Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Status
The first post of this thread is a WikiPost and can be edited by anyone with the appropiate permissions. Your edits will be public.

Transients

macrumors newbie
Dec 21, 2019
2
0
Norway
can anyone explain the logic behind "no column browser" on apple tv music app. And no option for list view anywhere. Only fr.... thumb nail view all the way. On a 55" tv im pretty sure it would be possible to add a nice column browser or option for list view, no?
 

NERunner

macrumors newbie
Jun 17, 2011
8
1
Massachusetts
After eight weeks of working with my music library on Catalina, I am confident that Apple used their J.V. development team to decouple Music from iTunes. I have spent untold hours fixing all kinds of problems; problems I never had in the so-called "bloated" iTunes. Indeed I have a large library, a little more than 500 GB with about 200 playlists.

One of the most irritating issues is the replication of duplicate playlists. Some of my playlists are duplicated over 50x just by shutting down and restarting the application on my Mac (and no, I don't shut it down during any sync processes). I have exported and created new library files and still the same issues.
Screen Shot 2020-01-17 at 7.19.12 PM.png

Another of my favorite but less irritating issues is the multiple duplicate playlists that appear in the playlist selection window in Finder. And some of these include the smart playlist gear icon.
Screen Shot 2020-01-18 at 10.08.28 PM.png

I have had to delete all my music on my iPhone 3x in several attempts to fix this. Even after wiping my iPhone clean and restoring a backup, it adds all my old (empty) playlists. Does anyone know how to wipe these out easily and not individually?


I never had any of these and other issues with iTunes. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot...Apple sure loves to live by the motto: "If it ain't broken, we'll break it someday."
 

Nacho98

Suspended
Jul 11, 2019
729
674
Music is working fine for me, but it was a struggle and took many hours of recovering lost artwork. It was not a clean transfer from Mojave, but eventually I got there.

But what's the deal with missing artist images (not to be confused with album art)?

1) On Mojave, I had most of them.

2) On Catalina, nearly all of them are missing - but not every single one.

3) Oddly enough, I manually manage music on my iPhone - nothing in iCloud - and transfer songs from my computer to my iPhone via cable. Somehow the artist images are nearly all there on my iPhone, but not the source computer? Note that I wiped the music entirely off my phone and transferred it all fresh from Catalina, so the phone clearly got those images from the Music app/metadata that transferred over.

4) I *did* uncheck the "Automatically Update Artwork" box under advanced preferences. Since this will check for both artist images and album art, and with the effort that album art was to restore, I was terrified to leave this checked, so I unchecked it. My album art is perfect now, so I don't need Music going rogue and overwriting album art I already have and creating file inconsistencies.

5) Despite #4 above, even with that box unchecked, Music says it is updating artist images in the lower left hand corner every time I start Music, and some - just a few - artist images have shown up, even after unchecking that box. So that box isn't entirely preventing the images from being retrieved, which is good.

What's the deal here? This seems like an inconsistent mess. I'd like the artist images, but I'm not about to check that one box and risk collateral album art damage, especially since it seems to have found a way to populate a few artist images even with that box unchecked.
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: ErikGrim

The Weatherman

macrumors member
Sep 13, 2016
93
273
I would like to report a significant memory leak I am experiencing when adding a batch of files (30+) to my Music library via the "Automatically Add to Music" folder. All tracks get imported normally but when the app processes the embedded artworks the memory usage goes through the roof (usually >85%) and if too many files are processed simultaneously the application freezes and I have to force to quit it. If I don't, the memory continues to leak and eventually the whole computer become unresponsive and I have to hard reboot it!

According to multiple reports on forums, memory leak related issues in Music are common when it comes to artworks processing...
 

Actually87

macrumors newbie
Jan 21, 2020
3
2
The biggest issue I've been having with Music in Catalina is disappearing playlists. I have about a hundred playlists, and after updating to Catalina I lost about 5 of them. Irritating, but I had heard so many horror stories about Music that I figured if that's the only thing I lost, I was lucky. But I just had another playlist disappear and this one had over 2,000 songs and will take a long time to recreate. Needless to say, I am not happy. I am certain I didn't delete it by accident. It was there last night, and this morning it's just gone. Has anybody else been experiencing this? Is there a way to prevent it? Is there a way to get the playlist back?
 
  • Like
Reactions: ErikGrim

WilliamDu

macrumors 6502
May 22, 2012
267
98
I have been accumulating iTunes music tracks for over twenty years with a current and growing total of over 15,000 multiple genres.
Many purchased from Apple iTunes store, many ripped from purchased CDs and/or public library files.
Considering the numerous posts about iTunes, Music and general issues with Catalina including .2, I can't imagine a sane collector of significant music files even considering updating to Catalina at present.
When someone can tell me they have large files like mine, have upgraded to Catalina and have their music experience operate as good or better than Mojave, retaining album art, playlists and genius lists, causing no problems syncing their music to an iPod Touch, Classic or iPad, i'll start listening to comments.
Already over the years, the iTunes store has "forgotten" several albums I purchased several updates ago and will no longer "Complete your album" of some of them of which I initially purchased partial albums.
My music is one of the most core functions of my Apple environment of two iMacs, about a dozen assorted iPods and Pads.
It's all backed up periodically to Time Machine and the Cloud (about which I've seen Catalina gripes), a second external hard drive, an off-line hard drive and DVDs.
Even so, I'm waiting a long time with Mojave which is pretty stable and has a usable iTunes function.
My music works OK on all the mobiles, so clearly the group that does IOS is much better than the Catalina team. MACOS is huge and complex, but updates shouldn't be released with widespread, significant bugs. Apple has very deep pockets, and needs to buy some better MACOS QC instead of trying to compete with Disney, Comcast, etc. and buying sideline twerks like Beats and Dr. Dre.
Fix your computers, Apple. Leave entertainment to the entertainment professionals
 

dotnet

macrumors 68000
Apr 10, 2015
1,600
1,291
Sydney, Australia
I have been accumulating iTunes music tracks for over twenty years with a current and growing total of over 15,000 multiple genres.
Many purchased from Apple iTunes store, many ripped from purchased CDs and/or public library files.
Considering the numerous posts about iTunes, Music and general issues with Catalina including .2, I can't imagine a sane collector of significant music files even considering updating to Catalina at present.

FWIW, I've got just over 14,000 items in my library (a mix of ripped and purchased tracks), and I'm using Music on Catalina.

When someone can tell me they have large files like mine, have upgraded to Catalina and have their music experience operate as good or better than Mojave, retaining album art, playlists and genius lists, causing no problems syncing their music to an iPod Touch, Classic or iPad, i'll start listening to comments.

It works, not without issues, but it never has. I've been losing the occasional artwork or custom tag ever since iTunes went cloud and Match. I can't say that Music in macOS 10.15.2 is noticeably buggier than iTunes was. What annoys me most is the loss of some functionality, like the missing artwork in song view.

Already over the years, the iTunes store has "forgotten" several albums I purchased several updates ago and will no longer "Complete your album" of some of them of which I initially purchased partial albums.

Yes, iTunes has, at times, been a lot worse than Music is now.
 

Userid42

macrumors newbie
Jan 26, 2020
1
0
Australia
The biggest issue I've been having with Music in Catalina is disappearing playlists. I have about a hundred playlists, and after updating to Catalina I lost about 5 of them. Irritating, but I had heard so many horror stories about Music that I figured if that's the only thing I lost, I was lucky. But I just had another playlist disappear and this one had over 2,000 songs and will take a long time to recreate. Needless to say, I am not happy. I am certain I didn't delete it by accident. It was there last night, and this morning it's just gone. Has anybody else been experiencing this? Is there a way to prevent it? Is there a way to get the playlist back?
Yeah, I had this same problem. I lost most of them, and those were there previously would no longer sync between/ with my other devices (iPhone & iPad)

My solution has been to re-create them. There seems no way to do otherwise.

Were the ones you lost Smart, Genius, or just manually curated?
 

TonyM42

macrumors member
Dec 2, 2015
95
83
Reading UK
My 2015 MacBook Pro Retina 13” always opens the Music app in full screen mode irrespective of how I left it when I closed the app. I know that I can reduce the page manually or with the zoom control but I would rather it opened the way I left it. I’ve reported this to Apple but no resolution to date. Has anyone else had this issue / found a solution?
 

TonyM42

macrumors member
Dec 2, 2015
95
83
Reading UK
I had the same issue. Fixed by removing the app preferences.
Close Music, run

defaults delete com.apple.Music

in Terminal, and reopen Music.
Brilliant! That’s been bugging me for ages. Many thanks.
......so pleased that this has been resolved - keep turning Music app off and on just to check!!!
 
Last edited:

JUMA55

macrumors member
Feb 18, 2008
53
31
Am I missing something, but is there no way in Music to show album and song totals at the bottom of the screen as one can with iTunes?
 

Burningtime

macrumors member
Jan 2, 2015
37
84
BOSTON, MA.
I've asked this in another thread, but this is probably the better place for it -

My issue is this: I recently bought a brand new 2019 iMac and did a fresh update to Catalina. I've been importing my iTunes library (around 2TB worth of music, mainly my own ripped CDs, tapes and LPs) to my new Music library piece by piece. For the most part this is fine but my main issue is that I cannot drag and drop music from my Music library to my plugged in iPhone. It should be as easy and dragging and dropping an album onto my phone but nope, nothing happens.
The workaround I am using is that I am just making new playlists, dragging the albums onto the playlist and then dragging the playlist onto my iPhone. This works fine. But it's SUPER annoying.

Has anyone else encountered something like this?
 

ErikGrim

macrumors 603
Original poster
Jun 20, 2003
6,467
5,085
Brisbane, Australia
Oh great! I'm sure all of the issues have been resolved with this version.
I was able to cross out a single bug: I no longer get a beachball when switching to playlists for the first time.

Also this beta killed my installed iTunes. Fortunately I kept the install pkg and once reinstalled it worked again.
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.