iOS7 Music app is driving me crazy...
From what I can tell, in the update to 7.0.3, this situation only got worse.
Let me back up and say, it seems that what is driving all of this is the desire on Apple's part to force people to use iCloud and to act as if all their music came from the iTunes music store.
For instance, if you try now to add a song to an alarm using the Clock app, you are given a list of ALL your music from iCloud, NOT just the music which is on your phone. Apple doesn't seem to understand that all of us occasionally buy music which we listen to once or twice and decide we don't like, or don't want to hear again for a while. To present this music to me every time I try to create a new alarm, thus slowing me down from getting to the music I DO want to use, is just nuts! And unlike the Music app, there is no toggle to turn off this "feature" and be presented with ONLY the music which you actually have loaded on your phone.
Similarly, if you use Siri to start a song playing, Siri searches not just the music on your phone but also your iCloud music and will start downloading a song from the cloud, even if it misunderstands the name of the song you are asking for. Nuts!
This is even true for me, and I don't use iCloud for music, nor do I use iTunes Match. (However, even if you don't use iTunes Match, Apple still treats your music purchased from the iTunes Music Store as your iCloud/iTunes Match music). I have a zillion CDs, I move music on and off the phone myself, I really don't want to worry about whether I'm on wifi or my data plan when I'm just trying to listen to an album.
On top of that, there is a change in 7.0.3 which continues to make life difficult for those of us who edit the album information to make things easier to find. If you bought music from the iTunes Music Store and then changed the name of the album, the Music app now ignores your changes and lists the name as it appears in the iTunes Music Store. With 7.0.2 I noticed that this "function" was being applied (in my case at least) only to purchases of the last month or two. But with 7.0.3 all of my music bought from iTMS has now been "renamed" thanks to Apple.
If you only listen to Justin Bieber or even the Beatles you might not think this is a big problem. Okay, but there was no need to muck around with those of us who DO need to rearrange things.
To give the most obvious example, if you are a fan of classical music, you know that the original album information from the iTMS is often useless for how you go about choosing and listening to music once you have the music on your iPhone or iPad or iPod.
For instance, I purchased a multi-album set (on CD, it's 6 or 7 CDs) from the iTMS of Martha Argerich, a very famous pianist, playing a variety of piano concertos. On the iTMS this is all one "album", but in fact it contains 16 separate compositions which any music fan thinks of as individual pieces, not as an "album".
iTMS lists the "artist" as Martha Argerich, but that doesn't help me find music at all (in my iTunes library on my computer) because my way of listening to music is usually to think, "I'd like to listen to some Mozart, or some Chopin". So I change the "artist" to Mozart, and the album name to "Piano Concerto 1 - Argerich" or something like that. That makes it very easy to find the music I want to hear.
But with iOS7, the Music app ignores my changes and goes back to showing the original iTMS listing!!! This is incredibly inconvenient because you wind up with a display that looks like the attached pic...
So how the heck am I supposed to find the album I want to hear???
Well, I can say that the most depressing aspect of this to me arises from my realization that what is behind this is the desire to drive more business to iCloud, iTunes Match, and the iTunes Music Store. And I think because it's obvious that the business people are driving the design and UI decisions, the usability and "user friendliness" people at Apple are going to be losing this battle for a long time.
The irony of this is that one answer to this problem is to NOT buy music from the iTMS but instead buy from Amazon downloads or buy on CD. Because THEN the Music app WILL respect my changes to the original album names, etc.
The other answer, I suppose, is to make a playlist for EVERY album on your iPhone, so at least things are easier to find, and can be arranged in the order you want. But what a waste of time.
For those who care, I have explored a bunch of apps to try to get around this problem. None of them are ideal because they all draw on the Music App database and thus have the same problem with displaying album names as they are in the iTMS originals. But some of them are simpler, cleaner, and make it far easier to listen to a single album alone. Ones I have checked out are Audacity (which fails for me because you cannot turn off your iCloud music in the music list -- at least as of a couple of weeks ago when I tried it), Ecoute (which is okay but is mostly intended for people who care about cover art), and Picky (which is my choice because it is the simplest and cleanest; it allows you to choose music by Artist>Album pretty much as the iOS6 Music App did, though it still uses the iTMS album names.).
If someone knows of an app that gives me back my control over the album names, I would love to hear about it.
And by the way, a note to developers: there is a huge market opportunity here to make an app which is aimed at listeners of classical music, jazz music, world music, as well as some rock and pop fans, who listen to music differently than those who only keep the latest pop hits on their phone.
So disappointing from the company that made music listening SO easy and enjoyable with the original iPod!
(FYI, I posted this in Apple discussion forums as well... just posting here because the discussion had a link to this thread. We need to keep the heat on Apple to fix this. Hope that is ok here... thanks, PD)
