Music - Missing Features, Bugs, Issues & Troubleshooting (Tahoe)

[Jashue]

Another update, and it's still broken.
Feedback sent, here is the copy/paste. I'm sure at this point, all my feedback goes into a spam folder.

"A new update, and once again this has not been fixed (is there no embarrassment?).
See screenshot attached for clear example.
Searching a local library in column browsing view shows results in the main window pane, but not subordinate panes.
In the example provided, a search for the album “Joshua Tree” yields the 49 songs from that album in the main song window, but shows all 4,189 albums in the album column window pane. Similarly, it shows 1,916 artists in the artist pane rather than the single artist associated with the search (U2).
This has been broken since somewhere around Sonoma 14.2, and it’s challenging my lifelong enthusiasm for Apple."

We all have our little lines in the sand regarding Apple and our patience for development. I'm pretty forgiving about a lot of the controversial decisions they make. I hate, for example, the menu bar at the bottom of the window (like almost everyone), but I've been able to roll with it. This issue, however, drives me insane for some reason. Why don't they fix it???? I'm the guy that had the first Mac laptop on my college campus (Powerbook 140). I'm the guy that bought the G4 Cube (talk about drinking the Koolaid). I stuck with the company when they were very much in danger of going belly up, and extolled the virtues of their products to anyone that would listen during that time. I'm the guy that stood in line the day the first iPhone was released, and I was joyful when the company made a comeback. This little thing, though, makes me wonder what has happened.

 

[mscrutchin]

60,000 song smart playlist is wild, haha. Though I also use a big smart playlist for my "all songs" and "all songs minus 1-star songs", so I can kinda understand it. What is yours for??

I find it impossible to rate songs because how I feel about music can change so drastically over repeated listens, but I totally get it (for movies, I rate everything I watch on Letterboxd!). Music is too difficult for me to rate, though -- I would be bumping songs up or down full stars and half-stars constantly throughout the day.

Anyway, my largest smart playlist (60K+ songs) has the following rules:

- Time is in the range of 1:31 to 11:22
- Grouping is not Hidden Track
- Title does not contain [Silence]
- Title does not contain Intro, Outro, Interlude, Prelude, or Skit
- Last Played is not in the last 3 months

So basically most of my library that I haven't listened to recently minus super short tracks and super long tracks, non-song tracks (hip-hop heads know the prevalence of intros/outros, interludes, preludes, and skits!), and tracks with nothing but silence (not uncommon on '90s CDs with hidden tracks). And while I enjoy some hidden tracks, many of them begin with several minutes of silence, so I just weed them out too. Songs-only playlist, or close to it.

I don't remember my reasoning for that exact duration range, but it cuts down on brief non-song tracks that aren't caught by my other rules (and longer song + silence tracks)... and, hey, it spans from Bad Brains' "Pay to Cum" (1:31) to Bob Dylan's "Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" (11:22).

 

[Slix]

I find it impossible to rate songs because how I feel about music can change so drastically over repeated listens, but I totally get it (for movies, I rate everything I watch on Letterboxd!). Music is too difficult for me to rate, though -- I would be bumping songs up or down full stars and half-stars constantly throughout the day.

Anyway, my largest smart playlist (60K+ songs) has the following rules:

- Time is in the range of 1:31 to 11:22
- Grouping is not Hidden Track
- Title does not contain [Silence]
- Title does not contain Intro, Outro, Interlude, Prelude, or Skit
- Last Played is not in the last 3 months

So basically most of my library that I haven't listened to recently minus super short tracks and super long tracks, non-song tracks (hip-hop heads know the prevalence of intros/outros, interludes, preludes, and skits!), and tracks with nothing but silence (not uncommon on '90s CDs with hidden tracks). And while I enjoy some hidden tracks, many of them begin with several minutes of silence, so I just weed them out too. Songs-only playlist, or close to it.

I don't remember my reasoning for that exact duration range, but it cuts down on brief non-song tracks that aren't caught by my other rules (and longer song + silence tracks)... and, hey, it spans from Bad Brains' "Pay to Cum" (1:31) to Bob Dylan's "Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" (11:22).

Wow, very nice! I should clarify, my 1-star rating is used like how use your playlist: anything 1-star is skipped while shuffling (since I both mark them as 1-star and set the toggle for skip while shuffling), but it's mainly for songs I don't want to hear regularly, like intros, outros, interludes, things like some video game soundtracks/sound effects, or songs I only want to hear during an album listen for whatever reason. Some iPods don't respect the skip while shuffling toggle too, so this helps. Rating songs can be tricky, and half of my 7,000 song library still doesn't have a rating, haha.

 

[cubbie5150]

Would love to do this but the music library alone is 1.44 TB so until SSD becomes cheap as chips, HDD it is.

With AI firms/data centers snapping up every scrap of hardware made, not likely in our lifetimes.

FWIW, Music app (which I actually very rarely use for actual playback) is thus far, dare I say, snappier in opening/general navigating since the 26.4 update.

 

[pjanoo]

All of my music is stored locally (I don't subscribe to Apple Music) and I sync it with my iPhone for listening when I'm out and about. A couple of things that I have noticed with the latest Music app...

• When I sync my iPhone, Finder keeps switching to "Back up all the data on your iPhone to this Mac", instead of selecting what I have always used, which is "Back up your most important data on your iPhone to iCloud"
• Play counts and last played dates are no longer syncing from my iPhone to my Mac. They are only logged if I play the file on my Mac. Bothers me as I have a few smart playlists that rotate tracks that I haven't listened to in, say, the last few months. This would break those playlists for me.

Curious to know if anyone else is having these issues?

 

[Airsculpture]

They just can't get Album Artwork to work in every area can they ? 🙄

 

[ErikGrim]

It's a shame they don't do this on the Apple TV also, with local music files with embedded lyrics.

Yes, this would super-useful as I use the custom lyrics for tracklists for my DJ set

 

[gank41]

Anybody else's curser disappearing when Music is in Full Screen? Really strange..

 

[gank41]

I'm able to Quit the Music App now and it stays closed! For what seems like a year now, whenever I'd Quit the Music App it would immediately relaunch. I've either just avoided using it or I've had to force quit like 5-6 times for it to stay closed. Now it seems to reliably quit when I choose to quit it! Yay!

 

[dobratzp]

MacBook Air M4 here. When updating to 26.4 and then also when updating to 26.4.1, none of my songs will playback in the Music.app. If I try to play a whole album, I see the song titles briefly flashing by, but no music plays. To fix this problem, I select every song and delete from my library. Then I quit and restart Music.app and then re-add all the songs.

Of course, this clears any play counts, star ratings, etc. Also when browsing by artist, the artist artwork is not part of the M4A files, but instead gets downloaded in the background over a few days.

 

[68000/030]

I swear this app gets worse with every update.

 

[mscrutchin]

I swear this app gets worse with every update.

What's worse about it after the 26.4 and 26.4.1 updates?

26.4 solved a number of my issues, including insufferable beach-balling with large libraries. It's pleasant to use again and I haven't noticed any new problems, but of course there's still massive room for improvement.

 

[the3ye]

I don’t know if it’s something on my side, or has Music app (1.6.4.88) on my MacBook Air M4 with Tahoe 26.4.1 stopped executing „previous track” shortcut from keyboard (both F7/previous track key or cmd+left-arrow)? It’s working on albums with multiple tracks, but not on singles or albums with one track only. It used to work, but suddenly stopped. Even when I click „previous track” from menu bar (under controls) it doesn’t work... It does work when I hit the „previous track” icon on controls during playback, though.

 

[droplink]

Has anyone mentioned that bug in which the text that is entered in search bar disappears at random if left alone for a second or when you command tab into another app?

Like when you want to type the name of a band but you need to quickly cmd+tab to remember how to spell the name.

 

[Toffee917]

Is anyone else having an issue with the curated radio stations in Apple Music on macOS Tahoe? What I mean is that after several songs, the queue clears out for some reason and the app stops playing. Not only that, sometimes songs do not start immediately.

If any has a fix for this, I'd appreciate the help. I already tried clearing up cache and preferences.

 

[Macs Pain]

Of course compilations are f*cked up again. Most of the songs of compilations appear (again) as their own album.
This was fixed for a short time a while ago, but yay, it's back again. 😆

EDIT: just for clarification, in the Music App it's fine, this happens with finder muisc sync to the iPhone, maybe more of an iOS or Mac OS problem

 

[mscrutchin]

Of course compilations are f*cked up again. Most of the songs of compilations appear (again) as their own album.
This was fixed for a short time a while ago, but yay, it's back again. 😆

Compilations are fine for me, but I realize my tagging may be a bit different than most -- (1) I don't check the compilation box, but (2) I do put "Various Artists" (no quotes) in the Album Artist tag for the entire album. So all my VA comps are filed under an artist called Various Artists. I think I started doing things this way for VA comps many years ago specifically because iTunes was acting weird when I'd check the compilation box. Can't quite remember.

(I also put "Compilation" in the Grouping tag, for my own purposes, but this shouldn't have any effect on how these albums appear.)