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iTunes Radio Reviewed


Marc Wielage

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So iOS 7 rolled out last night, and I made the jump and decided to put it on my iPad 2. The installation process was painful: Apple's servers were so clogged, it took the better part of 90 minutes to get the update, then wait endlessly for the device to reboot. Once I re-entered all the password information, I pulled up the new iTunes and fired up iTunes Radio... and it sounded horrible. Hideous distortion, clipped, compressed, the works, just unlistenable by any mammals on earth.

 

Resisting the desperate urge to panic, I did a quick Google search on "iTunes Radio Distortion," and sure enough, a few hundred other people had the same problem. The solution: reboot yet again. So I did that, waited for the screen to reappear... and now I had zero audio at all. System audio was dead, iTunes was dead, everything gone. Mute switch had no effect. I started to repeatedly whack the iPad on a nearby table in frustration, hoping to knock the gremlins out, but that didn't seem to help (though it made me feel better).

Another Google search revealed, yes, hundreds of other people have encountered the same difficulty. The solution? Once again, give it a boot to the head. Another couple of minutes of shut-down and power-up. I once again fired up iTunes... and this time the red "Radio" button was missing. Vanished, like it had never been there. I started pounding the iPad on the table a little harder.

As a desperate "hail-Mary" attempt, I rebooted a fourth time... and great god almighty, I finally had iTunes Radio! iTunes Radio at last, iTunes Radio at last. You're presented with essentially a blank screen showing you a list of 250 in-house Apple radio stations, each with a designated genre of music. Since I pay for the Apple iCloud (a mere $29.95 a year), I get to avoid the commercials the regular iTunes Radio drops in every so often. I looked around for Oldies... but like Sirius Satellite Radio, Apple eschews that designation in lieu of Decades, their classification for older music. I popped up several 1960s channels, including one devoted to Surf/Garage, general '60s, '60s British Invasion, the LA Rock Scene, plus channels for different kinds of Classic Rock, and in the R&B section, Classic Motown. Couldn't find any Beatles or Beach Boys, so I clicked the "+" symbol to add a new station, and stumbled upon a search window at the very top of the screen. Type the artist you're looking for, and voila... there's an entire channel devoted to Beach Boys, an entire channel devoted to Beatles, and even an entire channel devoted to ELO. Not bad.

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Here's the surprise: I was… well, maybe "blown away" is too effusive, but I was very pleasantly surprised to discover that the level and EQ of all the music was very evenly handled -- no song was too loud, no song was too soft -- and yet I didn't hear any gross pumping or signs of severe compression. Even better, the bitrate of the music sounded absolutely fine to me; I was expecting something that sounded like that "metallic, choppy, phasey" quality of Sirius Radio (64kbps on satellite, 128kbps online Premium), but that's not what I heard. This sounded to me like it was at least at 192kbps if not more. Granted, this is not audiophile quality, but it was perfectly acceptable to my ears for background music; I'd call it at least the equivalent of a decent FM station. Each song is presented intact, with no voiceovers or interruptions, and there's a slight 1 or 2-second silence in-between songs -- no glitches, no clicks, no segues. It's basically like listening to somebody else's iPod, assuming they have similar musical tastes to yours.

There's a couple of caveats with iTunes Radio: because Apple has to pay the record labels X cents per song, when you just play a piece of a song, Apple still gets charged. As a result, they put a limit on the number of songs you can skip past (about 5 or 6, by my estimate). There's no rewind button, so you can't re-listen to a song you've already heard. By using the "Star" (*) key, you can check off "Play More Like This", or "Never Play This Song" when the format comes up with a song you dislike. One assumes that, like Pandora and Spotify, the service remembers your dislikes and uses it to come up with a better playlist in the future. There's also a button in the upper right to buy a download of the song (for anywhere from 69 cents to a buck-29), which I think was a concession to the record labels. I noticed that on some channels -- like Beatles Radio -- the "Play More Songs Like This" and "Never Play This Song" are not available. (I sometimes like Bowie, but hearing "Fame" on the Beatles channel is not closely-related enough to me, despite the presence of Lennon as a background singer.)

The custom channels -- as when I asked for an all-ELO station -- are a mixed bag. I assumed what they'd program would be similar 1970s synth/progressive orchestral rock, something like Moody Blues, Emerson Lake & Palmer, Yes, stuff like that… but instead, I got Styx' "Come Sail Away," Blue Oyster Cult's "Don't Fear the Reaper," Doobie Brothers' "China Grove," Journey's "Feeling That Way," and Aerosmith's "Come Together" before I heard an actual ELO song. Don't get me wrong: I like all these songs to some degree, but they're not in the same universe as ELO to me. (And admittedly, you put a dozen nutty rock fans in the same room, and none of them are going to agree on this crap.) The Beach Boys channel was a lot closer, playing a healthy dose of Jan & Dean, Four Seasons, and the Rip Chords, which make sense. But then they threw in the Jackson 5, which makes no sense.

The cost of iTunes radio is surprisingly cheap: just $2.50 a month, if I do the math correctly, for the ad-free version. Note that there are still interruptions every so often: my paid subscription still yielded occasional announcements that said something like, "you're listening to iTunes Radio. Be sure to buy the new Ozzie Osbourne album, available next month on iTunes!" But at least they're not trying to sell me erectile disfunction pills or arthritis medication, which is what you figure they'd pitch to Baby Boomers. Apple has to pay the record labels $.0013 cents per stream, but I'm not exactly sure how that works out when you bypass songs.

I'm fascinated by the technology of iTunes Radio: every new song always starts at the beginning, regardless of when you skip to the next track. Assuming there's at least 250 channels being fed down the pipe at once, that means that there's actually five songs simultaneously playing for each one you hear, all being buffered in the stream. And they also have a reasonably-decent full-screen color JPEG image of the album cover (my guess is maybe 250x250 pixels), blown up and anti-aliased to look reasonably-good on a 10" iPad screen. You can pause the song at any time, come back an hour later, and pick up the song right where you left off. And again, the sound quality is far better than I ever expected it to be. Unlike Pandora and Spotify, Apple is rumored to be using human programmers to draw connections between songs, and is constantly monitoring the feedback from listeners on what songs fit certain channels. So far, they're not batting 1000 here, but I expect the music selection to improve over time as I figure out what iTunes Radio does, and iTunes Radio figures out what I want to hear.

I haven't figured out what the bandwidth requirements are going to be for iTunes Radio. For example, if your ISP only gives you (say) 10GB a month in downloads, how long will it take before you exceed that cap if you listen to iTunes Radio 24/7? How viable will iTunes Radio be if you listen to it via 3G or 4G on your iPhone in your car? How affected will the stream be by dropped packets or slow reception? Will the service get worse when millions of users try to access the streams simultaneously? I can't say. What I can say is that on the limited bandwidth in my neighborhood (20mbps peak, average more like 16mbps), I have yet to hear a single dropout or glitch. 

Does iTunes Radio make sense to a hardcore rock collector or music fan? I have mixed feelings on it. I think it's too early to tell if their allegedly 2-million-plus playlist will really come up with interesting songs I never could've heard otherwise. But for me, it's a very inexpensive alternative to satellite radio, the sound quality was far better than I expected, and I think it's going to put a huge scare in more expensive services like Pandora and Spotify. Apple is reportedly losing money on every subscriber they get -- the free version theoretically makes up for its losses with paid advertising -- but one assumes with $150 billion cash in the bank, Apple can afford to lose money on iTunes Radio… for awhile. Take advantage of it while you can.

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This is an astonishing bizarre "update" story --- pleased that it has a happy ending, I guess. I don't think I have ever had that much drama in one outing ever --- glad you survived it all Marc.

 

Now, below I have posted the article in Rolling Stones on how to use ITunes Radio (assuming, of course, that your iOS7 device is still operational!).

 

 

By Evan Shamoon - Rolling Stone
September 19, 2013 11:35 AM ET
 
If you've used Pandora in the past decade, then you already have a very clear idea of what Apple's iTunes Radio is all about. This is the company's first proper attempt at integrating streaming radio into its ubiquitous iTunes iOS 7 and desktop apps. Like many things Apple does, it's a derivative idea dressed up for mainstream success. Pandora currently has more than 70 million active monthly users, and Apple wants to eat them.
 
iTunes Radio Prepared to 'Pounce' as Streaming 'Arms Race' Heats Up
 
Featured Stations
Featured stations – your quickest ticket to music on iTunes Radio – take several different forms. Apple is heavily promoting stations that feature artists like Drake and the Beatles, while also hiring others including Diplo, Katy Perry and Jared Leto to "guest DJ" their own stations. (Even these vary somewhat: Leto provides overworked commentary alongside his set, for instance, while Diplo does not.)
 
Apple has also been hiring specialists in various genres to curate other stations, such as "The L.A. Rock Scene: '60s and '70s" and "3 of a Kind: James Blake, Rhye and Disclosure." Click the play button on the Pepsi Pulse EDM station, and you're presented with video of Beyoncé drinking Pepsi while staring at herself in the mirror, followed by dance music. The Featured Stations area combines algorithms, human curation and corporate sponsorship into a creamy, homogenized milkshake of content. Would you like a Frosty with that?
 
Custom Stations
It's also possible, of course, to create your own stations, based on an initial song, artist or genre choice. You can only skip six songs per hour, though this limit is station-dependent (skips on one station don't count towards another). Each station is outfitted with a slider that moves between Hits, Variety and Discovery. You can share your personalized stations through Twitter, Facebook SMS or email, and send them to nearby friends using AirDrop. (This feature might as well be called "Mixtapes for the Lazy," but we'll leave the marketing to Apple.)
 
As with Pandora and Apple's Genius (both of which use thumbs up/thumbs down icons), iTunes Radio lets you nudge your playlist with "Play more like this" and "Never play this song," found under the Star icon on the play screen.
 
History
Using the history tab, you can browse through every song that's been played on your iTunes Radio account, across all platforms. You can't replay them, however; instead, you get the option to listen to the iTunes preview clip, add the song to your Wish List or buy the damn thing outright.
 
One part of what makes iTunes Radio potentially lucrative for Apple is its tight integration with the iTunes Store. Buying the song you're currently enjoying is only a single click away on any screen in iTunes (there's actually a $.99/$1.29 buy button inside the main play bar), and it's only two clicks to add a song to your iTunes Wish List or bring you to the appropriate iTunes Store album page. Never has it been so easy to buy stuff.
 
Of course, Apple is also making money on ad sales. Audio and video ads run once every 15 and 60 minutes, respectively; if you're a subsciber to Apple's $25-a-year iTunes Match cloud music service, you get to listen to iTunes Radio ad-free.
 
Early Impressions
On iOS 7 devices in particular, iTunes Radio boasts the clean aesthetics you'd expect from an Apple product. More importantly, iTunes bests Pandora in terms of sheer volume: While Pandora users have access to roughly a million songs, iTunes Radio listeners get somewhere in the tens of millions, which obviously leads to more variety and less repetition. And with the hundreds of millions of iTunes users out there, there are exponentially more users (and more listening data) for Apple to work with.
 
But at its core, iTunes Radio is simply a decade-old streaming service rebranded and built directly into iTunes. As a Pandora clone it's perfectly fine, but it has nothing like what Spotify and Rdio are doing in terms of social discovery features. Is it better than iTunes' previous radio integration? Definitely. Will it be popular? Probably. Would it succeed without being installed on every capable Apple music device in the known universe? Highly unlikely.
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My iPhone5 and ipad3 update worked flawlessly. No issues with radio. I only used it a little to try it, including while driving in my car, and the quality was at least Pandora quality. In my car I use Bluetooth to connect to an aftermarket head unit. I didn't do a lot of listening so I don't know how the variety is. I like the slider between predictable songs and discovering new artists. Not sure if this uses genius data to know what MP3s I already have, and what unlisted to a lot. That's potentially a lot of data. I don't have iTunes Match, so maybe they don't really know what artists I listen to most.

iTunes told me you can skip 6 songs per station per hour. Nothing about a daily limit, but I'm not sure. Pandora is 12 / day and no more than 6 in a given station.

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I had always heard Pandora hired "experts" to help make some stations better. For example if you listen to the punk station and thumbs up the Clash and the Ramones it might not feed you too many teenage Warped Tour type bands.... and vice versa. In my experience with Pandora, no matter how much I thumbs downed a lot of stuff, they kept playing a lot of stuff I really really didn't want to hear. It made me wonder if they were taking money to push certain bands. Maybe they are more like commercial FM radio than we realize... Or maybe the stations i tried had nobody tweaking the selections.

I'm optimistic for iTunes Radio. The idea is appealing for some of my long drives to jobs. It should be a lot easier for Apple (or somebody similar) to get through the legal hassles than a startup.

BTW I don't think the rewind button is legal with current streaming licenses, if this is similar to streaming licenses that radio stations have. The idea being you can easily record it.

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This is an astonishing bizarre "update" story --- pleased that it has a happy ending, I guess. I don't think I have ever had that much drama in one outing ever --- glad you survived it all Marc.

 

Doh, I've had worse. I can recall an OS9 update in the 1990s that resulted in a smoke-filled room, overturned furniture, and brain-matter spattered all over the ceiling. It took a couple of days to sort out that misadventure. The OS7 / iTunes Radio fiasco only took me about an hour or two of teeth-gnashing, and it eventually worked OK. My philosophy is: I never take no for an answer from a computer. I just beat it with a whip and a chair until it works.

 

So far, I've been impressed and surprised that iTunes Radio worked as well as it does. I think this might actually be a useful service, provided you have a decent internet connection and can fine-tune a station to just play the kind of stuff you want to hear. The other surprise for me was that the sound quality wasn't terrible -- and in fact, was much better than I expected, and better than more expensive competing services.

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