It is just too sensitive to meh connectivity. When the cell connection is less than perfect, it will loop, or cut out, or otherwise malfunction, and gives unhelpful diagnostics.
The download feature is nearly unusable on an iPhone due to the Apple restrictions on background processing. I would be happy to just copy my whole library onto the phone if ARC could be configured to look at, but it cannot.
Plan B: copy library into Apple Music
Make a copy of the library
Convert any flac to m4a
Connect phone to mac
Drag entire library into Apple Music for the phone
Good Things
All the music is there, and can be played with or without a cell signal
Bad things
No album art
No simple path to bring playlists
takes a long time
How Rune could make this unnecessary
Allow for users to copy the library onto the phone
Some way to get full downloads without having the have the phone sitting there in ARC for hours and hours doing nothing else
Some export mechanism optimized for ingesting into Apple Music
I think my previous post here made no sense. You can use Soundiz to copy your albums, tracks, and playlist from Tidal or Qobuz to Apple Music or vice-versa.
Iām using āApple Musicā which is both the subscription service and iTunes Match (which was historically from mp3 days). Iāve found you can match a file with the iTunes Plus format, which is more than good enough as an alternative for what ARC would offer. If you must have lossless, then I think itās possible to re-match with Apple Music and, by my data, more than 90% will be in ALAC .m4a.
Yes, itās more expense over ARC, which I always complain about, but then a lot of my listening is on some sort of commute.
More recently Iāve gone with FLAC (Roon will scream at me if I try to feed it the abominable lossy) and then converted to AAC .m4a: the album art comes across fine. This perceived downside is puzzling to me.
We have a very substantial ālocalā library, so the loss of the Qobuz items from the library is tolerable in return for reliably being able to play the others.
Yes, I drag the entire library directory into Apple Music.
Iām not following how Matthew is managing the album artwork: in my library file system, those are sitting in jpg files, which Apple appears to ignore when I haul them over.