Ever since I picked up my new iPad on Friday, I’ve been testing iTunes Match and iCloud syncing. I decided to see how well it would stream music from iCloud, so that’s one of the first things I did when I got home. I know I’ve complained about the music app on iOS before, but I have not extensively tested the iPad version.
Connected to an 802.11n Wi-Fi connection, which is hooked up to a 100Mbps Internet connection, I began my streaming testing. For the most part, things went pretty smoothly. I could play any track and it would almost instantly start. There was certainly no noticeable lag between the moment where I tapped the play button, and when the actual music started.
It’s super convenient to be able to access my music library in the Cloud, with the ability to download any individual songs or albums that I want to store locally on my iOS devices. Things didn’t go 100% smoothly though. Unfortunately it seems that Music.app is not very stable in iOS 5.x. There were a couple times during the night where the app crashed after trying to skip forward a few tracks. Also, there’s one really annoying bug with displaying the wrong album art.
I present the example below. If you haven’t already noticed what is immediately wrong, you will find that the current track I’m playing is by Def Leppard. The album art that is actually being displayed is for another band — Kamelot in this case. This seems to happen with any track when I tap on the album in the player control bar.
I’m almost considering going to Rdio to stream my music, just so I don’t have to deal with these issues. It would be nice if Apple started ironing out some of the bugs in their core iOS apps.