From time to time on these forums I've seen threads where people have been driven absolutely off the cliff by some pecadillo following an OS update. I've previously ignored that stuff or laughed it off. "You were upset because iTunes Match replaced all your rare cuts with generic commercial releases? Ha! You shouldn't have given Apple access to your private library!" or "You can't run 32bit apps anymore? Get with the future!"
Now I have my own tale of aggravation.
It all began a couple months back, when I decided to take an almost-unused late 2012 iMac I had sitting here, and "upgrading" to Catalina. That upgrade wasted the hard drive. I had plenty of feedback here from people who said it was impossible for the update to do that, and I'm sure plenty more people will tell me the same. "Correlation doesn't equal causation", sure I get it. But the fact is the computer worked perfectly, I'd previously done plenty of security upgrades, software installs, and I had two VMWare packages installed with full Windows builds. It worked. Until Catalina.
I bought a new 2TB drive from Larry, along with his install kit. Thanks to the OWC videos, it was probably the smoothest upgrade I'd done in forever. I installed Catalina on an external drive, booted from that and did the install. Everything seemed fine. I figured I'd get my network library running on it, so I could use the iMac to replace the MacBook I use as a source for my ancient but wonderful office stereo. And thats where the trouble began.
It took me quite a bit longer to get my downstairs music library running on Catalina. Its on a 5TB drive attached to my Airport Extreme (final gen). I can have that library up on any pre-Catalina system in under 30 seconds. My 2009 MacBook Black saw that network drive and attached the library in two clicks. Catalina, despite being pointed to the library about twenty times, loaded the wrong path name. I still can't figure out how I got it working. But I did, and with the MacOS when I get past a stumbling block like that I generally write it off and move on.
I went to look at a movie, and found that the friendly iTunes icon no longer represented iTunes, with all of its media management. It now is just "Music". I found that I had to go into the AppleTV app, which also had to be pointed to my media library. The steps were similar to adding the music library so I did it that way.
What a huge mistake that was.
The first thing I noticed was that the previous iTunes interface (which had been referred to as "bloated" by more than one member here, along with a few columnists) was now replaced by a single window with a 4 button banner at the top for choosing sources. Movies, TV, Kids, Library. Since I want nothing to do with Apple's streaming efforts, I clicked on Library. A sidebar opened giving me the option of choosing recent additions, etc. There was a very poorly done text list of genres underneath that. I could think of a half dozen ways to have done that better. As it is, its just entirely too fatiguing to look at for more than a second.
In the library view, my first real stress of the morning happened when I noticed most all of my poster art was gone. Hundreds of "one sheets" that I painstakingly sourced and loaded into the metadata was either completely gone or bunged down to a tiny thumbnail stuck in the middle of a 16:9 window with the 2/5 of the pane on either side of the thumb a blurred mix of the one sheet colors.
I looked around for a way to go back to portrait art, but apparently this it, the way things will be forevermore, as Apple decides that nearly a century of movie marketing and history will take a back seat to their attempt to redesign the cosmos. After wasting half an hour reading reviews of different player software, I went for the old familiar and grabbed VLC, which I abandoned after a few minutes of trying to figure out how to get it to point at a library. Apparently it only works for streaming sources or videos manually dropped on the VLC player, unless I missed something.
I gave up on the art for the time, and tried to pick a movie. Only thing was... the movie I wanted to watch wasn't there. And I know it was there on the library drive this morning. I tried doing a search for the movie title, but as soon as I hit the first character, the screen of movie mutilated movie art thumbnails (mostly grey 16:9 boxes) was replaced with a streaming movie screen. I clicked back to my library and started typing again, and it sent me to the streaming library. I can't search my own library now? Let me guess - I have to click on the desktop, bring up Spotlight, and search that way, right?
Undeterred, I gave up on the search, clicked back into my library, and kept poking around. I noticed something else unusual - there were movie descriptions far in excess of what I'd entered or what iFlicks had done for me. On every movie, including ones I hadn't edited metadata for yet. I never allow Apple programs or any other program to scan my drives for movies or music, because I don't want them to compile any data on my viewing or listening habits. I never gave Apple permission to do this scan.
I went to the Finder and looked at the iTunes folder on the network drive. In the Movies folder, something was very wrong... Out of the 400+ movies on that drive, that should have been in that folder, I saw only 15 folders for movies that should have been there. There was a 16th folder called "Movies". WTH? I opened that folder, and found the other 385 movies, stripped of their folders, their subtitle info, and whatever else they came with. Its all gone. It even took the year out of each title and replaced it with the resolution. All of my movies are 1080HD, I don't need to know that! What I do need in the title is the year, so Infuse loads the correct art when I watch the movies on my tv! Now I get to go through at least half of those movies on Infuse - those movies that have a common name, like Running Scared for instance - and select the proper release year to get the right info and poster art. And then I'll get to do it again, and again, and again, because a lot of times Infuse metadata doesn't stick.
Best of all, I headed downstairs to post this thread on my main machine, a 2017 iMac. I figured I'd check on my iTunes on this machine. The music came up fine, but according to iTunes, there's no movies in the library.
So, Apple decided to come up with a new Movie and TV app that destroys file hierarchy without asking or even notifying. It strips metadata. It accesses a remote database for meta info, again without asking or notifying. It has basically ruined dozens of hours of my filing and annotating effort.
Right now, I'm thinking there's no new Apple purchases in my future.
Now I have my own tale of aggravation.
It all began a couple months back, when I decided to take an almost-unused late 2012 iMac I had sitting here, and "upgrading" to Catalina. That upgrade wasted the hard drive. I had plenty of feedback here from people who said it was impossible for the update to do that, and I'm sure plenty more people will tell me the same. "Correlation doesn't equal causation", sure I get it. But the fact is the computer worked perfectly, I'd previously done plenty of security upgrades, software installs, and I had two VMWare packages installed with full Windows builds. It worked. Until Catalina.
I bought a new 2TB drive from Larry, along with his install kit. Thanks to the OWC videos, it was probably the smoothest upgrade I'd done in forever. I installed Catalina on an external drive, booted from that and did the install. Everything seemed fine. I figured I'd get my network library running on it, so I could use the iMac to replace the MacBook I use as a source for my ancient but wonderful office stereo. And thats where the trouble began.
It took me quite a bit longer to get my downstairs music library running on Catalina. Its on a 5TB drive attached to my Airport Extreme (final gen). I can have that library up on any pre-Catalina system in under 30 seconds. My 2009 MacBook Black saw that network drive and attached the library in two clicks. Catalina, despite being pointed to the library about twenty times, loaded the wrong path name. I still can't figure out how I got it working. But I did, and with the MacOS when I get past a stumbling block like that I generally write it off and move on.
I went to look at a movie, and found that the friendly iTunes icon no longer represented iTunes, with all of its media management. It now is just "Music". I found that I had to go into the AppleTV app, which also had to be pointed to my media library. The steps were similar to adding the music library so I did it that way.
What a huge mistake that was.
The first thing I noticed was that the previous iTunes interface (which had been referred to as "bloated" by more than one member here, along with a few columnists) was now replaced by a single window with a 4 button banner at the top for choosing sources. Movies, TV, Kids, Library. Since I want nothing to do with Apple's streaming efforts, I clicked on Library. A sidebar opened giving me the option of choosing recent additions, etc. There was a very poorly done text list of genres underneath that. I could think of a half dozen ways to have done that better. As it is, its just entirely too fatiguing to look at for more than a second.
In the library view, my first real stress of the morning happened when I noticed most all of my poster art was gone. Hundreds of "one sheets" that I painstakingly sourced and loaded into the metadata was either completely gone or bunged down to a tiny thumbnail stuck in the middle of a 16:9 window with the 2/5 of the pane on either side of the thumb a blurred mix of the one sheet colors.
I looked around for a way to go back to portrait art, but apparently this it, the way things will be forevermore, as Apple decides that nearly a century of movie marketing and history will take a back seat to their attempt to redesign the cosmos. After wasting half an hour reading reviews of different player software, I went for the old familiar and grabbed VLC, which I abandoned after a few minutes of trying to figure out how to get it to point at a library. Apparently it only works for streaming sources or videos manually dropped on the VLC player, unless I missed something.
I gave up on the art for the time, and tried to pick a movie. Only thing was... the movie I wanted to watch wasn't there. And I know it was there on the library drive this morning. I tried doing a search for the movie title, but as soon as I hit the first character, the screen of movie mutilated movie art thumbnails (mostly grey 16:9 boxes) was replaced with a streaming movie screen. I clicked back to my library and started typing again, and it sent me to the streaming library. I can't search my own library now? Let me guess - I have to click on the desktop, bring up Spotlight, and search that way, right?
Undeterred, I gave up on the search, clicked back into my library, and kept poking around. I noticed something else unusual - there were movie descriptions far in excess of what I'd entered or what iFlicks had done for me. On every movie, including ones I hadn't edited metadata for yet. I never allow Apple programs or any other program to scan my drives for movies or music, because I don't want them to compile any data on my viewing or listening habits. I never gave Apple permission to do this scan.
I went to the Finder and looked at the iTunes folder on the network drive. In the Movies folder, something was very wrong... Out of the 400+ movies on that drive, that should have been in that folder, I saw only 15 folders for movies that should have been there. There was a 16th folder called "Movies". WTH? I opened that folder, and found the other 385 movies, stripped of their folders, their subtitle info, and whatever else they came with. Its all gone. It even took the year out of each title and replaced it with the resolution. All of my movies are 1080HD, I don't need to know that! What I do need in the title is the year, so Infuse loads the correct art when I watch the movies on my tv! Now I get to go through at least half of those movies on Infuse - those movies that have a common name, like Running Scared for instance - and select the proper release year to get the right info and poster art. And then I'll get to do it again, and again, and again, because a lot of times Infuse metadata doesn't stick.
Best of all, I headed downstairs to post this thread on my main machine, a 2017 iMac. I figured I'd check on my iTunes on this machine. The music came up fine, but according to iTunes, there's no movies in the library.
So, Apple decided to come up with a new Movie and TV app that destroys file hierarchy without asking or even notifying. It strips metadata. It accesses a remote database for meta info, again without asking or notifying. It has basically ruined dozens of hours of my filing and annotating effort.
Right now, I'm thinking there's no new Apple purchases in my future.
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