Apple Music macOS Review
Apple Music app on macOS Catalina is “not so great”
This one can’t be blamed on Catalyst.
Via John Gruber:
Music on Mac is just an utter embarrassment for Apple. Truly an ignominious fate for iTunes, which started 20 years ago as an exemplar of a great Mac app.
Previously:
- WWDC 2021 Announced and New Developer App
- How to Search Your Music Library in Catalina
- The Falling Ladder of Abstractions
- iTunes XML and Music in Catalina
- Music.app on macOS 10.15
- Is There Hope for the Mac App Store?
Update (2021-04-15): Cabel Sasser:
That is definitely not the UI experience I expected when clicking “more” in Music
Update (2021-08-13): Mark Hughes:
So, I was listening to my last playlist, and realized I don’t own one of the albums, so I figure I’ll grab it off iTunes…
No iTunes app. No “show in iTune Store” action on the album page (Share has since shown back up, because Apple Music is non-deterministic). There’s an iTunes Store on my phone, but I want to download it here on my desktop. Fine, where’s the store page. It’s… missing. After some duck searches, turns out you have to open Apple Music Preferences, check “iTunes Store” in a little grid. I didn’t deselect this, it came deselected, meaning NOBODY is going to see it.
3 Comments RSS · Twitter
Music app on iOS and iPad OS especially also really bad in terms of UI/US and just basic feature set, and full of bugs.
Since they are part of the same system, it should be considered as a whole.
I've run into quite a few issues shown in the video.
One thing I'll note regarding sorting a playlist and adding columns: yes, that's possible. Go to View, then as Songs (instead of as Playlist). This brings back the classic iTunes-style table view, including the column browser, sorting, column selection, etc. Why does this distinction exist at all? I'm not sure. I'm guessing the old style was regarded as too nerdy?
Leaving aside the many issues with state (e.g., back button) or inconsistency (stuff like drag & drop works in some places, but not in other similarly-looking places), I'm also annoyed by the volume slider. My window is ~1400 pixels wide, but the volume slider gets 60. This is somewhat mitigated by being able to set it through horizontal scrolling, but then comes the other issue on top of that: sometimes, when switching speakers, it sets the volume level to that of the previous speaker. Which, when you're going from the internal speaker of a MacBook to the speakers in your living room, is absolutely not something you want to do while music is playing. And because switching speakers can take anywhere from half a second to twenty seconds, you don't really know if or when that happens.
Lots of papercuts. OTOH, lots of little ways Apple could make it just a tad better, if they wanted to.
I think it's obvious that Apple is letting it rot, and in a year or two it'll be replaced by a unified iOS/Mac app.
