MusicSmart - Liner Notes

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I hope this app gets better. I don’t use Apple Music, but I bought this app based on a couple glowing reviews that said it works with your library in addition to Apple Music. It can’t find the vast majority of my library, whether downloaded from iTunes or copied from CDs. They touted that it’ll tell you which musicians are credited on albums and tracks like I miss from the liner notes of yore. But it doesn’t do that on the few songs it was able to identify. Instead it offered a links to music videos or banal snippets about the artist like where they were born. Not at all what I was expecting. Frankly I’d like my money back.

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This is a concept that’s been a long time coming. But serious aficionados and collectors will find it disappointing. You’ll find plenty of info on newer releases and for pop recordings, but what shows up on even very well known classic albums is often erroneous or bare bones. First, in spite of what some of the online reviews say, I didn’t find any original liner notes for any of the albums I checked on. And many, many famous albums that have sold millions of copies show up with generic or worse album art (Apple Music itself is much more likely to have correct album art). BB King’s Live at the Regal shows up with a generic “Electric Blues 101” album artwork; no musician lineups or songwriting credits on Pet Sounds or any Beatle albums. How is this even possible? Somehow, though, MusicSmart reveals accurate age, birth city and middle names for even the most obscure artists - not 100%, but for a high proportion of albums in your Apple Music collection. Search is an annoyingly missing feature. And, again, songwriting credits, which must be legally registered with every song still under copyright, are somehow missing. All that said, I give the app 2 stars because there is the potential, if the developers can ever link it up with a decent database, to provide all this info and more within the structure of the app. And the depth of info provided for a lot of newer popular albums is kind of amazing (sample sources for newer big selling hip hop albums is a really cool feature). Looking forward to the developers getting this one right in future updates, or if it finally inspires Apple to finally embed full liner note, album art and artist info within Music, that would be worth the $1.99 too.