Music streaming services are replacing MP3 classics. Platforms, such as Spotify, have managed to put an end to music pira-cy by offering a very comfortable and affordable alternative, even with the possibility of listening to music for free , legally, in exchange for listening to advertising banners. After the success of this platform, other companies began to create their own platforms. And one of the best alternatives to Spotify is Apple Music . Unfortunately, if you use Windows, the user experience leaves a lot to be desired.
Apple always stands out for one thing: taking care of its ecosystems. If you have an iPhone, an iPad and a Mac , you will be able to have everything perfectly connected and linked. However, the moment you try to use their products or services on other platforms, such as a Windows PC, is where the problems begin. Of course, Apple supports the use of its products on other systems, for example, through the iTunes program.
However, the use of services outside the ecosystem is dire. While on macOS and iOS there is an excellent app to use a platform as basic and essential as Apple Music, Windows users have fallen into oblivion for the company.
Fortunately, although they do not have the support of Apple for this purpose, there are different ways to listen to the streaming music of this service from the Microsoft operating system. And even from Linux! Next, we explain the different ways to do it.
Listen to Apple Music from iTunes
iTunes is Apple’s official program for managing your devices. Initially, this program was the way to buy music on their platform and transfer it to the iPod classics. However, right now it has only remained as a program to manage iPhone and iPad, to be able to make backup copies and transfer data from the PC to the device, and vice versa.
On macOS, iTunes has been separated into several separate applications. And one of them is the new Apple Music app. However, in Windows 10 it is still intact, being a heavy, slow and difficult to use program. But, in the end, it is the only official way to listen to the music of this service.
We must open the iTunes application in Windows 10 , and look in it for the music section. The program will ask us to log in with our Apple account to be able to access our subscription and, in addition, check if we have bought music in this store in the past to automatically add it to the library.
Once we are inside, it will take time to synchronize the playlists (if we have them) and we will be able to access the music. We can use the search engine to find the albums or artists that we want to listen to, and even download the songs we want to listen to them offline. What we do not like (and that, for example, does not stop neither on the iPhone nor on Spotify) is that when we change the song there is a few seconds of pause while the new track is downloaded and cached.
We can download iTunes for free from the Apple website, although if we have Windows 10 it is much more convenient to do it from the Microsoft Store , the application store. So we will forget to update it and we will always have it ready.
Use an OpenSource player based on Electron
In the absence of an official client capable of listening to music from Windows, there are developers who have created their own free alternative apps to fill this gap. One of the best we can find is Apple Music Electron .
This program, OpenSource and available on GitHub, is based on the web version of Apple Music, and allows us to listen to our lists, or any song we are looking for, from a very simple, neat interface and with integration with the operating system. This program is based on Electron. and it has a customizable CSS so that any user can customize the appearance according to their needs. It is a very light and easy- to-use, cross-platform program and has advanced features such as GPU acceleration, which helps improve the overall performance of the program.
It has a very active development, so it is constantly improving and evolving. We can download this program, without paying anything, from this link . Once installed we will have to authenticate with our iCloud account, with an active subscription to Apple Music, to be able to access it.
Listen to Apple Music from the browser
In addition to the above options, if we do not want to install anything on the computer, we can also listen to streaming music from this platform using the browser. Apple has its own web version of Music so that we can listen to music from it without having to do anything. In addition, there are third-party websites that also allow us to access this platform from a much more beautiful and well-cared interface than Apple’s.
Apple Music web version
Similar to Spotify Web Player, Apple has its own online stream that we can access from the browser.
We can access this platform from here . A trick: if we want this website to work as an app, from the Windows 10 Edge browser we will be able to install it as if it were another program on the PC thanks to the PWA. In this way, the Apple Music website will have its own icon on the desktop and will open in a separate window from the rest of the browser. the closest possible way to having an official native client on your PC.
Musish
Musish is the best option we can find to listen to Apple music from the browser. This web application has an appearance very similar to that of the official Apple application for iOS and macOS. This website has most of the functions that we can find in the official client that allow us, for example, to access the sections “For you”, “Explore”, “Radio” and “Library”, among others. What is missing are the social functions, since, for example, we will not be able to access the list of friends or what each of them listens to.
We can access this website to listen to the music from the following link . Obviously, we will need a subscription for Apple Music , since, without which, we will not be able to generate the access token necessary for the platform to access the music.
If we like this platform, we will also be able to install it on Windows 10 from Edge as a PWA. So we can open it with a double click and use it as if it were just another program.
