If you dig through the archives, you will read my travails around a permanent solution to my streaming/collection.
The last “winner” was Amazon Music, hands down the best app experience, a decent library (not as big a selection as Apple, but enough) and the instant “AutoRIP” feature of what I bought from them were clinchers. The real win for Amazon is that whatever magic they do, even when I hit deadspots in my commute (via VTA Lightrail in San Jose), it just kept chugging.
Ironically, the big disappointment in streaming performance was Google Play music. Just garbage streaming performance, every time I have tested it.
But, the Amazon “Win” was not to be permanent.
You might have heard of Amazon’s full-court press on Alexa. A few “updates” ago, Amazon made an upgrade to their player, to “Alexa-fy” it. In general I don’t care. I am old as dirt, so I don;t really like the voice control thing, but hey, I’m not forced to use it, right?
Well, if it just was dormant, that would be one thing. But, the Alexa-fication seems to always be listening for a command to shift genre’s or to skip the track when douche-nozzle Ted Nugent rolls up (I just can’t listen to his crap due to his politics). But, this background listening consumes CPU cycles. Lots of CPU cycles. Like in __ALL__the CPU cycles.
Seriously, on both my personal MacBook Pro with a pretty beefy Core i5, and on my work Lenovo T450, again with a decent i5, it just pegs the CPU’s all four threads 92 cores) 100%, all the time.
No bueno.
No problem, I will find a way to turn it off. What, Amazon in their infinite fucking wisdom doesn’t give an option to disable? What fuckery is this?
It is the type of fuckery that makes me delete the program(s) and ensure that when the renewal comes around again, I don’t renew. Flawless streaming performance can’t overcome the moronic stupidity of forcing Alexa on unwilling users.
Back to Apple Music, which has greatly improved its streaming performance, and provides access to my entire library, as well as their deep catalog.
Sigh. More to come.
Coda
This has been floating around in my head for a while. After writing (and posting it) I again opened up the Amazon music app on my Mac, and I was pleasantly surprised that it didn’t threaten to melt down my CPU. Still no way to stahp the integration of Alexa and voice control, but at least it isn’t holding my computer hostage. Will continue to monitor.
