Apple Music feels like an alpha (Bugs list) [Suggestions] {Poll}

[mattoligy]

The new Music App and the new Apple Music Service feels more like an alpha let alone a beta! They have had long enough to apply polish and stability, so how the hell have they released this mess to millions without concern

Here's the main UI changes I feel would be better suiting...

1. Connect is a mess and very confusing, it doesn't work well and so connect should be an area (feed) on each artists page.
2. Artist pages should be heavily focused on as an artists main hub, the place where fans can find everything related to the artist.
3. There should be more links across the entire experience, linking directly to Artist Pages from albums, tracks, playlists and various thumbnails UI wide.
4. "Top Charts" should be a main tab and not a hard to find link from within the "New" tab.
5. The "For You" and "New" areas are a complete mess, more organisation needs to be practiced across these areas focusing on making it easier for the user to browse Artists, Albums and Playlists, rather than all of the above being a messy mishmash of information.
6. More design, UI and organisation traits need to be learned from the way the iTunes Store is laid out.
7. The ability to reorder playlists from most recently added first.
8. 320 kbps audio and a bigger catalogue of music.

List bugs below and I will do my best to add them to this post...

• Regular Crashes (iOS)
• Backgrounded Music App Times Out, Unloads From Memory And Stops Playing Music (iOS)
• Similar Artists Links Don't work (iOS)
• Unable To Start Station Errors
• Can't Enable iCloud Music Library In Settings (iOS)
• Beats 1 AirPlay Problems

• Some tracks won't play - they try to stream and time out.
• Tracks added to a play list are later missing from said playlist.
• Trouble syncing (have to turn the iCloud library off and back on again).
• Search sometimes wont show results for track name and remixer when its in the library.
• Add to specific playlists sometimes works from a search but often doesn't present the option.
• Incorrect number of followed artists.
• Beats 1 currently playing song shows the wrong meta data.

 

[MentalFloss]

Interesting. I have encountered a number of bugs (I posted some of them in my thread about playlists), but nothing as major as that.

 

[M. Gustave]

iPhone 5s, it crashed the very first time I launched it.
Aside from that, it's one of the ugliest, most confusing apps I've ever seen.

 

[dannys1]

• Some tracks won't play - they try to stream and time out.
• General start times are no where near as fast as Spotify which is near instant, Apple music anywhere between 1 second and 6 seconds for me until track starts playing.
• Added a bunch of stuff to a play list last night - none of it appeared in it.
• Didn't sync with my iPhone, had to turn the iCloud library off and back on again.
• Can't organise playlists on iPhone by recently added first, its always oldest added at the top - utter fail (like Spotify)
• Sections are cluttered, clunky and not clear.
• Search sometimes wont show results for track name and remixer when its in the library
• You can't just search for an artist and land on their artist page and start streaming tracks like Spotify, it requires a search, click on the artist name, click on albums, open the album, then play. Very long winded.
• You should be able to specify newest releases at the top of each artist page, I don't care about Top Songs, then Top albums, then top videos - its taking up 2 pages of screen scrolling to get down to the list of latest releases in order. It should do it more like Spotify - a short list of most streamed at the top is fine (though I really don't care what the most streamed by other people are if i'm searching for a particular artist, i'd rather it go to the bottom) and then you should get a list of albums and singles which you can play directly from the artist page without multiple clicks through the system.
• Add to specific playlists sometimes works from a search but often doesn't present the option, see below...

Searched for "Chaemini" and then a click on the three dot icon lets me add to a playlist...

Yet in this search a click on the three dots doesn't give the "Add To" option?? Some might have noticed i'm clicking on "Top Results" in this case and thats maybe why, but nope, when it appears it appears when you click on it from Top Results, Songs or Albums

Sometimes to go to add to, and the playlist is blank. You have to click off and reclick again, it'd be much easier to have a floating playlist bar really where you can drag tracks in...maybe I can do that with two windows...i'll see - i notice you can't drag anything from the play bar at the top, which is a shame as its quite handy for grabbing stuff from radio stations.

And then on top of all that clicking on the three dots, you've got this random right click menu which shows you playlists that don't actually really exist (they're recent additions from saving albums in Apple music?!) do we need the doubling up of both menus?

There are more issues i've found, its been a bit of a nightmare really. I wanted it to blow Spotify away, but it gets as many things, if not more wrong.

Also i tried to replicate some of my playlists from Spotify in Apple Music and probably 15% of the tracks were not available on Apple Music - so the library isn't there yet either.

 

[mattoligy]

Nice post Danny very informative

 

[MALmen]

Anyone else noticing that the number of artist your are following does don't appear correct?

 

[Bram.96]

I also think Apple Music is a broken mess at the moment. I have added several songs to my library but they don't show up when I want to play them right there. It show me other songs from the same album, but some are lacking and when I add them again they're still not showing up. I've also noticed that when you 'stream' music it uses your storage the same way as you would download it, so what's the point of streaming it anyway? I can't delete these files afterward either so I'm stuck with over a gigabyte of useless space on my iPad at the moment. The videos app has been doing the same thing since freaking iOS 7!

 

[MentalFloss]

Added a bunch of stuff to a play list last night - none of it appeared in it.

For me it's less "predictable". I add songs to a playlist, and some appear in it, while others are deleted and I have to add them again. Once, a song disappeared from a playlist while I looked at it.

Didn't sync with my iPhone, had to turn the iCloud library off and back on again.

Was the same for me. iCloud library was on by default, but only after I disabled and re-enabled it, it took effect.

You can't just search for an artist and land on their artist page and start streaming tracks like Spotify, it requires a search, click on the artist name, click on albums, open the album, then play. Very long winded.

Well, there we have a bigger problem. In my opinion, the whole search function in iTunes and Apple Music is amateurish. It is very strict about how you spell things and word order and things like that. In the year 2015, I would expect that a search request for "Deep Porple" would yield a "Did you mean 'Deep Purple'?" answer with the suggested results displayed below. So what you mention is just a small part of a huge problem. Apple urgently needs a team to work on improving the Search user experience.

Also, I consider it a bug that when I make a playlist available offline, the songs are downloaded but don't show an "available offline" icon, and I can click "Make available offline" on the already downloaded songs again - and then the "available offline" icon appears.

In general, I have been lucky with the streaming performance. No hickups. No wait times. Just a lot of usability issues.

 

[Deefuzz]

Right now I am having an issue when listening to Beats1 where the "Currently Playing Song" shows the song that last played 35ish minutes ago and won't change to match the song currently playing.

Even if I kill the app and open it back up it still shows that song. If I play something else and go back to Beats1 it still shows that song.

So if I want to know what is currently playing I have to open up Shazam, which starts the music playing through that app, Shazam it (which doesn't work with headphones on), click on the button to "Play in Apple Music" to be brought to the album page and then add it to my library from there.

 

[burgman]

Right now I am having an issue when listening to Beats1 where the "Currently Playing Song" shows the song that last played 35ish minutes ago and won't change to match the song currently playing.

Even if I kill the app and open it back up it still shows that song. If I play something else and go back to Beats1 it still shows that song.

So if I want to know what is currently playing I have to open up Shazam, which starts the music playing through that app, Shazam it (which doesn't work with headphones on), click on the button to "Play in Apple Music" to be brought to the album page and then add it to my library from there.

Same problem here thanks for posting

 

[dannys1]

Right this is getting worse by the minute...

Not syncing between phone and iTunes at all. Or if it does, a little bit...like some random recent additions. Playlists not update, no way to refresh iPhone.

Some things I add to a playlists are appearing at the bottom despite it being ordered descending with newest at the top?! Some have no appeared multiple times, some wont add at all.

Its all very clunky and sluggish...it feels like everything has to go to the server and back again. You can't drag stuff from Apple Music to a playlist like you can in the My Music section, which would help considerably, you can't multi add tracks in one go to a playlist, even if you go into the album and multi select them.

Suddenly all the bad points of Spotify seem a joy and this is feeling like Apple Maps 2.0.

Just to top it off, in Apple Maps, Crewe in the UK was listed as Crewe-Wrexham (a place an hour away in Wales) and in Apple Music, Michael Jackson's entire artist profile has him listed as Michael Jackson & Justin Timberlake. Wonder how long until thats fixed...he's only one of the most famous artists in the world like Apple...

Some more bugs and/or missing features.

• You can't search by record label (You can do this on Spotify)
• Whats the point of the heart button if it doesn't create a playlist of "hearted" tracks? I get that its to build an idea of what you like for curation purposes, but like starred in Spotify surely it would be a very quick and easy way to build a list of singles and one of songs you like, especially ones you hear on the radio?
• iTunes/Apple/Apple Music refers to everything as "Albums" even singles and EP's. Spotify got ti right by splitting this up.

I think the right way to display search results would be like this.

If you type the full name of an artist you go directly to their profile page (this doesn't' happen at the minute you have to click through) - partial matches, spelling mistakes etc would display search results like one - the search box should auto guess artist names as you type though (it does sort of do this anyway, as does Spotify)

Then you'd get to the artist page, the top first thing should be latest release, as it is, but should be "latest releases" showing last album and all singles and EP's - then a SMALL section for most popular, followed by in chronological order albums first, then EP's, then singles and a link to jump straight to the top of these sections instead of having to scroll past all the albums (like you must on Spotify) - each track from all of these should be directly playable.

This should also be customisable, each block should be modular so people can chose to have "most popular tracks" of an artist on top first if they wise, or latest releases, or start with singles, then EPs, then albums - and hide sections completely (like videos) if they want, or demote them under neath all the above.

Everyone agree that would be the most logical way to implement this cluster muck of a navigation system? It's like the best of Spotify but better - oh and label search and clickable record label names like artists.

If Apple could get remixes right too, so that clicking on an artist, that also does remixes would show them on their artist page (under remixes for instance!) that would be another bullet to Spotify.

 

[sbarrios93]

Is there an estimated time of when Apple will release a new version of Apple Music (iTunes+Music app) with bug fixes? I'm really liking Apple Music but there's so many bugs and things not working as they should..

 

[dannys1]

Is there an estimated time of when Apple will release a new version of Apple Music (iTunes+Music app) with bug fixes? I'm really liking Apple Music but there's so many bugs and things not working as they should..

Id suggest most of this is server side - bar the missing features I want.

 

[dannys1]

Seems there are network issues now, maybe why my sync sucks.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/z9r9x1mf3v8evun/Screenshot 2015-07-01 14.20.44.jpg?dl=0

 

[dannys1]

These are remixes, why has Apple Music truncated the names so I can no longer tell which track is which??!

 

[JuryDuty]

A few more I've noticed--some of these aren't bugs, but clearly bad UI...

• Playlists completely different between my iPhone, iPad and Macbook
• Uploaded all my music to icloud...won't show up on my phone or ipad
• No easy way to listen to this week's new music that I can tell (like in Spotify where there's a weekly playlist)
• When I'm playing in my car and then turn the car off, it starts playing on my phone instead of shutting off (like Spotify does)
• When playing a song full screen, YOU CANNOT SWIPE to the next song! You can only press a button. How could Apple miss this?!!
• As others said above, music takes a pause to load, often stops playing completely when switching songs.
• Right-click menus seem all over the place as far as options go. Where's the consistency? Sometimes you can "heart" a song...sometimes not...sometimes you can add to playlist...sometimes not...
• And, as everyone's posting, playlists aren't saving our songs right now...

I'm very disappointed with this rollout. Given that Apple already had a music service, radio service and iTunes matching service, how could this get so terribly flubbed up?!

 

[rocknblogger]

I have to agree. Apple Music in its current form stinks. There's nothing here to make me even consider switching from Spotify. I can add to the list but there's no point. I think anyone reading this thread gets the idea. It's a shame really. I expected a lot more from Apple. Dare I say that Beats music app was much much better.

 

[hi_howareyou]

I'm finding if I add two (or more albums) which contain some of the same songs (such as an album and the band's best of) then not all songs will show under both albums which is annoying.

For example in this screenshot, this album is a collection of two other albums with some bonus songs - because I have added the two albums individually only the bonus songs will show under this title

 

[dannys1]

For anyone cares, i'm working on this and submitting to Apple via my dev account bug reporter - i hope someone reads it, if anyone wants to add anything they've found, let me know.

https://www.evernote.com/l/ABUCB7lG8xVE15NK0e1svfX5Wy3-7801J-8

 

[MentalFloss]

A few more I've noticed--some of these aren't bugs, but clearly bad UI...

• Playlists completely different between my iPhone, iPad and Macbook
• Uploaded all my music to icloud...won't show up on my phone or ipad

These two sound a bit like you have the "Show Music Available Offline" switch enabled on your iPad and iPhone.

 

[jmitch150]

I have to agree. Apple Music in its current form stinks. There's nothing here to make me even consider switching from Spotify. I can add to the list but there's no point. I think anyone reading this thread gets the idea. It's a shame really. I expected a lot more from Apple. Dare I say that Beats music app was much much better.

Beats was 100000 times better. I wish I could go back until this is all sorted out.

 

[gforce216]

The long press on albums for the iPad Music app totally does not work on my iPad Air 2. It will gray out the screen to make it seem like a pop up is appearing but nothing appears. This only occurs on the search results screen. Works elsewhere.

 

[chrispfeiffer21]

• General start times are no where near as fast as Spotify which is near instant, Apple music anywhere between 1 second and 6 seconds for me until track starts playing.

dannys1, you definitely have that right with this. I find that the connection time between tapping a song and actually playing a song is quite long. I do believe however Spotify have been doing some pretty clever techniques in streaming the music to devices such as using P2P where it can, however my knowledge is a little flaky on this. There is the potential that things will smooth out server-side, and people will begin to calm down with Apple Music (I imagine right now everyone is doing everything they can think of on it)...

But lets hope it get's better, and lets hope for an 8.4.1 to fix some of the bugs mentioned

 

[dotnet]

May I just add for completeness that for me the continuing lack of consideration for classical music is most disappointing, if somewhat expected. I'm always harbouring a silent hope that the issues below may one day get fixed by a new version of iTunes, and I had a glimmer of hope when Apple Music was announced, but alas it wasn't to be.

The way iTunes views music in terms of song/artist/album seems fundamentally incompatible with the way classical music is referred to. Here, the primary determinants are – in decreasing order – composer, work, movement, performer (which can be an attribute of either work or movement). There are albums, too, of course, but when they contain more than one work by a composer they are always compilations, assembled by the label or performer. They represent the physical recordings as sold on CDs or LPs and are somewhat orthogonal to the way classical music is viewed and organised.

Works very frequently consist of multiple movements or parts. Those end up being referred to as songs in iTunes (regardless of whether anybody actually sings). There are literally thousands of movements called I. Allegro in my library, hundreds by certain single composers alone. Artists in iTunes lingo are always the performers of a work on the given recording, which often leaves you in the dark as to who the composer is when tracks are playing. For example, right now on the Classical radio station there is a piece playing called Violin Concerto in E Minor Op.64: II. Andante. The also displayed album name is Mendelssohn & Bruch: Violin Concertos, artist is Nigel Kennedy. This is both too much and not enough information. The song name is way too long, and if you haven't heard the violin concertos by Mendelssohn or Bruch before you're left guessing which composer's piece you're listening to.

The song/artist/album tagging scheme leads to absurdly long movement names sometimes, when the tagger tried to work around this deficiency and encode everything into the title: Bach: Concerto In D Minor For 2 Violins, BWV 1043, "Double" - 2. Largo Ma Non Tanto. All of that is the song title.

There is a composer tag that can be used for searching, making playlist etc., however it is never shown in any Now Playing display, on any device.

What is sorely missing is another level of hierarchy, for the work. When shuffling classical music it would be desirable to shuffle by work, not song. When searching for works it would be desirable to get a list with works intact, in the right order, they way they were recorded, not a jumbled up and out of order list of movements from various recordings of the work (most classical music lovers own multiple recordings of the same works made by different performers).

What is the chance of this ever getting fixed? Very small.

I have taken to manually editing tags to conform to a scheme I made up for my own use, making use of the song name, artist, album, album artist, composer and grouping tags. This has served me reasonably well for years (apart of the manual effort of editing each and every track's tags), but with the advent of iTunes Match this has become a futile effort, since Match overwrites or wipes out tags of many (but not all) tracks indiscriminately, of albums I ripped myself from CD and manually tagged afterwards. Needless to say that the iTunes tagging is of poor quality, with lots of errors in spelling and fact, and of course not containing the information I had in my manual tags.

I don't see many people complaining about classical music being a square peg into the round hole that is iTunes, but it sure is causing me a lot of frustration.

 

[jonnyb098]

Unfortunately we were warned in an article from 9to5 mac months ago.....internal employees were quitting over the new music service and lots of issues making it all work right.