Geekery

Whatever I’m geeking out about at the time.

macOS Golden Gate Music app still crap

by

The latest thing in my “Apple really needs to get their shit together with the macOS Music (iTunes) app” file:

If you have a compilation album where the tracks aren’t numbered (common for things like mashup compilations), the tracks display and play in alphabetical order…but they display alphabetically by track title, and they play alphabetically by artist.

Screenshot of Apple's Music app showing a 'Bootie Mashup Top 10 September 2026' album. The tracks are listed alphabetically by track title, but red arrows show how they play alphabetically by artist.
In a sane world, the tracks would be played in the order they’re displayed. Apple’s Music app hasn’t existed in a sane world for years.
Also still broken: Shuffle by album. (See my post from almost exactly a year ago about this issue in macOS Tahoe.)

In Album view, check Controls > Shuffle, and make sure that Shuffle is set to on and by albums. Double-click the Albums option in the Library section of the sidebar to start audio playing. The first track of the first album by the alphabetically first artist (in my case, A-Ha) starts playing, and the “shuffle” option gets turned off (both in the menu and in the control toolbar).

Same behavior when starting from Songs view.

I’m not sure if there’s even a way to get shuffle by album working in any context at this point.

Also, you used to be able to use a modifier key (I can’t remember if it was option or command, but I think option) to skip to the next album rather than the next track (or to jump the start of the current album). That functionality seems to be gone as well.

I have a large collection (> 43K tracks, 142 days, or 330 GB) of music that lives on my computer. I often like to listen to albums, instead of individual tracks. The combination of those two factors means that “shuffle by album” (and “skip to the next album” or “start this album over”) were some of my more frequently used features of Music/iTunes. And it’s been pissing me off for years now that these seemingly simple ways to listen to music are broken.

I’ve looked at other music players, some of which are album centric, but…

  • Most of them are built to tie into Music (the streaming service), not Music (the app/iTunes) playing local files.

  • Those that do work with local files don’t have the ability to work with the Music/iTunes “Music Library” file, which means they can’t update play counts, dates, ratings, or any of the other metadata.

  • Because I have far more music than I can (or want to) keep on my iPhone, I have lots of smart playlists set up in Music/iTunes that control what music is on my iPhone at any given time.

  • Because non-Apple music apps can’t update the Music Library file, play counts and dates don’t get updated, and the smart playlists never update. So if I want the smart playlists to update so that the music selection on my iPhone updates, I’m locked in to using Apple’s Music app(s).

If Apple would…

  • get their shit together for music lovers who prefer to own their music rather than stream everything and make Music/iTunes a first-class local audio player again, or
  • allow third-party music apps to update track metadata in the Music Library file,

…then I’d probably be fine. Either option would work — but both would be best, because then Apple’s software would suck less, and third-party developers would be able to do more.

Sadly, I don’t expect that to happen anytime soon, if ever.

(This rant originally a Mastodon thread.)

The City and The City by China Miéville

by

Book 42 of 2026: The City and The City by China Miéville. 2010 Hugo Best Novel winner (tied with Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl).

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️: Mostly a crime noir, but set in two cities that share the same physical space but do not interact. The crime novel part is a good mystery; the setting itself is fascinating and has me looking at the spaces I live in differently.

Absolutely baffled that this tied with The Windup Girl, which I gave one star and was sorely tempted not to finish. What was up with the Hugo voters in 2010?

Me holding The City and The City.

I Miss Music Stores

by

This has been coming to mind as I travel through Germany on our vacation this year: I really miss music stores. Just like scrolling through Amazon or Netflix is a pale shadow of browsing through a bookstore or a Blockbuster, the convenience of online music shopping (specifically purchasing, though choosing something to stream fits as well) just doesn’t give the same satisfaction as browsing through the bins of a good music store.

I last visited Germany in the summer of 1991, and was here the summer before that in 1990 as well. Both times, part of what I blew my hard-earned (…ahem…provided by my parents…) money on was music that I wouldn’t have found in the United States. These are also the only souvenirs that have survived the decades from those trips.

I discovered Poems for Laila, a German folk/pop band, and brought home their first two albums, Another Poem for the 20th Century and La Filette Triste on CD, both of which I still count among my favorite albums, and I’ve picked up the rest of their albums digitally over the years.

I got several CD samplers, the first two in the Techno Trax series (Vol. 1 and Vol. 2) from ZYX Records and the first two of Zillo Jubilaum’s German Mystic Sound Sampler series (Vol. 1 and Vol. 2), and a lot of those tracks were in regular rotation when I started DJing a few years later.

Most painfully in retrospect, on that second trip in ‘91 I remember seeing in-store displays for The KLF’s just-released The White Room, listening to bits of it at listening stations, and thinking it sounded neat but then choosing something else and leaving it behind. The KLF, of course, soon became huge, and I’ve always good-naturedly regretted having missed the chance to have been among the first to play them in the U.S. (and possibly the first in Anchorage).

Listening to any of those albums immediately brings me back to those first European trips; the trips themselves, but also the experience of finding a music store filled with music I didn’t know, browsing through, trying listening stations, and taking chances on things that caught my ear.

Collage of the covers of the six mentioned albums.
So much good music on these. I can easily recommend any of them.

Sadly, with online purchasing and streaming having taken its toll, music stores are much fewer and harder to find, and generally cater more to the vinyl collector. Which is fine, and I’m glad they’re able to hang on in some form, but as I’m backpacking around on this trip, picking albums up on vinyl isn’t a terribly realistic plan.

Yes, it’s just an aspect of the modern age, and in many ways, the online purchasing options are both more convenient and (if you actually go for purchasing through storefronts like iTunes, Bandcamp, Qobuz, or the like) better for the artists. But being here and having the memories of those earlier trips and the music I was able to bring home has really been making me miss not having that as an option now.

Reaper Man by Terry Pratchett

by

Book 38 of 2026: Reaper Man by Terry Pratchett.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️: Death gets fired, and explores life as a mortal being (more or less), while the rest of the Discworld has to figure out what’s going on when Death isn’t doing Death’s job anymore. It’s easy to see why Death is a favorite character in the Discworld series, as Pratchett continues to do a masterful job of using the character to look at life and make death (the concept) a bit less intimidating.

Me holding Reaper Man

The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi

by

Book 37 of 2026: The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi. 2010 Hugo Best Novel winner (tied with China Miéville’s The City and The City).

⭐️: Actively disliked this one; a rare instance where I came very close to bailing out and DNF’ing, and only stuck it out because it’s part of my Hugo Best Novel reading project.

A dystopic future where fossil fuels have run out (and, apparently, renewable options like wind (except for sailing ships), solar, hydro, etc. just…aren’t a thing? anywhere? for no discernible reason?) and power comes through kinetic energy stored in ‘kink springs’, and the resulting societal collapse combined with ecological change has devastated food supplies worldwide. The overall background is basically colonialism; substitute genetic engineering agriculture companies for the East India Tea Company and Thailand for India, and you’ve got the gist. Genetic engineering has progressed enough that there are now “New People”; genetically created intelligent artificial life that is genetically encoded to be servile.

One of these New People is the titular “windup girl” (who isn’t actually windup, but New People are intentionally given a way of moving that mimics stop motion/clockwork creations), a sex slave who is repeatedly abused over the course of the story, with some of these instances being explicitly detailed across multiple pages of the story. The first instance within the first few chapters was more than enough for me, having it happen again and in greater detail and length later on was when I almost bailed out of the book entirely. Instead, I just skimmed past and kept skimming through the rest of the book just to get it done with.

Obviously enough people liked it and found it worthwhile for it to win a Best Novel Hugo award, but I can’t recommend it.

Me holding The Windup Girl.

Night of the Living Trekkies by Kevin David Anderson and Sam Stall

by

Book 36 of 2026: Night of the Living Trekkies by Kevin David Anderson and Sam Stall.

⭐️⭐️⭐️: An entertaining adventure as a Star Trek convention becomes ground zero for the zombie apocalypse. A few things here and there that bothered me a bit, but mostly nothing really major. The biggest thing for me was that the authors couldn’t resist giving nearly every person and place very obvious Trek nods for names (the hero is Jim Pike, the hotel is the Botany Bay, and many, many others), and yet, somehow, it seems that none of the die-hard Trek fans at the convention ever notice this or think it’s at all noteworthy. While identifying the names was a fun mini-game as I read, within the context of the story, it broke my suspension of disbelief (apparently, zombies are fine, but insufficiently observant and pedantic Trekkies is over the line).

Me holding Night of the Living Trekkies.