Sometime during Mac OS 15, and certainly now in Mac OS 26, Apple decided to drop Chapters support for enhanced m4a music files. Or it is deeply, deeply hidden…
Google’s AI disagrees indicating the opposite, that Apple is expanding support for Chapters… er, um … for Podcasts
Somebody forgot to tell Apple engineers that enhanced m4a files are not podcasts.
Other than pursuing Feedback and requesting this feature back Is there a worthy and Mac safe alternative for playing these music files? Chapters is definitely a worthy feature for long form music compilation files. Quicktime does not support, although, I bet that if there was still a QuickTime Pro that might
Just to add, it appears there is some history of a clamor for more support of Chapters features for Podcasts.
But is doesn’t make sense to abandon support for Chapters in Music … I mean, wasn’t the code just there, no need to expand OR Eliminate it from Music …
I’m still mad how their music artwork is messed up. I’ve turned it off. deleted all album artwork. Turned on and … now I have a greatest hits of Stevie Wonder image on greatest hits of Steeley Dan. Music is a mess.
(also had bought new music…usually every 6months… Apple blocked the Apple Card! I picked all I had in my Wishlisht … thought they noted it was going away, so I just bought $122 worth of albums…only to be declined. Then an email that YES..its me. Then they went through. Sigh.
I wonder what the odds are that Apple truly considers submissions via the Feedback Assistant.
I know they read (some of) them at least with regard to submissions about actual Bugs. You might have some luck with submitting what clearly is a bug in their system
hmmm I wonder if Chapters will ever reappear, it seems such a basic enhancement to keep, espeicllay considering the titular: Enhanced m4a format. But its abandonedment is not really a bug
Once upon a time (ca. 2003), I reported a bug in iTunes and a few weeks later, I got an e-mail from an Apple engineer assigned to fix it. He wanted some additional information about what he could to do reproduce it.
I realize that this was over 20 years ago, and that engineer might have been violating some kind of policy by contacting me, but it does prove that somebody is (or at least was) reading the reports.
I assume that they have some people assigned to triage feedback, create support tickets for anything new, and increment the count of reports for things that are duplicates. And some other people will review the set of tickets to assign priorities (based on severity and amount of interest), which will in turn drive their project managers to assign tasks to developers.
A crashing bug that affects most users is going to top priority - and we’ve seen these sort of things get fixed very quickly. Lesser bugs will have lower priority. New feature requests lower than that. I assume cosmetic bugs or requests to put back deleted features are at the bottom of the stack.