If you’ve struggled to bend Apple Music to your will, or have faced the challenge of recovering from missing music (or a damaged library), you may find my new blog post intriguing.
While rebuilding my curated music catalog in Apple Music, I learned a ton more about both the Apple Music app and AI chatbots (which I used extensively during the project).
I made some possibly dubious decisions along the way and am curious what TidBITS Talk readers think. I’d appreciate comments from anyone who’s faced similar problems.
Warning: the post is a long read, but I’ve broken it into chapters.
@Ponce1000 - Thanks for sharing your AI-assisted experiences with rebuilding your Apple Music Library. Your blog post is quite a testament to the complexity of Apple’s current environment, especially for people who like to curate their libraries or have imported a lot of music from CDs or other sources.
Personally, I’ve given up. I have over 30,000 tracks in my library, with approximately 3,200 purchased from the Apple Store. I’ve lost too much time trying to repair libraries that Apple “helpfully” updated over the years.
Just a few weeks ago, Apple updated a few of my albums with album art that had nothing to do with the artist in question, never mind the songs. (FWIW, I think that Doug’s “Re-Embed Artwork” AppleScript can help to avoid that issue but I am not certain.)
Of course, managing a music library is as idiosyncratic as the range of people who have music libraries. So much frustration with the modern Apple Music experience would be minimized if only there were an option to require review and confirmation before any automated changes get made to an Apple Music Library.
Thanks again for attempting to cover this topic. There is a lot of good info in your post.
PS. It gets tiresome to speak of Doctorow’s “Ensh*ttification” concept, but at the same time, the concept is one of the most important factors in today’s society. I think it drives much of what has gone wrong with the Apple Music interface. The Norwegian Consumer Council (a government agency) recently produced an entertaining video about the subject:
Thanks for reading my Apple Music soap opera! I wish a good alternative existed, but given my preference for a streaming solution without any reliance on physical media and for a subscription vs. paying for albums, I think I’m stuck with Apple Music.
So far, my new system is working really well. I never made friends with the Music app on my iPhone, but interacting with my music via Marvis is far more inviting and satisfying.
However, adversity hasn’t plagued my setup yet, so the true test will be how resilient it is to any problems that come up.
That was an incredible post. Thank you for sharing this Herculean effort and writing this incredibly detailed report.
Managing your music on a computer seems to be gnarly. I bought Soundjam right before it got acquired by Apple and morphed into iTunes. Weirdly enough the user experience in many respects has been going downhill ever since.You’d think they’d have it figured out by now
Thanks for the feedback! My guess is that 1) Apple Music has a ton of code rot from its long history (going back to iTunes) and 2) that it’s serving too many masters (has too many different use cases to handle). If only Apple were successful enough that it could afford a from-the-ground-up rewrite.
I’m very tempted to revisit a complete ‘scrap and rebuild’ of my Music. I have a relatively small library of around 1600 songs, but over 150 are ‘ineligible’, and another 100 are locked at ‘waiting’.
Most annoying right now is the inability of Siri to play things. I get in the car and go “Hey Siri, play Time by Pink Floyd”. Siri chirps back “Playing Time by Pink Floyd from Apple Music” followed almost immediately by “There’s a problem with Apple Music” and silence. BTW, there is no issue with the 5G connection.
If I navigate to the song it plays just fine, it’s (seemingly) just the automation — that I really want to use when driving — which is horribly broken. My hope is by unsubscribing from Apple Premier One and ditching the Music subscription, I may be able to simply store everything on device and it might work. I also have a Linux box here on which I’m looking to run Plex or similar.
Apple Music has been a nightmare since the subscription service started, the Siri failure is just the latest punish for users.
I have never used the Apple music subscriptions. I have tried to have Siri play a song that is stored on my iPhone but it never finds the song and tries to download it from … somewhere.
I’ll add this to my comments from yesterday. Despite Siri simply refusing to play a song from Apple Music (“Hey Siri, play Time by Pink Floyd”), it will happily locate and play the album (“Hey Siri, play Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd”). Music seems seriously broken.
The Alarm! That’s a name I haven’t heard for a long time. I saw them opening for U2 in, I think, 1983…nobody knew who they were but they played hard and strong (in the words of Mike Peters that night, "let’s bring the temperature up to regulation!).
My post mentioned that I noticed the initial problem with missing music on Dec 24. I published my post on Feb 10, and I think I only started writing it after finishing the rebuild. I probably spent about 2 weeks writing/editing/capturing the screenshots. For both projects, I fit the work into my daily routine as time permitted, for about 1-3 hours per day. I also multitasked; e.g., during my elliptical workout, sometimes I’d re-add albums to my playlists via my iPad.
I’m retired; if I worked full-time, there’s no way I’d have had time to do the rebuild project, let alone write it up.
I never saw The Alarm live, but they were cohorts of U2 and Simple Minds that never became quite as popular. Definitely new wave/modern rock stapes back in the day.
VH1 had an entertaining episode of “Bands Reunited” over a decade ago that featured The Alarm. If interested, you should be able to find it on YouTube and some other channels.
