For about 10 years I’ve considered Windows iTunes to be malware. Music playback w/ apples own apps on MacOS has been bad ever since Apple got into the music business…. Sigh, if only the Beatles estate had won that lawsuit over the use of the ‘Apple’ brand for music…
Services and operating systems should just be separate things. They can (and should) be able to work together, but pre-installing AppleTV+ on my Macbook and Candy Crush on my Windows machine are both stepping over the line. iTunes/Apple Music is definitely the perfect example of this, going from "slick Winamp upgrade" to "Apple Music sales vector" over the course of 20 years.
It's reasons like this why I advocate for Apple to separate their hardware and software. It's fine if they want to integrate their first-party offerings, but gluing them to the OS makes me uncomfortable. I don't trust Apple to not degrade my user experience anymore, unfortunately.
Isn’t integrating services with the OS the whole point of Android for Google?
They aren’t licensing technology to handset vendors, they just are keeping the numerically larger but profitability smaller sector of the smartphone business safe for advertising.
Not necessarily. Google is certainly just as complicit as Apple in pushing their services, but you can still use Android and even Pixel hardware without Google (or with anti-Google mitigations). This mostly comes down to the openness of the AOSP and availability of unlocked hardware, which luckily for Google is not that attractive on either count.
So, I'd say that Google is to Android what Canonical is to Ubuntu. Both are developing "open" products that technically qualify as Free software, but use their services to lock people into convenient but exploitative agreements. They're bad, but using Android without Google is much easier than using an iPhone without Apple.
I recall beyond the usability issues (who wants a big stupid MP3 player? Not me.), iTunes when you uninstalled it left a bunch of stuff behind on the system. I'm not talking just odd files here and there, I'm talking entire sets of running services you have to remove from ARP or otherwise nuke. Bonjour was one that comes to mind, but there was more I can't recall offhand.
Apple Music got considerably worse from early 2020 to 2022. I was impressed by the features, search by lyrics, promise of personalized recommendation, things were pretty smooth, but cracks started to show.
- issue with being repeatedly slammed to reauthenticate
- bizarre iTunes integration
- won't play nice with sleep-locked Windows laptop
- random features ripped out of the PWA, like "Artist Radio" (presumably an attempt to protect their recommendations from adversarial scrapers)
The last straw was I "got auth booted, playback cutoff, buy a family plan" at midnight NYE, left an angry ticket. Next week, ticket closed, final cheeky de-auth. I immediately canceled, and can't say I've had any reason to consider returning.
I have a ~100 item Notes file of stuff like this that I experience regularly on iOS and macOS. It's optimistically a list of Radars I would file should I ever work at Apple again, but I'm fully aware that 95% of Radars like these go nowhere so it's more realistically just a space to vent.
A few of the really bad ones are Radars I filed years ago that went nowhere and still annoy me to this day (top prize probably goes to FaceTime audio ducking).
What are radars? Is that the internal name Apple uses for bug reports? And more importantly, why would Apple ignore radars like this? It was clear (at least in the 10.8 days) that Apple cared about reliability and stability.
> Is that the internal name Apple uses for bug reports?
Yes, but also all other types of progress tracking.
> why would Apple ignore radars like this?
The only Radars I've filed to other teams that actually got any traction are clear-cut bugs with a simple repro that don't require any UI/design changes to fix. Without a repro & sysdiagnose the engineers will likely never even read through the whole bug report before discarding it.
In general my view is that a lot of Apple engineers are stretched pretty thin and don't really have time to work on that kind of stuff with the pretty quick pace that a yearly OS release schedule imposes on them (supporting redesigns, new UIs, new hardware). If a bug is caught immediately it's considered a regression and there's a higher chance it'll get fixed, but issues that are around for >1 year without being flagged back to the engineers responsible are unlikely to ever be prioritized.
The most unlikely "bugs" to ever get fixed are design issues that aren't really considered bugs in the first place, like the FaceTime audio ducking issue I mentioned above. For reference, when you're on a FaceTime call the OS (both iOS and macOS) will heavily dampen all other audio to the point where it's pretty unintelligible even at 100% volume. There's no way to fix it because it's Working as Intended(TM) and the Apple designer knows what customers want more than you, the other engineers, or the customers themselves. It's been around for years and has had dozens of Radars filed internally and externally but no progress has been made.
I echo this - I bought an apple watch but ended up returning it because it was so hard to reliably do basic tasks like connecting your AirPods and listening to a podcast. It would work fine ~80% of the time but sometimes it just wouldn't work at all and there's no clear fix other than resetting everything which is super annoying. Apple support was also completely useless. The apple watch hardware is amazing but the software was such a letdown.
Yeah it was definitely cool when it was working, but having it not work 1 out of every 10 times was getting frustrating. I ended up returning it. The Apple Watch for me was always a nice-to-have, not a must-have, so returning it was an easy decision.
That's the new Pixel fingerprint reader experience.
They buried it under the screen (why? who gave a shit?) so they can make it (generously) 70% reliable instead of the 99.99% reliable reader they had on the back.
Sync'ing from laptop to devices, via anything but iCloud, has gotten so much worse than it used to be. It used to be pretty good -- for it's time anyway.
The ecology just isn't built for actual owned media anymore. And so many people have only a phone now, so no reason to try to sync.
I think this is probably true on Android too.
I don't know about the Watch, or what the documented ways are to get media files on it.
But for iPhone, I think there are probably better ways than Apple Music, even for audio files. That's just not what Apple Music is about anymore, it's mostly about purchased music.
> so many people have only a phone now, so no reason to try to sync.
Wait until the AR glasses come out. I pretty much guarantee that media syncing will be a huge deal, and Apple had better get their iCloud act together by then.
iCloud is a shambles; and I say this as an Apple user for more than thirty years, and has pegged his career to Apple.
It regularly deletes music without warning -especially if I import it from CDs (that’s still a thing, for us boomers. I have even recorded vinyl records), and also regularly restores music that I delete.
I have also had it do that thing, where my (non-DRMed) song, recorded from a CD, is replaced by the DRMed “radio edit” version of the song, from Apple Music.
That’s fun.
Whether or not the sync actually happens, or if the song stays on the original device, seems to be a crapshoot.
Safari bookmark syncing is … not good. It rearranges bookmarks, refuses to delete some, refuses to sync certain ones, according to some internal algorithm. Etc.
We've seen this before, it's a bit like the "no outside food or drink" policy at the movie theater. Apple (and Google, Microsoft, et. al) want to stop you from using your media so you're funneled into buying theirs. If people can easily play local files, it diminishes the value of a streaming/music management tool. Probably explains why Groove Music and Play Music failed, while Apple Music still has a surprisingly devout userbase.
This is one of those things that will hopefully be opened up with more standardization. There's nobody to blame but ourselves for not enforcing this earlier, and hopefully in the future opening an MP3 file won't be harder than it was in 2005.
I spent good money for a ScanDisk double-pronged device (and app) to get around this problem. It does and doesn't work - I have to have it plugged into the iphone to hear my music that I didn't buy on the itunes store. Now I'm paused, not buying more music until the govt steps in. All my digital purchases were from itunes over many years; but that was before I owned any Apple devices, and so everything could work smoothly together.
I don’t think it’s really so much the hardware and software vendors as it is the music industry — and their very powerful lobbyists and lawyers. The tech companies have to play along with what the music industry wants — if they don’t, then they don’t get to have the top artists on their platform — and THAT is why Zune/Groove Music failed, not anyting tech related.
re: Android, I have syncthing running on a windows, Linux and android phone. I make a change in from my desktop PC and it nearly immediately replicates the changes on my other devices whether I'm on my home network, at work or abroad. works really well.
+1 for this. Not exactly a setup for the average Joe, but if you know your network/filesystem topology and have compatible devices, Syncthing is nothing short of a godsend.
I don't know, I can plug my android phone into my computer and tell it to pop up as a drive and drag and drop files from Nautilus... (or I can use Google Drive or SFTP...).
Eh - it's not really the same. Android certainly still mostly pushes you at cloud based services (ex: Youtube Music/Amazon Music/Spotify/ETC)
But there's not really a "Standard" music player for the ecosystem, so the expectation is that you pick a 3rd party app you like and use that. And for the vast majority of those - the simple "you have a filesystem - play files from it" approach works just fine (ex: I use VLC for local content, and JellyFin for self-hosted music).
Personally - having my library hosted on my own JellyFin server is basically miles better than anything else I've found (And using either the native app or a specific music client for jellyfin).
The downside is the cost of entry is much higher, and it takes more time and effort to get setup the first time.
Also - your results will vary a lot more depending on which app you pick, and what features that company supports.
So... the experience defaults to something that's more complicated and less featurefull but can be significantly better than that available via iMusic/iCloud at the end of the day.
Android in the past was surprisingly terrible at copying data to/from PCs. Anyone saying it works great is using some third-party tool that requires extra setup, or they aren't syncing a lot of stuff (media libraries, and iTunes used to also sync email accounts and some other settings). Aside from the lack of a proper syncing tool like iTunes, the basic Android File Transfer was super unreliable, often failing randomly mid-transfer. In some cases, you even had to enable it with a secret combo like "go to settings and tap the model name exactly 7 times," which was seriously how you did it on some Galaxy phones.
Android was always focused on cloud stuff, which makes sense given that their biggest markets are places where most people don't have PCs, plus Google wants that halo effect from Android. I appreciated that iPhones were designed for my PC too. But iPhones were generally bad at copying any other data ad-hoc. They added AirDrop specifically for this, and... Like 90% of the time I don't see my other device, or the transfer fails. I don't even bother anymore.
> They added AirDrop specifically for this, and... Like 90% of the time I don't see my other device, or the transfer fails. I don't even bother anymore.
Oh god! This bugs me so much. I don't understand why it's so hard to get this right. I'm sure it is, but why?
I know that if one of my devices switches from our 5GHz to our 2.4GHz network this can happen, but even when they're on the same network, it happens sometimes. (And why do my devices keep trying to force themselves off of the 5GHz network? WTF?)
And I get that it's called "Airdrop", but I'd really like it to work over ethernet, too, since that's a lot faster!
I read that AirDrop uses Bluetooth to make machines handshake then transfers the actual data over a p2p wifi network. But I vaguely remember it also working over existing networks, even with ethernet, which may have been in an older version. Either way, it's complicated and thus unreliable. I'm guessing Bluetooth is the weakest link there, cause I have a hard time even pairing speakers with that crap.
Unfortunately, it is also true for android. Especially with the google drive "audit" requirement for software to access your files in google drive, it's actually much worse than iOS.
> iTunes used to be if not the, then certainly a flagship app for Apple.
I have used iTunes off and on for around two decades and it has never been a great or even mediocre experience. It was always bad. The author is fondly remembering a time which might never have existed.
For me, iTunes was quite good on Mac. It's the Windows experience that has always been an afterthought, for example: why is there not an option to turn off "black out other monitors when going full-screen on a movie"?
I didn't even mind it on Windows, honestly. The installation process was convoluted and it was a bit resource-heavy to run, but I liked it more than Winamp and Windows Media Player at the time. It was a flawed port, but still nice to use.
> why is there not an option to turn off "black out other monitors when going full-screen on a movie"?
Here was my train of thought on reading that:
Who voluntarily uses iTunes?
Who voluntarily uses iTunes on Windows?
Can you watch movies in iTunes on Windows?
Why would you ever want to do that?
Blacking out other monitors on full-screen? That's a pretty novel idea, I've never seen that before. Apple would never implement such a cool feature on a competing platform.
for those that "deify" Steve Jobs, please recall the day that Jobs Apple CEO personally visited the tiny office of Audion developers, and told them "you have no chance" of marketing their fun and well-designed Mac native application.. as part of the iTunes rollout, backdrop anti-trust on MSFT over media tools.
He also promised to open source the tech behind Facetime, presumably because he could see it would create a rift in society. Now, Tim Cook dances on that rift.
iTunes was set up to organize and listen to a music collection instead of just showing a table of music files. That was a pretty good experience and I don’t know of any other app that does that even today.
I have used iTunes — consistently — for around two decades, and while I agree that iTunes was mediocre, Music app is soooooo much worse. It's total crap. Embarrassingly bad. I would happily trade Music app to get iTunes back again.
I’ve been using Music (previously iTunes) since it was called SoundJam MP. It’s always been fine for me. It’s had some issues here and there but nothing that would ever get me to describe it as “bad.”
Why do you think it’s bad? I’ve heard others say the same but I’ve never heard a general (as opposed to esoteric) reason.
I thought it was pretty great around roughly 2004-2015.
What won me over compared to Winamp was iTunes' smart playlists. I'm actually surprised they haven't borked, neutered, or removed that feature. It's still the same and it's still good.
It did a lot of other things right too. It was convenient to edit metadata for multiple files. CD ripping was painless and used a high quality mp3 encoder at a time when that was not a given. In general, it was one of those apps that just behaved logically to me and rarely if ever surprised me in a bad way.
When iTunes introduced "iTunes in the cloud" or whatever it was called -- the ability to have your files mirrored in the cloud -- I was more or less in heaven for a while. I had a few moans and niggles but nothing much.
I actively kind of hate it now though. Too many media types (with different paradigms) crammed into one app. The result is a mess. Not sure it could be any other way.
I instantly gave up on iTunes around 2006 or so when I spent three weeks ripping music from CD into my own file system, imported it into iTunes (because let's see what happens...) and it utterly and spectacularly trashed everything.
I haven't used it since. (Although it still starts automatically when I try to rip a CD using XLD.)
Now I use VLC for music on my phone and Vox on MacOS. Both are imperfect. FLAC isn't gapless in VLC, and Vox keeps trying to sell me things. But they work well enough to get some semblance of the job done.
The real problem is the conflict between utility and consumption. iTunes/Music were never there to conveniently manage and play audio (utility), but to lock users into a consumption silo. So importing and playing music from external sources has never been a design goal.
Vox has some similar issues, but isn't quite as bad. VLC is more of a utility app, which makes it more useful. (I suspect it has no problem playing an MP4 audio playlist.)
> How can such basic functionality be this incredibly broken?
That's what I'm thinking almost every day when working with Apple devices. There is so, so much basic stuff broken on both macOS and iOS. I truly miss the days where Apple devices were a reliable tool, even a source of inspiration.
I'm glad to hear others experiences match my own. Sometimes when some bizarre behavior manifests I can never quite tell if I'm the bozo who did something silly and tickled some feature unbeknownst to me or if the device did something truly unexpected and buggy. You'll probably get a kick out of this characterization I made recently in another post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34157476.
Another characterization I've made is that Apple is a primarily a hardware company, they don't have the software chops and are scrambling to try to backfill that skillset. They overly reward the bright and shiny but eventually the inability to tame complexity will be their downfall.
Wait until he tries to search for this file. The main "Search" field use to just filter music based on the string. But since iTunes became Music, it now shows an auto-curated screen of crap you don't want.
...and the old search is moved to Songs -> (upper right) "Show filter field". They even change the shortcut key, which is the worst part imo.
Thank you SO much for posting this- I have been missing that feature very badly, and had _no_ idea that it was still there in any form. Having it back makes using Music.app about a thousand times more tolerable!
I would say this is no longer basic functionality. Personal music collections were huge in the mp3 era, but today few people care about moving music between devices.
Further if you think of the complexity involved, streaming is a more “basic” task, than navigating file formats, transfer protocols, DRM, disc storage, library metadata, and more.
It’s basic in the sense that it’s conceptually trivial from the user’s point of view and therefore should just work, and not break in non-intelligible ways, given that the functionality has been made available at all. Users shouldn’t have to carefully navigate their use cases based on what the majority use cases might be.
A more general point is that software should establish a clear conceptual model of the things it allows to manipulate (music files, tracks, playlists, …), and all basic operations on that (insert, move, remove, reorder, rename, syncing between two devices, …) should be straightforward, orthogonal, and just work. Only having specific workflows available/functioning requires the user to memorize those specific workflows, instead of being able to reason about what they can do based on the conceptual model.
Ironic that the iPod was all about using that basic functionality they've since removed and now pretend never existed. Many people LOVED that basic functionality.
The hardware is still incredibly reliable and astoundingly performant. The rate at which they're capable of delivering them to the store and your doorstep is too. Per number of devices sold, it's crazy that they encounter as few issues as they do. Yeah, they've had some real 'Oops' moments, but on the whole it's crazy good.
As for software? Yeah, it's really, really bad. :( I think Apple has forgotten how to do software.
They know how to do software that makes money. They don’t know how to enable their users. They stopped building bicycles for the mind and started building dump trucks for cash.
Yeah I got an iPhone for Christmas. I never thought Android was great but it's what I've used since I first had a smartphone.
It's hard for me to figure anything out on the iPhone. Nothing seems obvious or discoverable beyond the basic "tap an app tile to open it." Some of that is just differences from Android but the various gestures and the way settings are scattered all over the place just seems almost arbitrary. Maybe there is a rhyme and reason but I feel that if I wanted to learn that I'd need to sit down through a tutorial.
I once worked with a product manager who said "if users need training, you've failed" this was in the context of a consumer-oriented website but it seems to be a lesson lost on Apple.
What you're used to matters unless you're willing to put in some effort to learn the differences. I used (and developed for both) iPhones for years, then Android, then back to iPhone. During my Android time I got my wife an Android phone to use, and she tried for a couple days then said basically what you said. She had no idea how anything worked, and if she did take the time to figure it out, what is she really gaining over her iPhone? I returned her Android phone.
At this point there is so little difference in phones (particularly the flagships) for the average person, they should just pick what they like/are used to, and move on with their life.
A large part of the problem is that most of the touch device UI is “discoverable.” There is no indication-or reason to believe—that a long press might do something different than a tap, or that a swipe might reveal an option (or that a swipe in the other direction will reveal a different option), etc etc. it is all extremely opaque, not entirely consistent between applications, and completely different between OSes.
> That's what I'm thinking almost every day when working with Apple devices. There is so, so much basic stuff broken on both macOS and iOS. I truly miss the days where Apple devices were a reliable tool, even a source of inspiration.
With all due respect, whenever these days were, I suspect people were saying the same thing then because people have a tendency to romanticize the past no matter what year it is.
As annoying as some of this stuff is, i've found Android/Windows/Linux to be as broken in this regard. The last time I tried transferring photos/videos from my Android to a PC, it transferred at ~5-10MBps over a USB 3 connection because of limitations with MTP. So these phones can record in 4K@60FPS, have 256/512GB of storage but 5-10MBps transfer speeds.. and there is no easy way to get around this limit..
Any sort of syncing between PCs/mobile devices is universally neglected in favour of the cloud now. Why invest in syncing when they could charge you for cloud storage instead?
> and there is no easy way to get around this limit..
I mean, Apple could just add a better physical connection to the iPhone. Either the USB3-speed Lightning port they used twice on a few iPads, USB3.x over USB-C, or even the brilliant Thunderbolt standard they helped make nearly a decade ago. But... the iPhone's physical transfer speeds are still stuck in 2001. It's genuinely an unbelievably amount of negligence for a company that directly profits off of cloud customers.
Using the USB-C connector doesn't guarantee high speed connectivity. Technically that connector can fall all the way back to USB 1 speeds. Hopefully we'll see higher speeds, but Apple never put their higher speed Lightning ports on the phone, so who knows.
The EU did nothing. When Apple moved away from the 30 pin connector to the lightning connector they promised they'd keep it for a minimum of 10 years since so many people were howling about the change. That was 2014. Guess what? It looks like Apple will be adopting USB-C in 2024, thus fulfilling their 10 year promise. Meanwhile, since 2014, Apple has been adopting USB-C across their entire product line - except the iPhone which they had promised they wouldn't do.
So, let's end the farcical statement that the EU stood up to Big, Bad, Apple. The EU did nothing.
The EU is telling Apple that the iPhone may no longer use connectors that they license themselves. Apple can do whatever they want in 2024, but if they want to sell phones in Europe then the iPhone will ship with a more agreed-upon connection standard.
If Apple still wants to use a superior in-house technology, they can implement Thunderbolt on iPhone.
That ars article was published after the regulatory ball was rolling. The fact that iPads and Macbooks have already switched to USB-C is part of the mounting frustration surrounding Lightning - plus the fact that Lightning was redundant and licensed by Apple.
We need regulators to do this so Apple doesn't change their mind and make "Lightning 2". Even if Apple did have a full USB-C switch on their roadmap, every company in FAANG needs a healthy fear of regulators. Europe cracking down on the App Store and Apple's silly proprietary cables are the start of this, and a fantastic first turnout so far.
In 2014 Apple said they would use the Lightning adapter for at least 10 years. Meanwhile they've adopted USB-C across their product line. Apple famously never announces future product plans but I think it's pretty easy to read the tea leaves with regards to what they were going to do.
Well, now there are no tea leaves to read. If Apple doesn't want to be transparent or work with their community, these are the kinds of laws we'll be forced to pass. They have to be responsible with their power, as the single largest private company in the world. We have to hold them accountable.
> Why invest in syncing when they could charge you for cloud storage instead?
Bingo. I started seeing this everywhere I looked and it made me furious. Everything, in small ways, seems to sabotage the user trying to control their things. Eventually, and at scale, they win. It's fatiguing to constantly be fighting these toys.
> These are sent via WhatsApp so the audio recordings are mp4 files, which for some bizarre reason won't open in Music and instead open in QuickTime Player, despite definitely being audio files.
.mp4 being associated with a video player seems reasonable, since it's almost always used for video. (I think the only difference between .mp4 and .m4a is the extension? It's just serving as a signal about which app should open it, really.)
> Create a new playlist, transfer some previous songs over, then try to drop the new m4a's onto the open playlist. No go. Play around for a while, figure out that the entity that accepts the drops is the TableView, not the surrounding view. So you can't drop the new files into the empty space below the songs, you have to drop them onto the existing songs.
Interestingly, this is the user winding up on the single most fiddly path because it's what felt intuitive to them. In pretty much any Music library view but the playlist view, dragging a file into the window is all you need to do. They unfortunately picked the single view where it's focused on letting you rearrange the tracks.
I'd suspect that the Music app's workflow is built around "I want to add this to my music library", whereas the author's mental model was more around "I need a list of files so they get transferred". Which are similar, but that falls apart in cases like this. Which is sort of Apple's fault for not smoothly supporting edge cases, to be sure.
Which in hindsight seems extremely naïve. Files are just too damn useful a concept. Their main rival, databases, have a bunch of peculiarities that limit their generality. When people want to share information any longer than a paragraph or two, they send a file. You can’t beat files!
Of course ultimately the distinction between files/filesystems and databases is not that clearcut; I'd argue that in many ways filesystems are just databases promoted at kernel level.
That's what cloud providers want. I think users don't care and prefer whatever is the simplest and most reliable method. Cloud resources disappear all the time which tends to make a lot of users upset.
Is it discussed somewhere the ideology behind this? Users are too dumb for files? Pay extra for App Store apps just to open your own files? Prevent privacy? Security?
I think layered on that, it was more the case Apple really really really never wanted to have the concept of single song music files seep into iOS, especially as it was "share with your friends" device.
The revenue stream from the iTunes Store started in 2003, well preceding the iPhone.
> .mp4 being associated with a video player seems reasonable, since it's almost always used for video. (I think the only difference between .mp4 and .m4a is the extension? It's just serving as a signal about which app should open it, really.)
mp4 is a container format, all it does is wrap some codecs and add metadata. There's no requirement that it contain video. The smart thing to do would be to inspect the mp4 and open it in an audio player if it contains an audio stream but no video stream.
So if I understand correctly, if you have a file with an unknown type then change the extension to something still unknown, it'll preserve the first default editor you set for the file.
I used to work on this part of CoreMedia. Opening the mp4 header is fast enough that spotlight does it in the background for every supported media file on your system.
For tens of thousands or even millions of files, inspecting the header only loads about an extra page into RAM per file. Or, since Apple already has the Spotlight index with this track data in it, 0 extra pages.
Basically, only track information that's not already in the Spotlight DB needs to be loaded so the performance should be the same as walking the filesystem for filenames.
But how fast is that? Cause Spotlight is running in the background, not blocking you from opening the file.
I think the bigger issue is just that users expect a .mp4 to open with their default .mp4 player, and in fact some people don't know about "open with" and change the extension as a way to pick the player.
Unless it's changed since I was there, Spotlight is more or less a sqlite3 database so it has about the same complexity as navigating a filesystem tree but probably with better cache affinity.
But also this concern about loading the header of millions of files is such an edge case that I don't think it matters. A human tapping on a piece of glass to play a few files would notice no difference in performance.
i've never seen mp4 containing anything else than video so it's reasonable assume they would contain video most of the time and thus have a video player as the default app.
Peertube can create audio-only mp4 files by setting the video resolution to 0 [1]. I use this to create audio-only versions of lecture videos for use on the road etc - which is why I made this feature and submitted the PR.
QuickTime Player is an audio player, why wouldn't it be?
However, the underlying complaint is that Music doesn't claim to be capable of handling mp4. Which is basically true; the "m4a" and "m4v" that Music does claim to support are restricted subsets of mp4.
Should Chrome handle files with a .heif extension if they contain AV1? That's pretty much the same question.
Yes. It isn't the default player for .mp4 as it isn't really a general video player.
Also, I just did a quick check, if you rename an m4a to mp4, and add it to the magic "$APPLEMUSICFOLDER/Media/Automatically Add To Music" folder, Music will import it, but give it a Media Kind metadata field as "Music" and not "Music Video" (which you get with actual video files), so it obviously does deeper inspection than just the filename.
Sure but if your default file handler for mp4 files is Quicktime (as is the default for anyone who hasn't changed it), why would you expect macOS to open mp4s in another app because of the just because it's a music video, or, in the author's case music only?
The author needs iTunes Match. For some reason doesn't want anyone knowing about this service but it's the only way to sync your own music in Music.app.
But iTunes only runs on Windows or macOS so I think you're stuck to having one of those around with iTunes running on it. I was hopeful, Id love an iPhone but have SO much music and no way to get it onto the phone without buying another computer.
I don’t think Music is really intended for this use case.
Maybe look at third party apps that let you play local files like Vox Music Player.
If you want to stick with Music you can always subscribe to iTunes Match that will sync your local files libraries seamlessly
We are (were) deeply/widely invested into the whole Apple ecosystem, and they are very rapidly losing that spot in our lives/homes. Nearly every interaction has become immediately frustrating. Moving away from all of it. There's zero possibility of help with any of it, and less than zero possibility of their fixing any of it. Major bummer.
Apple Music on MacOS is hands down the worst first-party app I've ever used. It legitimately was hard for me to believe that it could be as bad as it is when I first started using it. I had a moment where I believed, just for a second, that I was on a Windows machine, and the app was a shoe-horned third-party monstrosity like using Microsoft on Mac, or vice versa. It is gobsmackingly bad. Audio quality is great though!
You also can't uninstall Apple Music, nor can you get it to not respond to media controls from headphones. So a few times a week I accidentally open an app I never want to use because it wants to force itself on me. Lame.
The bozo bit as described is how I thought about Sony for a long time.
I had a different name for it, "The idiot engineer".
That for all the amazing premium quality products Sony releases, every product has at least one extremely poorly thought out area. It was like there was some designer/engineer who was the son of the CEO or something, and got to work on every project.
This goes for their professional equipment as well. I worked with their cinema projectors a few years back. In theory they were better than most other solutions, but managing them were ... cumbersome. You could only access it using a special program that only ran on Windows. It was really picky with DCP's. And it was difficult to know what it was doing at all tiems. You had to say at least three hail mary's when attempting to upgrade them. At one point upgrade could only be done with a USB stick that you had to connect deep inside the projector.
But it was 4K before there were movies in 4K. They came with laser projectors early. They were ready for high frame rate from the beginning and almost never needed replacement parts fitted unlike certain other manufacturers.
My favorite example of this with Sony: the WH-1000XM series noise cancelling headphones are absolutely great and they would be the only headphones I ever use if only there was a way to mute the microphone from the headphones themselves. There's even a touch-sensitive panel on the earpiece and several control options you can pick to have available through it, but mute is not one of the options.
IMO the whole physical interface on these makes no sense. The microphone seems to be garbage, so why even include it? The touch panel literally never does what I want it to do, I wish they'd just replace it with buttons. The ONE tactile button on the device (aside from power) can only be used to change the noise-canceling mode, which I never do.
What I would do frequently is pair to another device, so it would be great if that one button could be used to unpair-and-enter-pairing-mode. Instead, I "repair" by connecting it to one device over bluetooth, and another device with a cable. It's a silly, awkward thing to do with my wireless headphones, but it's 100% reliable. Oh well.
My example for a similar product is Sony NW-S703F, a noise-canceling MP3 player.
It was a thing of beauty, just terribly pleasurable to use. The noise canceling and audio quality was great.
But - it only supported a proprietary audio format, and everything had to be transcoded instead of just copied over. Took forever, and it couldn't successfully transcode every format.
And that's how Sony stays in business. It was such a good music player once the music was on there, I am tempted to buy another one as long as it's cheap.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 235 ms ] threadIt's reasons like this why I advocate for Apple to separate their hardware and software. It's fine if they want to integrate their first-party offerings, but gluing them to the OS makes me uncomfortable. I don't trust Apple to not degrade my user experience anymore, unfortunately.
They aren’t licensing technology to handset vendors, they just are keeping the numerically larger but profitability smaller sector of the smartphone business safe for advertising.
So, I'd say that Google is to Android what Canonical is to Ubuntu. Both are developing "open" products that technically qualify as Free software, but use their services to lock people into convenient but exploitative agreements. They're bad, but using Android without Google is much easier than using an iPhone without Apple.
It's ridiculous but at these other apps are all broken as you've now experienced.
- issue with being repeatedly slammed to reauthenticate
- bizarre iTunes integration
- won't play nice with sleep-locked Windows laptop
- random features ripped out of the PWA, like "Artist Radio" (presumably an attempt to protect their recommendations from adversarial scrapers)
The last straw was I "got auth booted, playback cutoff, buy a family plan" at midnight NYE, left an angry ticket. Next week, ticket closed, final cheeky de-auth. I immediately canceled, and can't say I've had any reason to consider returning.
A few of the really bad ones are Radars I filed years ago that went nowhere and still annoy me to this day (top prize probably goes to FaceTime audio ducking).
https://openradar.appspot.com
Yes, but also all other types of progress tracking.
> why would Apple ignore radars like this?
The only Radars I've filed to other teams that actually got any traction are clear-cut bugs with a simple repro that don't require any UI/design changes to fix. Without a repro & sysdiagnose the engineers will likely never even read through the whole bug report before discarding it.
In general my view is that a lot of Apple engineers are stretched pretty thin and don't really have time to work on that kind of stuff with the pretty quick pace that a yearly OS release schedule imposes on them (supporting redesigns, new UIs, new hardware). If a bug is caught immediately it's considered a regression and there's a higher chance it'll get fixed, but issues that are around for >1 year without being flagged back to the engineers responsible are unlikely to ever be prioritized.
The most unlikely "bugs" to ever get fixed are design issues that aren't really considered bugs in the first place, like the FaceTime audio ducking issue I mentioned above. For reference, when you're on a FaceTime call the OS (both iOS and macOS) will heavily dampen all other audio to the point where it's pretty unintelligible even at 100% volume. There's no way to fix it because it's Working as Intended(TM) and the Apple designer knows what customers want more than you, the other engineers, or the customers themselves. It's been around for years and has had dozens of Radars filed internally and externally but no progress has been made.
But when everything is working, I find it to be super useful… so what are you going to do?
They buried it under the screen (why? who gave a shit?) so they can make it (generously) 70% reliable instead of the 99.99% reliable reader they had on the back.
The ecology just isn't built for actual owned media anymore. And so many people have only a phone now, so no reason to try to sync.
I think this is probably true on Android too.
I don't know about the Watch, or what the documented ways are to get media files on it.
But for iPhone, I think there are probably better ways than Apple Music, even for audio files. That's just not what Apple Music is about anymore, it's mostly about purchased music.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210598
Wait until the AR glasses come out. I pretty much guarantee that media syncing will be a huge deal, and Apple had better get their iCloud act together by then.
iCloud is a shambles; and I say this as an Apple user for more than thirty years, and has pegged his career to Apple.
I have also had it do that thing, where my (non-DRMed) song, recorded from a CD, is replaced by the DRMed “radio edit” version of the song, from Apple Music.
That’s fun.
Whether or not the sync actually happens, or if the song stays on the original device, seems to be a crapshoot.
Safari bookmark syncing is … not good. It rearranges bookmarks, refuses to delete some, refuses to sync certain ones, according to some internal algorithm. Etc.
This is one of those things that will hopefully be opened up with more standardization. There's nobody to blame but ourselves for not enforcing this earlier, and hopefully in the future opening an MP3 file won't be harder than it was in 2005.
Eh - it's not really the same. Android certainly still mostly pushes you at cloud based services (ex: Youtube Music/Amazon Music/Spotify/ETC)
But there's not really a "Standard" music player for the ecosystem, so the expectation is that you pick a 3rd party app you like and use that. And for the vast majority of those - the simple "you have a filesystem - play files from it" approach works just fine (ex: I use VLC for local content, and JellyFin for self-hosted music).
Personally - having my library hosted on my own JellyFin server is basically miles better than anything else I've found (And using either the native app or a specific music client for jellyfin).
The downside is the cost of entry is much higher, and it takes more time and effort to get setup the first time.
Also - your results will vary a lot more depending on which app you pick, and what features that company supports.
So... the experience defaults to something that's more complicated and less featurefull but can be significantly better than that available via iMusic/iCloud at the end of the day.
Android was always focused on cloud stuff, which makes sense given that their biggest markets are places where most people don't have PCs, plus Google wants that halo effect from Android. I appreciated that iPhones were designed for my PC too. But iPhones were generally bad at copying any other data ad-hoc. They added AirDrop specifically for this, and... Like 90% of the time I don't see my other device, or the transfer fails. I don't even bother anymore.
Oh god! This bugs me so much. I don't understand why it's so hard to get this right. I'm sure it is, but why?
I know that if one of my devices switches from our 5GHz to our 2.4GHz network this can happen, but even when they're on the same network, it happens sometimes. (And why do my devices keep trying to force themselves off of the 5GHz network? WTF?)
And I get that it's called "Airdrop", but I'd really like it to work over ethernet, too, since that's a lot faster!
Check if BT is enabled on both your phones.
I have used iTunes off and on for around two decades and it has never been a great or even mediocre experience. It was always bad. The author is fondly remembering a time which might never have existed.
Here was my train of thought on reading that:
Who voluntarily uses iTunes?
Who voluntarily uses iTunes on Windows?
Can you watch movies in iTunes on Windows?
Why would you ever want to do that?
Blacking out other monitors on full-screen? That's a pretty novel idea, I've never seen that before. Apple would never implement such a cool feature on a competing platform.
- You have purchased video/tv content on your Apple TV or other iOS device
- You want your podcasts sync'd across your devices
If you like listening to albums you can also keep them in your file system by artist, album, and song and have an easy time finding things.
I think a lot of the Music.app issues stem from it being what looks like a SwiftUI/Catalyst app more than anything else.
Why do you think it’s bad? I’ve heard others say the same but I’ve never heard a general (as opposed to esoteric) reason.
What won me over compared to Winamp was iTunes' smart playlists. I'm actually surprised they haven't borked, neutered, or removed that feature. It's still the same and it's still good.
It did a lot of other things right too. It was convenient to edit metadata for multiple files. CD ripping was painless and used a high quality mp3 encoder at a time when that was not a given. In general, it was one of those apps that just behaved logically to me and rarely if ever surprised me in a bad way.
When iTunes introduced "iTunes in the cloud" or whatever it was called -- the ability to have your files mirrored in the cloud -- I was more or less in heaven for a while. I had a few moans and niggles but nothing much.
I actively kind of hate it now though. Too many media types (with different paradigms) crammed into one app. The result is a mess. Not sure it could be any other way.
I haven't used it since. (Although it still starts automatically when I try to rip a CD using XLD.)
Now I use VLC for music on my phone and Vox on MacOS. Both are imperfect. FLAC isn't gapless in VLC, and Vox keeps trying to sell me things. But they work well enough to get some semblance of the job done.
The real problem is the conflict between utility and consumption. iTunes/Music were never there to conveniently manage and play audio (utility), but to lock users into a consumption silo. So importing and playing music from external sources has never been a design goal.
Vox has some similar issues, but isn't quite as bad. VLC is more of a utility app, which makes it more useful. (I suspect it has no problem playing an MP4 audio playlist.)
iTunes/Music has always been an unusual app, but there were work flows (play flows?) whose practicality has come and gone.
That's what I'm thinking almost every day when working with Apple devices. There is so, so much basic stuff broken on both macOS and iOS. I truly miss the days where Apple devices were a reliable tool, even a source of inspiration.
Another characterization I've made is that Apple is a primarily a hardware company, they don't have the software chops and are scrambling to try to backfill that skillset. They overly reward the bright and shiny but eventually the inability to tame complexity will be their downfall.
...and the old search is moved to Songs -> (upper right) "Show filter field". They even change the shortcut key, which is the worst part imo.
Further if you think of the complexity involved, streaming is a more “basic” task, than navigating file formats, transfer protocols, DRM, disc storage, library metadata, and more.
A more general point is that software should establish a clear conceptual model of the things it allows to manipulate (music files, tracks, playlists, …), and all basic operations on that (insert, move, remove, reorder, rename, syncing between two devices, …) should be straightforward, orthogonal, and just work. Only having specific workflows available/functioning requires the user to memorize those specific workflows, instead of being able to reason about what they can do based on the conceptual model.
As for software? Yeah, it's really, really bad. :( I think Apple has forgotten how to do software.
It's hard for me to figure anything out on the iPhone. Nothing seems obvious or discoverable beyond the basic "tap an app tile to open it." Some of that is just differences from Android but the various gestures and the way settings are scattered all over the place just seems almost arbitrary. Maybe there is a rhyme and reason but I feel that if I wanted to learn that I'd need to sit down through a tutorial.
I once worked with a product manager who said "if users need training, you've failed" this was in the context of a consumer-oriented website but it seems to be a lesson lost on Apple.
At this point there is so little difference in phones (particularly the flagships) for the average person, they should just pick what they like/are used to, and move on with their life.
With all due respect, whenever these days were, I suspect people were saying the same thing then because people have a tendency to romanticize the past no matter what year it is.
Any sort of syncing between PCs/mobile devices is universally neglected in favour of the cloud now. Why invest in syncing when they could charge you for cloud storage instead?
I mean, Apple could just add a better physical connection to the iPhone. Either the USB3-speed Lightning port they used twice on a few iPads, USB3.x over USB-C, or even the brilliant Thunderbolt standard they helped make nearly a decade ago. But... the iPhone's physical transfer speeds are still stuck in 2001. It's genuinely an unbelievably amount of negligence for a company that directly profits off of cloud customers.
So, let's end the farcical statement that the EU stood up to Big, Bad, Apple. The EU did nothing.
If Apple still wants to use a superior in-house technology, they can implement Thunderbolt on iPhone.
We need regulators to do this so Apple doesn't change their mind and make "Lightning 2". Even if Apple did have a full USB-C switch on their roadmap, every company in FAANG needs a healthy fear of regulators. Europe cracking down on the App Store and Apple's silly proprietary cables are the start of this, and a fantastic first turnout so far.
Bingo. I started seeing this everywhere I looked and it made me furious. Everything, in small ways, seems to sabotage the user trying to control their things. Eventually, and at scale, they win. It's fatiguing to constantly be fighting these toys.
Don't even need to do that, just change the file name suffix from .mp4 to .m4a
And in the Finder, right-clicking on a file gives a submenu "Open with..." where you can choose the application that will open it.
.mp4 being associated with a video player seems reasonable, since it's almost always used for video. (I think the only difference between .mp4 and .m4a is the extension? It's just serving as a signal about which app should open it, really.)
> Create a new playlist, transfer some previous songs over, then try to drop the new m4a's onto the open playlist. No go. Play around for a while, figure out that the entity that accepts the drops is the TableView, not the surrounding view. So you can't drop the new files into the empty space below the songs, you have to drop them onto the existing songs.
Interestingly, this is the user winding up on the single most fiddly path because it's what felt intuitive to them. In pretty much any Music library view but the playlist view, dragging a file into the window is all you need to do. They unfortunately picked the single view where it's focused on letting you rearrange the tracks.
I'd suspect that the Music app's workflow is built around "I want to add this to my music library", whereas the author's mental model was more around "I need a list of files so they get transferred". Which are similar, but that falls apart in cases like this. Which is sort of Apple's fault for not smoothly supporting edge cases, to be sure.
The revenue stream from the iTunes Store started in 2003, well preceding the iPhone.
mp4 is a container format, all it does is wrap some codecs and add metadata. There's no requirement that it contain video. The smart thing to do would be to inspect the mp4 and open it in an audio player if it contains an audio stream but no video stream.
https://eclecticlight.co/2022/12/24/how-does-macos-tell-the-...
For tens of thousands or even millions of files, inspecting the header only loads about an extra page into RAM per file. Or, since Apple already has the Spotlight index with this track data in it, 0 extra pages.
Basically, only track information that's not already in the Spotlight DB needs to be loaded so the performance should be the same as walking the filesystem for filenames.
I think the bigger issue is just that users expect a .mp4 to open with their default .mp4 player, and in fact some people don't know about "open with" and change the extension as a way to pick the player.
But also this concern about loading the header of millions of files is such an edge case that I don't think it matters. A human tapping on a piece of glass to play a few files would notice no difference in performance.
[1] https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/pull/2213
However, the underlying complaint is that Music doesn't claim to be capable of handling mp4. Which is basically true; the "m4a" and "m4v" that Music does claim to support are restricted subsets of mp4.
Should Chrome handle files with a .heif extension if they contain AV1? That's pretty much the same question.
Also, I just did a quick check, if you rename an m4a to mp4, and add it to the magic "$APPLEMUSICFOLDER/Media/Automatically Add To Music" folder, Music will import it, but give it a Media Kind metadata field as "Music" and not "Music Video" (which you get with actual video files), so it obviously does deeper inspection than just the filename.
Of course, he could have just used Files.
What do you think are the intended use cases of the operating system's proprietary audio-file-playing application?
https://github.com/geophile/reality-distortion-field
This is not basic functionality. The vast majority of iPhone users never plug their device into a computer.
I had a different name for it, "The idiot engineer".
That for all the amazing premium quality products Sony releases, every product has at least one extremely poorly thought out area. It was like there was some designer/engineer who was the son of the CEO or something, and got to work on every project.
But it was 4K before there were movies in 4K. They came with laser projectors early. They were ready for high frame rate from the beginning and almost never needed replacement parts fitted unlike certain other manufacturers.
What I would do frequently is pair to another device, so it would be great if that one button could be used to unpair-and-enter-pairing-mode. Instead, I "repair" by connecting it to one device over bluetooth, and another device with a cable. It's a silly, awkward thing to do with my wireless headphones, but it's 100% reliable. Oh well.
It was a thing of beauty, just terribly pleasurable to use. The noise canceling and audio quality was great.
But - it only supported a proprietary audio format, and everything had to be transcoded instead of just copied over. Took forever, and it couldn't successfully transcode every format.
And that's how Sony stays in business. It was such a good music player once the music was on there, I am tempted to buy another one as long as it's cheap.