Anecdotally, Apple Music has deteriorated exponentially for me. iTunes was such a stable, usable piece of software, but I can't get reliable use out of Apple Music for the life of me. It _feels_ like a shoddy Electron app. But that's not fair to the actual Electron (or similar) apps that actually work. For all its many design and product flaws, Spotify actually works.
I love that I had to install a shim service [0] with the same ID as Apple Music's since it can't otherwise be turned off, which was causing Apple Music to appear every time I pressed a media key but had no media playing.
That's the kind of shiesty KPI-boosting tactic I'd expect from Windows, not a machine I paid almost $4000 for. Apple comes installed with a ton of irremovable bloatware and somehow gets a pass.
Apple Music on Mac definitely needs a ground-up rewrite, though I worry it'll lose uncommonly used features, like the ability to upload and stream your own music. I think a lot of Apple Music weirdness is from the fact that it's been built up over the years upon iTunes, which was essentially a completely different product that offered different thing. No one is really buying digital music any more, but they still need to handle everyone's old libraries and purchases, so there's a weird disconnect between your local music library and your cloud Apple Music library. So there are completely separate screens for viewing e.g. an album in your local library versus "in the cloud" even though they're both views for the same content.
Incidentally the iOS Music app has generally been pretty good to me, but starting in the most recent iOS update has been having crashing issues. I'm not sure what exactly causes it, but it's typically when I rearranged the queue then minimize the player to get back to the home/library screen.
The upload-and-stream-your-own-music feature, as handled by the Mac desktop Apple Music app, seems to be 90% bug and 10% working. I can’t imagine a rewrite being worse than the status quo.
Funnily enough that's the one feature that works pretty well for me and is keeping me on Apple Music as opposed to Spotify.
Considering the state of every recently made/"remade" first party Apple app I cannot imagine how horrible the Music app would be after they got done with it.
That feature is the single worst thing Apple has done I have ever encountered: it stole my music library.
At some point when migrating from one Mac to another, it "forgot" which songs were actually mine. It's all Apple Music now. I have songs that the application _knows_ were added to my library in 2003, but for which it steadfastly maintains they're Apple Music downloads. Worse: some songs have been replaced with other recordings. Other are "unavailable" for unexplained reasons.
Oof, I would be livid if that happened to me, too. Maybe I just threaded the needle and got lucky or something, but I'm disappointed to hear mine isn't a universal experience.
It really is bad. I mean, the navigation design is bad to start with (just back, no forward? Genres are under Search?), and it’s buggy. It hangs randomly and sometimes it just doesn’t make sound (you had one job!).
My last experience with iTunes was a long long time ago, in the iPod days, when you needed to use it to sync music, but it was a horrible piece of software back then.
It’s more horrible now. Syncing now opens a Finder window with an inconsistent look and feel, and sometimes fails to copy new songs in a synced playlist. The playlist view has the album art taking up half the screen, but there’s no way to shrink that section. And there’s no visual indication for whether shuffle is on - it has no grey box around it when enabled.
I kind of think they made it shitty on purpose to push everyone towards a subscription. Many of these issues apply to locally stored songs and playlists, which is how I use it.
Did you use it on Windows? I never understood the hate for iTunes. It was a dream for someone like me who'd spend hours customizing their library. A far cry from today's software from Apple.
In fact, I was never able to use Apple Music because it handled bad internet atrociously. And last time I checked (2022?) it was still not fixed.
It's a meme created by idiots who for some reason wanted to shit on Apple. Hilariously now the same memers will defend Apple tooth and nails even though Apple has never been so bad at software.
iTunes was a great software, even people using it on Windows liked it a lot.
It really is sad how Apple can't keep such a simple app, that has been working more or less flawlessly for the modern history of the company, working correctly. Bugs I've seen include:
- After waking from sleep, the current song plays silent audio (skipping forward and back again kickstarts it to start playing again)
- When streaming with lossless audio, somewhere in the first ten seconds of the song, it'll skip
- Mouseover events don't trigger when scrolling moves an item behind the mouse — you have to get the cursor to leave and reenter the object in question
- Radio stations randomly stop playing sometimes
- And I haven't seen this one in a while, but for a long time, albums in my library would randomly have a song or two split out into its own separate album. So I'd have two of the same album, one with (say) track 5 and the other with tracks 1-4 and 6-10. Deleting and re-adding the albums would at least temporarily fix this.
Yep and they all suck.
The hardware is nice but why do you pay so much to run shitty software that does not even focus on local stuff? If I want some cloud stuff, Google is cheaper...
It's like buying a car because it looks very nice and has a great engine but the driving experience is absolutely terrible.
It's not actually Electron; it's a bit of an unholy mishmash of webkit doing layout of things that are sometimes native views with interaction handling that's also a bit of both. It just has many of the same problems that that Electron apps have, which is also why the interactions are so janky.
So it’s like those late 90s ActiveX IE iframes in Windows programs all over again? That sucks. iTunes did seem to have some of it too in the Store section.
> iTunes was such a stable, usable piece of software
It used to be the case a long time ago. I think it was decent up to iTunes 5 or 6. They crammed into it iPod apps and stuff, which resulted in a terrible UX. Then came the UI lag.
Apple Music, at least when I last used it, could not handle copying podcasts to my old iPod Video - this is now handled in Finder, as best as I can tell. It will copy the tracks, but it doesn't properly flag them as podcasts so if I switch to another track and then go back to the podcast it does not remember my location.
have you tried their "books"? you cannot search by almost anything! Extra-strangely, selecting book language is macos-only feature!
Does anyone even maintain it?
My main issue with podcast alternatives is that onbe feature I use is walk into a room and ask Siri to play a podcast. That works with Apple but not anything else. What is the latest podcast has to sync across devices.
However any maintainance or search for podcasts is crap with Apple and better elsewhere.
Yep. I have completely abandoned Apple Music (after 4 years with them and the destruction of my local library btw), it just sucks.
Both on the phone and the mac. Spotify just works, it's faster, more pleasant and has the relevant features in the right place.
The only thing missing is lossless audio. But I have been listening to 256kpbs AAC since basically the first iPod so I'm not going to care that much at this point...
I am not an Apple Music subscriber and don't stream much music besides SomaFM, so I may not be in the norm.
I always have selected on the sidebar Library -> Songs with View -> Column Browser enabled. And I search only using the "Filter" text input on this view. It's as close to how iTunes used to be in the early days of OS X (sans brushed metal).
What I see on the screen is just mostly dense text except the small thumbnail at the top for whatever is currently playing. There is no other related artwork or graphics loaded. I fear once a re-write of this app happens, this view is gone... replaced with lots of fancy graphics and loads of whitespace padding everywhere.
I had to cancel Apple Music because, bewilderingly, sometimes I'd click a song to play and it just, wouldn't, play. Like, the most basic, simple thing I'd expect a music app to be able to handle. No error. Just nothing. This would happen two or three times a week. It feels utterly insane to say in 2025 that I chose my preferred music subscription service because I prefer a service where I give them money then they give me the ability to play music, but Apple physically cannot even manage that.
I have a consistently reproducible, if edge-case crash in Apple Music for at least a couple years now. I host a DAAP server (using the OwnTone software) to listen to my music with using Apple Music. It doesn't happen with a freshly-opened Music instance, but if it's been open for a while, then I pause, then restart the server instance, Apple Music crashes. I've reported every crash with a copy/paste of the repro steps in the comment.
Apple Music is basically the same as an Electron app. But it uses a native framework and
technology and Apple’s markup language for the views - Apple Markup Language
I canceled my Apple Music subscription a few years ago after leaving the app open for long times would heat up my computer and use 100% of the cpu. It no longer feels like they have the "it just works" feeling they used to in all of their software.
It's a bit hit and miss for sure. If you turn off the subscription and Apple Music portal stuff it works fine though. I use it with a cable to sync to my iPhone with offline files I ripped with XLD from CDs. It's all the network crap that breaks it.
I use Apple Music on my Windows work computer and it's pretty good. I still have iTunes on my home Windows PC (I use it for ripping CDs) and it takes much longer to start.
I own dbPoweramp which I believe uses EAC, but iTunes is just easier (I rip to ALAC) and is good enough. Apple will probably drop support soon, but until then I'll stick with it.
To be fair iTunes had become such a kitchen sync software. The Windows version is universally hated I think, I remember hearing jokes about iTunes on regular TV talk shows.
what is Music doing to you? Other than being slow to launch I really don't have any issue. I have made multiple lists and use it daily to listen to music. I don't recall it crashing in recent memory or not doing what I expect? Tbf, I currate my own music and lists and don't use the streaming a lot. Occasionally I use the station feature I guess, and it's passable. I'm certainly no power user though.
iTunes was such a piece of garbage. It would literally get stuck in a login loop whenever you tried to open it and it was pretty unintuitive design. Apple Music is not perfect but 100x better than iTunes. However, I never bought Macs for Music. It has always just been the most ideal development machine.
iTunes used to be extremely buggy for me, and things got a bit better with the Apple Music app.
But, within the last week a bug which messes up all the album artwork on a synced iPhone struck my partner's device - I've not seen that one since iTunes.
The experience of browsing the iTunes store is laughably bad...
The back button that goes back multiple steps while losing context of stuff you had clicked in between, the way the search box is in a whole other part of the UI and it has a three mode toggle. The way that clearing the search phrase does a new search for "".
The other day I bought an album on Bandcamp and imported it. Music app adds a "show complete album" link when I view the album in my library. Instead of doing anything useful this link clicks through to a whole different album in the iTunes store.
Or yesterday I browsed to "Joni Mitchell" and got some kind of curated homepage for the artist with background image art etc. The albums are grouped under a series of headings ("60s/70s" and "80s/90s") that don't include all her albums. There's no way to 'view all'.
You literally can't reach say "Blue" without going back out and searching for it explicitly.
Just idiotic and broken features left right and centre.
Ah, you know, now that I think of it, Apple Music has this pretty bad bug where after a couple of hours of playing music my playlist will stop playing and nothing I do will make the playlist usable again. This never happened in iTunes.
> iTunes was such a stable, usable piece of software
Excuse me?
iTunes was IMO always bad. I will grant that the Mac desktop version of Apple Music is possibly even worse than iTunes ever was, though.
(This is slightly off topic, but I find it both amusing and rather infuriating that the iCloud payment system doesn’t accept Apple Pay. Oddly, it seems to accept PayPay. Really, just about everything involving the account and payment system in iCloud and Apple Music is awful.)
