I’m really disappointed that Beats 1 Radio won’t work in iTunes on older versions of OSX. On my mountain lion OSX 10.8.5 machine which is an older iMac (and runs awful on Yosemite) I found that when updating to iTunes 12.2 all parts of Apple Music work with the exception of Beats 1 radio. This seems ridiculous as everything else works fine. It’s obviously a ploy to get everyone to upgrade to Yosemite & eventually El Capitan. Problem is, older machines don’t play well with the latest OSX.

I’ve tried many times to upgrade this iMac and every time the machine has been unusable. It’s a good spec and has 8GB of ram so I’m in no rush to upgrade to newer hardware. This seems to be a restriction imposed by Apple as opposed to the hardware as streaming is hardly demanding. Really disappointed in this apple. First you crippled older ipads & iphones and now this. Petty.

I’m hoping to come up with a workaround for this, or perhaps Apple will backtrack and remove this OSX requirement. Pointless & would be a deal breaker for me as I use iTunes all day to play music in the office while I work and in the home at night.

The iMac in question is my main machine. It does so much work daily & often has the entire adobe suite running alongside text editors, ftp clients, itunes, chrome. It really is a workhorse & this restriction on beats 1 radio streaming is an absolute joke.

So far Apple Music is an hour old in my hands & I’m already loving it. The initial setup was pretty easy with the exception of some awkward genre bubbles to select when setting up your profile. There seems to be a ton of artists available to stream and iTunes match has been integrated into a My Music tab.

I’ve followed a few of my favourite artists already & played with the streaming quality which seems responsive & crisp. No load times to speak of & nice bitrate streaming. I would like to see a way to limit the bitrate for use on mobile like in the Google Play app, hopefully apple will adopt that for users with smaller data plans.

The UI also seems pretty good. I keep losing the now playing as it minimises to a bar which needs to be clicked to bring it back. Will get used to it in no time but weird as users are used to looking at the bottom or top of a screen for minimised windows.

As it’s a brand new platform, a lot of the connect features are yet to be populated. Artists will need to start using the service & scrapers will need to start collecting content for the artists. I also found that bands such as Tool are not available to stream, but this is pretty standard as they aren’t on Spotify. Also Steve Wilson’s new material isn’t available. I’ve already found a bunch of music which isn’t available to stream so this will compliment my library & iTunes match as opposed to replacing it.

Anyway this is all new & I’m still playing with it, but I’ll write another post when I’ve got to know Apple Music better. Until then, a bunch of screenshots for you.