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?

Technology Would Work Perfectly If It Wasn't For End-Users!

As we start another new year, I’ve been intrigued by a few discussions I’ve been party to during recent days. One was about upgrading to Mojave (macOS 10.14) and the other was about a smart home system that is very popular in the UK called Hive. The conversations were quite different yet they shared some key similitudes. Both indicated that there are large numbers of people who make key decisions about technical matters by casually surfing the internet and reading negative comments, primarily on social media.

In the two specific discussions I’m referring to, both on Facebook, the original posters were inclined to ignore the good advice and being swayed by both ill-informed suggestions or by completely misinformed statements.

By the end of 2019, it will have been thirty years since I first touched a computer. Strictly speaking, it wasn’t even a computer; it was a dumb terminal attached to a mainframe system in a different part of the city. Since that October day, I’ve witnessed staggering changes in the IT industry which I have ended up spending my life in.

The biggest difference, of course, is that back then, computers were anything but the consumer units that they have become today. The MBP that I’m writing this on is many orders of magnitude more powerful than the old ICL1900 I first used. In those days, before the infinite wisdom of the public was harnessed into the ultimate truth of today’s internet, if you had a problem you had to figure out a solution yourself. And so it has been for most of my working life. In general, you had to programme your way out of problems. Even today, many teething computer problems can be overcome with a bit of imagination and a couple of useful tools. Luckily, some of the smart people who write some of these tools are also generous enough to hang out on the internet and provide amazing advice to those of us who are prepared to do a bit of work and actually think about a problem rather than just expecting someone else to fix it for us.

Whenever you get a new Mac (or upgrade to a new OS) there are often a few things that don’t work quite the way they did. In an ideal world, you’d have the wherewithal to dig down and find out the root cause of the problem and fix it. Sadly, most of us don’t have that luxury these days. I recently found that my new MBP had a minor problem when it auto-switches from  Light to Dark modes (using NightOwl). For some reason, this switch forces a Finder restart and this, in turn, means that TotalFinder terminates. My solution was to use Keyboard Maestro to build a macro so that whenever Finder restarts, TotalFinder will automatically restart as well. It’s a seamless action and I don’t have to do anything.

My point is, that with a bit of imagination and a few readily available tools we can get over niggling problems with fairly simple workarounds. Sure, it took me a couple of hours to isolate the problem, research potential fixes and eventually create my own but was that a good enough reason not to upgrade to Mojave and solve a whole bunch of other problems. Clearly not. But many people out there seem to be looking for excuses not to do things which are pretty much common sense. And they are aided and abetted by others who are determined to make things worse - like the guy who stated that Mojave will not run 32-bit apps. Funny, that, because my version does!

After reading about the person who decided that they had read so much bad press about Hive in a Facebook Hive and Nest forum that they were going to go with a completely different system, I was reminded about the recent reviews I read on Amazon about products I have purchased and found worked perfectly. Although technology has become more prevalent in our homes and daily lives, the majority of people still don’t have any idea about how it works, how to install it correctly, or how to use it correctly. In many cases, they don’t even know why they’ve bought it. “I’ve just bought an Apple Watch - what does it do?”….

So it’s easy for people to buy something, plug it in and then sit back and complain that it doesn’t work rather than actually take the trouble to do it properly. Much of our technology is still emergent - it doesn’t always work exactly as it should, but for many people, it does for most of the time. They just don’t tell the rest of us, because they are quite happy getting on and using the time they’ve saved to do something interesting rather than whine and criticise things they simply don’t understand!

Are problems with Apple kit on the increase? Probably not. But there are now 100,000,000 Mac users all of whom have access to the internet and many of whom are all too ready to bad mouth the technology when it doesn’t work the way they expect. So problems become exaggerated and other people believe the negative hype.

For the record, I have Hive installed in my house and recently we installed it in my fiancee's house. 99% of the time it works perfectly, and I’d be happy to recommend it to a prospective buyer.

For many years I’ve held the belief that if end-users didn’t exist there wouldn’t be any issues with technology. That’s never truer than now!

Happy New Year!

Oops - I(Tunes) Did It Again...

Another new operating system for the Mac and another half baked version of iTunes...

The Apple Harvest has never shied away from commenting on the mess that iTunes has become. It's hardly a lone voice either. But it would appear that none of the professional or personal voices are being heard by Apple. Or if they are, they are not being listened to.

In my day job I'm a business improvement consultant. I help companies understand their problems and give them ideas on how to solve them. I help them look for opportunities where they may be blinkered. I also help them manage change, and one of my golden rules is "Continuous Tinkering is not Continuous Improvement". I even wrote a post about it on one of my other blogs.

Apple have well and truly got into the rut of continuous tinkering when it comes to iTunes. Each step forward (and I genuinely do like some of the things they do each time a new release comes out) results in a number of steps backwards.

It really is time for one giant step change for the product team who need to throw away the legacy  and start again from scratch.

So what exactly has upset me with this latest version of iTunes?

• Technology now allows us to see over a billion colours on a screen but Apple insist on using white backgrounds for everything. Now I know that not everyone liked the colour option of iTunes 11, but it was a preference and they could turn it off. Now we have no choice - we have to have our eyes blown out by blindingly white backgrounds (same goes for the Notification Centre - brilliant white only)
• For You used to be really quite an attractive option - the only thing I like about this new incarnation is the inclusion of new music
• It used to be really easy to flick between an artist's music in your library and that on Apple Music that isn't in your library - now it's virtually impossible without having to make notes. OK, not a problem with a small library, but I have over 4000 albums, and I don't have an eidetic knowledge of which albums by which artists I have in my library
• When I click on the first track of an album I expect to be able to play the album and then finish. I don't want the next 'n' tracks in my library to appear in the current play list
• It would be quite useful to have better visibility of the current playlist in general - for example I would love to be able to delete a selection of songs without having to delete each one individually (and have it replaced by the next song in the library)
• Play Later seems to only be available under certain conditions - I'm not yet entirely sure what they are
• Who on earth decided that the Shuffle option should be turned on by default? 
• Pre-ordered albums with a few songs available seem to exist in an alternative universe to all other albums - pulling in tracks from other albums/singles and EPs 
• The Recently Added library list shares none of the characteristics of other items like Albums or Artists

Then, of  course, there are the bugs that still cause problems especially the iCloud Music Library option unchecking itself at random.

I could probably, just about, live with any one of these, and try and establish workarounds for them, but as a whole, they make using iTunes a proverbial pain in the butt! The Music app in iOS 10 has another set of quirks, but at least the overall experience is more consistent than iTunes.

Apple seems to have forgotten that not all users listen to music the same way - those of us with large downloaded libraries, particularly those of us who are album oriented, listen to our music in a different way to those who stream singles and odd songs. In different circumstances, our listening methods change, but Apple is seemingly forcing us into a specific way of listening to our music and is removing the flexibility for us to take back any control. 

But above all - it would be great not to have to constantly have to relearn how to use an application that is so fundamental to so many users every time a new release comes out. We actually want consistency and continuity - we don't want constantly changing ways of doing the basic things we've been doing for years. Some things don't need innovation - they just need to do what they're supposed to do. And with a minimum of fuss and effort on our part!

So, please Apple, either redesign iTunes from scratch, or give us the flexibility to tweak it to suit ourselves. But please, above all....stop tinkering and pretending that its an improvement!