iOS 8 Music Player: even worse than iOS 7

[John6Plus]

So, the main thing I was hoping for in iOS 8 was an improved music player, but things have only gotten worse.

Here's my experience:

The first thing I tried after upgrading - which went smoothly - was check the infamous "artist" category in the music player. Meh, the same as before, utterly useless reverse-chronological list of all the albums with all the songs. No sane artist/album hierarchy like every iPod and previous (to iOS 7) iOS player. Fine.

I added a new album to my phone (via iTunes on my Mac), and promptly lost the artwork to everything except the album I added. I've seen variations of this problem all over the place, so I assume it will happen again.

I fixed it by unchecking the music syncing for the phone, syncing it... oh, it left all the music there. I did a backup/restore. The old music was now just 40GB of yellow "other." Great. Restore to factory. Restore backup, it synced, erased the space on the phone. I re-checked music, sync'd and left the room as it loaded my ~7000 songs onto my 5S.

After it finished, the album artwork was back - yay!...?

Now, since the artist view has been useless for the past year, in order to make the "album" view usable, I changed the "Sort Album" setting on all of my albums to "Artist Year" so they'd be sorted in my album view in the way I wanted. This has worked for a year. So Led Zeppelin is "Led Zeppelin 1969a" and "Led Zeppelin 1969b" and Led Zeppelin III is "Led Zeppelin 1970" and so on and on. 600+ albums. Phew. Otherwise the album view is useless - I can't imagine wanting to sort my albums by the name of the album.

So, after my restore above, all of my Albums were listed in the right order in album view, with one crippling exception - for a few albums (just a few) it changed the "Letter Category" by using the actual album name.

For example, Adele's "19" suddenly had a # above it, even though it was in the A's. For Aerosmith it went back to an "A" - until it hit Draw The Line where suddenly it was "D" - and back to A. This was odd, and completely broke the righthand letter shortcut. So touching "M" would take me to the A's. Touching "S" took me to... A.

I changed the name of the album from "19" to "Adele - 19" and resynced. The new name showed up, but it STILL showed up under a "#" in the list.

On a totally random guess I converted the album to MP3 (it was a 256K iTunes purchased album) - unchecked the AAC's, let the MP3's sync, and it fixed it. I did this for the 4 or 5 other problematic albums, all iTunes bought (but I have many, many more that worked fine) and it fixed the issue.

I want a good music player. Third party players don't work for me because they can't access the hierarchical playlist structure, and I use those a lot. I plan on filing a bug report, and once again complaining about the idiotic lack of artist/album organization.

I've never used the iPad music player, does anyone know if the 6+ uses its style or if it is just a big iPhone version? I have a 6+ on the way.

 

[Richardgm]

While I listen to my similarity sized library every single day, I'm glad I'm not anal retentive about how my music is sorted (I rely on playlists). I use iTunes Match and never had problems with album art (every song has embedded art).

I'm lucky I guess.

The 6+ in landscape has a two pane view.

Ps: I find issues with iTunes Match's sluggish syncing and the horrid way Music displays lyrics, though.

 

[John6Plus]

While I listen to my similarity sized library every single day, I'm glad I'm not anal retentive about how my music is sorted (I rely on playlists). I use iTunes Match and never had problems with album art (every song has embedded art).

I'm lucky I guess.

Ps: I complain about iTunes Match's sluggish syncing and the horrid way Music displays lyrics, though.

I dumped iTunes Match 2 months after it debuted. It was a nightmare back then; I assume its gotten better but haven't missed it.

I wish I could be non anal retentive about my music - it would have saved me a lot of angst. Prior to my first Apple product - the first iPod Nano back in 2006, I think it was. It was the first player that did a good job of organizing my music. This continued through 10 more Apple products (Macs, Apple TVs, iPod touches, iPhones) until iOS 7's player. iTunes, for all its problems, actually does a good job of organizing it the way I want, with plenty of options.

Oh well. The album art thing seems to be hit or miss, and I don't expect that to be a long-lasting bug.

 

[CesiumDev]

Hi John,

Unfortunately the nested playlist hierarchy is not available to 3rd party developers. But beyond that, you may want to check out Cesium. I got so fed up with the iOS7/8 music.app that I decided to create my own alternative.

Cesium has been submitted to the App Store and is pending review. You can follow @CesiumApp on Twitter for updates.

Cheers!
Mike

 

[FatPuppy]

So, the main thing I was hoping for in iOS 8 was an improved music player, but things have only gotten worse.

Here's my experience:

The first thing I tried after upgrading - which went smoothly - was check the infamous "artist" category in the music player. Meh, the same as before, utterly useless reverse-chronological list of all the albums with all the songs. No sane artist/album hierarchy like every iPod and previous (to iOS 7) iOS player. Fine.

I added a new album to my phone (via iTunes on my Mac), and promptly lost the artwork to everything except the album I added. I've seen variations of this problem all over the place, so I assume it will happen again.

I fixed it by unchecking the music syncing for the phone, syncing it... oh, it left all the music there. I did a backup/restore. The old music was now just 40GB of yellow "other." Great. Restore to factory. Restore backup, it synced, erased the space on the phone. I re-checked music, sync'd and left the room as it loaded my ~7000 songs onto my 5S.

After it finished, the album artwork was back - yay!...?

Now, since the artist view has been useless for the past year, in order to make the "album" view usable, I changed the "Sort Album" setting on all of my albums to "Artist Year" so they'd be sorted in my album view in the way I wanted. This has worked for a year. So Led Zeppelin is "Led Zeppelin 1969a" and "Led Zeppelin 1969b" and Led Zeppelin III is "Led Zeppelin 1970" and so on and on. 600+ albums. Phew. Otherwise the album view is useless - I can't imagine wanting to sort my albums by the name of the album.

So, after my restore above, all of my Albums were listed in the right order in album view, with one crippling exception - for a few albums (just a few) it changed the "Letter Category" by using the actual album name.

For example, Adele's "19" suddenly had a # above it, even though it was in the A's. For Aerosmith it went back to an "A" - until it hit Draw The Line where suddenly it was "D" - and back to A. This was odd, and completely broke the righthand letter shortcut. So touching "M" would take me to the A's. Touching "S" took me to... A.

I changed the name of the album from "19" to "Adele - 19" and resynced. The new name showed up, but it STILL showed up under a "#" in the list.

On a totally random guess I converted the album to MP3 (it was a 256K iTunes purchased album) - unchecked the AAC's, let the MP3's sync, and it fixed it. I did this for the 4 or 5 other problematic albums, all iTunes bought (but I have many, many more that worked fine) and it fixed the issue.

I want a good music player. Third party players don't work for me because they can't access the hierarchical playlist structure, and I use those a lot. I plan on filing a bug report, and once again complaining about the idiotic lack of artist/album organization.

I've never used the iPad music player, does anyone know if the 6+ uses its style or if it is just a big iPhone version? I have a 6+ on the way.

Do you buy your songs from itunes or other legit stores or do you just pirate the songs? Cause pirated music has some bugs: you may find in the same album a 320kbps song and 256kbps song, also, some songs might miss some info or there are strange characters and itunes can't read them. I can continue with a few more paragraphs... Anyway, I pirate music and I find myself modifying the info of a song all the time and sometimes it requires a lot of work from me to make an album look good on my phone. Have a great day.

 

[KUguardgrl13]

So your artist view doesn't look something like this?