In case anyone is interested... I found a workaround to the playlist
copy from disc issue that I detailed above. After playing around a bit, I discovered that if you highlight all songs from the disk and right click and choose 'add to playlist',
all songs do import into the playlist. But, by doing this, I found another bug. Playlists created this way will disappear when you close and reopen the Music app. You have to manually create a new playlist after using the 'add to playlist' option, and copy all songs from the first playlist into the new manually created playlist in order for the playlist to stay put after exiting Music.
To successfully copy a playlist from an optical disc to Music in Big Sur - do the following:
- Insert disc, click on it in the side bar to reveal the songs on the disk.
- Click the header of first column twice to get your playlist sequence in the correct order.
- Choose or enter 'select all' to highlight all songs.
- Right click on highlighted songs, choose 'add to new playlist'.
- Music will now create a playlist named 'Playlist' and will copy ALL songs to it.
- Once the songs copy over and added to this generic playlist, create a new playlist (with a proper name).
- Copy all songs from the initial generic playlist into this newly created playlist.
- Delete the generic 'Playlist' playlist.
That's it! Just 8 steps to do what iTunes used to do in one drag of an icon! So easy, it
'just works!' 🙄
...unfortunately, the embedded artwork is still only visible when you play a song. There is no thumbnail preview in Playlist view and it doesn't look like the Music app is trying to create it (ArtworkAgent is not running at all). It's been several hours, and there are only 155 songs in my library at this moment, and the artwork folder in my user library is still empty.
It really is just shocking how such basic functionality was broken in the latest version of the Music app. I've never imported a playlist via optical disk in the Music app under Catalina since that's where all my playlists are made. I find the Music app in Big Sur is lacking and is more buggy than the version in Catalina. I am curious how the Big Sur Music app earned its version number. What was added or improved over the version in Catalina? Certainly not artwork management, efficiency, stability, options, functionality and so on.
Apple is really making it hard for those of us who do not just shuffle rented top 40 music via their Apple Music streaming service! Perhaps this is all part of the grand plan to phase us out.
