Apple really messed up Playlists in Sonoma on Mac, why no more album artwork?

So Apple Music in Sonoma has had a major change to playlists, and it literally removes features in favor of making your own ugly generic playlist covers, that literally no one wants. And it used to take 4 albums that were in the playlist and make that the cover, but nothing with covers is even an option anymore, except adding your own.

And if you make playlists out of a single album, it used to take the name of the album, but now you have to type it in yourself, and it won’t take the album artwork or allow you to paste the artwork you copied from it’s own artwork tab, you have to select from a file or from photos. So if I put in a new album, I have to put the album artwork on the track, then add it to the playlist too? WTF APPLE!

The new ploylist window with the ugly generic art you can chose and what you type shows up over it.

The add your own artwork (no option to use existing artwork).

You can drag artwork to the plus or choose a file or from library, but nothing to chose album artwork, WTF!

I consistently feel like Apple puts people in charge who have never used the software, or aren’t long term users, or don’t see why people liked the old behavior.

There is a thread on this at Apple, but since Apple doesn’t read their own forums, who really cares?

The problem is this needs to get out to the tech press, so that Apple actually sees about it and sees that people care about this, but with people just talking on the forum that they don’t even read it will never get seen. Hopefully people will at least post some feedback and get this out there.

Mac Performance Guide on Apple’s Invasive Spotlight Indexing Impairing Use of Mac

Mac Performance Guide is quite negative on Mac performance, and it is the only place I have seen to show negative performance of Mac Studios, and he is certainly right on the Core Rote in Apple Systems. And this article on Spotlight Indexing is very interesting as I hate when does things that you have no control over. Spotlight is one of those things, especially when it indexes and you have no control over it. A simple pause indexing would be an amazing thing.

Personally I hate Spotlight as it doesn’t find everything for me, I use Find Any File for any major searches.

And for core rot I have to bring up my issue with Apple Music and moving iPhone sync to the finder. Also the fact that the damn sync has to sync twice to sync any files to my phone. Why? WTF!

Why is it so hard to find Lossless and Spatial Audio on Apple Music?

Don’t get me wrong, I am a big fan of Apple’s addition of Lossless music up to 24bit 192hz and Spatial Audio (a new Dolby Audio suround mix for stereo headphones, here with Apple’s proprietary chip), but my big problem is finding what music is available. Sure there are Spatial Audio playlists, but no Lossless Playlists but I would like to be able to search by album and spatial or lossless to find music to listen to.

And yes I know most people can’t hear the difference with Lossless, but if it is mixed well I have an Emotiva XDA-1 DAC a good headphone amp and nice headphones, so it does sound pretty damn good.

And I have been impressive with Spatial Audio, at least well mixed spatial audio and my PowerBeats Pro headphones. It does sound pretty damn impressive for bluetooth headphones, much like Dolby on my headphones on my XBOX. Pretty impressive when mixed well.

And there lies the problem, make it easier to search for Apple! I know they are all for simplicity, but simplicity at the cost of functionality is not worth it.

Apple Music’s new streaming Spacial Audio and Lossless

So Apple upgrade it’s Music service recently and added both Lossless and Spacial Audio to it’s Apple Music for the same price. Now I haven’t yet tried the Lossless mainly because I use Beats Pro headphones on my iPhone and I haven’t yet upgraded to Big Sur on my mac, though I am excited to try it on my mac since I have an old Emotiva XDA-1 which should be able to handle at least higher quality audio very well. I also have some wired lightning bolt headphones from 1more that should be able to handle it for my iPhone, that I need to try out.

So I decided to give Spacial Audio a whirl. There are a couple of demos with the Weekend and Marvin Gay and then some playlists. And I have to say the effect is certainly amazing and a hue improvement over the stereo versions. It certainly sounds like the music just opened up completely and does sound so much better. Wow!

I would to hear some pink floyd mixed for this, as it sounds so expansive. I have to say I am impressed.

UPDATE

OK trying out the lossless on my 1more headphones, not the highest quality but 24bit 48hz and it is pretty damn impressive! The Spacial certainly improves the wireless experience, but the Lossless is damned impressive.

FURTHER UPDATE

Turned on Lossless on my Mac, as my Emotica XDA-1 Supports 24bit 192kHz, which is what the lossless goes to. Now the 16bit 44.1kHZ, sound good but the higher quality ones, especially The Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Wow.

In Music you can see a symbol in the corner if it is lossless.

And if you click on it it tells the bit rate, and every track is different.

And the higher bit rates do sound better if you have a DAC that can decode them and good headphones.

WOW.

Why is Mac OS Finder iOS Sync so inferior to the previous iTunes Sync

 I have said this before and I am sure I will it again, but why when Apple split up iTunes to make Music, Podcast and TV apps and moving iOS music sync to the finder did they make it so far inferior to the previous sync?

Now I know they want you to pay for Apple Music to get your music there, but they were already getting you to pay for music through them. I think they just don’t want you to sync your own music libraries anymore, they want you to just stream your music.

And why is it worse. Well first off if you plug in your iOS device and go to it in the finder, and try and sync any local music (going to the Music tab and selecting any songs or playlists the sync button switches from blue and and press-able to grey and not press-able).

Before any changes it has a sync that you could hit, but not if you make any changes.

This makes the whole iOS thing seem broken, but there is still a way to sync, but you have to get through the whole syncing process once, which can take a very long time. And all it shows for status bars, is a little circle in the sidebar and a syncing thing on the bottom, but both are extremely slow.

The sidebar shows the whole process.

And this is just showing the backup stage, but no indication of how much of the synching this is.

Of Course in some steps you get this wheel, which is pretty much as unhelpful as you can get.

And this process can easily take 30+ minutes.

One it has done a full backup and finished. You can then go into music and select what music you sync and hit sync (it will not be grayed out this time) and only then will your local music sync. And it has to do a whole other sync to get your music over.
Honestly What the Absolute Fuck??!?!?
And even worse sometimes it doesn’t work after 1 sync and you have to do another sync before you are able to move your music over. Really?!?!??!? FUCK YOU APPLE!!!
iTunes never did this.

And with iTunes I could use Wifi Sync. Now I am sure you are saying that you can use Wifi sync with Music, and yes you can, but you can’t stop it.

With iTunes if you had to stop any iOS sync you could force quit iTunes. Sure not an ideal solution, but it worked, and say you could restart or shutdown your computer.

With Music if you have WIFI sync on, you can’t restart or even quit the finder to get it to stop. The only way to get it to stop is to hard reset the computer, which is beyond not ideal.

You can least stop the cable based sync by unplugging the iOS device!

And don’t even get me started with Apple Music. If you sync your library with Apple Music you can get into tons of trouble. There are more forum posts about what this can do to your library than you can read in a lifetime. It has been known to overwrite all your music, replace it with lower quality music, or even different music. And without syncing Apple Music, you can never save any of their music, other than marking it as liked.

Honestly you should be able to keep your streaming music separate from your local library and not be forced to commingle them. And if they do commingle there should be no way that Apple can mess up your local library (which is why they should be kept permanently separate). 

The best solution would be able to have local music and streaming music apps that are separate. So nothing can screw each other up. I want to keep my music that I have ripped higher quality and not have anyone touch it or screw it up!

And Apple could now care less about people who have their own music all they care about is people who buy or rent music (yes paying for streaming music is renting music).

When adding new music to Apple Music, formerly iTunes who wants it to autoplay? I sure as hell don’t!

 When using Apple’s Music, formerly iTunes to import music, why does it automatically play what you are importing? There used to be a choice in iTunes to keep it from doing this, but Apple purposely removed this feature. So now every time you import something it automatically plays that, even if you are already playing something else.

Now I don’t know about you, but importing and wanting to play are seperate things, and I would always rather chose to hit play than to have auto-play.

Why does this feature even exist? And it gets ridiculous when importing downloads of multi-disc albums, when it plays some random track off all 4 discs, starting one, then another, then another, then another.

I know apple doesn’t want me to own any of my own music anymore unless I buy it from them or stream it from them, but I don’t buy any music from them, and I wish they would have a more hands off approach.

Apple Music Sync should not force you to sync your Mac’s Music library



I really hate that I am unable to sync my Apple Music Subscription music without also syncing my Music on my mac which I want to sync manually via a cable to my iPhone. I feel like I am getting ripped off as I can barely use the functionality of Apple Music which I am paying for. The two services should be separated.


I do not want Apple to sync my music on my Mac to the cloud, I have over 62,000 songs most of which are not available from Apple Music and if they are I have customized all the metadata to be just how I want it, and I don’t want to take the chance that Apple will mess with it. I tried iTunes Sync when it first came out, and it messed up my whole library and took me years to get it back to exactly how I wanted it.


I want to be able to save playlists from Apple Music and have what I do in Apple music be consistent across my devices, but should not have to also do the same with my personal music library. I don’t want my music to be recompressed (bad enough to have to do use Apple Uncompressed instead of the more ubiquitous Ogg) or messed with in any way. Bad enough that I have to use the awful Finder Sync for music, that can’t be force quit.


Honestly I wish Apple Music and Music were split as two apps, and your mac music could become part of Apple Music if you wanted it to, but it should be your choice.

Apple should do one more separation of itunes, having Apple Music it’s own app

So Apple broke up iTunes with Catalina, making Music, TV, Podcasts and putting local sync into the finder. I have made no qualms of what a mess I think they have made, but since this is how things are going to be I think they should make more break and remove Apple Music from your local music library, and then put local sync back into “itunes” the app for your local library.

I already can’t use Apple Music to it’s fullest, because I don’t pay extra to sync my local music to the cloud (i put my music on my iPhone or a decent subset) so i can’t save playlists or songs from Apple Music. And yea this is a ripoff as I don’t want to sync my local library, but would love likely playlists on Apple Music to sync between devices. And a separate app would completely solve this problem.

And bringing back “itunes” for just your local music would be great, it would solve all confusion between local and Apple Music , and even better if they put sync back in an app it would solve so many issues. Pre-Catalina I enabled wifi sync, and automatic sync when connected so I always had current backups of my iOs devices, but I had to shut both of these off with Catalina. Moving iOS sync to the find means there is no way to cancel the sync. Previously you could always force quit itunes, but the find reboots if you force quite it and the sync continues. This is a problem when I am running video editing software which has crashed and necessitates a restart, but you can’t because an iOS device synching! And the sync seems so much slower, but maybe that is because there is no progress bar until the actual copying of music takes place, and it is  so damn slow!

And maybe, just maybe it would fix the fact that I have to sync twice to sync and local music. If i try and pick anything to sync on the first sync, the apply button becomes greyed out. After the first sync i can then chose music to sync and hit apply and music is synched. This takes a huge amount of tine because I back up locally. I like to have full backups with passwords and the like, plus the restore is faster than icloud. And when i first tried icloud backups, the restore failed on ipad and iphone and I list a year because i went back to my previous local backup.

Now I am sure Apple doesn’t care to do this because they expect us to just use Apple Music, but I use both and hate how local sync has become a second class citizen!