Another bug with Catalina’s finder iOS Sync and Folders in Apple Music

OK so I have noticed a major bug in syncing with Catalina’s Finder iOS sync. I have some music organized into folders in Music (the late lamented iTunes music portion) and something has happened to the alphabetical order that it shows in sync.

Here is my music of Big Finish Doctor Who audio as it shows in Apple Music.

All the playlists are in alphabetical order in Music as you can see.

Now in the Finder iOS Sync that is not the case.

This is not in order at all. And the synced files are mixed all throughout in random order! WTF!

This is a huge mess!

I have posted both on Apple’s Discussion site and have submitted Feedback to Apple. And I have also posted on MacRumors forums.

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UPDATE: So 10.15.1’s latest security update seems to have solved this problem. Unfortunately now I can’t get the sync working as it greys out anytime I make any changes.

Catalina Finder IOS Sync doesn’t tell you what stage of syncing

So I did make the move to Catalina after SoftRaid upgraded to 4.8 with Catalina support, and overall I am OK with the split Music, Podcasts and TV apps that replace iTunes. In fact the TV app is superior because it now will play back 4K movies on my iMac Pro.

My biggest complaint so far is with the Finder Sync for iOS. It seems mostly the same, save for a few things I don’t like. First off your apply and Sync Buttons are greyed out while the phone is syncing. So if I connect the iPhone or iPad it starts syncing, then I can make any changes I want, but can’t apply them until the current sync is finished. In iTunes I could apply as soon as I made the changes I want to.

And the problem with having to wait is not knowing when it will end. At least iTunes had text based feedback of what was going, and would tell me that it was in the backup portion which always took forever. Now all you get is a little spinning ball next to the device in the finder which gives no indication of how long the sync is going to take!

And then after that it does give a little indicator to give you some idea of how long it will take, but not text information of what is syncing at that point. You can see the white filling up means how much time it is going to take.

So what did the first spinning thing mean? I am going to have to assume that is the backup. If so it went much faster at least the first time.

And I always sync playlists, and every time you open the program it reverts to Albums. How hard would it be to remember where you were? Really?

iOS 13.1 on iPhone is messing up badly on playlist artwork for playlists I have synced from my computer

So I have noticed a really frustrating issue on my iPhone X on iOS 13.1 with the music app. I have all of my music organized into playlists by albums and I sync them by playlist, but on iOS 13.1 the album artwork is wrong and consistently changing on many of my playlists.

Here is an example.

The Playlist for Brittany Howard’s album Jaime shows as Tim Michin, but I click on the playlist it shows the proper artwork.

Even weirder is if click on <library the artwork has changed.

And it is again correct once I go into the playlist, but then it changes again when I come back out.

This behavior is incorrect and obviously not supposed to be happening.

I have posted about this at Apple Forums as well, and tried submitting a bug report, but it doesn’t allow pictures an this one you really need to see the pictures to see what the heck is going on.

The Apple Music App replacing iTunes had better still support Star Ratings!

So it is official, as rumored iTunes is dead, and split into 3 apps (well 4, as syncing is going to be built into the finder).

There is Music, Podcasts and TV.

The thing that scares me is that Apple has already pulled Star ratings from the iOS apps, and replaced it with like and dislike. So does this mean that all ratings are going to go away?

I have been rating my music since iTunes began, and before in fact when it was SoundJam MP.

And honestly I don’t want to lose the granularity of 5 star ratings, but if I have to someone at Doug’s Scripts had better write a script that allows you chose a rating or above to move it to a like, so I can at least recreate my smart playlists with likes.

Apple releases iTunes downgrade to return App Management for iOS

Since Apple released itubes 12.7 they removed both App management and Ring Ztone management from itunes completely. Well because of complaints Apple has now released iTunes 12.6.3 which features app management, of course once you install it you will no longer get notices for new versions of iTunes and it will eventually break.

Apple should just admit they were wrong and either put the functionskity back or make a new app that has just iOS management.

Apple Giveth and Apple Taketh Away. Taking away ringtone support from iTunes 12.7.

So Apple has released iTunes 12.7 and after years of people complaining have removed some parts of itunes to relieve all it’s complaints of bloatware.

They have removed the iOS App store and the Ringtone manager completely from iTunes.

Unfortunately there is no way to now organize or control your ringtones from within iTunes. You can manually drag ringtones to your phone with iTunes, but they have removed the sync feature. This is a feature I used all the time, and this is just frustrating. I make my own ringtones, as I don’t want to pay Apple for them, but they obviously just want me to buy ringtones from them.

Of course I still want custom Ringtones. Luckily the latest version of Rogue Amoeba’s Fission has updated Ringtone support, that saves the files locally (since it can no longer install them) and you can manually install them using iTunes.

Of course there is the problem of getting the old Ringtones out, but luckily I have Ecamm’s PhoneView, which I could pull the ringtones back out to my Mac (as well as backup texts and messages and many other thing).

I hate how Apple has a propensity to remove features that they no longer care about, but many people use all the time and have been using for years!

And I am not looking forward to when I get my next phone and have to re-install all apps via download instead of directly from my Mac!

Apple removed my post on removing 5 Star Ratings from iOS 10!

So i started a discussion on apple discussions about them removing 5 star ratings from iOS 10. It was to get people to contact apple about this to get the feadback, and hope people would show their displeasure and Apple might change their wrongful change, but they erased the posts as of today! The posts were at this point.

Apple dontacted me with the following e-mail:

Hi Jonah (Jonah Lee Walker), 


Thanks for participating in the Apple Support Communities.

We’ve removed your post No 5 Star Song Rating in iOS 10 because it contained either product feedback or feature requests that was not constructive.

To read our terms and conditions for using the Communities site, see this page:  Apple Support Communities  – Terms of Use

We hope you’ll keep using our Support Communities. You can find more information about participating here:  Apple Support Communities  – Tutorials

If you have comments about any of our products, we welcome your feedback:  Apple – Feedback

This is bullshit! Apple is not ony ignoring the posts, but erasing them from existance! WTF! Obviously they have no plans to put this feature back! This could not be more B******t! Nice wat to treat your customers Appke!

Simple Background Music Player App for the Xbox One

Well a company called TroubleAcres has an app that can play music off a USB stick on your XBOX one. It is free and it works, but it is very simple. It only plays MP3, WMA and FLAC files on a FAT32 or NTFS USb drive within a folder called “Xbox Music Library” and it has a limitation of only 200 files and plays them in alphabetical order. It does read files in folders, but only to add to the alphabetical list.

It works and I can finally play my own music. Just have to keep it to 200, and put music on I want at the time.

I am on a Mac and use ALAC files, which are not supported, but luckily the $5 M3Unify app from the awesome Doug’s Scripts will convert to MP3 and put files in folders by artist and album. Of course for now those folders are useless, but hopefully it will work at some point. And ALAC support would be great too, since the One does support AAC in it’s Media Player app (which also supports a DLNA, and folders, but for some inexplicable reason doesn’t support Background Music making it next to useless).

Still fixing my iTunes Library after disasterous update to El Capitan

After my disasterous update to El Capitan which tanked my iTunes Library, I am still working on cleaning it up!

I have fixed the music, and re-rated all my tracks, and only lost about 20 tracks out of my 40,000 plus itunes library, but now I am working on video and that is such a mess. So many tracks have been randomly renamed! I have to go through and watch some of them and figure out what they are and rename them!

All I can say is never move your iTunes library to an external Synology as it just ruined my iTunes library completely!

Apple has released iTunes 12.4 and made it even more of a pain to use!

And yet another update to iTunes, with version 12.4, and once again Apple has made things harder to do.

Yes the sidebar is back permanently, instead of having to turn it on, but they have made it harder to use. Instead of tabs that were always up, now you pick, music and videos from a drop down menu. which is much slower than individual buttons. And now if you want to listen to your music list by songs, you have to scroll to the top of the playlists, which is obviously much slower than having a dedicated menu to do it (I think the menu was slow, but having to scroll to the top of the playlists to do is just dumb).

And then Playlists. When you create a playlist it puts it in a playlist format, where you can’t change order or see different ways to sort it at all, and there used to be a dedicated drop down to change it to Songs, so you can edit the order, or see if the order is by track or whatever. I hated having to do that, but now you have to go to the view menu, and go to the sort as Drop Down menu! Much harder and slower! And come on apple, lets us pick our default setting for Playlists! The default Playlist setting is useless! You can’t change anything, which is the whole point of playlists! Let us chose our own default choice, especially if you are going to make it even harder to use!

And now to create a new playlist from a selection of your music you used to right click, and select create new playlists, now you have to go to the add to playlist drop down and go to the top and select New Playlist. Additional drop down menus DON’T MAKE THINGS EASIER, THEY MAKE THEM HARDER APPLE!

And the back button. I don’t understand how it works. If I go to a playlist then to teh Songs in the Library and a new Playlist, and hit back, it goes back to the first Playlist, not the Songs that I was just at that I have to scroll all the way to the top of the list to get to. These items should stick to the top!

I do like that when you make a new playlist it is selected and shown on the left (which was gone as of recent versions), but it makes it hard to get back to sorting music by songs, since that is at the top of the sidebar!

I don’t know why Apple who is supposed to be all about making things easier thinks they have to change things and make them harder or even remove features with an update! First they took away the ability to open multiple playlists, then they made playlists default to an unchangeable playlist view. And now they have just make everything take more steps and be harder (and there aren’t even keyboard shortcuts to make it easier). What is next?

I really wish someone could come up with an interface to replace iTunes that works with the iTunes back end, and lets you customize it and use it like you want to, instead of being forced to do it how Apple wants, which seems to constantly be a harder and harder method! WTF APPLE!