By Joe Rosensteel
February 21, 2023 2:00 PM PT
Music to no one’s ears
Look, I’ve been hoping that at some point, the rocky transition from iTunes to the Music app would be over and we’d all look back on it and say, “Wow, I can’t believe that was so brief.” But it isn’t over. Here I am, in the year 2023, and I have the same problems using the app that I’ve had for about half a decade at this point. And yes, many of these problems are tied to changes made for the Apple Music service.
When launching the Music app on macOS, you always start off at the Listen Now section of the app. It doesn’t matter what I was previously listening to in the app—that information has been lost to the sands of time. I can’t resume playback of anything I was listening to on this device, or any other. Anything I was looking at in the interface is wiped away too. I can, instead, see the four things that Apple thinks I want immediate access to. Those are “Joseph Rosensteel’s Station” in Apple Music, a new EP from Mariah Carey (sorry, Mariah, this is not one thing I need), the opportunity to revisit Beyonce’s Super Bowl performance, and the new album from Orbital (I know, we’re all surprised they’re still releasing albums, but I listened to this several weeks ago so it’s not new to me at this point).
What’s so bad about that, Joe? Well, the “station” Apple Music compiles for me—and, anecdotally, every Apple Music user I’ve spoken with—is trash. A churning abyss of things I’ve tangentially listened to that spans every genre, tempo, style, etc. Listening to it is unlike listening to a radio station; it’s more like an angry jukebox out to shuffle in some random thing and kill whatever vibe you had from the previous song. As a rule I don’t bother even listening to it, so for it to always be the number one thing here is ridiculous.
Surely, the section under it, Recently Played, is exactly what I want? No, I want what I was last listening to, where I was last listening to it, tied directly to the play button. Recently Played only provides the entire song, album, or playlist I was listening to from its start.
If I scroll down, I get more recommendations. It’s good that they’re further down, because if I’m not in the mood, I can just stop scrolling, but that first chunk of the interface is irritating because I want to resume what I was listening to. Even if I quit and reopen the app instantly, it all resets.
Let’s say I start listening to Flowering Jungle by Monster Rally on my Mac, but I realize that I need to go downstairs. There’s no way to transfer where I currently am in my Mac’s Music app to my iPhone’s Music app. My iPhone says “Not Playing”, so it has no playback history of its own to even resume from at this moment. Instead, the iPhone’s Music app presents me with the same Listen Now options, where I can go to Recently Played, navigate into the album, and pick the song, and then offset the time to match roughly where I was on my Mac. Convenient!
If only there was some way to do, oh I don’t know, let’s call it a hand-off between the two devices that are both made by the same company, running software by the same company, and using the same music service that knows exactly what I am streaming from it. Something with a little continuity. What a concept.
But I still haven’t found what I’m looking for
The other thing that’s really irked me is searching, which is usually the other thing I want to do when I open the Music app, if I’m not resuming what I was previously listening to.
The search field in macOS used to have a little toggle at the top that let you choose whether it was finding results in your library or Apple Music. That’s moved to the browse page and the search results page, which changes the behavior of the search text field, even though those buttons are not even in the same ZIP code. For a while I thought they’d just removed the library search, but it’s still there…if you want to do more work to use it.
You can also search in Apple Music and then go to your library version of an album or song by right-clicking on the tracks and picking “Show Album in Library” which also does a neat thing where you can see that whatever they use to style the album interface is different between the two for no good reason at all.
If you want your own version of the album and isn’t exactly what Apple Music has, then you must use the toggle in the browse interface before searching. I have a version of the Tron: Legacy soundtrack that I bought from Amazon because it had an exclusive track. It’s in my library and I can manually navigate to it, but I can’t use Apple’s search to get to it at all, only the versions of the album in Apple Music. Doesn’t seem like a huge deal, right? Well at some point I “loved” a track in Apple Music from this album, and now I have a version of the Tron: Legacy soundtrack in my library that has one track in it.*
Look at the stars, look how they shine for you
Speaking of “loving” music, some of us prefer a more nuanced system for rating music. Sure, five stars is overkill and most people are either ranking their music either zero stars or five stars, but there are those of us with a rating system that we’d like to keep using because we were using it already. Even though the stars have been eradicated from the interface, you can still right-click on a track to see its star rating metadata or to even to rate it. Like when you go two levels deep in Windows’ Settings and you get that Windows 95-looking dialog about a network adapter—that’s where your stars are buried.
Some of my albums have had their star ratings wiped out, which I can only assume is from some iCloud Library sync issue at some point in the last eight years, so it’s no longer something I can reliably use or invest additional time in. It does, however, drive some of the features I like to use, like Smart Playlists.
What, you’ve never heard of Smart Playlists? Gather ’round, kids and let me regale you with how they work: They’re basically saved searches that filter your music library by the file metadata, and they’re super neat. Unfortunately, having a library is kind of the enemy of using a music streaming service. Apple would much rather you use stations or their human-curated playlists, but I don’t like to rely on those because at any point the human-curated playlist could be changed by a human who isn’t me. It’s not versionable and it’s not mine—it’s the service’s.
C’est la vie! I can make my peace with Apple product managers who the stars made sad, but not so much with the slow erosion via data loss of something that I use to play the music I want.
You’re getting closer to pushing me off of life’s little edge
As a long time user of iTunes, and now the Music app, I’m at a loss for why all of this is so bad, other than that Apple makes too much money to care. Why is this a streaming-first experience that is executed like a standalone music player? Why does my library even exist if I’m not really supposed to use it?
There are a thousand other things I could needle Apple Music product managers about, but let’s just start with playing what I want. A high bar.
[Joe Rosensteel is a VFX artist, writer, and co-host of the Defocused and Unhelpful Suggestions podcasts.]