iTunes ?

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.)