Music - Missing Features, Bugs, Issues & Troubleshooting

[canyelles]

After reverting back to Mojave, I am now on Catalina for good 🤪.

How can I pick two ore more albums at the same time in the album view? I used the alt key and the arrow keys before. In Catalina it doesn’t seem to work anymore. Many thanks.

Hold down the command button and click the albums you want

 

[tkermit]

Opening a whole new view for each album, and then kicking you back to the top of the album list when you back out again, is beyond annoying. I can sort of understand the inline album view being pushed back to the next version to release in time for Catalina, but kicking you to the top of each list is just too much.

The Music app is completely useless for random browsing through albums, when you're trying to find some song to play or want to build a playlist with songs from multiple albums.

Really disappointing considering Apple once again managed to needlessly make things worse by trying to "improve" one of their products.

 

[vddobrev]

How do you report an issue with Music App when it is not in the list of apps on the Apple feedback site?

 

[Nacho98]

Just curious - I just updated from Mojave to Catalina, and surprisingly my Music transferred over flawlessly.

I did see one thing that surprised me though - in the user folder, then in the Music folder, there is a Music folder and an iTunes folder, and lots of stuff in the iTunes folder.

I realize Catalina took a bunch of iTunes stuff in order for that transfer to happen, but I guess I was not expecting ANY references/folders/etc. to iTunes once we moved off it? Guess I figured if nothing else they would've renamed all those iTunes files and folders to be replaced with Music naming instead.

 

[Nacho98]

.

 

[Boatguy]

Rumor is that the column browser is back in 15.2.

 

[ErikGrim]

Rumor is that the column browser is back in 15.2.

It is as we have already noted.

 

[Freis968]

How do you access the column browser? I don't see anyway to enable it.

 

[ErikGrim]

How do you access the column browser? I don't see anyway to enable it.

Cmd-B or from the View Menu. There's a screenshot in the wiki post. Also you need to be on the Catalina beta.

 

[lars666]

Do I experience this correctly that typing mixed fragments of the song title and the artist (for example) doesn't lead to a result anymore and that you now have to precisely only type one, the song/artist name OR artist name, but no combinations of any kind anymore to find what you are searching for? Man, that sucks ... If I remember correctly, Steve Jobs even mentioned sometimes in the past that this was his "vision" of a perfect search function in iTunes – that you can type mixed fragments of whatever it contains – song title, artist name, album title – and it will show up ...

The new music app sucks so badly on so many levels, it hurts.

 

[Nacho98]

i mean i can do everything i want manually...except delete playlists off devices. wtf? where is this functionality? i can do that from an iphone itself, but not an ipod classic. so i basically have to delete every song off the ipod and reload everything and all playlists just to add one new song?

 

[Burningtime]

I cannot for the life of me find out how to manually drag music from my Music app on my iMac onto my phone. This is driving me insane.

For some bizarre reason, I can drag music onto the sidebar and create a playlist and then drag the playlist from the sidebar up onto my plugged in iPhone and it will sync.

But trying to just drag a single album onto my phone? Nope. Nothing seems to work.

Any help is really appreciated!

 

[azzaer3]

The Album View and back button setup is super annoying – I can't view albums in place, they open up in a new view. And when I hit the back button to resume looking at individual albums, it jumps me right back to the beginning of the list view, completely losing my place. Bug or thoughtless UX?


And why is the grid view in Music centered now and doesn't fill the panel with albums, as before? It looks kinda nice but I also miss being able to see more album covers at once and not have all this empty space

 

[Nacho98]

Lost all album art manually transferring libraries from one MBP running Catalina to a brand new MBP running a clean install of Catalina.

Album art is totally 100% fine in the old MBP, but not one album shows up in the album view or playlist on the new one.

But if you click on a song and click Get Info, MOST artwork is in there (some got lost completely though).

I'm at a complete loss how to fix this, or what went wrong considering this was a manual copy of an existing flawless library.

 

[Nacho98]

I've still got a whole load of albums that aren't showing artwork that was (and still is) embedded in the files. My computer crashed while it was initially importing the library. Does anyone have any suggestions? Can you rebuild the artwork database, or force Music to reload from individual files?

Did you ever get this sorted? See my post directly above.

I know that I can option click upon opening and point Music to an old iTunes library instead of the Music library. This works pretty well and brings in the artwork, but there are two reasons I can't use this:

1) I made extensive library updates (song tags/album art/etc) AFTER updating my old machine to Catalina in an effort to get everythig updated to Catalina and then cleaned up before what should've been a flawless transfer to the new machine.
2) I shouldn't have to point Music to an iTunes library when the whole point of the Music library is to get away from iTunes.

Because of these reasons, I MUST get the Catalina Music library to work as the iTunes one is horribly outdated and regressive now.

Also, my machine never processes artwork but for 30-60 seconds, then stops, and no artwork appears. Not like others here who have artwork process slowly but eventually show up.

 

[Freis968]

I cannot for the life of me find out how to manually drag music from my Music app on my iMac onto my phone. This is driving me insane.

For some bizarre reason, I can drag music onto the sidebar and create a playlist and then drag the playlist from the sidebar up onto my plugged in iPhone and it will sync.

But trying to just drag a single album onto my phone? Nope. Nothing seems to work.

Any help is really appreciated!

Yes, I am having the same issue and this is just some STUPID thing Apple did apparently to just piss everyone off or someone overlooked it. Hopefully, they will fix this idiocy!

 

[Sowelu]

I am still trying to understand what Apple's goal was by splitting up iTunes into 3 other apps. At first we all thought this was going to be a leaner faster iTunes, but the new Music app has that same heaviness to it, and is missing many features of the app it replaces. A few big steps back. It looks like it's going to take many updates for the Music app to get some of the lost functionality back.

Also, they should have kept 'iTunes' as the spun off music app name. iTunes would represent all non-streaming and streaming music available from Apple as they are all tunes. Not only is it an iconic brand name, but it can also help differentiate between Apple Music the service, the store, and the iOS and macOS apps. When everything is named 'Apple Music', searching for help for any app or service that bears that name gets a bit muddy.

 

[lars666]

I am still trying to understand what Apple's goal was by splitting up iTunes into 3 other apps. At first we all thought this was going to be a leaner faster iTunes, but the new Music app has that same heaviness to it, and is missing many features of the app it replaces. A few big steps back. It looks like it's going to take many updates for the Music app to get some of the lost functionality back.

I still can't get over how sluggish, slow and buggy the new "leaner" Music app is (at least for me). This is the very first time Apple really gets me in trouble with one of their app updates – it simply is unusable for me and I'll not be able to take care for my music collection anymore like this. Praying for every new update which will make this first "Music" iteration more responsive again and re-adds the most important functions like search bar automatically shown in every playlist, marking more than one album at once (doesn't work anymore for me!) etc.

 

[Burningtime]

Yes, I am having the same issue and this is just some STUPID thing Apple did apparently to just piss everyone off or someone overlooked it. Hopefully, they will fix this idiocy!

This is even more confusing as now I can manually drag my music onto my iPhone but when I import new music from my backup drive to the App, it won't let me drag those songs to the iPhone. This is annoying and confusing to say the least. I really hope they fix this and the other problems Music seems to have as soon as they can.

 

[emikaadeo]

Is there a way to stop Music from downloading Artist artwork in Artist pane?
I've unchecked this option in app settings but it's still downloading.
My goal is to display default icon - not the silly pictures

 

[jacg]

Here's where you have your say about Music. Not impressed so far. Album navigation is horrible and not Remote app functionality.

https://www.apple.com/feedback/apple-music.html

(I got this address by guessing after 'sharing a concern' in Podcasts - another UI that removes useful functionality.)

 

[mbert]

On iTunes I used to export playlists as m3u files so that I could keep my (Android) phone's playlists in sync. There doesn't seem to be an export function for playlists on 'Music'. Any workarounds?

 

[jagan]

I'm glad column browser is back.
I'm still on High Sierra, but when I "one day" update to a post-Catalina release, if Music still is buggy, I might start using this ($24.95) app:

Swinsian

I haven't used it that much (iTunes is still standard), but it seems like a solid option (with a column browser).

 

[jlgg]

I'm glad column browser is back.
I'm still on High Sierra, but when I "one day" update to a post-Catalina release, if Music still is buggy, I might start using this ($24.95) app:

Swinsian

I haven't used it that much (iTunes is still standard), but it seems like a solid option (with a column browser).

I was looking at Swinsian myself. The deal breaker for me was the lack of any remote app. I contacted the developer and received a very prompt reply, but sadly no remote app is planned. For the present, I am staying with Mojave and iTunes. If anyone finds a comparable application which does allow for remote control, I'd be grateful to hear about it.

 

[macrlz9]

I updated the wiki post. If anyone has any suggestions or work arounds...

• No way to import a video file and change the 'media kind' to 'Music Video'. Videos can be imported to the TV app but only have options for "Movie" "Home Video", or "TV Show". Existing Music Videos prior to the Catalina upgrade are in the Music app.

Nevermind, it seems videos imported into the Music app automatically get tagged as Music Video. I guess I'm still getting used to navigating the new app.