I have previously posted about how Apple removed Album Artwork from it’s playlist creation (it used to add 4 album covers) and you have to manually add it, but this post from MUD or Make Use Of has a solution that is an improvement on the album artwork.
This is the shortcut the Playlist Cover Art Generator, which you can customize to show 4 to 47 covers and have text as well. You have to allow private scripts and large datasets, but it works fast and well.
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.
OK, WTF APPLE! Now I have hated Apple’s sync to iPhone since Apple Music came around and music sync was moved to the finder. Not only is it super clunky and slow as all hell, you can’t force quit the process like you could by quiting iTunes, so I had to turn off automatic wifi sync when device plugged into power because it literally meant I could not restart my computer if something went wrong until sync was done.
And it was just weird to have sync in the finder, since you deal with your music and playlists in Music, why not have sync there? It just seems arbitrary, but it also never worked well.
I could not just sync music to my iPhone or iPad, I have to let the iPhone backup first, because any changes I make in the sync before a first sync finishes, just get completely ignored. And if this is the case, it shouldn’t let you make changes until the sync was completed! WTF!
And now with Mac OS Ventura’s 13.3 Update, things have gotten much weirder. iPad sync remains the same, where if I plug in my iPad, it shows up in the finder (and I have to go through trust issues with my phone and mac which I can’t seem to ever remedy no matter how many times I reset network settings). and it syncs, and there is at least something in the side of the finder showing something is going on.
Unfortunately the same cannot be said for the iPhone. I thought something was wrong with my iPhone when I tried to sync it after the update as it would not show up in the finder. Eventually I looked in Music and it does show up there.
So I said what the heck and clicked on the phone there and it gave a new window with a new button.
So it looks to be listing all music on my iPhone (quite a bit), but there is a button on the right hand side that says Sync Settings. And when I hit it, a finder window opens up with the previous iPhone Finder window allowing sync, the problem is that it doesn’t show up at all in the sidebar. So who knows where this window is supposed to be.
As you can see it doesn’t show up on the left hand side at all, so it’s initial sync, which takes a while, has absolutely nothing showing progress in the finder, which sync with the iPad shows. To see where it is, you have to go back to Music.
And once that finished you can then watch progress in the finder window on the initial sync it must do before you can sync any music to your iPhone.
So once this initial backup finishes I can make changes to the music on my iPhone, but only in this window, and as you can see my iPad shows up in the Sidebar, but not my iPhone.
I can only think that is this is a mistake. You want Sync to be in one place, not having to go back and forth between Music and the Finder to get a sync going.
And all I can think is that most people are using streaming music and not their own music (they must not have a huge library of Grateful Dead Live music), so they haven’t noticed this abomination that has happened for just the iPhone in Ventura 13.3.
I also posted at Apple’s support community, but I am pretty sure they don’t read their support community, so problematically they might not realize it is a problem. And I have reported it as a bug in Apple Feedback.
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 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.
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.
So I run an iMac Pro and have JBOD drives in an external OWC USB 3 housing. It is an older model as I have a newer one for a Raid, but it doesn’t always show up when I restart. It does sometimes, but often I have to power it down and then back on to get it to connect.
The problem is that I keep my iTunes Library on it, and if I accidentally try to play a song in iTunes instead of just saying it can’t find the library, Music instead resets the location of the library to my main drive, where none of my music is and when I reconnect the external drive and re-asign it it I often have to wait whole it rescans everything, and I keep losing the view options I have set for all my playlists, and that annoys the living shit out of me!
Yes I have done the technical support with OWC and they really tried to help, but nothing seemed to help. Sometimes the drives just don’t show up and I don’t know why. Likely cause it is older hardware. They are fine once connected, but just sometime don’t connect.
I just hate Music’s response, just tell me it can’t find the file, don’t reset the library position every time. Wait until I reconnect or tell you to make a new library file! Fuck!
I have been chronicling all the problems I have had since moving my iMac Pro to Catalina with Music, formerly iTunes. Since Apple broke iTunes into multiple apps I have had nothing but problems with the app.
One of the big ones for me is that in the move to Music, Apple decided to ignore all the years of column organization you did with your playlists. They defaulted every playlist to the Playlist view, which only shows your album artwork, song titles, album title and time of the track.
There is a much superior Songs view, but even it starts with only limited columns, but as with iTunes if you customized the main songs list to have the columns and widths that you want, then they would propagate to all new playlists you create. Now the problem arrises, because all your playlists from iTunes were reset to the default Songs layout, so you either need to change each and every playlist (over 3100 for me) or it is time for a trip to Doug’s Scripts.
Doug’s Scripts has been around for a while now previously having the best applescripts for iTunes, and now slowly updating scripts to work with Music if they work. My only complaint with the site is that you should be able to search for scripts that just work with Music, and maybe it could use a voting system to vote on old scripts and see if they can be made to work on Music, as their are few that I really miss. Still it is just an awesome site.
And Doug has updated an old script to fix this very problem, Assimilate View Options V 5.1. This script brings up a window with all of your playlists and you can select them and hit process and it will go through and duplicate the playlist and add all the tracks in the same order with the current View Options baked in. It’s only issue, is that pesky view being automatically set to the Playlist view instead of the Songs view you want. So you will still need to switch every playlist to Songs, view, but Doug has a tip to set a keyboard shortcut to the Songs view so you can at least speed up the process.
I still can’t fathom why apple doesn’t let you specify a default view in Music. And it is worse that Apple chose to ignore your organization from iTunes when importing into Music, but I am assuming that was easier for them, but hell if they would have just let you update the view options first so that all the playlists imported with your default would have been amazing. That is assuming Apple still cares about people using local music libraries and I am pretty sure they don’t. So for now this is at least a solution.
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!
Holy Shit! They actually fixed it. There was an earlier update that said it was fixing the issue, but it didn’t actually fix it, but the latest Catalina Update 10.15.3 has fixed the issue and I can now see folders from Apple Music in alphabetical order in the finder iOS sync. WOOHOOO!
I had submitted feedback via the new Feedback Assistant app, and hope that helped getting this feature fixed. Lets hope they keep brining feature support back to what it was in iTunes!
