If you read my review of music streaming services in 2022, you would know that I pretty much chose Spotify as the main winner. Times have changed with Apple Music and Spotify both changing their user interface and pricing, as well as available features. Lets explore my top two choices from last time and really compare them to what features I look for.

Desktop application

Apple Music

The last time I reviewed these two, Apple Music still used iTunes as the Windows desktop app to access the service. Well, by some 'miracle' they have actually released a full-on native Windows app! Who knew Apple could actually make proper Windows software? Apparently no-one, because like others that have used the application and myself, the app 'works,' but barely. Lets list all of the quirks I have found so far:

• The font is really jagged which makes it look odd when reading anything.
• It crashes quite a lot.
• Using an adaptive sync monitor, anything that is animated such as playlists or album art syncs your monitor frame-rate to the animation frame-rate.
• Sound check which is just volume normalisation doesn't work properly sometimes and you need to pause the music and then play it again for it to work.
• When managing your Apple ID in the app, if you enter the subscriptions section and click on Done it doesn't do anything. You've essentially soft-locked yourself and either need to close the app or click back on your mouse if it supports that functionality.
• Hovering over the app in the taskbar presents no playback controls.
• There is no full screen view for lyrics or even the album art. The web player has this...
• No word by word lyrics, only line by line.
• The recently searched section only saves one entry, when there is clearly meant to be space for more.
• The music video player looks like they just recycled it from iTunes, thus it has controls that aren't as intuitive.

Overall it is not a good experience when compared to the web player.

Spotify

They have continued the tradition once again and decided to change the user interface for the hundredth time. This time, they have given the app a partition-based system meaning you can resize the left and right boxes. I am not a big fan of this decision as it wastes space due to the gap in between each element.

Overall its decent, definitely better than the Apple Music app for Windows.

New features

Apple Music

They added Apple Music Sing, which is a way to remove the vocals from supported songs. Too bad it only works on iPhone, iPad and Apple TV.

Spotify

There is a new DJ feature which I swear hasn't been worked on since it came out. Essentially, it is a large playlist disguised as a radio station which just plays a bunch of songs with an AI voice in between. If you listen to it for over one hour, it literally just loops back to the start...

They also added AI playlists exclusively in Australia and UK for now. I haven't really used it much so I can't give my opinion on the feature, but it seems to just take in much of the data from other existing algorithms and curated playlists.

Audio quality

Apple Music still wins, as they have lossless audio quality. Spotify still only has 320kbps Vorbis which isn't necessarily bad and is supposed to be transparent for most users, but it is objectively of lower quality than all other services providing lossless audio at no additional cost.

Verdict

Once again, Spotify wins for their multiplatform support. The app for Apple Music is just terrible on Windows and I really hope they improve upon it as I would say that on their mobile apps, they are a very viable competitor to Spotify.