Apple's long-awaited streaming music service, Apple Music, will launch on Tuesday.

Replacing the official music app on iOS, Apple Music combines your iTunes library and uploads with on-demand streaming, live radio and a new artist-centric social network.

There is a lot to uncover in Apple Music. In full disclosure, I had less than a day to play with the shipping version of Apple Music with iOS 8.4. Expect a full, complete review later in the week.

That said, here are my first impressions after using Apple Music.

Look and feel

I have to say, Apple Music is a really well-designed app. There is a lot in the app — it's jam-packed — but Apple has done a really good job of making the app easy to navigate.

The app follows Apple's other UI and UX patterns from iOS 8, but this app feels more polished and finished than the old music app. A search button is at the top of the app at all times — easy to access anytime you want to search for a track, artist or album either in your own library or in Apple Music.

At the bottom of the app are five sections designated by different icons: For You, New, Radio, Connect and My Music.

My Music

We'll start with the My Music app since this is where all of your existing iTunes purchases live. My Music is your iTunes library. If you're an iTunes Match subscriber, anything you've uploaded to iTunes Match shows up here too.

If you don't subscribe to Apple Music, you'll just see your own purchases in My Music. The layout is similar to the old Music app, with artists listed in alphabetical order. You can also access your playlists from this section.

If you subscribe to Apple Music, however, your own purchases will sit alongside any albums or songs you've added from the greater Apple Music library.

In this way, Apple Music immediately has one advantage over other streaming music services: It creates one library, merging your purchases with anything you've added to your collection from the streaming side of the equation.

Google Music does this too — but if you're someone who is in the Apple ecosystem, this is the first time you've been able to have your purchased songs combined with your streaming songs in shared playlists and side-by-side for offline listening on desktop or mobile.

It's incredibly nice to just think of your library as one library, not bifurcated into sections, especially on mobile. If you have an extensive iTunes purchase history or you're an iTunes Match subscriber, the benefits of having that stuff and your playlists alongside the other offerings of Apple Music really pay dividends.

You can download tracks for offline listening, whether you "own them" or not. Just tap on the three dots next to a track or album and select "Make Available Offline."

Local files on your device will then show up with a little phone icon in the top corner.

If you used the old music app extensively, you may miss some of the ways you could categorize or display albums and genres. Fortunately, the search functionality in the app is now much better than it was with the Music app in previous versions of iOS.

For You

For You section of Apple Music Image: Screenshot Apple, Mashable

The real heart of Apple Music is the For You tab. This is basically your music homescreen. When you open the section for the first time, you're asked to go through a discovery exercise. This was lifted directly from Beats Music and it's one of the best discovery tools I've used over the years.

You start by tapping dots with genres of music. The more you tap, the bigger a bubble gets. You can remove bubbles you don't like and pick and choose what types of music you like. Then move to artists, where you do the same thing.

Once you're done, give the app a second and the Apple Music app will have a customized, "For You" front page with recommended artists, curated playlists, albums and genres.

Apple Music also uses your iTunes purchase history to inform what you see. Throughout the day, more recommendations and playlists find their way into that screen.

It's hard for me to over-stress how much I like For You. From the very beginning, the recommendations in playlists and albums that the app showed me were dead-on accurate, reflecting my various musical interests.

Straight out, I was given a recommendation of a Taylor Swift love ballad playlist and albums from The Kinks, Sufjan Stevens, Elliot Smith, The Shins, Miguel and Drake. So basically my musical brain.

Scrolling up throughout the day, I was treated to more hip hop suggestions, a lot of Death Cab for Cutie, some War on Drugs, some Mark Kozelek (hey, I like both), some Madonna and more.

As I finish writing this post, I'm getting recommendations for playlists to start the day.

The idea behind "For You" is to help make it easy to find good music to listen to. Tapping on an album or playlist will play it instantly. You can then either add it to your library, keep it playing in the background, add a track to another playlist or just cycle through.

The DNA of this experience really is what we saw with Beats Music last year, but now it's more refined and feels more fully realized.

New

Image: Mashable Elizabeth Pierson

If For You is all about recommending good music meant for you, New is all about highlighting important music that was recently released and finding curated playlists across genres.

New music is highlighted at the top and new albums are shown off. Some of the releases are brand new, others appear to be new to Apple Music.

Underneath new albums are Hot Tracks, which show off some of the, well, hottest tracks — deemed by the curators of Apple Music and by listeners.

Below that are Recent Releases, which are designed to highlight albums that maybe you missed but shouldn't have. In each genre, a curator who is an expert in that genre is keeping an eye out for the latest new stuff.

Below that is the Top Charts section, which shows the top songs, albums and videos according to playback and purchases.

Scroll on and you enter the curated playlist area. Here you can tap on Apple Music Editors, Activities and Curators to access human-created playlists.

The Apple Music Editor area is edited by the editors of each genre section. Apple employs individuals not just to oversee genres but to also oversee countries and territories. Which means that what you see in the UK and what I see in New York may be different.

These sections include recommended albums, playlists of new music (that are updated weekly), playlists related to a certain topic or band and other highlights.

In the Classic Rock section, for instance, there is a special section dedicated to showing off the best Grateful Dead albums, in honor of the #Dead50 concerts.

The Activities section is comprised of playlists defined around a certain activity. This is similar to what you see on Spotify and Songza.

The Curator section includes playlists and highlights from various music influencers, such as Rolling Stone, Pitchfork and NME.

Radio

Image: Mashable Elizabeth Pierson

The heart of the Radio experience is Beats 1. Unfortunately, Beats 1 isn't live yet so I didn't have a chance to check it out.

I did get to check out some of the other human curated stations, however, including Soundsystem and The Mixtape. The two stations are kind of two sides of the same coin: Mainstream-friendly music, with an eclectic edge. Soundsystem is something that might appeal more to younger users, whereas The Mixtape has something for the slightly-older (but still hip) music fan.

You can also create playlists around an artist or song, just as you could with the old iTunes Radio.

Connect

Apple tried to do social networking with music once before. It was called Ping and it was an unmitigated failure.

Now Apple is trying again, this time with something called Connect. With Connect, musicians and Apple editors can share information directly with users.

Think of it as Instagram crossed with YouTube crossed with Soundcloud. The idea is that artists can share photos, videos and insider tidbits.

But beyond that, they can also share music tracks. As I'm writing this, Trent Reznor is sharing the entire With Teeth album without vocals to Connect. It's crazy to listen to, but you can hear it directly in the app.

M. Ward shared a live performance he did on KCRW in 2014. That track and perfromance isn't available in Apple Music or in iTunes, but I can hear it entirely in Connect.

When I spoke with Trent Reznor on Monday, he told me that the idea with Connect is to let artists choose what they want to paywall and what they don't. The idea is that if an artist wants to release a new track or video through Connect, she can. You can also share Connect content with friends or on Facebook or Twitter.

I'm not sure if Connect is going to work. It's a great idea but to work will require that artists actively use it. Without seeing the toolset Apple is offering the artists to publish content, it's hard for me to know whether they'll bother with Connect or if they'll just continue posting photos to Instagram, music clips to Soundcloud and videos to YouTube.

But I like the idea of Connect and I certainly like that it gives fans a chance to get in touch with artists. Beyond that, I like that the Apple Music editorial team can highlight Connect content for users to see.

Beats Music reborn

Much of the Apple Music experience really is Beats Music. And this is a good thing. I always thought Beats had the best discovery mechanism of the streaming services. With live radio, human curated playlists and access to your iTunes purchase history, I'm really liking Apple Music.

Will it replace Spotify for diehard subscribers? That's a more complicated question — and one I plan to address in Mashable's full review.

For now, however, the For Me section alone has made me excited about music for the first time in a long time. And that's a good thing.