iTunes ?

Alternatively I’m open to suggestions for replacements for Music on Mac. (I’ve also been exploring Ubuntu some too.)

The changeover from iTunes to iTunes Match to Apple Music was . . . less than perfect. I've encountered numerous instances of lost tracks and missing cover art. And the way Apple Music handles smart playlists on mobile devices is unpredictable.

I'm still limping by with iTunes on my MacBook Pro, terrified to make the switch. Ostensibly my library is on an external hard drive and I'm told it's "pretty easy" to switch with this type of external drive library but... I have my doubts.

Your doubts are very valid. The specific issue that I feel like killed my library (of fifteen years ha) is with syncing my iPhone. I use USB to sync — don’t trust this “cloud” jibberjabber — and now when I sync it copies the entire music library selected for my phone over again. I usually keep thousands of songs on there and like to sync frequently so I regard that as a dealbreaker.

I’ve been able to rebuild the library from scratch and recover a lot of the data from my old library by exporting playlists. Still l very tedious, but I actually want all my data, that’s why I stuck with these senescent apps.

I am pretty expert at transferring music libraries and glad to offer advice if needed when you decide to make the fatal leap.

But Jimbeaux I don’t really have any issues with smart playlists.

Ha, I'm even more old fashioned in that I don't sync at all with my iPhone, especially since my library is larger than the space on my phone, I just manually add and remove songs from the iPhone via USB.

Yeah I think we’re basically the same unless by “manual” you mean one-by-one?

My library wouldn’t fit on my phone either, I sync selected playlists. I have a main phone playlist and also use the “grouping” field like hashtags so I have smart playlists like ‘Lounge’ etc.

But Jimbeaux I don’t really have any issues with smart playlists.

I see it mostly in classical playlists--I have one, for example, that is based on not having listened to an album in more than a year. The tracks often show up completely out of order, and a lot of times a particular track won't show up in the list, even though I haven't listened to that one any more recently than I have to the rest of the album.

xp - not one by one, but I'll just grab either a playlist or a bunch of albums to drag onto it

Like an old-school iPod.

xp

As for the smart playlists I don’t mess with the classical-specific fields and don’t doubt they could cause issues.

You know what really grinds my gears - that manual USB syncing doesn't really work anymore if you're on Apple Music. You still have to go to the phone make sure those files are downloaded in the app.

It’s working for me now since I rebuilt my library.

But FFS Apple:

"Podcasts are stored in a cache folder in ~/Library/Group Containers/243LU875E5.groups.com.apple.podcasts . This is not designed to be user accessible, and the podcast files do not display the original file names. You can, however, drag podcast files from the Podcasts app to the Desktop or to a folder."

Do these files actually exist? Who knows.

It’s a little weird that I’m so attached to my music that I had some little dissociative moments when I was feeling a little ‘tired and emotional’ and wasn’t sure whether my system was glitching or I was.

Well I broke it again. That’s at least 20 hours of work wasted since my last backup. Always Be baCking up! Wow this is frustrating.

My experience is that Music is just iTunes with podcasts and video stripped out, everything looks and works the same: tagging, playlists, syncing, scripting. Unfortunately, same limitations too (no multiple artists, multiple genres, etc).

I hate how the view changes on its own. I have to manually set the filter field to search my songs, and then it disappears and I have to bring it up again.

xp

Yes all my scripts etc from iTunes seem to work the same. It’s just that my library somehow got corrupted in the migration. (I have been told that skipping major upgrades can cause issues so that may be part of it.)

If you’re on Mac or Linux do you like any non-cloud alternatives?

I'm on Mac - I've got Plex/Plexamp/Prism and Navidrome/Substreamer as additional servers/clients for streaming/syncing outside the house but neither are fully equivalent. Swinsian is OK for local playback but no sync-to-iPhone/iPad so I don't really see why I should switch.

It's all very frustrating since you can see what Apple Music *could* be with only a little bit of effort from the Apple devs: some additional support for tags like release type (album/single/live/etc), language, multiple artists/genres. Support for streaming/sync outside the local network (iCloud Relay looks ideal for that). Allow building smart playlists on the mobile app. Not really rocket science, but it's clear there's been zero investment in local music.

Smart playlists don’t even update on the mobile app (they used to.)

I kept my old iPod and upgraded both the battery and the hard drive. (The hard drive is basically an SD adapter with two SD card slots. The SD cards I use are pretty standard and inexpensive - put together they can hold over 500 GB.)

My phone gets used for too many things - I don't always have the opportunity to recharge the battery, I don't have steady internet access if I'm taking a long subway ride, and it doesn't even have a headphone jack anymore (I don't like ear pods, my headphones and ear monitors are much better), so I generally keep my music on my iPod, not my phone.

I have an old Macbook that got upgraded to the last iteration of iTunes before Music, so it can only synch, not drag and drop, but that's fine - I basically have two complete copies of my iTunes library, one on an external drive and one on my iPod, and going along with syncing at least means I don't have to worry about backing shit up because it's built into the setup. I haven't moved to Music yet, but will probably have to eventually. The OS on the old Macbook is getting less and less functional as it supports less and less software.

Just caught that sorry. A few issues — I wouldn’t really count your iPod library as a backup sorry. There’s no guarantee you’ll be able to recover that if need be. I have my phone library, my MacBook library, and and a backup on a hard drive. (I don’t fw Time Machine.) That’s one point in iTunes favor — if you get your libraries straight it does handle switching between them fairly painlessly.

My phone gets used for too many things - I don't always have the opportunity to recharge the battery, I don't have steady internet access if I'm taking a long subway ride, and it doesn't even have a headphone jack anymore (I don't like ear pods, my headphones and ear monitors are much better), so I generally keep my music on my iPod, not my phone.

Assuming you aren’t philosophically opposed to having an iPhone it will serve your purposes. I often go to airplane mode on transit to save my battery but just playing music offline doesn’t eat up much charge generally. Not entirely clear on your headphone preferred there tho. Clearly iPhone phased out headphone jacks which turned into a positive for me cause I terminated wired headphones very regularly. Bluetooth earbuds work for me, these Belkins seem nigh indestructible.

Actually just realized you said the iPod library is stored on SD cards (very clever). So that does serve as a dependable backup, my bad.

It just gets worse and worse from my POV. I had to replace my old phone and didn’t realize the new one had home sharing enabled which caused most of my library on the phone to appear as “not available in your country or region”. That was a nice scare.

They’re trying to rid of ratings in favor of ‘loves’, ratings aren’t marketable enough. Every update is in the direction of making it more crappy. Can I just have iTunes back?

Re the lack of headphone socket, there is also an inch long, inexpensive and very high quality 3.5mm-lightning adapter you can leave clipped on your headphone jack. It seems like a fudge for a couple of days and then you forget it because it works well. At least the phone is waterproof as a result of the deletion.

Waterproof until you have to get a third party screen/charging jack replacement. Hence my need to replace my old phone (it did have quite a sordid history of screen replacements).

I’m now able to isolate the failures in my rebuilt library to specific songs. However the app is actively refusing to let me delete these problem songs at this point. I delete, I log out and log back in to clear RAM or whatever (I’m no Turing okay). The songs are still there! If this is AI, I’m impressed with how pigheaded it is.

(Actually harkens back to one of my dad’s best German phrases: die Tücke des Objekts — the spite of objects.)

Yeah I have some Autechre tracks that keep resetting the artist name, regardless of how many times I change it to the correct title. There must be hidden caches or something.

Could have to do with permissions? Really wish they hadn’t taken that “repair permissions” option from disk utility long ago. Supposedly it’s an automatic process now but I have doubts.

Anyway with regards to the specific gripe I had, restarting my computer sorted it. For now.

I will wrap up my interminable griping, I had thought that at some point soon I'd be able say "well I've been working on for FIVE MONTHS but I finally finished rebuilding my library!" But no, it's just an endless pit of wasted effort and time.

A couple of technical notes I meant to mention though:

- The Doug's Scripts page is a good source for the Artist-Name Corrector and other scripts etc which are currently being updated for the Music app: https://dougscripts.com/itunes/index.php
- If anyone else catches The Bug in Apple sound output that's going around, this is the key phrase to clear it (until it reappears):

sudo killall coreaudiod

(Via Terminal of course.)