i quit streaming

30 Apr, 2026

I cancelled my Apple Music subscription the other week and it lapsed four days ago. This is a decision I had been meaning to make for months and just never committed to it because I didn’t want to sacrifice on convenience, but in the end I went through with the cancellation. I had cancelled two months ago but then renewed the subscription because I was faced with the fact that ripping CDs and applying metadata takes time that I wasn’t so keen on doing at the time (because my dumb ass did it shortly after I was burnt out from exam season).

Why I decided to go through with this eventually is a combination of things that range from my unwillingness to continue to financially support a parasitical business model to wanting more control over my music library. Artists who are already well-known and/or conform to what’s marketable are the only ones to profit from these platforms’ algorithms, but my choice wasn‘t solely founded in that. If this had been my only issue, I would’ve continued buying CDs to support those who are worthy of support or just to have an unalterable record in my hands. What tipped the scale for my quitting was that I didn’t want my music to change without my consent or knowledge.

Anyway, with this post, I wanted to talk about how I did it and the steps I took. So first, I gave a spare USB to a friend who underwent the transition way before me and already has his library tagged with the correct metadata. We share a similar taste in music so I asked him to copy all that he thinks I like from his library to mine. This significantly reduced the effort required to move off streaming for me as I only had to rip from CDs what I listened to but he didn’t. For ripping CDs from my modest collection, I used good old iTunes, or what remains of it inside of the macOS Music app, then tagged it using Meta Tag. I’ve heard about beets to automate that, but haven’t delved much into it yet.

Once all of my music was in the Music app, I plugged my phone into my Mac and synced my library which was quick and easy. What surprised me is that the sync was bidirectional, meaning liking songs and play counts synced over to my Mac in the syncing process as well. What’s more, iDevices can be configured to sync what’s there to sync when plugged in which means one step less to perform and it all happens in the background as long as I plug them into my Mac.¹ The only annoying aspect of this process is that I can’t connect my watch to my Mac or phone by cable so I have to wait for my humble 15GB library to transfer from the phone to the watch by Bluetooth (or WiFi as well?). Once the initial transfer to the watch is over (for which you don’t need iTunes Match as I had feared), edits, removals and new additions are reflected pretty swiftly.

The native Music app on iOS is a bit disorienting. Clearly, it’s not meant to be used without a subscription. While you can disable the Apple Music sections (and with that some of the prompts to „upgrade“), you can’t escape the buttons and references to features the require a subscription to be used. I understand that animated lyrics are not embedded into my music files and thus the lyrics field is sometimes present, though greyed out, but what drives me nuts is that pinning items is still available as an option in the menus, but it’s subscription-gated for inexplicable reasons, meaning that tapping it by mistake would bring up a screen-filling scare screen-style view that invites me to enable „Sync Library“ which requires a subscription. Additionally, there are some glitches with the new album view they added recently where it often thinks my albums are downloaded (from Apple Music or iTunes) and then it realizes that they’re not which makes the play button jerk sideways.

I also hate this new album/playlist view for taking the dominant cover color and making it the background color, so I decided to return to using Marvis Pro. It’s really customizable and allows me to make the app a bit calmer than the default Music app. I configured it to be very simple and it basically mirrors the default app, except it doesn’t jiggle and jerk as much and doesn’t advertise to me a service I had thought was disabled in the settings. Its artist pages are much nicer and I’ve missed them dearly. I use the user grouping field in song metadata to add attributes such as „Album“ or „Single“ and then create filtered sections in the app that display only one or the other, which is in sharp contrast to the default app’s dumping of everything together.

All in all, this was a very necessary and worthy switch, made easy by the iTunes legacy in my devices.² Except for the absence of pins (which I can work around in Marvis with filters for my use case) and animated, synced lyrics, I miss nothing. I rarely made use of Apple Music’s algorithmic discovery, although I used their „Focus“ playlists. What I expect to be a bit more effort than before is listening to new music recommended to me. It’s not a matter of opening my music player and looking for it; I have to seek it out more intentionally and then ensure the metadata is right, import from my Mac and sync to my phone. However, since I usually get recommendations in batches and explore rarely unless nudged to it, this shouldn’t be a problem. To counter the inconvenience of adding new stuff, I’m going to keep full albums in my library and set Marvis to skip disliked songs automatically so I can easily give disliked songs a second chance if I decide to do so.

PS: While it‘s possible to uninstall the Music app on iOS and solely use a third-party client, doing so wipes your existing library for some reason and you have to resync. Every time you install and uninstall, this will happen. Moreover, the same would happen on the watch including wiping your music library that probably took forever to sync. I learned this the hard way and forgot to put it in the post.

PPS: Apple Music ate the star rating option in the Music app's settings' general tab. If you had that option disabled prior to the subscription lapsing, you won't be able to turn it back on without using the command graciously provided by this Redditor:

defaults write ~/Music/Music/Music\ Library.musiclibrary/Preferences.plist ratings-mode -int 3

Replace with 0 to disable it again. If your library file is at an alternative location, change the file path accordingly.