all of this, so much, all of this. Ugh. I hate it.
I really am considering switching to Spotify.
I tell you, I miss Rdio every day. Every single day.
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Yes! Rdio was such a pleasure. I especially remember listening to Random Access Memories the summer it came out.
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Holy smokes, I haven’t thought about Rdio in a long time, good call!
PS: I find app naming nomenclature hilarious: just remove the 2nd or final vowel preceding a consonant.
I have an AWESOME bug that I’ve been dealing with on macOS since the switch over from iTunes to Music. I have worked tirelessly–until I finally gave up–with Apple tech support to address it. In my composer view, which is the second most important view to me next to the column browser, the list of songs attributed to the composers are wrong after a certain letter in the alphabet. Let me explain, curious reader.
I am not sure what letter in the alphabet this begins with, but I know it’s right for a while. But let’s look at some M composers. I have Mendelssohn, Felix (1809-1847) as a composer. When I click his name, I get compositions from Natalie Merchant. But, I get the rest of the Natalie Merchant songs under her own name.
I have Noel Gallagher mixed in with Nikki Costa.
I have Van Halen tracks from one album mixed into the composer list for Simpson & Ashford.
All the metadata in the tracks themselves are correct. I.e., Jump is not listed as being composed by Simpson & Ashford but by Van Halen/D. Roth/Van Halen. The rest of the tracks in 1984 seem to be correctly associated with the correct composer.
All these tracks are in the right place in iOS music.
This mostly a problem with classical music, where I work with the composer view the most. I use the pop/rock tracks just to hammer the point home.
It’s infuriating.
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I totally agree. It’s like something out of Through the Looking Glass.
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There’s Cider, which is limited by Apple Music’s API to 256kbps, but at least my music plays reliably. Others here on MPU have mentioned Fidelia, which can play downloaded music from AM:
I was reminded of my own issues with AM, which seems to have been “fixed” on Ventura by… disabling select-all. This is a $2.3T company.
I am looking forward to trying Cider, thanks! Very exciting. Lossless is cool but makes no difference for my Studio Display speakers or AirPods.
I would love to use Music on my Mac to control the two HomePod minis that flank my monitor. Except I gave up on that adventure after about three goes. I just grab my phone which reliably controls them.
What would the Mac do wrong? I forget all of the issues I had, but the most egregious one would be the music would simply stop dead in the middle of a song and the Music app would no longer be outputting to the HomePods but set for local Mac audio (and playing nothing).
Thanks for confirming my decision to stick with Spotify for listening to music. I’m sometimes tempted by the cheaper price of bundling with Apple’s other services, but music is too important to me to put up with an inferior app.
I uploaded my entire music library to iTunes Match when it was first released and for $20 or so a year its worked well all things considered.
Using Apple Music is worse than being waterboarded tho. I strictly use it to match my music so I can download it when I want instead of having hard drives with all my music.
Cider App has been a pretty good replacement but it’s a little rough but shows promise.
Perhaps the most hyperbolic thing I’ve ever read about AM 
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I’m still encountering all the bugs you’ve mentioned.
Biggest offender is the search and not being able to go back to a previous view. Songs that get divided into 2-3 different (same) album.
I remember when Apple Music was new. I have an iTunes Match subscription and I’m getting duplicates, missing Matched albums, albums that are divided into multiple of 2s and 3s and the Apple Music specialist the customer service transferred me to is also experiencing the same issue. He was great enough to fix some of the issue and told me to turn off Match if I wanted to keep Apple Music. Sucks that I lost some albums that are not available via streaming though. Had to re-rip some of my old CDs by busting out my old white Macbook.
Another issue I’m getting is that Apple Music won’t work on my work Mac if its not connected on an ethernet cable even if I lower it to just high quality AAC.
Reason why I’m still using AM: my music library available on all my devices including matched albums, lossless, I like their curated playlist, the Zane Lowe interviews, music video, and because all of my devices are from Apple.
I have Spotify when I get discounted plans because they have other features I like like the Liner Notes. Other than that, I still like AM more than Spotify.
P.S.
I also miss Rdio. I still have their tote bag that has a special place in my tote bag collection.
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I quite often get an error in Music on my iPhone the first time I tap play on an album saying “Not Authorised” or “Not available in your region”.
This is despite paying for the Apple One Premium which includes Apple Music, and the Music app having shown me the album in the first place, and it working the second time I tap play!
Most frustrating. The app or service definitely needs work!
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I too get this error on my iPhone, and the second play request is successful.
On my Mac an album or track will fail to play with no reason given. And does not play on subsequent requests. And this also happens for music I own and if I go to the music library will play just fine.
Exasperating.
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There was talk about a new, built from scratch, version of the iTunes/Music app. Anyone know about this?
My biggest grief with Apple Music is that it takes about 2 seconds to start playing a song.
I too can’t stand Apple Music any longer. But, it’s bundled with our Apple One and the whole family is using it, so switching to Spotify wouldn’t make much sense.
I encounter countless bugs on macOS and iOS, 90% of the time I can’t get my HomePod mini to play from my iPhone and I could go on and on and on
I too have been trying Cider out; it’s decent but can be buggy as well
If you find anything else let us know
Has anyone here tried Retroactive? I came across this MacRumors thread and am considering giving it a shot—it allows you to run old versions of iTunes, Aperture, and some other Apple software on post-Catalina releases of macOS. I don’t love messing around with SIP, though.
My latest gripe with Apple Music—the Mac app, to be clear—is that there’s no way to disable the karaoke-style lyrics. It’s not even a bug, the software just stinks.
I just discovered another weird bug. If you have a smart playlist that uses a track’s play count as one of the playlist criteria, the last track in the playlist’s play-count will not update if it will result in removing it from the list. What??? Here goes.
I have a smart playlist called Fresh Tracks, that collects all the music that I’ve recently added. A track is considered “fresh” until I’ve listened to it five times or given it a 1-star rating. The last song in the playlist will not update its count past four, but the songs above it all increase their counts as you would expect. If I manually re-order the list so that last track is the penultimate track (or anywhere earlier in the list) and play it, the count will magically update again and the track disappears from the playlist.
Here’s another fun one. Yesterday in the “New Releases” section was a song by Nick Mason. As I’m a Pink Floyd fan, and Nick Mason was/is the drummer for Pink Floyd, it made sense to show me that. And I gave it a listen. “Very different”, I thought. So I clicked on the artist name, and it brought up info about Nick Mason the Pink Floyd drummer. Yet this song was by Nick Mason the Greek Electronica artist.
I knew to check because right next to the Nick Mason song was a song by Yes. I’m a fan of the progressive rock band Yes, and clicking the artist brought up info about that Yes. But that was not the Yes, actually the band is “Ye_s”, that did this song. This is also true for Renaissance (prog) and Renaissance (world beat). Another recent new release suggestion for me.
Astonishingly bad.
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You know what I find strange about this? Music is the kind of app (and service) that a software engineer could completely lose themself in as a passion project. If Apple turned the app over to one passionate, creative music-aficionado, engineer and told said engineer to just “have at it,” imagine what she or he could do with this thing. Most of the issues to make Music better are really low-hanging fruit. The rest is giving users the tools to manage their libraries through integration with Shortcuts and exposing functionality. Improving the underlying database design to open up new fields for tags and other metadata would be the ultimate achievement, but even if that is too ambitious, there is much that could be done if the app just had a loving caretaker.
The same kind of thing could be done with Apple Music (the service).
This should get that attention, too, because it’s one of those apps almost everybody interacts with. iTunes and iPods are in Apple’s DNA. I would like Apple to “wow” us with the Music app like it did with the Apple Silicon Macs.
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