David McManus says the introduction of a new service has disappointed

After what felt like the longest drumroll in history, the cymbals finally crashed for the release of Apple Music last week.

To squeeze the metaphor further, it was like watching an encore from your favourite band and wincing as they come back to the stage to perform a new song in an unfamiliar style, hitting bum notes throughout.

The introduction of its music service cannot be called Apple’s finest hour.

First came the required update to iOS which put Music (Apple loves these generic names all of a sudden) on to our iPhones, iPads and iPods.

My music library amounts to about 15,000 songs which weigh in at somewhere over 100GB. Apple has incorporated its existing iTunes Match into Music which means that it goes through each of your tracks and matches them to ones in its own library, giving you access to stream them from the cloud rather than needing to store them on your device.

If your collection contains obscure music that Apple doesn’t have or is not licensed, it will physically upload it so that you can also stream rather than store.

I tried iTunes Match a couple of years ago and quickly gave up on it because it mismatched so much of my library, swapping songs that I had carefully collected over the years for a different version.

This was a widely reported problem at the time. Original mono recordings were exchanged for stereo remasters, live performances suddenly became studio mixes and most noticeably of all, sleeve art was completely messed up.

Apple Music made exactly the same mistakes.

It was also apparent that just because an album is available to buy from iTunes, it doesn’t necessarily follow that you will be able to stream it. Apple Music and the iTunes Music Store catalogue are not equal and that is a huge disappointment.

It was not for several hours that Apple released an updated iTunes for Macs and PCs and the wait only brought about further confusion and frustration. With the idea that everything was now cloud based, you should be able to create playlists on your computer and then have them available on your phone or vice versa.

Even after finally calling it a day at 1am and checking the next morning, I was still not able to see that anything had successfully synced between devices. Nothing I had added to my library from my Mac was showing up on my phone as I headed to work bleary eyed.

This was about as far removed from an Apple experience as it was possible to get.

Twitter chat was putting the problems down to a launch overload. After all the hype, giving every iPhone owner a free three-month trial would undoubtedly cause a spike in demand but the world’s wealthiest company should be able to handle it.

A couple of days in and the synching eventually started to work, presumably because so many had given up in frustration.

Time will tell but my initial experience has only added fuel to the argument that Apple is losing its mojo.