Why is Music app on the Mac so awful?

[MajorFubar]

I know...rhetorical question.
I was one of the people who actually got along really well with iTunes.
'Music' however is a disaster.
I swear the people who write these apps don't actually use them.
There are various really, really basic bugs that just never get addressed.
One of the most annoying, when searching either my library or Apple Music, is how sometimes the search box can lose focus after typing literally every character.
Or send a song to a new playlist, and said playlist sometimes doesn't appear until you restart the app.

And that's why Neanderthals like me think Apple was better in the 'olden days', when its software was coded by a herd of likeminded Apple-fanboi nerds, coding by candlelight into the wee hours while keeping themselves awake with coffee and cold baked beans straight from the tin.
If customers reported a bug I could picture them voluntarily going outside and flagellating themselves with barbed wire as punishment for their incompetence.
Now it's written by mega rich 'software technicians' with no allegiances except to the best salaries, and I don't think they necessarily use the apps they write other than when they're tasked with coding an update.

Urgh.

 

[Mr.Ben]

I also prefer the old iTunes. I used to be able to drop music directly into my iPod without adding it to my iTunes library and it would let you change song info direct on the iPod song list. Now with the new app, this functionality is no longer there. No info edits can be made to a song already on your iPod (right click no longer let's you 'get info'), instead you have to add to your library first, make sure info is all correct and then sync. For me it's much more time-consuming than it used to be.

 

[Fishrrman]

Remember...

You can STILL USE iTunes, if you wish.

The free (and nifty) app named "Retroactive" makes this possible:

GitHub - cormiertyshawn895/Retroactive: Retroactive only receives limited support. Run Aperture, iPhoto, and iTunes on macOS Sonoma, macOS Ventura, macOS Monterey, macOS Big Sur, and macOS Catalina. Xcode 11.7 on macOS Mojave. Final Cut Pro 7, Logic

Retroactive only receives limited support. Run Aperture, iPhoto, and iTunes on macOS Sonoma, macOS Ventura, macOS Monterey, macOS Big Sur, and macOS Catalina. Xcode 11.7 on macOS Mojave. Final Cut ...

github.com

 

[ThunderfromDownUnder]

Yep, big tech, always have to change UIs and features and products. Just leave the apps alone, just update integrations and other back-end and platform stuff. End of. These major changes and "new ideas" serve no purpose other than to make our lives a misery.

 

[UKenGB]

I know...rhetorical question.
I was one of the people who actually got along really well with iTunes.
'Music' however is a disaster.
I swear the people who write these apps don't actually use them.
There are various really, really basic bugs that just never get addressed.
One of the most annoying, when searching either my library or Apple Music, is how sometimes the search box can lose focus after typing literally every character.
Or send a song to a new playlist, and said playlist sometimes doesn't appear until you restart the app.

And that's why Neanderthals like me think Apple was better in the 'olden days', when its software was coded by a herd of likeminded Apple-fanboi nerds, coding by candlelight into the wee hours while keeping themselves awake with coffee and cold baked beans straight from the tin.
If customers reported a bug I could picture them voluntarily going outside and flagellating themselves with barbed wire as punishment for their incompetence.
Now it's written by mega rich 'software technicians' with no allegiances except to the best salaries, and I don't think they necessarily use the apps they write other than when they're tasked with coding an update.

Urgh.

I think splitting iTunes up into separate audio and video apps was fundamentally a good idea, but what an appalling botch of a job Apple have made of it. Inexplicable design decisions and the rest of the Music app working like an early and very poor beta (alpha even), e.g. windows simply not redrawing when the app has performed some task that changes what is displayed.

It is indeed an appalling attempt and made worse by Apple being apparently oblivious to its shortcomings. I would be embarrassed to release such poor software and it's disgraceful that Apple seem to simply not care how bad their software has become.

 

[JamesMay82]

I’ve noticed the search issue but more frustrating for me is it seems to keep losing the album artwork.. I’m convinced it’s to annoy me so I go full streaming

 

[BrianBaughn]

The quirky behavior and dropped features are annoying but the thing Music/iTunes has never had is being able to browse Apple Music with multiple tabs. I'd love to be able to quickly change between tabs like a web browser. You can actually do this on beta.music.apple.com but it otherwise lacks many other features.

 

[UKenGB]

I’ve noticed the search issue but more frustrating for me is it seems to keep losing the album artwork.. I’m convinced it’s to annoy me so I go full streaming

Trying to bring my iTunes library into Music on Monterey ended up losing about 75% of the artwork. In fact, I don't think Apple bothered to try and use existing iTunes artwork and relied instead on simply downloading again everything it could find - which turned out to be very little, even latest albums (new this year) from very big artists. A monumentally stupid decision that didn't even work as intended.

However, as I worked through almost 20,000 tracks needing artwork, I first cleared out all the incorrect artwork Music had 'helpfully' downloaded (i.e. can't find the correct artwork so just grab the first 'greatest hits' you can find). I then tried to quit Music and although it vanished from the screen, it had not quit. I was unable to make it quit and found others having this problem with Music busy and continuing to run after 'Quit'.

Eventually it did (hours later), but to my horror, on starting up Music again I found it had once again tried to download all missing artwork, getting it all wrong again. So all my previous efforts were wasted and I had to clear everything out again. That was why it takes an age to quit. It was busy grabbing all the wrong artwork again.

I then did not quit until I had correct artwork for everything which I assumed would then prevent it from any further artwork mess. However in the meantime I noticed a new checkbox in Music's Prefs. Without checking the exact wording now, it was something like "Download artwork and metadata for music". This is NOT the same option as downloading artwork for imported CDs, that has a different checkbox. So this new one looked like it was causing Music to try and fill in missing artwork and metadata for everything it determined was missing such information - each time you try to Quit.

I immediately turned that off and it has never delayed Quitting, nor tried to automatically download in the background anything again (apart from new CDs).

I have read of a lot of users having trouble with Music repeatedly getting the wrong (or no) artwork etc, but I think it is all controlled by that option. Uncheck it and Music no longer keeps making the same mistakes.

Music has many appalling flaws, like being unable to find even the most obvious artwork, but at least by correctly configuring it, you can prevent it from repeatedly making the same mistakes and in Music's defence, it has never failed to write field/tag data changes to the actual track files' metadata, whereas iTunes had for some years randomly not done that. I would make some update and iTunes reliably displayed that new modified data, but I would usually find it had NOT written that to the actual file. In fact I first discovered this while on a support call to Apple about something else. Needless to say, despite them seeing it first hand (we were screen sharing), nothing was ever done to fix this and I introduced Yate (music metadata app) into my workflow and while that is still invaluable, Music has never failed to update the actual files, so it's not all bad.

Having said that, the bad bits are truly dreadful.

 

[JamesMay82]

Trying to bring my iTunes library into Music on Monterey ended up losing about 75% of the artwork. In fact, I don't think Apple bothered to try and use existing iTunes artwork and relied instead on simply downloading again everything it could find - which turned out to be very little, even latest albums (new this year) from very big artists. A monumentally stupid decision that didn't even work as intended.

However, as I worked through almost 20,000 tracks needing artwork, I first cleared out all the incorrect artwork Music had 'helpfully' downloaded (i.e. can't find the correct artwork so just grab the first 'greatest hits' you can find). I then tried to quit Music and although it vanished from the screen, it had not quit. I was unable to make it quit and found others having this problem with Music busy and continuing to run after 'Quit'.

Eventually it did (hours later), but to my horror, on starting up Music again I found it had once again tried to download all missing artwork, getting it all wrong again. So all my previous efforts were wasted and I had to clear everything out again. That was why it takes an age to quit. It was busy grabbing all the wrong artwork again.

I then did not quit until I had correct artwork for everything which I assumed would then prevent it from any further artwork mess. However in the meantime I noticed a new checkbox in Music's Prefs. Without checking the exact wording now, it was something like "Download artwork and metadata for music". This is NOT the same option as downloading artwork for imported CDs, that has a different checkbox. So this new one looked like it was causing Music to try and fill in missing artwork and metadata for everything it determined was missing such information - each time you try to Quit.

I immediately turned that off and it has never delayed Quitting, nor tried to automatically download in the background anything again (apart from new CDs).

I have read of a lot of users having trouble with Music repeatedly getting the wrong (or no) artwork etc, but I think it is all controlled by that option. Uncheck it and Music no longer keeps making the same mistakes.

Music has many appalling flaws, like being unable to find even the most obvious artwork, but at least by correctly configuring it, you can prevent it from repeatedly making the same mistakes and in Music's defence, it has never failed to write field/tag data changes to the actual track files' metadata, whereas iTunes had for some years randomly not done that. I would make some update and iTunes reliably displayed that new modified data, but I would usually find it had NOT written that to the actual file. In fact I first discovered this while on a support call to Apple about something else. Needless to say, despite them seeing it first hand (we were screen sharing), nothing was ever done to fix this and I introduced Yate (music metadata app) into my workflow and while that is still invaluable, Music has never failed to update the actual files, so it's not all bad.

Having said that, the bad bits are truly dreadful.

Thanks for the reply and I'm glad im not alone in all this.

its even removed the artwork for the songs ive bought from iTunes and my biggest gripe is a monster boxset of all of Elvis recordings which is something like over 60 + Albums its changed 30% of them to a standard greatest hits album! and it won't let me download the lovely original artwork it had when I ripped them to iTunes.

I'm half tempted to create a new iTunes library and then re import everything back over as I think the library is probably all a bit corrupt with all the updates over the years.

I've just clicked get album artwork and its found some but missing 100's! I don't think ive got the energy to do it again!

 

[UKenGB]

The upgrade to Music didn't 'remove' the iTunes artwork, it just didn't bother to copy it across into the new Album Artwork system and relied on downloading what it needs, but in Monterey it seems only able to find about 10% of what iTunes had found, so a lot of music will seem to have had the artwork removed.

The good news is that when you manually add artwork in Music, it not only embeds it into the music files, but also adds it into its own AA system, which you can access and e.g. swap artwork files for ones you want. In fact, if you want your music files 'clean' with no embedded artwork, you can remove it later with any different tagging app and Music will not care. So you have then inserted the artwork you want into Music's AA system, while not having anything embedded in the files and you can do this with EVERY album/track that you want. This was not possible in iTunes.

It would all be irrelevant if correct artwork was found, downloaded and applied, but although Music in Catalina seemed to work ok in that respect, in Monterey it is essentially non functional. No idea how they made it so bad, but not unusual for Apple these days it would seem.

 

[JamesMay82]

The upgrade to Music didn't 'remove' the iTunes artwork, it just didn't bother to copy it across into the new Album Artwork system and relied on downloading what it needs, but in Monterey it seems only able to find about 10% of what iTunes had found, so a lot of music will seem to have had the artwork removed.

The good news is that when you manually add artwork in Music, it not only embeds it into the music files, but also adds it into its own AA system, which you can access and e.g. swap artwork files for ones you want. In fact, if you want your music files 'clean' with no embedded artwork, you can remove it later with any different tagging app and Music will not care. So you have then inserted the artwork you want into Music's AA system, while not having anything embedded in the files and you can do this with EVERY album/track that you want. This was not possible in iTunes.

It would all be irrelevant if correct artwork was found, downloaded and applied, but although Music in Catalina seemed to work ok in that respect, in Monterey it is essentially non functional. No idea how they made it so bad, but not unusual for Apple these days it would seem.

what do you mean by AA system? As an example I have soundtracks that I know I added the artwork manually because the soundtracks aren’t on iTunes. I selected the get info option and added the artwork via iTunes that way. That artwork is now missing from the Apple music app. It even removed artwork from my store bought tracks but then they re appeared when i did get artwork.

 

[MajorFubar]

Re artwork, I think I have an advantage because very very early on when starting to rip my near 1,000 CDs ten years ago, I disabled all the automatic options to download artwork, and added my own via Get Info, on every single album. Moving to Music seems to have kept them all.

Related to artwork though, a glaringly-missing feature is in Artist view where you can't add a custom chosen avatar for the artist thumbnail. I have quite a few blanks.

 

[JamesMay82]

Re artwork, I think I have an advantage because very very early on when starting to rip my near 1,000 CDs ten years ago, I disabled all the automatic options to download artwork, and added my own via Get Info, on every single album. Moving to Music seems to have kept them all.

Related to artwork though, a glaringly-missing feature is in Artist view where you can't add a custom chosen avatar for the artist thumbnail. I have quite a few blanks.

Where do you source your artwork from? and yes the artist view is annoying, they have those blanks even on the Apple Music subscription when I trialed it.

I've just been doing some testing and on my main machine it was only finding a greatest hits artwork for a normal album. I then imported the album to my laptop which doesn't have any music (essentially a new music library) and it found the correct artwork. its all very odd, maybe like I've got a bit of corruption or bad data over the years of upgrading to the diff versions of iTunes and now Music.

I'm not sure I've got the energy to find all the artwork manually again as its quite consuming.. some of its stuff I don't even listen to so I might just delete them lol

 

[MajorFubar]

Where do you source your artwork from?

I Googled most of it. About 100 CDs I had to scan the inlay cards myself though, either because they were to niche to have their artwork 'out there in internet-land', or what was available was poor quality. Any CDs which were/are only available here in the UK usually had poor artwork, incorrect artwork (ie the US artwork, but not the UK artwork) or no artwork available. Might be different now, 10 years later, but I wouldn't bet on it.

 

[bladerunner88]

https://www.albumartexchange.com

 

[UKenGB]

what do you mean by AA system? As an example I have soundtracks that I know I added the artwork manually because the soundtracks aren’t on iTunes. I selected the get info option and added the artwork via iTunes that way. That artwork is now missing from the Apple music app. It even removed artwork from my store bought tracks but then they re appeared when i did get artwork.

Album Artwork.

Remember that iTunes AA was separate from anything embedded in the files. So if you had no embedded artwork in iTunes, importing into Music.app would result in only having artwork it could find and download now (probably nothing or wrong). Anything you had before in iTunes AA system is ignored. Still there in the old iTunes folder, but not used at all.

Embedded artwork would be there, but the whole point of iTunes AA system was to utilise a single artwork file for the whole album rather than duplicated for every track which on average would mean about 12 x the storage requirement. Quite important at the time with limited capacity of iPods. It was a good idea, but there was no way to add ones own artwork into that system (well there was, but Apple locked that down to prevent it). You were left with having to embed artwork, so since in many cases iTunes was unable to find and download artwork (although in hindsight it was very successful compared to Monterey Music), that meant an inconsistency in ones music files as some had embedded artwork and some did not.

Now when you 'Add Artwork' (at least in Monterey) in Music/Get info, it is embedded AND inserted into Music's AA system. After which you can modify or even delete the embedded artwork and Music won't care. So overall, Music is a definite improvement with regard to storing AA. Unfortunately a total disaster as far as finding it in the first place is concerned.

Any embedded artwork in iTunes would still be there in Music. If it's not there in Music, it wasn't there in iTunes. However the only way to confirm is to use a different app that truly just reads/writes tags from files rather than having its own database (as do iTunes and Music) as things can get out of sync. As I think I mentioned, I found iTunes was simply not writing tag data back to the files. Sometimes. Hence why I started using Yate to work on metadata as that NEVER fails to write back to the files.

 

[UKenGB]

Re artwork, I think I have an advantage because very very early on when starting to rip my near 1,000 CDs ten years ago, I disabled all the automatic options to download artwork, and added my own via Get Info, on every single album. Moving to Music seems to have kept them all.

Related to artwork though, a glaringly-missing feature is in Artist view where you can't add a custom chosen avatar for the artist thumbnail. I have quite a few blanks.

So you embedded artwork in every track file. That is wasteful of storage space, but it is reliable since it means the artwork always goes wherever the track file goes. As a database developer, that idea of duplicated data is anathema to me, so I tried as hard as I could to avoid embedding artwork wherever possible. Music now allows me to achieve the perfect solution. Mind you, it's taken weeks to lick nearly 2,000 albums into shape.

I agree about the artist's artwork. That's been appalling since it was introduced. As far as I can tell, it is only populated for purchased music and that's disgraceful. Even now in Monterey, artist's artwork is almost entirely bereft of any actual images and as you say, Apple have ensured it is NOT possible to add ones own. By error or by design? The world's richest company cannot be that bad, so it HAS to be deliberate.

In contrast, I use Plex for actually playing music (well, all media in fact) around the house and my Music library in Plex, when viewed as Artists, every single one of the nearly 600 artists has a suitable image displayed. All that was done automatically. Without having to do anything. Meanwhile Apple actively prevent you from achieving anything like that, however much work you want to put into it.

Much as I love most Apple products and stuck with them through the dark times of what seems like so many years ago now, these days a lot of what they produce could only be charitably described as very poor quality with a lot of unpleasant connotations below the surface.

 

[jmckenzie]

One of the most annoying, when searching either my library or Apple Music, is how sometimes the search box can lose focus after typing literally every character.

Oh yeah, I HATE that one.

I also hate how the UI works — the stack of views under the back button just seems endless. I don't want my library to function like a web browser. And yet for all it's keeping track of, if I am browsing through my main library and am way down in the alphabet, then click in to an album to add one song to the play queue, then click back out, I'm back up at the As.

 

[UKenGB]

Oh yeah, I HATE that one.
…, if I am browsing through my main library and am way down in the alphabet, then click in to an album to add one song to the play queue, then click back out, I'm back up at the As.

Oh yeah, I hate that one too.

As I said, it's like a poor beta or even alpha release. As for being the final polished product of the richest software company on the planet, that is simply a joke.

 

[orionquest]

Oh jezzsh this thread popped up in my feed in a very timely fashion.

Just recently updated from Mojave to Monterey. And yeah first real exposure to Music.
It's sucks.
Ui is terrible, so much wasted space.
Never mind it didn't import my iTunes library, playlists nothing.
Not really a deal breaker since i just use playlists to play music. Even that is so awkward.

Might look into that retroactive.

 

[UKenGB]

Slightly unrelated, but I have an AppleScript I've been using with iTines. It takes the contents of a selected playlist and exports it all in a way suitable for use on in-car storage. It loads 25k tracks fro processing in a couple of seconds. In Music.app, it takes several minutes and then there's an AppleEvent timeout and Music is hung for quite a while afterwards, although it does eventually recover.

I increased the timeout to an hour. So it just hung for an hour.

Got to hand it to Apple, they really know how to f**k up sometimes.

 

[UKenGB]

…
Might look into that retroactive.

I tried that. It happily downloaded and 'sorted' iTunes for use without complaint. But…

iTunes immediately crashes whenever I try to start it. So it's not been any solution for me.

 

[Starfia]

There's definitely some weirdness in the Music app. Whether you can hide Apple Music seems to ebb with system updates. Dragging music to a playlist from the Finder seems to add it to my music library but not the playlist, so I take a little stroll to re-add it again from the library. I just sent Apple feedback for the third or fourth time in three or four years that I still have to turn the equalizer "on and off again" to make it kick in after resuming playback.

But…

… iTunes has also always been a little weird in some way or another. Initially its features were limited. Eventually, it was "bloated." And I remember that the days when it was "good" were the days in which I was restarting my Mac a few times a week out of necessity, which nowadays pretty much never happens. I think priorities around the Music app have shifted to be Apple Music-centric, but Apple software has always been a little quirky in some way or other. On the whole, it's pretty good, and even today with the orientation shift, nudging me ever more centrally into the "20 percent" of customers rather than the "80 percent" for whom the main features are intended, I still perceive the effort to maintain the features of yesterday that I use today.

 

[transmaster]

I had iTunes loaded on my PC because at the time there were no wireless updates. iTunes was a total dog. When I started it up it would become utterly unresponsive for upwards of 5 minutes when it was apparently scanning the 9TB of storage space I had. The only way I could close the page was the kill iTunes in the device manager. It got increasing worse trying to load my personal music files into it. I would do the transfer it would except them but they were nowhere to be found. Then I made the mistake of allowing it to work over my music files. It completely destroyed 5 TB worth of my carefully assembled files. Finally I installed and I still use jRiver Media Center. It was worth every dime I paid for it. Indeed it was one of the first things I installed on this Mac Studio I and typing on. It scanned and loaded all of my music, and video fills in and very short time. It does everything. I have had Apple Music since day one and it has improved a bunch. I notice with this Mac that any personal music I load in is automatically added to Apple Music. Media Player v.30 also does this automatically and this includes any video files.

 

[orionquest]

There's definitely some weirdness in the Music app. Whether you can hide Apple Music seems to ebb with system updates. Dragging music to a playlist from the Finder seems to add it to my music library but not the playlist, so I take a little stroll to re-add it again from the library. I just sent Apple feedback for the third or fourth time in three or four years that I still have to turn the equalizer "on and off again" to make it kick in after resuming playback.

I had this same problem adding songs to a playlist. You have to be very specific where you drag and drop the file to on the open playlist. Yeah it's dumb to be this specific, but it can be done. You have to drag and place the file right under another song in the playlist, you will see a line appear below the song where it will be added. Then drop.

iTunes was much better at this, just drag a song or bunch of them onto the playlist window and it was smart enough to know to add them.

Total regression here, and still no fix in sight after what 3 OS updates. Ridiculous.