Another huge annoyance with Apple’s Music that replaced iTunes, the Playlists have all reverted back to Playlist view!

OK, so I have another complaint with Apple Music, it’s music portion of the previous iTunes app for Catalina 10.15.

I have spent many years getting my iTunes Library just how I like it, including rating everything with Stars, and setting up my playlists just how I like them. And that has always meant View as Song vs View as Playlist which has been the default for way too long.

In iTunes you set up your default view with all the categories that I wanted, something like this:

And your new playlists show up with that organization once you switch to Songs instead of the damn Playlist view that doesn’t give enough information including track order. And it still does that.

The problem is that for all my existing playlists, and we are talking a FUCKING SHITLOAD OF PLAYLISTS they have reverted to the initial setup of these categories.

This is seriously fucked up! I have literally thousands of Playlists, and to have to change the settings individually for each playlist would literally take forever! WTF Apple! And I have always organized my music into playlists so I have a playlist for every album, but I put the year into the title so I can easily sync and know which year the album was! So I have literally a FUCK-TON OF PLAYLISTS!

I need a way to set the default setting and propagate it to all the existing playlists! FUCK ME!

I posted about this on Apple’s Ccommunities, not that I think there is a solution that doesn’t require me fixing every playlist individually.

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.

•••

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.

A Huge Problem with Mac OS 10.15 Catalina Finder iOS Sync!

OK so I was always worried about them getting rid of iTunes. I have been using it for too many years. Making it 3 apps does not make it any more efficient than one app, in fact I would say it makes it less efficient.

And they have already been changing features, trying to replace Star ratings with heart or no heart after I have been rating songs for years with stars does not work for me.

Catalina though broke up iTunes and moved iOS sync to the finder. Now it still has the same features as the old iTunes sync everyone said, but there is one big one that no one has mentioned that is really messed up!

Now first off I have already said that the new Sync does not give a text description of what is syncing, and while it does eventually show you a progress wheel, it does not show one at first (I can only assume this is the backup stage which always took forever with no indication of how long it takes).

Here my iPad and iPhone are both in that nefarious stage when you have no idea how long the sync will take.

Here you can see my iphone is at least int he progress bar stage, though still less info than old iTunes which told you what it was doing.

Anyway now here is the major problem with having the finder do the sync. If you are syncing an iOS device you cannot restart the computer because it will tell you that that the finder is not done completing the sync! Now with previous versions of Mac OS this still occurred, but you could just force quit iTunes and your computer would restart. You can’t do this with the finder! You can relaunch the finder with a right click in the dock, but the sync continues through this, and I even tried with Activity Monitor and the sync just continues not allowing you to restart. Now maybe there is a process that I don’t know what it is called that I could quit to allow this. Or if I turn off WIFI sync and disconnect the device, maybe it will stop and I can restart, but this is a problem! I am a video editor and there are just times I need to restart, so at the very least their should be a cancel button on iOS sync in the FINDER!!!

I have posted about this at Apple’s Discussions and MacRumors.

A Better Finder Rename 11 for Mac is an awesome upgrade

A Better Finder Rename is a must have app for me. It lets you rename files using various sets of rules, and the latest version 11 is an even bigger upgrade.

You can now add multiple file filterings to a single change making it so different file types have different renaming on a single rename! Wow! And you can save Actions and Presets! And their is now Preview filtering.

This is a must have upgrade for a must have program. I always find it hard to work on a machine that does not have this program installed!

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?

64 Bit Mac OS Catalina will disable a lot of apps, the steps I am taking, but still can’t upgrade right now: UPDATE

Apple has released Mac Os 10.15 Catalina, and it is the first to make the jump completely to 64 bit, abandoning the ability to run any 32 bit code. It is always recommended to wait a while to upgrade you system, or even better wait for 10.15.1 to work out some of the bugs. I am very interested in it though as I want to try out SideCar with my iPad Pro and Pencil.

Since there is no more 32 bit code many programs will not run, and you can tell which ones that will be in Mojave. Just to to your apple menu and About This Mac.

Then Select System Report:

Then go to Applications:

Then check the column that reads 64 bit and the applications that say no will certainly not work.

I have a lot of applications that will not work, but most are from old versions of Adobe that I still have installed.

Now I am certain to need some 32 bit application at some point in the future, and if you make the move to Catalina before taking some steps to ensure you can still run the applications you will never be able to.

My first step was to make a clone of my hard drive at Mojave for that I head over to Bombich and get the latest paid version of Carbon Copy Cloner. This is an amazing program I have used for years that will clone a hard drive and make a bootable copy. Now I have an iMac pro, so there are additional steps to be able to boot from an external drive thanks to the T2 security chip (you need to restart while holding down command and r and then change the startup security utility to allow external boot with at least Medium security instead of Full Security).

And to keep running 32 bit apps, since I own Parallels to be able to run Windows Applications on my Mac. Tidbits actually has a great article on how to do this using your Mojave Recovery Partition to create a clean install. Sure you will have to re-install the 32 bit apps to get them to run, but a nice clean install won’t take up the space that a full backup of my system would.

And finally it turns out I can’t upgrade to Catalina right now, as I run an external RAID using Softraid for my OWC Thunderbay. Now it will mount in Catalina, but will run slower and have no ability to recover hard drive that die or basically do anything with it in version 5.7.5. Now Softraid and OWC are an amazing company so they are working on it, but since Catalina is much more restrictive on running system extensions this one is going to be hard. It will first be available in 5.8, then in the new version 6 they are developing. I do hope it comes out soon.

••••

UPDATE!

Wow, so I got an e-mail from SoftRaid and OWC and they said that they should be releasing 5.8 within 24 hours with Catalina support! AWESOME!!!

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.

AVID bug stopping MacPro’s from rebooting turns out to be Chrome

So news reports have been popping up that 2013 MacPro’s running AVID Media Composer have been not restarting just going black. And the only fix was to re-install the Mac OS to get the system running again. Reports seemed to mostly focus on 2013 MacPro’s but from many rental houses, but also sone other macs were affected. It seemed to be that the user folder was having it’s permissions changed from admin to a normal user.

Well it seems that issue was not caused by Media Composer per se. In fact, according to ProVideoCoalition and Engadget it is a Chrome update that is screwing up the user folder. And it is only on macs that have System Integrity Protection (SIP) disabled. This means that in fact AVID is partially responsible, since AVID requires SIP to be turned off so it can get direct access to a Mac’s Graphic Systems. Of course neither Final Cut or Premiere or DaVinci require this, but AVID does.

AVID needs to fix this or work with Apple, because such an expensive and important software shouldn’t require you to lower your Macs defenses. And of course a Company as big as Google should know better as well, but why would they test with SIP disabled? I mean now they need to, but it is not something you would normally test for.

Problems with iMac Pro and OWC Thunderbolt 3 dock and displayport connector

So when I got my new iMac Pro (as my MacPro 4,1 finally bit the bullet) I decided to get an OWC Thunberbolt 3 Dock with 14 ports and 85 watts of power to connect more peripherals to my Mac.

Overall I love Other World Computings products and their service. They are a great company, but the problem with this device for me is the mini displayport.

I have the iMac Pro and an LG 4k 27 inch monitor. I was trying to hook up the LG via the mini displayport in the dock. First I tried an Amazon basics mini displayport cable to displayport cable and it just didn’t work at all.

Then I tried an Amazon basics mini displayport to HDMI connector. This seemed to work, and both monitors worked, but whenever the computer slept the displays and woke back up the second monitor acted as if it was just found, and all the windows that were on it would be moved to the iMac Monitor. Super frustrating especially when using, Premiere Pro, After Effects or DaVinci Resolve across both monitors. The display also did the same thing when I connected or disconnected anything to the dock, including my iPhone or iPad using the front high powered ports, or the SD cards!

I thought maybe it was the connector, so I spent quite a bit more money and went to apple and got the Belkin mini display port to HDMI that they listed since I didn’t see a direct one from Apple. When I got it, it had the exact same problems.

I contacted support, and they got back to me very quickly, and after some back and forth, basically it came down turning sleep off, but I didn’t want to do that, nor turn off let hard drives sleep, as I don’t want to ruin my RAIDs by having them run all the time.

So after being frustrated for a while I went for a USB 3.1 to HDMI adapter, and this I connected to the back of my awesome OWC ThunderBay 4’s Thunderbolt port, and the monitor works great now! Everything (well almost everything, as Messages seems to jump back to the iMac monitor quite a bit) stays on the second monitor when the computer sleeps and I can leave everything going to sleep!

And I can connected and disconnect things with the dock without any issues. The dock works great when I am not using it for it’s mini displayport connector. I am not sure if my dock has an issue with it’s mini displayport, or if this is just an issue with this dock and an iMac Pro, but it is something to know in advance.

My faith in Apple mostly restored with the new Mac Pro!

So Apple officially showed off the new MacPro at the WWDC, and it is pretty F***ING AWESOME!!!!

First off it looks like a Cheese-grater, which was literally to please the fans of the old Cheese-grater!

And it has handles, and you can even get wheels. And the metal case comes off so you can access it from all sides.

It has 8, 12, 16, 24 or 28 core Xeon processors, getting 300 kw of power so they never get throttled, with a special air cooled system.

It has 12 RAM slots capable of 1.5 Terrabytes of RAM (I can’t wait to laugh at the price of that from Apple).

And it has 8  PCI SLOTS! Well, 7 really, but DAMN! 4 double wide slots for graphics cards (both with an additional new PCI connector for the MPX modules) with 1 x16 and 2 x8 gen 3 for video cards. And the top slot is a half wife slot for Apple’s I/O card (which means it can be upgraded or changed out).

And the MPX Modules are special PCI graphics cards in containers. There is a half heigh one fro the AMD Radeon Pro 580x which comes standard. And then full size modules that fill 2 double wide PCI slots, for either the AMD Radeon Pro Vega II with 32 GB of Memory, or the AMD Radeon Pro Vega II Duo which is 2 cards in one with super fast connection between the cards (and you can install 2 of these! Wow that will cost a ton). And these all have extra thunderbolt ports (as there are 2 on top and 2 on the I/O card). And these can get 300 wats of power

The system has an unbelievable 1.4 kilowatts of power supply!

And my favorite addition, the Afterburner ProRES and ProRES RAW Accelerator PCI Card which can play 3 streams of 8K ProRes RAW or 12 streams of 4K ProRes Raw without touching the CPU or GPU! WOW! They said you can do realitime color correction and effects on DaVinci in 8K in realtime! My question is will it be supported via thunderbolt 3 for the iMacPro maybe along with a video card like the BlackMagic kit they support? And it would be even better if it also supported BlackMagic RAW!

And up to a 4GB SSD.

And there is also a rack mounted version!

WOW! This is a powerhouse, and the 6K monitor would make an amazing, though expensive addition!

My only complaints are AMD only, no NVIDIA. And sure NVIDIA wouldn’t let them do these MPX modules with Thunderbolt, nor support those new fangled PCI slots that allow them, but 4 NVIDIA cards in here would be screaming! And the 4GB SSD. I know people don’t like spinning platters anymore, but man I have so much stuff on drives now, 4GB which will be insanely expensive is just not enough storage! Hell I could only afford 2GB in my iMac Pro! I was hoping for some sort of built in raid when you could put in your own hard drives, but that was alas just a ridiculous dream.