Music.app's “Recently Added” view completely borked by Apple in Sonoma

[Mainyehc]

I'll keep it short: apparently, Apple has deliberately turned “Recently Added” view, a heretofore useful feature for perusing your library in chronological order like you would, say, your Photos.app library, into what is essentially a glorified “Recents” stack for albums, having capped its length at the last 60 ones added and removing all time period headers.

Interestingly, this was detected in the Public Betas of Sonoma, but the users here didn't sound the alarm. I'm beyond mad with all of this, and feel that I can trust Apple less and less with each update and that I'll likely have to go back to their beta programmes just to have a say on their shenanigans and try to prevent them from… turning my desktop OS and apps of choice into complete, iPadOS-level crap?

I've been hard at work in setting up an alternative, in the form of a Smart Playlist sorted by Date Added, but the sorting algorithms are full of bugs (or just plain stupid) and it will be a very involved process and require a lot of sleuthing, moving stuff around, etc., since Music.app doesn't even have a metadata editor (nor is there any other external, more hacky way of doing it; deleting, changing the system date and re-adding is the only way 🤦‍♂️).

Meanwhile, I called AppleCare and sent them a demo video, and will now have to rejoin the beta program and install macOS 14.1 just so I can legitimately fire up Feedback Assistant.app and voice my displeasure. If anyone here agrees that it's a damn shame this feature was outright yanked out for no good reason, I kindly invite you to join me in the fight!

 

[Diskutant]

since Music.app doesn't even have a metadata editor

Not sure what you mean by that. cmd+i let's you change metadata. no?

 

[Mainyehc]

Not sure what you mean by that. cmd+i let's you change metadata. no?

Sadly, no. You can change all metadata except for date added. It seems you could, in theory, edit the .xml copy of the library, but then Music.app would just swap those values for the current date anyway. Which might be why I inadvertently have all my tracks added between 2003 and 2013 listed as being added in a single day in late 2013; I believe I had a crash/corrupted library and, when reconstituting it from the .xml file, I did manage to preserve everything but date added.

 

[two-bit_lad]

I just discovered this as well. WTH, Apple!!! This makes Apple Music almost entirely useless to me, as I used Recently Added 90% of the time.

If enough of us complain, they'll add it back. Spread this link around!

Feedback - Apple Music - Apple

 

[Mainyehc]

Oh, there are some positive news, which actually make me a bit madder, because… yeah, Apple giveth, and Apple taketh away… I had this stupid bug because of the downscaled 5K resolution on my 4K screens, which made the miniplayer shrink to 2160px in height whenever I waked my Mac Studio up from sleep. They fixed it, so at least I don't have to manually resize it to fill the screen every single day, and even several times a day anymore, yay.

I'll still have to reimport hundreds or even thousands of tracks just to get something vaguely similar to what we had going on with the heretofore functional “Recently Added” view and, even then, it'll still be just a boring track listing, instead of a neat album grid view. 🤦‍♂️

I'll still reimport around 13,000 of them, the older ones, because of said crash, mind you (it's more than half of my library, ugh… And by having recently re-ripped around a 1000 of them from the 2010-2013 period, which removed the “Date Created” metadata which I would otherwise be able to access via the Finder on my brand-spanking-new, bespoke Saved Search, I'll also have to do a fair bit of guessing and look at historical concert/tour dates, personal diary entries, you name it), but the easily scrollable grid view…? Unless they soup up their sorting options on album view (and they should, in any case!!) or backtrack on this stupid decision, we're not getting it back…

People may think this is obsessive; yeah, a bit. But it still boggles the mind how the same company whose employees understand just how important photos are for the way people construct their memories, and who answer with the endless chronological library view and smart albums/events, could nerf such an analogous feature from an equally important product; we also have a “soundtrack” to our lives and, with the advent of always-on music and ultra-comfy wireless earbuds, more than ever before.

Come to think of it, with such a deep investment in on-device AI and proactive assistants, they should even come up with a smarter, curated list that combined streamed tracks from Apple Music and added albums (either bought from iTunes Store, ripped from CDs, or just saved from Apple Music itself), and ranked them according to play counts, while keeping track of all times when they were played, not just the last instance (it could be every bit as safe as health data and on-device or otherwise encrypted, of course). And, heck, it just occurred to me that Photos.app and Music.app should integrate in some way, and that one could add songs from the other and especially from said smart list, with appropriate genres, as BGM for its slideshows. Now that would hit you right in the feels.

Why should it be me, a regular ol' customer, to come up with such obvious observations and ideas for new or improved features? Oh, I forget, I'm a Design PhD student who took an optional UX course and actually loves music. Silly me. 🙄

 

[frozencarbonite]

I just came across this thread from your post on the latest 14.1 beta release. I have yet to upgrade to Sonoma. I'm on a M1 MBP and still running Monterrey. I never upgraded to Ventura because I heard it was buggy. Then I heard great things about Sonoma being the new "Snow Leopard" of the modern MacOS before it's release. When it was released I became hesitant after reading some things about Sonoma. But then I read about this type of stuff and it has me now entirely rethinking upgrading. Like you, I use the Recently Added view very frequently. And to lose that ability would be a downgrade, in my opinion. Hoping they will rethink this change, but knowing Apple's history of rarely reverting features, I won't hold my breath.