Music is a poor iTunes substitute

[Peter_M]

Hi,

I just upgraded to Catalina on my 2019 MBP, and overall I quite like it.

HOWEVER, I have a huge iTunes library with 6400 albums and several TBs of audio. After importing my music library into Music, all my fears were rightly justified. This program is a turd. Simply scrolling down in album view is slooooow, and the search function is also really slow. Much worse than iTunes. 2 hours after I imported my music library, still lots of album covers are missing. Why does Music need hours to import my album covers, when iTunes did it almost instantaneously (I turned off the "download artwork" and "sync library" options)?

It's been half a year since Catalina was released, and Music still runs like a poor beta. What's going on here exactly, diversity hiring practices run amok? This is not the Apple we all knew under Steve Jobs.


PS: Last time I checked, Music on iOS still isn't able to properly import my iTunes albums (tried from several different Macs - have to import maximum 4-5 albums at a time and twice), and I've had this issue for several years. Not good.

 

[Ritsuka]

Music is iTunes with a bunch of different UI elements. Performance is more or less the same. Probably it's downloading artworks from the web.
To search the same way as in the old iTunes use the filter field. See the sticky Music thread.

 

[Peter_M]

It shouldn't download any cover art (see my original post). Yes, I've tried the filter function. Another stupid design flaw btw., when choosing "all albums" by an artist in album view, the albums don't show up in chronological order, and afaik there is no way to change this. Sigh...

Also, the downloading artwork function is pretty much useless for anyone with a personal iTunes library, since there are lots of albums not in Apple's library, and *many* of Apple's covers are wrong. I've used Macs for 20 years, and know how these programs should work.

 

[Ritsuka]

You might think it shouldn't download the artworks. But Music might think otherwise

 

[Peter_M]

Well, it's my covers, not the iTunes ones. I've seen the difference, because the first time I started importing the "download album covers" function was turned on. The fault is probably Music still checking with Apple's music library database for every album, even though I've chosen to use my own covers, which is typical Apple nonsense.

Also for some reason Music stopped adding (my) album covers before it was properly finished, so I still have missing album covers.

 

[MisterSavage]

I haven't encountered the slow performance but I'm also like you missing many album covers.

 

[AgentElliot007]

I don't know how they made iTunes so much worse when transitioning to Music, but yes, you're right. This app like much of Catalina is complete garbage. Some of the design decisions are mind-numbingly painful. It's a major embarrassment and disappointment.

It's eaten my album art.

It's eaten a lot of my music; thank goodness for backups, but with a 40K song library, you only realize things are gone when you go looking for them, so I have no idea how big of a problem this is, and am hesitant to tinker around to find out.

Let's see, editing metadata is a nightmare because half the time it doesn't stick or divides the same album into two albums for completely inexplicable reasons.

Search has been stripped of so much power and the way it deviates from what view you're in hurts my brain so much and makes it next to impossible to do targeted metadata editing.

It crashes.

It slows down the system.

It's slow.

It's caused me to have a huge backload of music I want to put in it, but I can't bring myself to because I know it will get bungled and I'll have issues getting albums to display properly and a week later, half an album might be gone from iCloud Library/Apple Music anyways.

I never thought I'd miss the old iTunes so much.

For the record, I'm on a 2015 27" iMac with 4.0 GHz i7, 512 SSD, 32 GB ram, and the MD Radeon R9 M395X 4 GB. This should still be a pretty powerful machine, and was plenty capable of handling a bloated iTunes infinitely better than the experience with Apple Music. The software is simply hot rotting garbage.

 

[Peter_M]

If I were to guess MisterSavage, it's probably that Music handles large music libraries worse than iTunes. There's a lot of waiting for album covers to show up, during general browsing in Music, as well as searching (or using the filter, which is constantly disappearing, even though I want it to be seen permanently).

More than anything, you can tell that this program has been coded by varyingly degrees of clueless people, as obvious basic functionality is missing here - functions that any serious music listener would immediately notice missing.

 

[MisterSavage]

It's eaten a lot of my music; thank goodness for backups, but with a 40K song library, you only realize things are gone when you go looking for them, so I have no idea how big of a problem this is, and am hesitant to tinker around to find out.

This makes my blood go cold. I have backups thank goodness.

 

[Peter_M]

This makes my blood go cold. I have backups thank goodness.

Imagine having 90 000+ tracks... ?
(I've spent years and countless hours building my iTunes library, but I have several backups. Always have backups. )

 

[turbineseaplane]

Yes - like a huge portion of Apple software nowadays, it's total garbage.

 

[AgentElliot007]

This makes my blood go cold. I have backups thank goodness.

Seriously. I've been fuming so many times over this. It's bad enough that it seems to still want to lose cover art, but when you lose the files from iCloud Library and then go the distance to delete my local copy as well, and not even drop it in Trash, I lose all faith in the application. I have a lot of lossless live music that streaming apps don't have, so it really frustrates and complicates things for me when the music simply disappears. I'm also pretty sure Backblaze doesn't keep backups of files forever, so if I don't find the problems in time, I may actually completely lose a lot of music.

 

[Expos of 1969]

It is very sad how bad Apple Music is. I have 171 GB of music and over many years prior to Apple Music, I bought about $ 6,000 of albums from iTunes. I had the Match service for a while and that really messed my library up. I quit that and stuck with Apple Music. Then I tried Spotify. The dark interface is not to my liking but the Discovery and Recommendations are a million miles better than AM.

As streaming is the main listening method now, I saw no reason why I needed to stay with AM for the sake of the albums I purchased in iTunes over the years. I can listen to them all on Spotify for the same monthly cost as AM. And receive much better recommendations.

The only benefit I see to AM is that they allow me to keep 100,000 songs where Spotify still has a ridiculous 10,000 limit. However, I can work around that.

 

[Peter_M]

Seriously. I've been fuming so many times over this. It's bad enough that it seems to still want to lose cover art, but when you lose the files from iCloud Library and then go the distance to delete my local copy as well, and not even drop it in Trash, I lose all faith in the application. I have a lot of lossless live music that streaming apps don't have, so it really frustrates and complicates things for me when the music simply disappears. I'm also pretty sure Backblaze doesn't keep backups of files forever, so if I don't find the problems in time, I may actually completely lose a lot of music.

Auch, I didn't know about this. There is NO excuse for software that is randomly deleting files. I know Mail in Catalina had this issue at first, but Music also? That's disconcerting.

I also noticed that I can't search for genre in album view now. (For instance, I have a few hundred ECM albums. It's nice to be able to search for "ECM", and have those albums turn up.)

 

[MisterSavage]

Imagine having 90 000+ tracks... ?
(I've spent years and countless hours building my iTunes library, but I have several backups. Always have backups. )

Good gravy. I thought I had a huge library with over 13k.

I have a lot of lossless live music that streaming apps don't have, so it really frustrates and complicates things for me when the music simply disappears.

It's so annoying when I hear people say "just switch to a streaming service". A lot of us with huge libraries have rare, live, odd, etc tracks that aren't available to stream.

 

[turbineseaplane]

It's so annoying when I hear people say "just switch to a streaming service". A lot of us with huge libraries have rare, live, odd, etc tracks that aren't available to stream.

Absolutely spot on. Honestly, just going through and working with some mid 2000's semi-obscure Pop artists of mine the other week I found a ton of things that are either "gone" or never were on streaming to begin with perhaps.

I'm sorry, but streaming is simply no substitute for a curated library (if, like many of us in here, one cares about this).

My music library is literally a history of memories in my life and even the specific order of acquisition is critical for me. That's to the point that I add the dates of acquisition into the file names themselves so I can always sort that way anywhere and everywhere. iTunes gave me a big metadata scare on that front about 8-9 years ago so I adjusted course back then and don't count on iTunes/Music for much..

All I ask is that the Music app don't actively screw with my files and embedded data -- which is still too much to ask apparently.

 

[russell_314]

Good gravy. I thought I had a huge library with over 13k.



It's so annoying when I hear people say "just switch to a streaming service". A lot of us with huge libraries have rare, live, odd, etc tracks that aren't available to stream.

Apple probably didn't design the new music app with huge libraries in mind because people stream. The huge majority of people don't have terabytes of music. Streaming is a good compromise between pirating where the artist gets nothing but still being able to legally listen to anything you want. I wouldn't want to be the one caught with a million dollars worth of music and made an example out of ?

You might want to look into a third party music player. Back in the day I used Winamp but that's not for Mac. Perhaps someone here could recommend one or maybe create a post asking for suggestions. I bet there are still a few people around that still do it the old way.

 

[MisterSavage]

Apple probably didn't design the new music app with huge libraries in mind because people stream. The huge majority of people don't have terabytes of music. Streaming is a good compromise between pirating where the artist gets nothing but still being able to legally listen to anything you want. I wouldn't want to be the one caught with a million dollars worth of music and made an example out of ?

My huge music library isn't pirated. I bought a ton of used CD's back in the day. Also, video game soundtracks easily have over 20 tracks on each CD and can come packaged with 4 CD's. Not to mention the free music that is available legally. Nine Inch Nails recently let you download two new albums for free.

 

[harriska2]

Is VLC an option to move your iTines library to?

 

[russell_314]

My huge music library isn't pirated. I bought a ton of used CD's back in the day. Also, video game soundtracks easily have over 20 tracks on each CD and can come packaged with 4 CD's. Not to mention the free music that is available legally. Nine Inch Nails recently let you download two new albums for free.

I wasn't talking about you specifically. It's just from the old days of mp3 files many people to include myself used P2P sharing programs. I quit after seeing a guy get busted for having far less music than I had ?

 

[MisterSavage]

I wasn't talking about you specifically. It's just from the old days of mp3 files many people to include myself used P2P sharing programs. I quit after seeing a guy get busted for having far less music than I had ?

Oh for sure back in the day people were downloading mp3's like crazy!

 

[iAssimilated]

All my music in iTunes is simply backups of my CD collection. I have to admit that Music is the primary reason I have been hesitant to switch to Catalina. I listen to my music almost daily with iTunes/Homepods and do not want anything to mess with this arrangement. Sad to hear Music isn't getting any better

 

[oakrrl]

Very helpful to know this. I don't like Music but at least it hasn't eaten any of my files (I think). Given the reports here of deletions, though, I'm going to hang on to the old CDs I have in my garage. I put them onto my Mac a long time ago, have thought of donating them - seems maybe I better keep them.
One observation: I also have old and rare CDs (and some digitizations from LPs) which I treasure, but I've been surprised how much I enjoy streaming Apple Music - gives me a chance to sample many artists I wouldn't otherwise. My main complaint is how poorly AM handles classical music...and it doesn't play nicely with classical music streaming services like Primephonic or Naxos

 

[Peter_M]

Well, I bought a huge number of CDs in my time, and I've built upon that for several reasons. I teach music history (among other classes), and having a large music library of the best recordings and albums in various genres is very important to me. I have a fairly diverse taste in music, and own a large number of albums that are not available on either Spotify or Apple Music.

To be fair against Apple, I notice that scrolling through my library in albums view seems much quicker today, compared to yesterday (though several hours after the albums were imported). My other criticisms still stands though.

 

[lfaa]

I only have 200Gb of music - about 500 albums - but from my beginning with Apple (in 2010) I never put my music in the either iTunes or Music directory. I have all my mp3 or aiff files in a separate folder. And when I rip a CD it goes in the iTunes/Music Media dir, but I move it out to my 'secure' directory, and detele it from the Media directory (it requires to add it again to my library - takes a few sec to do it). I also always had unchecked the iTunes/Music options in the preferences, to prevent iTunes/Music to automatically feeds its Media folder etc. My iTunes/Music folders are consequently quite small (77 and 3Mb respectively). I had no issues with the album art etc when switching to Music with Catalina. I don't know if it makes sense. And if it's thanks to that way I managed my musical library from the beginning that I had no bugs with my music with Catalina and Music. Music still has (almost unacceptable) missing features compared to iTunes, but OK I hope this software will improve a bit in the next updates... One missing feature: controling the volume with 2 fingers on the trackpad, as I did with iTunes...