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.
