Irrational Rant about Apple Music - Please Ignore

#1

This is nothing other than venting.

The Music app on MacOS is a dumpster fire and Apple ought to be ashamed. Reordering playlists: disaster. Viewing useful song/track information in the default view: herculean effort. Drag and drop: darn near impossible.

I use Plex, Sonos, and Spotify all the time for music. As much grief as people give those apps, they’re a delight compared to the train wreck that is Apple Music (which I’m having to use for some church stuff). I’d not spent much time in it since iTunes went away. Now I’m incredibly thankful that I haven’t had to. This is inexcusably bad.

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#2

Here’s a short video of the delightful experience of attempting to drag/drop reorder a playlist.

#3

I have nothing to add but agreement. I hate the Mac app. It’s slow and awkward to use. I hate that Apple Music stuff is now mixed with my music. If Spotify supported AirPlay2 I would have switched already.

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#4

It remains to be seen how many of the infinite problems in the app will be solved, but Apple is rewriting the entire Apple Music app as part of the 12.2 update. Allegedly.

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#5

Good news about the rewrite, if only for performance and not UX reasons.

I realize that the Music team will never make the Music app as dense and powerful as DEVONthink, but a few concessions for those of us who like to see and filter a lot of text in table views would go a ways.

Side note: @Jezmund_Berserker 's HDR video is making the '21 MBP screen flicker weirdly in transition to brightening the whites–anyone else? :slight_smile:

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#6

Apple makes great hardware and good operating systems. But with the exception of a couple of their pro apps, their software ranges from OK to the aforementioned dumpster fire.

OTOH, Apple’s “Ted Lasso Channel“ is great.

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#7

They could have just left iTunes alone and it would be better than what it is now.

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#8

I’ve always had the feeling that Apple was somewhat focused on the music app on iOS and cared even less about the mac version.

I use Apple Music purely for privacy reasons, the UI of every single competitor is better.

Just this morning, I kept getting blank screens from searches and had to restart the app for them to work again. It may not be electron but it’s still pretty much a wrapper on webviews, and you can definitely feel it. Hopefully that rewrite will push things in the right direction.

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#9

Ha - I decided yesterday to think about moving away from Spotify and have just signed up for the 3 month trail of Apple Music.

Sounds like I’m in for some fun ahead

#10

I am fine with the actual service. It has lots of playlists I like, tons of music, etc. they just need to redo the apps. The current apps are broken, especially on the Mac. I have to restart it every other day currently because it stops working.

#11

I don’t even make it through a whole day on the Mac in Monterey. Note that it was fine in Big Sur.

I now run Music from my iPad Airplay to my stereo system via an old AirPort Express. And this is working for me.

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#12

I listen to a personal collections of MP3s through the Music app every day and have had no problems. M1 MBP on Monterey and iPhone SE2 on beta 15.3. Looks like I got lucky :slight_smile:

#13

Heartily agree @Jezmund_Berserker ! Apple should be embarrassed, though I suspect they see the ‘problem’ being those of us who persist in having our own personal music collections. I ended up cancelling my Apple Music subscription because of the mess it had made of my local library, but with the update to Monterey they removed the ability to turn off that part of the app, which shows to me where their priority lies.

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#14

Whoever at Apple thought we would mistake a Catalyst app for a real Mac app is not using their own product.

#15

Me, too. But that’s because I’m a highly adaptive person and have trained myself to swerve around the potholes and avoid the dumpster fires. And I cuss a lot.

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#16

It works fine for playing local tracks, other than the questionable UI at places. Apple Music is where it runs into problems.

#17

So am I. Apple could possibly have the best music service available. IF their apps were reliable and their digital assistant had a much better batting average when it came to playing the songs I requested.

I think Apple would pay more attention to their shortcomings if their apps weren’t built in.

#18

This is why I switched to Plex for TV, Films and Music.

As soon as they IOSified iTunes, I was out.

#19

Yesterday, I said to my HomePod “Play the album The Game.” A Queen album that is in my library and I have “loved”. It plays some rapper’s album with the same name. I never listen to rap, or that artist. Shouldn’t Siri have some intelligence?

Apple Music really wants me to listen to rap, they keep showing me screens full of it, but they have all my listening history and ratings that is almost never rap.

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#20

It’s like that everywhere, though - not just in the Music app. I have a contact whose last name is “Zons”, and for the life of me I can’t get “Call _____ Zons” to work. It’s guessed “Zones”, “Zane”, “Zanes”, “Zahn”…

If they just added logic something like “assume the user is far more likely to be talking about something on their device rather than something else”, and applied a bit of fuzzy matching (or a learning mechanism) it would be a much better experience.

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