: This block allows for an arbitrary amount of padding. | The contents of a PADDING block have no meaning. This block is | useful when it is known that metadata will be edited after | encoding; the user can instruct the encoder to reserve a PADDING | block of sufficient size so that when metadata is added, it will | simply overwrite the padding (which is relatively quick) instead | of having to insert it into the right place in the existing file | (which would normally require rewriting the entire file). | | -- https://xiph.org/flac/format.html#format_overview | hbn wrote: | The article mentions this. It's just half a megabyte seems like | a lot for metadata, especially since it's been doing this for | so many years, when storage was more expensive | nayuki wrote: | The article explained the reason for the AAC file padding. | I'm pointing out that other formats like FLAC (not mentioned | in the article) also adopt this strategy. | throwntoday wrote: | Depends if the space is utilized for album art which can | easily exceed 0.5MB | kadoban wrote: | If it's album art then it doesn't seem big _enough_. Either | way it's a bit odd of a size. Maybe it was for album art | back when resolutions were lower and it was enough. | iggldiggl wrote: | > If it's album art then it doesn't seem big _enough_. | | Doesn't it? Unless you're embedding print-quality artwork | or more than just the front cover, I would have thought | that 0.5 MB was plenty... | kzrdude wrote: | Knowing apple with their retina-everything resources, of | course it should be print quality album art. | Dylan16807 wrote: | Honestly 0.5MB of blank space is never a good tradeoff. If | you're adding album art that's a significant fraction of a | megabyte, then just rewrite the file. | | > which can easily exceed 0.5MB | | If that happens then you were better off never reserving | space at all. | fredoralive wrote: | Because I was trying to distract myself from stuff I looked at | some files in a hex editor, and really old DRM AAC / M4P files | from iTunes (still have a few around...) don't seem to have the | same huge "free" padding block at the start of them (you can | still see smaller "free" chunks, so they don't seem to be hidden | by the encryption). Which is weird. | | DRM iTunes Store files were 128kbs, whilst non-DRM ones are | 256kbs, as beyond removing DRM one of the selling points of what | was called iTunes Plus at the time was better quality. So it's | possibly back in circa 2009 someone made a fuckup with the | encoding settings and no-one has noticed since. Or its some | extremely weird conspiracy to sell larger iPods. | | Or perhaps they wanted to make the filesizes just a bit bigger so | that iTunes Plus files felt like quality, like the way expensive | products have metal weights added just to make them feel heavier | and more solid.[1] | | [1] For avoidance of doubt, this last suggestion may be what is | known as "humour". | outside1234 wrote: | Why didn't they just put the metadata at the end so it could | expand or contract? | matthews2 wrote: | "placing the metadata block at the end of the file means you | must download (or read from local storage) the entire song | before you can play it." | alpaca128 wrote: | How does the lack of album art prevent playback? | | And local music apps already build their own library so they | don't have to scan all files for metadata, I don't see how | the location in the file changes anything. | RandomWorker wrote: | Bigger is better, it's a larger file size so there must be more | quality. It works well for everything else. :) | davidhyde wrote: | Ripping from cd reserves 0.05% (about 5kb) for metadata. I can | imagine some communication breakdown where someone thought they | meant 5% (about 500kb) when specifying the number 0.05 with a % | next to it. You see percentage mixups all the time. | thrdbndndn wrote: | From my understanding 0.05% is just a stat from the files the | author collected, not that Apple encoder (which is used encode | these CD rips) actually reserve X percent based on file size. | It's more likely it reserve a static/absolute value of bytes | for every audio file. | cdot2 wrote: | In the article he describes how the 500kb was originally used | for album art but when Apple started storing that separately | they didn't remove the space for it in the music files | conductr wrote: | I see this type of bloat all over with Apple and | coincidentally their devices are, broadly speaking, priced | differentiated in large part by disk size and difficult to | expand storage. I actually don't believe it's a coincidence | at all. | brimble wrote: | But there are things they've done to save space, with a | _much_ larger effect than this, that they could simply | have... not done, if that 's what they were aiming for. | Much more likely they're just sloppy sometimes, like most | companies. | Melatonic wrote: | I agree - 0.05% or whatever who cares - but at very large | library sizes 500kb could start to add up. | | Then again I question who in the first place is keeping very | large libraries of apple music files...... | ungamedplayer wrote: | Apples ideal customer. | anentropic wrote: | It describes the author's conjecture that maybe it was for | album art, but actual reason is unknown | EricE wrote: | Since the album art happens to fit *perfectly* into the | space, it's a pretty solid conjecture. | etchalon wrote: | Album Art images are not exactly 500K. The percent mixup | conjecture is just as evidence based as the Album Art | conjecture. | mlyle wrote: | Percent mixup doesn't make sense when it's 500k whether | it's a short or long track. | riidom wrote: | Glad to hear I'm not the only one who stuffs as much music into | their phone as possible :) Not an apple user, but I'd also enjoy | some sudden extra 6% for sure. | [deleted] | dwighttk wrote: | Apple's album art has been janky for me for 20 years. I'm sure it | would be less noticeable if I had mostly mainstream music tastes, | but after years of doing album art manually, Apple screwed it all | up multiple times and I stopped caring as much about fighting | around the time I gave in and started streaming more music. | anentropic wrote: | Yeah it seems to randomly "forget" it | reaperducer wrote: | _Apple's album art has been janky for me for 20 years_ | | My wife and I sync music from the same Apple Music library. | | On her iPhone, the album artwork is completely random. | | On my iPhone, it's always correct. | | No amount of wiping the phone, or even upgrading to new phones, | will change this. Apple Music just hates her. | ungamedplayer wrote: | This is going to sound weird, but is your wifes phone set to | a non US english (even something like australian/british | english) language ? | | I found the same problem with my phone a long time ago for a | non US english account. Once i had that configured | differently than what my setting was on the app store it | would do all kinds of stupid things with the artwork. | lukifer wrote: | I feel your pain: I have a large and meticulously tagged | collection, and when I upgraded to a new iPhone, it seems to | have hit "shuffle" on every single album art, even after I | nuked it all and did a fresh sync. It's incredibly bizarre. | creeble wrote: | Yes, one of my favorite jankinesses is that iTunes would put a | timestamp _in the jpeg header_ of the embedded artwork for | every m4a file, ensuring that a hash of the artwork (for a | library system that tried to minimize duplicate artwork) would | always be unique. So you'd have a visually-identical but | duplicate artwork file for every song on the album. | fredley wrote: | Taken alone this might be unfortunate, but given Apple's long- | standing trend of upselling storage at hugely inflated prices | it's pretty damning. | jamil7 wrote: | For Apple Music it's probably a case of Hanlon's razor, it's | been buggy and busted forever. | willis936 wrote: | What if the incompetence is maliciously decided upon? | Hanlon's razor works for individuals, but falls apart for | larger institutions. | tshaddox wrote: | It also falls apart any time there is a legitimate | responsibility to do something. Negligence is malicious | even if it's convenient to blame incompetence. | Spooky23 wrote: | Incompetent management wouldn't be able to be consistently | incompetent. That's the big issue with incompetence. | | Apple is unique in that their product marketing has a big | role in the product design process. If you step back and | look at what they do objectively, there are a few journey | mapped "happy paths" that Apple designs to. They actively | remove features that distract from the true paths. | | It's noticeable with them as Apple has no sympathy for | legacy. But you can see it with other companies. An easy | one is Google Drive/Docs - they make it easy to find a | file, but didn't consider that you may want to see the | folder context of where the file is. | smugma wrote: | Less true in music. For example, iTunes Match is still a | thing, even though it's (mostly) obsolete if you have | Apple Music. | Spooky23 wrote: | Sorta. I'm an iTunes Match person. They sort of | integrated it as Apple Music lite. | | They wrecked the UI completely. Which makes sense - I | imagine that the program management of iTunes Match is | probably a low priority. Basically, i use search history | as a sort of playlist. | Ken_At_EM wrote: | I believe that you may be significantly underestimating the | incompetence of most organizations. | jklein11 wrote: | If all of the individuals are acting without malice, how | could the institution act with malice? Isn't the | institution just the collective will of the individuals? | | I could see it playing out like this, incompetence causes | the problem, incompetence fails to identify the problem, | incompetence fails to fix the problem. | [deleted] | 8organicbits wrote: | > If all of the individuals are acting without malice, | how could the institution act with malice? Isn't the | institution just the collective will of the individuals? | | I think we are on an unproductive tangent, but these are | quite important questions. An institution doesn't have | its own free will, so I don't think I can claim it can | have "intent to cause harm", but it can certainly cause | harm. | | An institution is not just a collection of people, it is | also the business processes and policies. While these are | created by people within the institution, they stick | around over time. As the world changes around the | organization, well intentioned policy can begin to harm. | | Individual employees following policy and normal business | practice (i.e. just doing their jobs) can behave | maliciously without their own intent to do so (sorry, my | hands are tied). | | An institution needs not only non-malicious members, it | needs to constantly re-evaluate its practices. | Importantly, when harmful outcomes are observed the | institution must re-evaluate and adjust, otherwise the | harm will continue. | | It's not enough for members to conduct their own behavior | without malice, they must also observe outcomes and | actively fight against the inertia of existing policy. | willis936 wrote: | That betrays the cooperative principle. Such an | institution could not survive. | exikyut wrote: | My vague understanding (just from reading blog articles) is | that iTunes became an insane metamorphization of the Eye of | Sauron, an infinite pit of quicksand (blub blub) and Yes(tm), | Inc (all things to all people). | | Y'know, iPod (and later iPhone) sync, music browsing and | purchasing, (payment handling), intelligent media | organization (or some approximation thereof), working with | giant media libraries... | | I get the idea that everyone just feature-piled on top of the | SoundJam code without fully scaling the design to the point | of being able to coherently load-bear the additional | functionality. So basically failure to adequately PM where it | counts. That requires PM that understands engineering, which | is sadly a tall order out of the gate and generally the most | crucial before projects get big and the need for support | becomes obvious. | | *IFF* that happened in this case (I have absolutely no | concrete idea), my question would be a) where "Steve really | wants this - put a good PM on it" and/or b) where "this code | explosion is killing everyone, we need PM help", ended up. | | iTunes history anybody? (Genuinely curious, wondered for a | while) | JKCalhoun wrote: | Curious as well. All I can add is that iTunes also needed | to run on Windows (and I believe QuickTime had, in effect, | the old MacToolbox running cross-platform). So add throw | that on the pile. | | iTunes had to move fast. There was not time, from what I | understand, to step back and refactor it in any meaningful | way. | at_a_remove wrote: | There never is time to refactor. | easton wrote: | Adding on to this, I heard a rumor (probably here) that | iTunes for Windows was ported by Apple porting Objective-C | and Cocoa to Windows, which is part of the reason it acted | so funny. I have no idea if that's true though. | kitsunesoba wrote: | Objective-C and Cocoa for Windows dates back to the | NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP/Rhapsody days, but yes it's true. | Safari for Windows also utilized this, perhaps to a | greater extent, because its UI looked significantly more | like its Mac counterpart than iTunes did, to the point | that even the text rendering was the same between Windows | and OS X. | mattl wrote: | Yeah OPENSTEP Enterprise (OSE) was a commercial product | sold by NeXT and briefly by Apple. Also later versions of | WebObjects that ran on Windows provided much of the same | tools. | jfb wrote: | Safari for Windows was a side effect of the porting work | that was happening on the Store to move away from a | custom renderer to just using WebKit. And the reason | iTunes on Windows was the way it was, and indeed, why | iTunes on Mac stayed in this hellacious status for so | long, is that it was built on _QuickTime_, which brought | most of the Mac Toolbox over to Windows, and then -- | eventually -- Carbon. | codyb wrote: | Yea, the idea this is some concerted effort to sell more | iCloud storage is kind of funny to me. | | I'd love to see those discussions - "The OKR was to sell more | iCloud storage so the Music team added half a meg of junk to | every song file" | | "Great!" | | ... I mean... weird shit has happened, but... I dunno, I've | worked at quite a few companies and I just don't get the | sense that that's Apple's MO. The bad publicity if it became | public that they actually did this on purpose would be | terrible, it seems pretty conspiratorial in this thread. | | Also, Music is a real shit, buggy app that constantly annoys | me. | throwthere wrote: | Devil's advocate-- 1.25gb additional storage for 2500 songs | isn't really with the effort to scam people, particularly when | you're already one of the most profitable companies in the | world | crossroadsguy wrote: | The other advocate - that's exactly how they're one of the | most profitable company in the world. Fleecing customer - by | making them buy chargers, earphones (ensuring its wire gets | dirty faster than any other), extra storage, open repair | hostile devices. List is quite long really. | | Besides that's not the only place they eat storage. Actually | it's so opaque you don't really know what's "really" | happening. | bayindirh wrote: | > by making them buy chargers. | | I'm still using the charger I got with my 2008 (pre- | unibody) MacBook Pro for my 2014 MacBook Pro, which is | perfectly operational in 2021. | | I'm using a Spigen 48W USB-C + USB-A charger (and a 60W, 2m | Baseus USB-C to USB-C cable) to charge my Macbook Air M1 | 2020. | | I'm using a Belkin wireless charging mat for iPhone X. | | So, no. | | > earphones (ensuring its wire gets dirty faster than any | other) | | Making rugged plastics requires a lot of nasty chemicals. | Either be nasty and durable, or be less nasty and be less | durable. | | Also none of my Apple devices' cables have frayed (incl. a | 30 pin connector cable for my now lost iPod Nano 2G). How | come? | | > extra storage | | I think their 200G plan has good bang for the buck, and | even I can't fill it up with normal usage. | | > Actually it's so opaque you don't really know what's | "really" happening. | | System preferences -> iCloud provides pretty good rundown | of which application is saving what, including the ones you | can't see in your drives (i.e. game saves, application | stuff, whatnot). | | So while Apple is not the best company out there, it's not | that worse either. | | P.S.: Repairability is a problem. I have nothing to say | about that, but at least battery change program is very | good. They've even found and changed some damaged parts in | my phone, _for free_ , when I sent it in just for a battery | change. | Mogzol wrote: | For chargers I believe they're referring to the fact that | apple stopped including chargers with new iphones. | | > Either be nasty and durable, or be less nasty and be | less durable. | | In my experience apple cables are both nasty and less | durable than most other cables I own. I have multiple old | 30 pin cables that are frayed at the connector, my old | ipod headphones had electrical tape on the cable where | the rubber was breaking, and all my apple cables are a | gross yellow color, while similarly old non-apple cables | I own are all still perfectly white. | | > I think their 200G plan has good bang for the buck | | It's average at best. It's the same price as google for | monthly payments, but google is cheaper if you pay | yearly. | jehb wrote: | Probably true. | | I'd argue, though, in my experience working at a large tech | company, the impact of a particular decision on the company's | overall bottom line rarely comes into play for a decision | like this. Instead, it's a mid-level manager who has been | given a goal to increase a particular number, and will be | rewarded based on quarterly performance against said | arbitrary number. | | Which manager put in their OKRs for the year to grow usage of | Apple's Music Library using a primary metric of total storage | consumed? Now, they didn't necessarily _cause_ the insertion | of blank space into the files, but they 'll be damned if they | let some engineer make a change that makes it significantly | harder to hit their growth goal for the year. | | Organizations don't cause things to be the way what they are: | the dynamics between people inside of organizations cause | things to be the way that they are. | travisgriggs wrote: | Never attribute to malice that which you can attribute to | incompetence. | cedilla wrote: | That's a good maxim for dealing with people you meet in | real life. It's a useless maxim for dealing with trillion | dollar multinationals. | jjoonathan wrote: | I'd say "dangerous" more than "useless." Big companies | have plenty of incompetence to go around, but they also | have plenty of malice disguised as incompetence, because | children learn how to play dumb before they can talk and | don't get worse at it when they grow up to become | megacorp employees. | mattnewton wrote: | Having briefly worked (as a grunt with no visibility into | exec decisions) in the maelstrom that is apple, I think | the only sinister thing that could be happening is no one | has an incentive to fix things like this, they only get | exposure / promotions on shipping new features or large | quality bugs. And so if they weren't bothered by it, and | no execs we're bothered by it, it would just go unfixed. | nemacol wrote: | Sure this 1.25gb:2500files is not massive - But if this | little conspiracy theory is true it is easy to imagine them | doing this sort of file padding in other systems as well. A | little bit here and there adds up quick. | | "When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done | anything at all." | | Personally, I think it is likely the padding was created for | future use. Maybe tagging or some other meta data. | wbear wrote: | They explain what the padding was used for and why it was | initially introduced in the article. This isn't something | that needs to be theorized on. | Dylan16807 wrote: | The article is only guessing at what 99% of the padding | is there for. | [deleted] | pkulak wrote: | > I believe the 500 kB block was originally reserved for album | art. Apple's servers would inject it on-the-fly into the | metadata at the time of delivery. | | This absolutely seems like the most reasonable explanation. | marcellus23 wrote: | Why would ripped CDs not exhibit the same thing if this was | intentional? | arbitrage wrote: | The fine article addresses this point. | marcellus23 wrote: | Where? | thefreeman wrote: | Not really. the article posits that this space was | originally reserved for album art and when that was moved | to external storage nobody remembered to remove the | reserved space. OP is suggesting apple did this | intentionally for some sort of profit motive. | emsy wrote: | It's not a good sign for a company when these allegations | become more plausible over time, which is definitely the case | for Apple. | londons_explore wrote: | The iTunes store launched in 2003, when most users were on | dialup. File sizes of music was _critical_ to the success of the | service. There is no way they would have had 500 kilobytes of | empty space back then. | | So when did this get added? | banana_giraffe wrote: | I do wonder if this was done because Apple noticed people change | Album artwork more than any other metadata, and wanted to leave | room so such an action would generally be quick, even on slower | drives. | dpcx wrote: | With the advent of streaming music as popular as it is (and | surely Apple had to see that becoming the trend), this seems | largely like a non-issue from a storage perspective. In fact, | it's really only costing Apple more money in bandwidth because | they still have to transmit that data - though I'd bet it | compresses extremely well. | basisword wrote: | Unless they have unlimited data the end user is also paying | directly for this, not just Apple. | fignews wrote: | Apple Music stores music locally. On my 512GB iPhone it's the | number one consumer of space | EricE wrote: | And by default it works like cache. If you need space the | music files are the first to go since they can just be re- | downloaded. | Cupprum wrote: | Depends whether you download it or just stream it. | Animats wrote: | If only Apple had some way to store metadata for a file | separately from the content. Something like files with a "data | fork" and a "resource fork", maybe. | sergiofuente01 wrote: | [deleted] | londons_explore wrote: | In 2022, we shouldn't be reserving any area of a file as 'spare | space' like this. | | On the very rare occasion you adjust the artists name in a music | file, the user expects the whole file will be rewritten. So just | rewrite the whole file. | | Whats next? Photoshop only writing out a quarter of an image when | I edit my ex out of a nice photo? MS Word only touching a few | bytes of a 100 page document when I make a heading bold? | dotancohen wrote: | > In 2022, we shouldn't be reserving any area of a file as | 'spare space' like this. | | In 2022, we should have file formats that are not naive of the | underlying filesystem. I store my text notes in Git, but I also | have two LibreOffice documents in there because org-mode | doesn't handle their contents well. It would be nice of only 5% | of the file had to be rewritten when I change a single word, | rather than the current 91% of the file. A 5% hit to storage | for a 91% reduction each time I update it would be a great | trade off. | coder543 wrote: | Under the hood, odt and docx files are zip files.[0] The | "91%" change has nothing to do with rewriting the file; it | mostly has to do with zip files and how poorly git handles | binary diffing. Plaintext files are rewritten on disk every | time you save them in virtually every editor and that doesn't | cause problems for git. | | I've never tried this, so take it with a heap of salt, but | you might have better luck with the diffing if you developed | a process that unzipped the file contents into your repo | after you're done editing it, and then zipped the contents | back up with the right extension when you want to edit it | again. | | Alternatively, you could just switch to a text-based format | like rtf, as long as you don't need any specific features | from odt or docx. | | (EDIT: someone else mentions a promising sounding "flat xml" | format, which I've never encountered before.) | | [0]: https://superuser.com/a/1356829 | 0xffff2 wrote: | >I've never tried this, so take it with a heap of salt, but | you might have better luck with the diffing if you | developed a process that unzipped the file contents into | your repo after you're done editing it, and then zipped the | contents back up with the right extension when you want to | edit it again. | | I have a current project where one of the other developers | has tried this. It might work for a solo project, but with | multiple developers on Windows (Excel) and Linux (Open | Office), I find that Open Office feels a need to | continually fuck with unrelated fields. Editing a single | field in an xslx file results in changes in a dozen files | in the unpacked version. Making any more complicated | changes results in a diff that's impossible to manage. | coder543 wrote: | Do you actually mean OpenOffice, or do you mean | LibreOffice? I would hope everyone is using the much more | improved LibreOffice by now instead of OpenOffice. | | Still, interesting to hear some feedback on how well (or | not) that idea has worked for some. | | The Flat XML option seems to be the best approach if you | need to edit documents more complex than what can be | represented in either markdown or rtf (rich text format). | nyanpasu64 wrote: | One option is to store files as a database like SQLite, which | I assume is designed around not rewriting the whole file on | every change. For example Audacity 3.x does this. | | However SQLite stores multiple files on disk for crash | persistence, complicating matters. But then again so does | Audacity 2, and Microsoft Office to an extent (file locking | rather than data integrity). | | Microsoft Word used to only append changes to the document on | save rather than rewriting the whole file, but this was | disabled since if you deleted text and saved the file, it | remained in the document. | https://www.cnet.com/culture/microsoft-disabling- | word-2003s-... | EricE wrote: | Modern file systems address all of that and more - without | the added complexity of a whole freaking RDBMS system! If | you are going to change an application it makes far more | sense to just update it to leverage the features of a | modern file system. | sjhuang26 wrote: | In your case, LibreOffice allows you to save the file as Flat | XML (e.g., .fodt), and the document will be written as a | single uncompressed file. Unfortunately, few apps have a | feature like this. | ktpsns wrote: | Wow, thanks for the Flat OpenDocument file type! Such kind | of files are much better to treat with git (i.e. human | readable diffs, for instance). However, unfortunately, | these files tend to get very large (200kB ODS vs. 7MB | FODS). What a pity the XML itself is not less verbose. | lelanthran wrote: | I dunno if that will help. I know Dia lets you store the | uncompressed XML, but I have seen it sometimes have a 100% | diff due to the serialiser moving *everything* around when | all that happened was that I rearranged half the blocks on | the diagram. | dotancohen wrote: | This is perfect for my use case, thank you! The .fodt file | is 150K, vs 117K for the .odt file. But after changing a | word less than 20 of the 1983 lines in the file have | changed. $ ls -hl todo.fodt -rw- | rw-r-- 1 dotancohen dotancohen 150K Apr 7 16:41 todo.fodt | $ ls -hl todo.odt -rwxrwxr-x 1 dotancohen dotancohen | 117K Apr 6 12:01 todo.odt $ wc -l todo.fodt | 1983 todo.fodt $ cp todo.fodt todo-edit-one-line.fodt | $ libreoffice todo-edit-one-line.fodt $ diff | todo.fodt todo-2.fodt | grep "+ " | wc -l 19 | Cupprum wrote: | > In 2022, we shouldn't be reserving any area of a file as | 'spare space' like this. | | I completely understand your point, but maybe it would be a | breaking change. | londons_explore wrote: | It wouldn't be. This spare space is entirely optional in the | file format specification, and it's up to the tool that makes | the file if it wants to include it or not. | userbinator wrote: | _You can't make changes to the metadata (e.g. change the spelling | of an artist's name) without reassembling the entire file to | recalculate the offsets._ | | Split the file after the metadata block; change the data inside | the metadata block (possibly changing its size); add the | difference between the old and new size to all the offsets in it; | recat the two pieces together. | | You could even do this "streamingly", to inject album art etc., | since you know what size the added content will be. Simply add | the diff-offsets to the right fields as they get streamed out. | | The above solutions didn't take much thought to come up with. I | wonder why no one at Apple thought of that (especially the | latter)? | rootusrootus wrote: | > The above solutions didn't take much thought to come up with. | I wonder why no one at Apple thought of that (especially the | latter)? | | The quintessential HN comment! | cogman10 wrote: | This is the sort of thing that also seems crazy rare to need to | fix. Ok, so you need to reassemble a file and recalculate | offsets when an artist changes their names... so what? How | often does that actually happen? Do people that download your | music CARE that the meta data reflects an old/wrong spelling? | | Even the argument of "Well, they need to download the whole | file before they can see the metadata" seems really weak. If | someone is streaming the music, why not stream the metadata | separately from the data? Why do those two things HAVE to be | together? | | Heck, why not have a metadata "db" (ala plex) instead of | insisting that stuff be bundled on the media itself? | | Just seems like a bad solution all around. | iggldiggl wrote: | > Heck, why not have a metadata "db" (ala plex) instead of | insisting that stuff be bundled on the media itself? | | Because that isn't portable and then a different faction will | be screaming "vendor lock-in". The metadata inside the media | file itself is in a standard format that _anybody_ can read, | and storing it inside the file also ensures that it cannot | become separated from the file it 's belonging to. | | Besides, any reasonable kind of software involving any kind | of media library will _already_ be keeping its own metadata | database (and that includes iTunes /Apple Music), because | rescanning the whole library on each program startup would be | ridiculously inefficient (all the more so historically when | hard disks were more common). But it can't be the sole source | of truth because see above - people who still keep a local | library of music around might want their media file | collection to be interoperable with other software, too. | ARandumGuy wrote: | I would guess the original file structure was designed for hard | drives, and was never changed. When storing on a hard drive, | you want the data in a single file to be located physically | close together, which becomes more difficult if you're | splitting up the file when you make metadata changes. | | Or, if the article's speculation is correct, Apple designed | their formats assuming only 5kb of empty space would be | allocated, which was insignificant even for the 1st Gen iPod's | 5 GB hard drive. No reason to do more complicated stuff if a | simple solution works. It only becomes a problem when people | don't bother to keep track of how much empty space is being | added automatically. | boesboes wrote: | This is what happens when you teach developers | 'storage/hardware/compute is cheap' if you ask me. That plus the | lack of interest in Apple Music development in general. (I cannot | imagine that shitty music player received much love over the pas | years. Still better then spotify though.) | | Funny side note: I recently made it's frontend crash. Turns out | it _is_ a JS frontend after all. I suspected as much because of | how slow & slugish it is, but I got an actual JS error & it fell | back to the old table interface | fredley wrote: | If you're buying your storage from Apple it is _not_ cheap! | zamalek wrote: | > storage/hardware/compute is cheap | | And this _definitely_ isn 't the case here. If you run out of | space it usually means an entirely new device. | kall wrote: | I believe they just fixed this (after how many years?) by | moving Music.app away from webviews to native views in macOS | 12.2. I wouldn't be surprised to still see a JavaScript error | in there though, or maybe a Java error because it probably | still runs on WebObjects. | [deleted] | hans1729 wrote: | > Still better then spotify though | | Surely you are talking about different clients than I have on | i/macOS? With Apple Music running on my MacBook, I couldn't | even control the player on the respective iOS app from the | couch. It was insultingly trashy UX, and I'm deep, deep into | apples ecosystem. My reaction was "what a joke, guess I _have_ | to use Spotify". | basisword wrote: | Apple Music could lack 90% of Spotify's features, but Spotify | will never get me back to their awful desktop UI. It looks | like it's made for toddlers. Full screen on an artist page I | don't even see 5 songs because they have this stupid big | banner section taking up 2/3 of the screen. Throw in their | spamming of podcasts to me and the whole desktop experience | is a mess. Apple Music has its issues but at least the UI is | kind of ok. That's how low Spotify has set the bar which is a | shame because their UI was great for about a decade and then | they just set it on fire. | wlesieutre wrote: | Remember when Spotify made headlines last year for having a | button to listen to an album in order? That's how low the | bar is. | | I switched to Apple Music as well. It's not perfect but at | least it's not trying to shove Podcasts into my music. | | Spotify also likes to complain about Apple being anti- | competitive by locking them out of features, then when | Apple does let 3rd party apps do things like Apple Watch | offline background music playback, Spotify takes two and a | half years to actually use it. | | https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/01/05/pandora- | releases-... | | https://newsroom.spotify.com/2021-05-21/enjoy-more-ways- | than... | | Edit to add: AirPlay 2 from iOS 11.4 (May 2018) still not | supported, so you can't do multi-room audio, only a single | speaker at a time | whywhywhywhy wrote: | > then when Apple does let 3rd party apps do things like | Apple Watch offline background music playback | | Entirely Apples fault, by the time they enabled the | possibility of the feature it had become apparent that | the Watch as a platform wasn't really worth focusing on | so it's on the backburner now. | | If that feature was possible day one, it would have | happened. But instead Apple has this attitude of locking | things out from 3rd parties and only moving when it | starts to make their products look bad. | wlesieutre wrote: | Offline music is really about fitness users, if you're | not a runner I can see how it looks useless. Anyone who | wants it has switched off of Spotify by now, so at this | point it probably doesn't matter if they ever get around | to it. | Thrymr wrote: | Offline music is also useful for travel: airplanes, car | trips with imperfect cell coverage, train tunnels, etc. | Not a small use case at all. | kitsunesoba wrote: | Yes this is big, with Apple Music I much less frequently | have anything promoted at me unless I'm specifically | looking for it. | | Apple doesn't twiddle with its UI nearly as much as Spotify | does which is nice too. It has its shortcomings, but the | consistency means that workarounds stick. | | Finally, Apple is surprisingly more permissive with Apple | Music's SDK than Spotify is, even allowing full | streaming/playback capabilities (a capability Spotify | removed from its SDKs several years ago), which means that | there are now several alternative front ends for Apple | Music available that can play music themselves -- | alternative Spotify front ends can only ever control the | official Spotify app and Spotify Connect devices which is a | real shame. | codetrotter wrote: | > alternative Spotify front ends can only ever control | the official Spotify app and Spotify Connect devices | which is a real shame | | I haven't used Spotify for a long time since switching | from Spotify Premium to Apple Music, but I know of a | third party open source library that might be of interest | to people who have Spotify Premium and would like to | explore alternative frontends: | | > librespot is an open source client library for Spotify. | It enables applications to use Spotify's service to | control and play music via various backends, and to act | as a Spotify Connect receiver. | | https://github.com/librespot-org/librespot | | More details from same GitHub page: | | > A sample program implementing a headless Spotify | Connect receiver is provided. Once you've built | librespot, run it using : | | > target/release/librespot --name DEVICENAME | | > The above is a minimal example. Here is a more fully | fledged one: | | > target/release/librespot -n "Librespot" -b 320 -c | ./cache --enable-volume-normalisation --initial-volume 75 | --device-type avr | | > The above command will create a receiver named | Librespot, with bitrate set to 320 kbps, initial volume | at 75%, with volume normalisation enabled, and the device | displayed in the app as an Audio/Video Receiver. A folder | named cache will be created/used in the current | directory, and be used to cache audio data and | credentials. | kitsunesoba wrote: | librespot is a great project, but I haven't used it to | resurrect the native Spotify client I had been working on | because it's technically reverse engineered, which means | users of my client risk having their accounts banned | (however unlikely that may be). | codyb wrote: | My favorite part of Apple Music has been the ability to | share playlists through iMessage to my friends and family | although I don't do that enough. | | Then, I love the Essentials playlists, basically, if you | search for any large enough artist they'll have a curated | playlist always called Essentials which makes it easy to | find. The curation is usually spot on although there's | been one or two that felt like misses out of maybe | fifteen or twenty that I've tried. | | Finally, the Apple premium plan for 30 bucks a month, | five members, 1TB online storage, Apple Music and TV | (couldn't really care less about sharing my workouts or | Arcade, but those are there too) is a pretty sweet deal | for my family and I. | | Dunno if Spotify or Tidal have things similar. And there | is some funkiness around sharing occasionally as I'm not | sure if my dad ever got access to Music, his account may | have been in a weird state since he already had a | subscription, unsure, will ask later. | | My dad likes that for his own music that Apple doesn't | have, if he imports it to his Music app on his computer, | Apple will auto upload to the cloud so he can stream it | from other devices. I haven't used this much but it | sounds pretty neat. | basisword wrote: | The API/SDK seems pretty good. I found this great | seemingly full featured client last week that I've been | enjoying: https://github.com/ciderapp/Cider | kitsunesoba wrote: | It's a bit odd, but Music on Mac and iTunes on Windows needs | to be controlled through Remote[0]. I tested it now and it | works fine. I agree that it's a tad odd that remote control | of the desktop version isn't as integrated as it is for the | Mac/Windows version. | | [0]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/itunes-remote/id284417350 | hans1729 wrote: | That's interesting to know, but just not going to fly with | me. While I agree with the other commenters here that | Spotifys Desktop-client is terrible, I don't miss any | functionality and I don't want to use an additional app to | control the music playing on the mac when spotify does it | natively. | | (That, and all my friends use spotify, too, so | sharing/group sessions etc. work out of the box) | dan1234 wrote: | One of my reasons for dropping Spotify was their desktop | client! | bombcar wrote: | It would seem to me (probably naivete) that if you have a | variable part of a file the variable part should come after the | fixed parts ... | seanalltogether wrote: | > For example, placing the metadata block at the end of the | file means you must download (or read from local storage) the | entire song before you can play it. To avoid this, encoders | tend to place it before the much larger multimedia stream | block. The metadata block refers to absolute positions inside | the multimedia stream block measured as an offset from the | start of the file. You can't make changes to the metadata (e.g. | change the spelling of an artist's name) without reassembling | the entire file to recalculate the offsets. | bombcar wrote: | I _know_ local storage can seek to a location in a file | without reading the whole thing (ZIP files start with a | pointer to the metadata directory which is at the end of the | file IIRC), so then all you need is a download system that | lets you grab the first block of the file, and then ask for a | later block without the middle blocks. | eropple wrote: | This requires multiple requests (or did before QUIC, things | may be better now) and a server expecting range requests. | It's much more reliable, considering the general mess of | web requests, to put everything at the front. It was even | more reliable in 2005 to do so. | pavon wrote: | Back in the HDD days, loading music metadata was far from | instantaneous even with the metadata in the front. Putting | it at the back would have doubled the time needed for the | UI to update. Now, that SSDs are more ubiquitous though it | might be time to revisit that decision. | JKCalhoun wrote: | Yeah, PDF suffered for this because the catalog was at the | end of the PDF file. My understanding is that "streamable | PDFs" are something of a hack where only the first page is | front-loaded. At least that used to be the case. | CharlesW wrote: | The key to understanding this issue seems to be "-movflags | +faststart". The TLDR is that Apple apparently isn't "fast- | starting" their MPEG-4 files before distribution. | | This became a thing when distributing QuickTime Movies on the | internet became a thing (it's not an issue with random-access | media), because one needed Movie metadata at the front of the | file in order to support progressive playback. Because the MPEG-4 | file format is effectively the QuickTime Movie file format, the | need to put metadata at the front of the file continues if you | want viewers/listeners to be able to play files as they're | downloading. | | That Apple isn't performing this extremely trivial pre- | distribution process is extremely curious. It makes me wonder if | this "common knowledge" was lost along the way, or if the people | who would know this kind of super-obvious production step just | aren't the same people in charge of Apple Music standards. | | For anyone curious about what fast-start implementations look | like: | | https://github.com/FFmpeg/FFmpeg/blob/master/tools/qt-fastst... | | https://github.com/kanongil/node-faststart | thrdbndndn wrote: | What? Faststart just means the metadata is at the front of the | file, which these 500KB padded m4a files do have. They just | have excessive paddings between the metadata and the content | stream. | | The author used this flag in FFMPEG because.. well, despite the | main goal is to shrink the padding, you still want to have | metadata at the beginning. | CharlesW wrote: | > _Faststart just means the metadata is at the front of the | file, which these 500KB padded m4a files do have._ | | You're correct in the sense that having metadata at the start | of the file means that these files are ready for progressive | download/playback, albeit with a chunk of unnecessary data | transfer. | | But the other important part of the "faststart" process is | that you get what used to be called a "flattened" file, where | the data is contiguous -- metadata is followed immediately by | compressed media data. (Tools for QuickTime Movies also | compressed the 'moov' header, but I'm not sure if that's | supported in MPEG-4.) | thrdbndndn wrote: | The article already detailed why Apple (or most of AAC | encoders) have this padding, and a reasonable amount of | them are useful. They just need to be smaller. | | The author don't actually need it to be"contiguous"; it's | just that FFMPEG stream copy is the easiest way to so. | | In this sense, Apple don't need to "flatten" their files, | they just need to have smaller padding just as what iTunes | is already doing when ripping user-provided CDs. | CharlesW wrote: | I think we're talking about two different things. | | You're talking about the space reserved to allow for in- | place metadata updates on songs that you've ripped. As | you've noted, it's not much and doesn't "need" to be | smaller. | | I and the TFA are talking about music files purchased | from and delivered by the Apple Music Store, which | include 500KB of wasted space. The solution the article | suggests (and that I added a bit more background to in my | post) is to do what any production workflow _should_ do | before distributing MPEG-4 /Movie files -- fast-start | those suckers. | | 0.5 MB is not much, but multiplied by the billions of | tracks Apple sells and streams in a year, pretty soon | we're talking about a significant amount of wasted | storage and transfer. | | > _In this sense, Apple don 't need to "flatten" their | files, they just need to have smaller padding just as | what iTunes is already doing when ripping user-provided | CDs._ | | What's the benefit to shipping any empty KBs with every | song purchased or streamed? | thrdbndndn wrote: | >What's the benefit to shipping any empty KBs with every | song purchased or streamed? | | For (quicker) in-place metadata updates? You just said | it. You can do so with the purchased music in iTunes. | | Not sure about the streaming services, but the article | isn't about it at all (nor did it talk about if they | actually have these 500 KB padding to begin with). | Dylan16807 wrote: | > But the other important part of the "faststart" process | is that you get what used to be called a "flattened" file, | where the data is contiguous -- metadata is followed | immediately by compressed media data. | | According to who? | | Do any media players care if there's a couple kilobytes | empty there? | [deleted] | WFHRenaissance wrote: | Just in case they want to make the song a _bit_ longer. | zxcvgm wrote: | Just like the author, I too am quite particular about empty space | in my MP3 files. | | When I was ripping my CD collection, I religiously tagged the MP3 | files with ID3v1. Later on, I had some tracks whose titles were | just a tad longer than 30 chars so I had to use ID3v2 for those | and I noticed the file size grew by _a lot_. | | Frustrated by this, I opened them in a hex editor and learnt that | ID3v1 was a fixed format of 128 bytes, but v2 was variable. I | also found out that the software had added a 4KB zero-byte | padding to the v2 tag, which was "necessary" because the tag is | now at the front of the file, and this padding allows more tag | data to be added easily later on. | | I tried various ID3 tagging software at that time and all of them | added a padding. So I learned about the tag format and wrote a | tagger myself that didn't add any padding. It was a great | learning experience, and I managed to shave those useless zero | bytes from my MP3s. | karmakaze wrote: | Dumb format. Tags should be allowed after the content data. | lmz wrote: | Enjoy streaming that "unknown track" if you can't seek. | gregmac wrote: | Implementing this would be a good learning experience that | will greatly increase your understanding of fopen, fseek and | how block storage works. It would be an interesting | experiment to benchmark reading a million files with tags at | the start vs the end, and maybe compare using spinning rust | storage to a modern NVMe drive. | teaearlgraycold wrote: | A life well spent | AA-BA-94-2A-56 wrote: | I'd love to be exactly like this, but I realise by over- | optimising my computer and its organisation, I'm under- | optimising my time. | folkrav wrote: | Unless I had a very large library or very limited storage space | and no way to expand, I'm having a hard time understanding why | this would objectively really matter at the scale of a personal | MP3 library. We're talking about a tiny bit under 1GB of | additional data per million individual tracks. | | Must have been pretty fun tracking this down, but I'm curious | as to why you'd go through all this trouble. Storage is cheap, | my time is not haha. | tommi wrote: | It's all about how you value your time. These kind of quests | are usually very valuable learning tool and fun. I have | learned a lot with hobby projects which didn't create any | value as end products but were valuable to me. | tomxor wrote: | There is also a cumulative value in your knowledge and | understanding when hacking on things for such specific | personal niggles - which over time makes future efforts | more likely to reap some combination of higher rewards, | faster execution and less effort... and more often than not | what we learn can be applied to our day jobs in unforeseen | ways. | | Having a problem organically emerge in front of us that | affects us personally is just a really easy thread to pull | on for learning things. | exfascist wrote: | The underappreciated joy of yack shaving. | RosanaAnaDana wrote: | >Wait, it's yack shaving all the way down? | | Always has been.. | OJFord wrote: | > Must have been pretty fun tracking this down, but I'm | curious as to why you'd go through all this trouble. | | ParseError? You recognise fun but not that it might be a | reason to do something? | zxcvgm wrote: | I think I was trying to get my entire music collection to fit | onto my iPod, which at that time only had 10GB of space. | | And also, I love to optimize things, so it made no sense to | me why squeezing 1-2 more words in the track title would | inflate the file size by 4KB. As a teenager, I probably had | more time on my hands back then. | kevin_thibedeau wrote: | It would be better to just reencode tracks with VBR capped | to 224 or 160 max bitrate. | twothumbsup wrote: | if you had a lossless source then sure, otherwise lossy | to lossy transcoding is not great. | megablast wrote: | Rencoding is an awful idea. | mayli wrote: | Not really, if you take A/B/X test and realize modern | codec can be transparent at low bitrate (e.g. | opus@128kpbs) | xxpor wrote: | opus didn't exist when people were worried about 10 gb | iPods | RealStickman_ wrote: | And also can't be played on said ipods. | cylon13 wrote: | It would certainly not be better to crunch the quality | than to remove useless zero bytes. | mshockwave wrote: | slightly tangent: is there any reason OP preferred "," over "."? | It looks so disturbing to me to be honest. | lm28469 wrote: | Yes, he's from Denmark: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_separator | tveyben wrote: | Well Oslo is not in Denmark, but in Norway (a different | country). | | I (from Denmark) find it "disturbing" to see `.' as the | decimal point, AM/PM for time, as well as writing the DAY | before the MONTH (MM/DD-YYYY). | | https://m.xkcd.com/927/ | | https://www.ctrl.blog/about/ "Ctrl blog ("Control blog") is | the developer-focused blog of Daniel Aleksandersen based in | Oslo, Norway." | [deleted] | [deleted] | turkeywelder wrote: | That's how most of Europe do decimal places, using commas | instead of full stops. | goosedragons wrote: | I get it and it's probably done out of habit but in English | it's just weird. AFAIK no English speaking majority area does | it either. | dragonwriter wrote: | Probably because the OP is from one of the many parts of the | world where "," is the decimal point and "." is the thousands | separator. | kencausey wrote: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_separator (i.e. not | everyone uses a period) | MarcoZavala wrote: | retSava wrote: | It could be a form of "look, this file is X large for Y minutes, | that's much more than Z, so it must be better!". | | I have a rising suspicion that some game companies with fluid | ethics do this - avoiding to optimize and strip unused content, | in order to inflate game size. | | "Wow, it's 102 GB, the game must be huge with boatloads of | content!" (ie huge == higher chance of I'm getting my moneys | worth). Which in turn becomes a problem with the latest | generation consoles that have quite little drive space | (Playstation ca 625 GB). | outcoldman wrote: | I have a few apps built for macos which I sell on app store. I | really like to keep app sizes small. Like if I would try to use | a library and see that the app size blow up from 5MB to 50MB, I | would not use it. So basically I don't use any libraries and | keep my apps in sizes of 3-5MB. | | At the same time I saw some comments, reviews about my apps, | that they are probably would not be good just because the app | sizes are too small. | prionassembly wrote: | I can never understand why people leave reviews on apps they | haven't downloaded. | xenadu02 wrote: | The App Store hasn't allowed this for years; only someone | who has downloaded or purchased the app can review it. | dijit wrote: | I used to work very hard to push game binary sizes down because | it limits the ability for our customers to actually play the | game if the patch sizes are too large (though, it must be noted | a large part of the company is entirely apathetic to this), but | nobody is inflating the sizes intentionally. | | As much as people like to hate on consoles gamers, it's | predominantly console "TRCs" which put limits on the size of | games, that's the only time the company really cares about the | sizes of games. | xenadu02 wrote: | Download size is a "tragedy of the commons" situation. The | overall size usually isn't owned by anyone and each | contribution to increasing the size is usually small so | monitoring it daily or weekly doesn't help. It is only when | you are able to compare the size 1 month, 6 months, 12 months | ago that a large jump can be observed - one accomplished by | lots of tiny 0.1% increments. | | But even if you do notice that and file bugs what team in | their right mind would spend time trying to reduce their own | component's size by 2% when they could spend that time on | features or bug fixing instead? And if you asked the majority | of their users would agree - "F'k the 20MB, fix bug | XYZ/finally implement feature ABC". | | Despite each individual decision along the way being arguably | the correct decision the product still adds up to +30% every | year. | birracerveza wrote: | That's probably because of high quality assets being shipped | with little to no compression to improve performance. | alpaca128 wrote: | And asset duplication on older console generations. The | consoles only had HDDs, and so to ensure a level's assets | would stream from disk quick enough they packaged copies of | all those assets together. So the exact same game can be | smaller on PS5 than PS4 as the SSD makes fragmentation | irrelevant. | | Often the developers also forget to remove unused files and | cut content, but I don't think this has a large effect on the | game size. | hobs wrote: | Almost nobody cares about the size, that's why its big - not so | much a purposeful game - there's no extra money to be paid to | bloat your own software, you'll do that fine on your own. | madeofpalk wrote: | > I have a rising suspicion that some game companies with fluid | ethics do this | | Occam's razor says that tooling, or developers, just aren't | great at shaking unreferenced content from production builds. | | I'm not a game developer, but its common to still ship unused | code or css in websites, just because someone forgets to remove | it, or its hard to tell if it's still used. I could only | imagine this is more of a problem in more complicated game dev, | especially when time to focus on non-functional requirements | like that can be hard to come by. | cton wrote: | Apparently they lose players when the game receives large | updates, so I think this is a pain point for them as well. | | https://www.pcgamer.com/call-of-duty-warzone-cant-have-more-... | exfascist wrote: | >Wow, it's 102 GB, the game must be huge with boatloads of | content! | | Does anyone actually think this way? SNES games were some | megabytes and often have more content than I can get through (I | still haven't beaten the SNES zelda... maybe I should pick it | back up.) Once you're in the Gigabyte range anything beyond is | likely waste. | not_math wrote: | I would guess a lot of people, maybe more non technical | people think that. Every console generation the file size of | games gets bigger because of bigger textures, better models, | etc. So it's easy to make the relation between huge file size | and quality, which isn't always true. The difference between | 5GB and 80GB should be noticeable, but now with 150GB games I | don't think it's all content and more bad file optimization | because it's cheaper this way and people don't (really) care. | k12sosse wrote: | I've always wondered.. Was a game like GTA5 80GB+ because | it contained the audio for localized in-game speech for | english/french/spanish/italian/etc.? Does this really | happen? Aren't we at the point yet where the audio is only | downloaded on demand for the localization of the PC unless | opted-into later? Also. Don't need your textures for | playing on an 8k monitor if I'm playing at 1440p.. unless I | want them. | madeofpalk wrote: | At least on Steam there is the _option_ for developers to | publish individual depots for different locales, and a | single game download can be made of multiple depots (so | you could have a global base depot, and then put | localised content in depots per locale). | https://steamdb.info/sub/398272/depots/ | JasonFruit wrote: | > quite little drive space | | > 625 GB | | When did I get so old? | ungamedplayer wrote: | I thought exactly the same question, I'm just happy that my | eyes, brain and fingers work well enough that I can still | type to the whippersnappers. | punnerud wrote: | Sound just like how SalesForce is storing data, and charging the | customers high prices for the data. | ajsnigrutin wrote: | How often do users change the metadata of music bought from Apple | Music? When ripping stuff by hand, this is understandable.. you | make a typo, want to add a year, do some locale changes to add | local characters, etc... so in this case i see a possible need to | waste 5 kB of space to save a couple of seconds after an edit. | | But with downloadad music with all the metadata (hopefully) | correctly set, even 5kB is a waste of space. | alan-hn wrote: | Isn't 0.5MB 500 KB? Not 5? Or are you referring to something | else | ajsnigrutin wrote: | From the article: | | > If you rip a CD with Apple Music using the Apple AAC | Encoder (the default option), it will reserve approximately 5 | kB of free space inside each file for this purpose. | | I was saying that even this is too much, and 500kB is 'way | way too much'. | lelanthran wrote: | > Isn't 0.5MB 500 KB? Not 5? Or are you referring to | something else | | The article said that the default is 5KB but Apple uses | 500KB, hence the poster is saying that even 5KB is overkill. | SketchySeaBeast wrote: | They are saying that even a much smaller amount of memory | than what they are wasting is a waste. | kall wrote: | I use it, but not very often. I do appreciate that it's still | possible. Spotify probably wouldn't even understand the feature | request. | thought_alarm wrote: | I always edit the genre so that the tracks work correctly with | my various different smart playlists. In rare instances I'll | also need to tweak the artist name to fit with the existing | tracks in my library. | | Sometimes the album or track names have extra info that I don't | care about and will delete. | | And TV show metadata is usually a mess and needs quite a bit of | editing. | zeitg3ist wrote: | I edit metadata for Apple Music stuff all the time, so it is | consistent with the other non-Apple Music stuff I have in my | library. I also fix capitalization (this is more common in non- | English songs, which inexplicably adopt English capitalization | standards), the occasional error in old songs (by comparing to | scans of physical copies), useless metadata on song/album | titles (looking at you, "(2013 Remaster)"), and sometimes the | year (for re-releases, I put in the original release year). | Then of course sometimes Apple Music overrides my corrections | because someone at a record label decided to change the | metadata on some song, so I also have to keep track of it using | a separate app ("Music Tracker") that tracks changes to my | library (which is also useful to know when something disappears | from Apple Music). | | I don't expect normal people to do this, but for me the ability | to edit metadata and mix streaming songs with ripped songs is a | huge advantage of Apple Music over other streaming services. | Unfortunately Apple Music has a lot of other issues, especially | with syncing, and I still can't understand why there's no | dedicated "featuring" metadata field (everyone pollutes the | song title: Spotify solved this), but for me there's no other | possible alternative. | TonyTrapp wrote: | I can't speak for AppleMusic, but some online stores are | terrible at providing metadata (e.g. JunoDownload often has | ALL-CAPS artist names, & turns into &, etc...). Often it's | simpler to just throw everything into Mp3tag and get new | metadata from Discogs or Musicbrainz instead. | can16358p wrote: | There are many artists/albums/songs on Apple Music which have | all caps too. | | I'm not talking about less-known artists too, two examples of | this in my collection are Steven Wilson and Linkin Park. | | Oh BTW talking about less-known artists, I've even seen the | whole song being incorrect (duplicate of another song on same | album) on Apple Music after switching part of my old MP3 | collection to Apple Music native. | iggldiggl wrote: | I'm not entirely sure, but I think I once came across a | song that was credited to both "Bob Dylan" and "B. Dylan", | or something like that. | reaperducer wrote: | _How often do users change the metadata of music bought from | Apple Music?_ | | I have to change the genre on all of the Christmas songs my | wife buys from Apple Music from "Holiday" to "Christmas" | because there are holidays other than Christmas. | | Otherwise, a "Holiday" smart playlist transitions from Silent | Night to Monster Mash. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-04-07 23:00 UTC)