Over the past two decades, technology has reinvented much of what we do in our daily lives, but the first major domino to fall was probably the advent of digital music. Next month will mark twenty years since the launch of Apple’s iTunes Store (fun fact: a birthday shared with yours truly), which, while not the first way to get digital music online, certainly which is the farthest.
The digital music experience has certainly changed in the intervening years, especially with the growth of streaming in the last decade, but when it comes to Apple’s take on music listening, well, there are a few things that frankly unchanged. enough. Sometimes it feels that Apple believes that digital music is a solved problem, that the company sits and dusts its hands, but there are definitely areas where the experience of listening to music can be improved.
Not so slow in the stream
In 2019, Apple split its venerable iTunes app on Mac into three separate apps: Music, TV, and Podcasts. While some look back on the iTunes era with nostalgia, I don’t buy it: iTunes has become a hot mess. In theory, splitting it into separate apps related to specific types of media is a good idea: people don’t want to watch TV shows or listen to podcasts in the same way. they listen to music.
In execution, however, the macOS Music app is basically the former iTunes app with Apple Music streaming functionality. While being able to join two tracks from your personal library and Apple Music in a unified interface has its benefits, especially when it comes to ease of use, it sometimes feels like of Apple to do some clever legerdemain. For example, one of my biggest frustrations was discovering that a certain track from an album I had added to my library was unavailable due to streaming rights. Why only one specific track? It’s almost always vague–but it pays off with the idea that the music in your library is real on your library.
Foundry
That’s just one example of where this mix doesn’t always work; there are many more, including pairing a clear version of a song with a clean version (or vice versa), ending up in split albums due to metadata problems, and simply getting the wrong version of a song (live instead of in the studio, for example). Critics of the Music app undoubtedly have many other points to add here, and it could easily be turned into a piece entirely on its shortcomings, but let’s talk about a couple of other glaring issues. .
Look, no handoff!
I shamelessly cribbed this from my friend and colleague Joe Rosensteel, who recently wrote an excellent article about the many problems with the Music app: why Apple hasn’t implemented Handoff for music ?
If you’ve forgotten what Handoff is, it’s one of Apple’s Continuity features (a catch-all name for a broader suite of functions), which can make it easier to move a task between on your Apple devices. If you’ve started writing an email on your iPad and then turned to your Mac and saw a second Mail icon in the Dock, that’s Handoff. (Frankly, sometimes I can’t get it, especially with apps from my Apple Watch.)
But there is no similar use for music. If I pause a song I’m playing on my Mac and want to take it to my iPhone–an analog made in the very first ad for the iPod in 2001, I have to launch the Music app on my phone, find the track, and skip ahead to where it is on the Mac. Apple’s Podcasts app has it right—sync the playhead position across devices, or at least let users choose that sync. The closest Apple has gotten is allowing you to transfer music from a phone to a HomePod by bringing them closer.
This brings us to another big issue.
AirPlay is not the thing
AirPlay is a mess. It’s not a hot mess; it’s just a mess. A few years ago, when Apple launched the first HomePod, the company changed the way AirPlay-like works. In the past, all AirPlay speakers were treated the same way: basically an external speaker for playing music from your device, whether it’s a Mac, iPhone, iPad, etc. to listen to the built-in speaker.
However, when HomePods were launched, with their ability to play music on their own without another device, Apple decided to treat them differently with AirPlay. However, if you start playing music on your device and then AirPlay it to a HomePod, it transfers the currently playing track in the HomePod’s own internal playlist, as if you were using Siri to tell the speaker to play a song.
IDG
This has caused me no end of frustration, especially when I start listening to an album on my phone, AirPlay it to my HomePod mini, and then go back to my phone only to find that it’s still on the same track. when I first It’s AirPlayed.
Now, instead of AirPlaying, you CAN control playback directly on a HomePod by using the AirPlay menu on an iOS device and scrolling down to Control Other Speakers & TVs… looks the same like the Music app, but it doesn’t let you do all the same things. (I, for example, cannot start playing another song on the HomePod using this interface.)
Meanwhile, all non-HomePod smart speakers still continue the old way of being treated as external speakers. The way it works is, of course, complicated, but whatever the answer is, it isn’t. Here’s hoping iOS 17 brings some much-needed revisions to the way AirPlay works—or, more accurately, doesn’t.