Did they give up on the Music app?

[Eric5h5]

This morning I installed iTunes 10.7 and was blown away at how much I loved it.

I wish I could sync my iPhone 13 Mini with it -- if so I'd be using it as my primary.

I've been running iTunes 12.9 for about a year (via Retroactive), it's far superior to Music and it syncs with my iPhone SE.

 

[Macs Pain]

It also puts a huge horizontal scrollbar when in "as Songs" view, even if you sort the headers/columns such that there's nothing to scroll.

Sure, I could turn off the option (in System Settings) to have the scrollbars hidden until use, but every other app manages it, and I like to see the vertical scrollbar as it gives me a rough idea how much more of whatever isn't being shown.


View attachment 2577474

This appeared with the 26.1 update… every update brings a new bug. 🤣

 

[T'hain Esh Kelch]

We underestimated what we had with iTunes I think.

I’m not speaking out of nostalgia, but the fact that I was literally still using iTunes up until last year and it’s just a better app than the Apple Music app.

Well, to be frank, in its peak years, iTunes was one of Apples most used apps, and thus got the developer and Keynote attention it deserved. Now everyone just streams, so it is of course not a focus for Apple anymore. And I am not surprised by how they treat it, they seem to have decided to cluster**** the majority of their apps in recent years, by changing things just for the sake of change. UX be damned.

At least it opens up for indie programmers, and I am surprised we haven't seen a fully fledged iTunes clone that can rival it, on the market yet.

 

[turbineseaplane]

At least it opens up for indie programmers, and I am surprised we haven't seen a fully fledged iTunes clone that can rival it, on the market yet.

I think the issue for uptake tends to be syncing to devices.

 

[firevsh2o]

I think the issue for uptake tends to be syncing to devices.

I could imagine that something like "Albums" could be the solution. This app is a frontend for the Apple Music library.

The Mac version has only been available for a few weeks, so there are still a few bugs, but it's a good start.

Albums - Apple Music Player for iOS

Albums is the Apple Music player and library management tool that puts you in control of your music. Enjoy robust stats, built-in Insight Collections, last.fm scrobbling, a Release Feed to keep up with new music, and more. Albums cares about your music library as much as you do.

www.albumstheapp.com

However, it's still missing some features that are important to me (Remote app, AirPlay with multiple speakers, control via media keys, to name the most important ones).

In the car with CarPlay, this app has already replaced Apple Music for me. For about a year now, I've been using Albums almost exclusively because Music was very buggy, and Albums also has some nice features. Especially the ability to easily access all albums by the same artist from a single album is great.

 

[T'hain Esh Kelch]

I think the issue for uptake tends to be syncing to devices.

Yeah, that's a big issue. Maybe if we get something with built in easy to use WAN streaming, and an app to go, then things may change. But then we are likely way out of indie territory.

Sad really. iTunes 10-11 was amazing, Music is fighting you more often then it should have. Which is also what I experience when using Reminders, Calendar, and System Preferences.

And don't even get me started on Books. Holy moly did Apple wreck this one.

 

[!!!]

IIRC there were a nice animation that expanded down as well. It was an experience, unlike nowadays...

The Music app is such a worse experience compared to iTunes. I open an album, and the entire screen just changes, no animation, not even a slide animation. I do notice the back button, so I figure I can swipe back to go back to the album list? No. Need to hit the tiny back button to go back. As opposed to iTunes where you can click on any of the whitespace or any of the other albums or IIRC the esc key to exit the album view.

Music is a second-rate afterthought on the Mac, which itself is an afterthought to Apple's cash cow, the iPhone.

I would say the Music on iOS seems curiously neglected whilst the Music app on macOS is woefully neglected.

My only explanation is that 5-6 years ago, Apple had a strategy to start merging their app code base to be a 'universal' apps that worked on Mac, iOS and iPadOS, starting with content apps like Music.

If so, I suspect that this was harder than they thought and they've never launched their efforts, leaving the weird half iPadOS half macOS UI of Music to wither on the vine, in the mean time.

That is the point of SwiftUI, and Catalyst. Obviously it doesn't really work well because even for instance the Mac app has a sidebar, while the iOS app has a bottom tab bar. They don't even contain the same thing. So you end up having this common base code but then you keep needing to make special paths for each platform and it just becomes an unmaintainable mess. The cherry on top is the fact that SwiftUI throws away many Mac niceties.

We underestimated what we had with iTunes I think.

I’m not speaking out of nostalgia, but the fact that I was literally still using iTunes up until last year and it’s just a better app than the Apple Music app.

I am still using iTunes on an older Mac. It's not nostalgia, it really is just plain better. So many weird design choices, like why are the shuffle and repeat buttons crowded together with play/next/previous? It just makes that area so busy. And why doesn't it show me the time played/remaining unless I hover over it? Why does it not ignore the first click to activate the app? I'm constantly switching to some other tab. Why does pressing Enter while editing the song's info in the Get Info panel cause the song to play AND the song to be favorited? Why does favoriting even exist, why are they trying to hide the stars?

 

[TumbleDryer]

The music App for me is genuinely the worst Apple app they ever made. They got it right with iTunes 1 and iPhoto 1 and things just went backwards. Photos app too is a terrible experience.

 

[Apple Knowledge Navigator]

Is the iTunes Store broken for anyone else? I don't have any forwards/backwards buttons, and the navigation is a nightmare.