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!
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.
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.
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.
Thank you! Yes, this entirely. I’m working with a client whose basic pitch is not dissimilar to Apple Music, but with the passion project spin. You captured it entirely. My thoughts exactly.
How this is not the best app on the Mac boggles my mind.
I’m using Cider now, because at least it plays an album all the way through without glitching.
They used to be - but not anymore.
Today, their DNA is pushing Apple Music subscriptions.
Conversion rate to subscriptions is the measuring stick for the app today, not flawless playback and meticulous library management. And its is probably two different target demographics that care about these things.
One baffling change for the worse was the decision to remove the album view tray that used to slide down when you clicked on artwork in album view. Now, everything goes to its own screen, and all context is erased. I used to be able to quickly scan three or four albums for a particular song, but these days… alas, alack!
Feels like a lot of these problems emerged as a result of Apple Music taking the driver’s seat. Subscribed playlists being stuck at the root level where they can’t be sorted into folders is another point of frustration. I’ve had to reorganize many of my own playlists into their own folders just to clarify what’s what—however, MusicKit doesn’t play nicely with playlists in folders, so if you try using another player on iOS like Marvis, you’ll eventually encounter bugs when trying to display those nested playlists. What a nightmare.
The real culprit can probably be traced back about five or six years before Apple Music took off, when they first introduced their own social media into iTunes and were consolidating MobileMe and iTunes Store accounts into iCloud. Seems like the transition was much easier for people who hopped on the Apple bandwagon after the iPhone took off, than it was for legacy Mac users.
If I have lyrics or playing next sidebar enabled, I can’t switch the search between apple music and my library.
Most annoying thing is search leading me to iTunes store instead of Apple Music.