I’ve been on a mission to replace all MP3 with lossless and have been culling my collection, stored in Music.app and before that, iTunes. I’ve been an iTunes user since Day 1. There’s always been complaints about this and that, but I’ve never paid attention to them since it “works for me!” Sure, the cloud syncing strategy is awful, but it’s awful across all Apple products. You can never tell what is local and what is in Apple Cloud. However, that’s really lightly touches on what my current workflow. Once I figured that out, I haven’t had any issues.

Now that I’m hard core organizing, I just realized how hard core buggy as hell this UI is. Among the issues:

1) You can’t do anything from the Recently Added section. Sure, there’s a … menu on each album, but Delete from Library doesn’t delete at all.

2) You will often find Music will split up an album into two or more albums with the same album name, same artwork. When you bulk edit all of them, you’ll find the title will either be blank of “Mixed” indicating both fields have some bugged hidden string character. This reeks of a data issue in Apple Music. There’s dirty data in Apple Music, and when Music tries to sync all the meta data, it gets crap from Apple, and Music processes crap.

3) God help you if you try to fix the above by bulk edit multiple songs across multiple albums from the Artists section. It *never* works flawlessly. Sometimes the changes propagate to other songs you did not select, bringing in other songs into the album. Sometimes now instead of two albums, you have three. You have to bulk edit from the Songs section instead.

4) Copying files. This is a Finder issue. You can drag files from the Finder, Music lights up, you drop your files, and nothing… Copying fails. You have to hold the files in the Music window for *many* seconds before the OS realizes what you’re trying to do, and sometimes that still doesn’t work.

5) If you have one single song from a compilation album done by various artists, you can’t ever edit that one album, even from Album section. Music will associate the album to the song’s artist and from any section, Album, Song, whatever, it will think the artist created that album. Hitting “Get Info” from the Album Section or the album from the Artists section brings up the song’s Get Info box. Fucking Apple thinking you’re an idiot and trying to be smart here.

6) Shitty error messages. When adding to an iPod, I kept getting at message saying the songs being added to an iPod failed. That’s it. That’s all it said. Activity window reported the same thing too, no detail. Turns out when this happens, Music spits out a log file somewhere, and I found it. This log file is actually useful. I encrypted the files at too high of a sampling rate, which my iPod can’t play. You could have just said that in the beginning, Music…

7) Wrong identification from Apple Cloud. If a song has the same name and track number in both the original album and a compilation, Apple Cloud often misidentifies the album name, either tagging it with whichever one you *don’t* want. No idea how many times it gets it right, and that isn’t something that can be determined unless you’re Apple.

8) The Search In Apple Music/Your Library/iTunes Store selector box gets too easily buried. Once you start diving in from a set of search results, Apple Music thinks any subsequent searches are in the option you wanted last and won’t show those options again. You have to back all the way out ( via the < icon) of the search result to get those options again.

I can see some of these issues go back to Apple Cloud, which like I mentioned, has always had major syncing and data issues. Music.app fine if you’re just playing a song, album, playlist. I haven’t found a problem yet with *playing* music. But holy shit is it buggy as fuck…

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 28th, 2023 at 10:11 am and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.