Apple Music for macOS Still Sucks and it’s getting worse

It has been a little over two years since my last major rant about Apple Music. I occasionally whinge on Twitter or FaceBook, but no one really pays any attention — mainly because they are currently busily techsplaining why the latest Apple Hardware sucks. I currently have three issues, and they are all show-stoppers!

Photo by Mick Haupt on Unsplash

1. I usually can’t quit Apple Music without having to resort to a piece of third-party software
2. Search regularly crashes the Music app
3. I sometimes can’t add any more music to my library (sometimes I can!)
4. Downloaded albums and playlists randomly get stuck during playback at the end of a song

Apple Music ignores the request to Quit

When I have to use a third-party piece of software to close the Apple Music application, I’m pretty sure that the end is nigh. 99 times out of 100, Apple Music won’t Quit, won’t Force Quit, won’t quit via Activity Monitor — occasionally it pretends to, but then it reopens immediately. The only way I can get it to quit is to use NoTunes. This is insane. Nobody should have to write a utility to close a standard commonly used application on a modern operating system!

Search crashes the Music App

Another regular glitch is attempting any search crashes the Music app completely. It doesn’t matter if I’m looking in my library or Apple Music (iTunes Store seems to be exempt, though!), the app will panic and die. Of course, that then requires the automatic library check to kick in, during which time I can do nothing except wait. Why can’t this be a partially modeless activity? At least let me look at Listen Now, Browse Apple Music or reset my sound levels.

What’s with the 100,000 iCloud Library limit?

I’m old school. It comes from having lived abroad with crappy, expensive and low data allowances, which means I store all my music on external drives rather than streaming. My music library (my own music (ripped or purchased) and Apple Music tracks — I split out TV and Movies years ago) is now just under 1Tb in size with over 100,000 songs, split across 9000 albums by 2000 artists. So, it’s big, and it’s now subject to the ridiculous Apple restriction that an iCloud music library cannot contain more than 100,000 songs.

Let’s just quickly look at that restriction. Officially, that 100,000, apparently arbitrary limit, doesn’t include purchases from the iTunes Store. It says so in Apple’s documentation, although by all accounts, this is acknowledged by Apple support to be incorrect, and they keep saying that the documentation needs to be updated. If this were true, I wouldn’t have any problems because three-quarters of my music was purchased from iTunes! Even a 100,000-song library takes up less than 2Gb of space. As an Apple+ subscriber, I have access to 2Tb of storage, so that sounds like nonsense unless Apple Music developers simply cannot understand how to work with large libraries — which, in this day and age, also sounds like nonsense. It gets a little more bizarre, though. Under certain (random) circumstances, I can add music to the library. Sometimes just a song, sometimes a couple of albums, but mostly, I get an error message saying this addition would take me over the 100,000 song limit. Even more bizarrely, I can continue adding albums to my iOS devices, although they won’t appear in the macOS library. It’s the inconsistency that I hate.

Music randomly stops playing after a downloaded song ends

Now I’ve got that particular rant off my chest; here’s the real problem. When I play downloaded music, regardless of whether it was purchased or part of the Apple Music collection, I rarely get to listen to more than a couple of tracks before it stops playing. Usually, a track will finish, and another one or maybe two tracks will play before it all goes quiet. The progress bar will show the first track that failed and indicates that the song never started playing. At some stage in the process, Apple Music hangs briefly and then recovers but has lost its memory and can’t figure out what it’s doing. The only way to recover is to open Apple Music and physically stop the ‘current’ track, and either start playing it again or skip to another track. If like me, you are listening to music in the shower and this happens, there is nothing you can do. Even Siri can’t help because the system status has got so confused that it can’t work out what’s happening.

I have tried everything ever mentioned in the history of Apple Music and iTunes, but I cannot get over this. It happens on multiple M1 and Intel Macs. It happens with different drives and even the internal drive — I’m lucky enough to have a 2Tb SSD on my M1 13” MBP, which happened on that when I tested it. I have rebuilt the library from scratch. I downloaded every single track again. I’ve deleted caches. I reinstalled macOS time and time again, including a clean install.

The case for splitting Apple consumer apps out of macOS gets better by the day

And this last idea of having to download and reinstall the entire OS to fix a problem with one app is out of the dark ages of bad software design and delivery. It’s long gone time that Music, Mail, TV, Maps, Home, Photos and maybe even Messages, Safari, FaceTime, Calendar and Contacts were all built and delivered as stand-alone apps, just like Pages, Numbers and Keynote. As a developer back in the day, the mantra was always to decouple code and subsystems as much as possible so that a problem with one part had as little effect as possible on the system as a whole. Why do the developers of the consumer apps need to work to the same delivery cadence as the macOS team? That’s simply bad management. iOS allows you (these days) to install just about any Apple app independently of the OS. It’s high time the mothership caught up! Even if they are unwilling to change the cycle of releases, at least let us delete and reinstall consumer apps via the Mac App Store!

With the Far Out event due to take place next week (September 7th) and the imminent release of Ventura, I’m hoping that some of these problems may magically disappear. But I’m not going to hold my breath! Failing that, it may be the next best thing will be a clean install of Ventura rather than an update — and then see what new problems I’ll encounter! Better the devil you know?

Apple Studio Display — I’m loving it!

I hit my 60th birthday earlier this year, and after over 45 years of staring at screens both at work and ‘play’, my already dodgy eyesight is not getting any better. When I returned to Prague in 2019, I bought a cheap Dell 24” monitor to sit alongside my work and personal laptops and used a hardware switch to flip between them. Back in the UK, I have been using a Dell P2719H 27” monitor which is a bit easier on my eyes, but still not ideal.

New Studio Display in my UK office set-up (photo from author)

                   

So, I’ve been looking at buying a new monitor for a while, and it has proved to be a really difficult decision. My needs appeared to be fairly simple, or so I thought:

• It needed to work in an exclusively Apple environment (no more Windows for me now I’ve retired!) with M1 Silicon
• I wanted a minimum of a 27” display with 4K resolution
• From a design perspective, it needed to look the part
• A few additional ports would be useful
• Good all-round display quality for photo-editing, writing and website design
• It needed to be delivered on my next trip to the UK — between June 26th and July 13th
• 
  

There were a few unknowns — did I like the idea of a curved monitor? Was a 34” screen overkill (and would it even fit on my desk?)? Would I keep the existing 27” Dell (which does have a portrait mode which I like for documents)?

I had a short list with 27–34” monitors from the usual suspects — Dell, Ben-Q, Samsung, LG and even Huawei. And the Studio Display from Apple. I watched dozens of YouTube videos and eventually ruled out the Huawei because even though I loved the design, I’d prefer to err on the safe side of data privacy. I also liked the Samsung M8 but decided I wanted a monitor, not an all singing, all dancing video box. My desk is quite constrained regarding worktop space, so I stopped looking beyond 27” and curved monitors. After watching more videos about the scaling issues with 4K and Apple, I was becoming more inclined to stay in the Dell stable and choose a U2719D UltraSharp 27 with 2560 x 1440 resolution. But there was a nagging doubt in my mind about whether I would regret not going for the outrageously expensive Studio Display and end up buying one in a year anyhow…

My trip to the UK was only going to last three weeks. Our local Apple store is in Leicester, and it looked like they had some base Studio Displays available for in-store collection, but by the time I got back to the UK, the cupboard was bare and would stay that way until August/September. A quick search indicated AO.com had the base model in stock for next-day delivery, so I bit the bullet and placed an order. AO.com came to my rescue when I wanted the 13” M1 MBP in a hurry last time I was. I knew they’d come up with the goods in the UK, and it was no more expensive than buying from Apple.

I was confident that the base model would be right for my needs. I use a Twelve South Curve Riser on my desk, so I figured I wouldn’t need the height adjustable stand; I’ve always been comfortable with the glossy screens on iMacs I’ve owned in the past, and I don’t have a monitor arm (or enough space on my current desk).

Despite watching various unboxing videos for the Studio Display, when it turned up on the doorstep the next day, I was taken aback at how big, and heavy the box was and was grateful I hadn’t decided to try and bring one home on the bus from Leicester! If you’ve watched any of the unboxing videos, you’ll know that this is an experience in its own right. A few minutes later, the display was on the stand and plugged directly into the 13” M1 MPB via the Thunderbolt port. I plugged my 2 SanDisk Extremes into the USB ports and my Quntis light bar into the third slot. Finally, I sorted out the power cable, booted up the laptop, and installed the Studio Display software update.

Quite simply, this is the best display I have ever used by a long way. Text is crystal clear even for my dodgy eyes. The speakers are so good that I’ve unplugged my old faithful Harmon Kardon Soundsticks II and now use the Studio Display speakers in conjunction with an original HomePod sat on the bookshelf behind me.

I’m not going to get involved in the discussion about the webcam. I like that there is one built in; quite frankly, it’s plenty good enough for my purposes. The first time I used it in anger was during a call with my financial advisor, where both myself and my fiancée could fit in the viewfinder without having to be sat on top of each other. Quite frankly, in these days of WFH, where many of my former colleagues had such poor internet connections that they turned their cameras off and often asked other participants to do the same thing, webcam quality is the least of my problems! It works, and it’s good enough.

I’ve been using a Twelve South Curve Riser as a monitor stand. It also serves to hide the Thunderbolt Hub and keep it cool. This proved a little too uncomfortable with the combined height of the Studio Display and the riser, but setting the monitor on the middle shelf fixed this problem perfectly. The hub now sits atop the monitor's base in the shelf space.

My big challenge is to figure out how to set up a dual display with the M1 13” MBP using both the Studio Display and the 27” Dell. I purchased the Hyper Dual 4K HDMI 10-in-1 USB-C Hub, but it arrived after I returned to Prague, so haven’t had a chance to set it up yet. The workaround has been to use the 27” Dell monitor on the M1 MacMini, and use universal control to make it look seamless, which works about 90% of the time, but needs a nudge from time to time. I suspect that the sleep settings were perhaps out of sync.

I also really, really need a bigger desk…and another Studio Display in my Prague office...