macOS

macOS Tahoe Music (app) breaks shuffle

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Sigh. Shuffle by Album seems to be broken in Apple Music (the app, not the service; what is it with companies giving their apps and services identical generic names?) under macOS 26 Tahoe.

After starting Music, if I go to my library’s Album view (that is, songs that are downloaded and stored locally), the shuffle icon in the new control bar appears to be glowing (with a bad effectThe left side of the audio control bar in Apple's Music player under Tahoe, with the shuffle icon highlighted in red with a very harsh, hard-edged glow with no fade. It looks really ugly.), but if you check options, through the menu bar, Controls > Shuffle shows “Off” and by “Albums”. If I switch that to “On”, I get about a two-second SPoD (Spinning Pizza of Death) — which seems really odd for an audio player on an M4 Mac Mini — before it responds again.

Pre-Tahoe, I could either hit “play” or double-click the “Albums” item in the Music app sidebar, and Music would randomly choose an album, play it through, then randomly play another album.

Now, If I hit the “play” control, Music starts playing the first album in however the album list is sorted; I usually keep my Album display sorted by year, so it always starts playing the oldest item in my collection (Victrola 88049, Enrico Caruso performing “Ideale (My Ideal!)”). If I double-click the “Albums” item in the sidebar, Music starts playing the first song of the first album sorted alphabetically by artist (for me, that’s “Take on Me” off of A-Ha’s Hunting High and Low). Either way, though the shuffle icon is still glowing, checking the menu bar’s Controls > Shuffle shows that that’s now set back to “Off”.

If I let it play as-is, it just plays through the album. If I set Shuffle back to “on”, then it start shuffling by song, not by album. Well…sometimes. Right now, I can’t get it to shuffle at all, even though Shuffle is turned on, both in the menu bar and with the glowing shuffle icon in the control bar.

Revised original line: Shuffle is either partially broken (only shuffling by song, not by album) or entirely (not shuffling at all), possibly randomly choosing (…shuffling?…) between the two options.

I know Apple’s gone all-in on their streaming Music service, but I really wish they still had a few people assigned to making sure they had a decent basic audio player. Music just gets worse and worse for those of us who have extensive non-streaming collections.

Environment:

  • M4 mini (2024, 16 GB)
  • macOS Tahoe 26.0.1
  • Music 1.6.0.151
  • 41,596 tracks on 4,044 albums (136.4 days, 317.43 GB)

Related question:

Are there any third-party audio players for macOS that write back metadata to the macOS Music library?

The biggest reason that I’ve stuck with Music is that I use its smart playlists to regularly update the playlists that live on my iPhone, so they’re regularly updated and the songs on them rotate around. (My regularly used playlists all have some variation of “exclude if listened to in the last two months” as one of their rules.)

As far as I know from past digging, no third-party audio players write metadata (esp. when last played) back to the Music library, so the smart playlists wouldn’t work anymore.

If there’s a good, functional audio player, especially if aimed at people who actually value listening to owned music rather than streamed, that plays nicely with the Music library metadata, I’d dearly love to know about it.

Weekly Notes: March 31–April 6, 2025

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  • 🚀 This weekend was a little bit of convention conflict, as Saturday we had the final Norwescon 47 planning meeting before the con, and Sunday was Seattle Worldcon‘s announcement of this year’s Hugo finalists. Got everything done, but it did make me glad there aren’t many weekends where I’m trying to do stuff for two conventions at the same time.

📸 Photos

Single-panel comic of two men sitting on a park bench, one is about eight inches tall. The small one is saying, "You think you've got problems! Not only am I the incredible shrinking man, but I've also been bitten by a werewolf so every full moon I turn into a gerbil!"
From a conversation with a friend, one of my all-time favorite Bizarro comics, clipped and saved back when I was in high school.

📝 Writing

📚 Reading

🔗 Linking

  • Guillaume Lethuillier: The Myst Graph: A New Perspective on Myst: “Upon reflection, Myst has long been more analogous to a graph than a traditional linear game, owing to the relative freedom it affords players. This is particularly evident in its first release (Macintosh, 1993), which was composed of interconnected HyperCard cards. It is now literally one. Here is Myst as a graph.”

  • Jessica Bennett at The Cut: If Hetero Relationships Are So Bad, Why Do Women Go Back for More? A new straight-studies course treats male-female partnerships as the real deviance.: “‘In this class, we’re going to flip the script,’ she went on. ‘It’s going to be a place where we worry about straight people. Where we feel sympathy for straight people. We are going to be allies to straight people.'”

  • Nilay Patel at The Verge: Best printer 2025: just buy a Brother laser printer, the winner is clear, middle finger in the air: “This is the third year in a row that I’ve published a story recommending you just stop thinking about printers and buy whatever random Brother laser printer is on sale, and nothing has happened in the miserably user-hostile printer industry to change my recommendation in that time.”

  • Sarah Jones at the Intelligencer: Then They Came for People With Disabilities The right-wing effort to roll back civil rights finds a new target.: “Though the Rehabilitation Act and the Americans With Disabilities Act had bipartisan support and were signed by Republican presidents, it’s hard to imagine Trump signing either piece of legislation. A more ruthless strain of conservatism always percolated within the party, and now it dominates and threatens the protections that Cone, and Lomax, and so many others once fought to win. At risk is the concept of civil rights itself.”

  • Shelly Brisbin at Six Colors: Twenty Thousand Hertz Dives Deep Into Apple Accessibility History: “The latest episode of the Twenty Thousand Hertz podcast takes a stab at telling Apple’s accessibility story through sound—not only the sound of a host and his interview subjects, but the way Macs and iPhones sound when they speak to people who use their accessibility features.”

  • Watts Martin: What makes an app feel “right” on the Mac?: “So it’s possible that the right question—at least for me—isn’t ‘is this app using a native UI toolkit,’ it’s ‘is this app a good Mac citizen.’ In other words, does it embrace long-standing Mac conventions?”

  • Seattle Worldcon 2025: 2025 Hugo Award Finalists: “Seattle Worldcon 2025, the 83rd World Science Fiction Convention, is delighted to announce the finalists for the 2025 Hugo Awards, Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book, and Astounding Award for Best New Writer.”

ABBYY FineReader Amazement and Disappointment

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I’ve spent much of the past three days giving myself a crash-course in ABBYY FineReader on my (Windows) work laptop, and have been really impressed with its speed, accuracy, and ability to greatly streamline the process of making scanned PDFs searchable and accessible. After testing with the demo,I ended up getting approval to purchase a license for work, and I’m looking forward to giving it a lot of use – oddly, this seemingly tedious work of processing PDFs of scanned academic articles to produce good quality PDF/UA accessible PDFs (or Word docs, or other formats) is the kind of task that my geeky self really gets into.

Since I’m also working a lot with PDFs of old scanned documents for the Norwescon historical archives project, tonight after getting home I downloaded the trial of the Mac version, fully intending to buy a copy for myself.

I’m glad I tried the trial before buying.

It’s a much nicer UI on the Mac than on Windows (no surprise there), and what it does, it does well. Unfortunately, it does quite a bit less — most notably, it’s missing the part of the Windows version that I’ve spent the most time in: the OCR Editor.

On Windows, after doing an OCR scan, you can go through all the recognized text, correct any OCR errors, adjust the formatting of the OCR’d text, even to the point of using styles to designate headers so that the final output has the proper tagging for accessible navigation. (Yes, it still takes a little work in Acrobat to really fine-tune things, but ABBYY makes the entire process much easier, faster, and far more accurate than Acrobat’s rather sad excuse for OCR processing.)

On the Mac, while you can do a lot to set up what gets OCRd (designating areas to process or ignore, marking areas as text or graphic, etc.), there’s no way to check the results or do any other post-processing. All you can do is export the file. And while ABBYY’s OCR processing is extremely impressive, it’s still not perfect, especially (as is expected) with older documents with lower quality scan images. The missing OCR Editor capability is a major bummer, and I’m much less likely to be tossing them any of my own money after all.

And most distressingly, this missing feature was called out in a review of the software by PC Magazine…nearly 10 years ago, when ABBYY first released a Mac version of the FineReader software. If it’s been 10 years and this major feature still isn’t there? My guess — though I’d love to be proven wrong — is that it’s simply not going to happen.

Pity, that.

In Search of a MarsEdit Equivalent for iOS

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A question for macOS WordPress bloggers who use Red Sweater Software’s excellent MarsEdit: What’s your go-to mobile iOS blogging tool?

MarsEdit is a great example of a “do one thing and do it really well” piece of software, and I’ve yet to find anything equivalent for mobile blogging. I just want exactly what MarsEdit gives me: A list of my most recent posts and pages, a solid plain-text Markdown editor, and access to all the standard WordPress fields and features.

Every other editor I’ve tried either doesn’t do one or more of those things or is otherwise not quite right in some way. Ulysses was the closest and I tried it for a while, but while it’s a great editor, it doesn’t pull a list of posts and pages from the blog, just works with whatever’s local or in its own cloud sync or Dropbox or whatever, and last time I used it, had a bug where alt text wasn’t getting applied to images correctly.

(The WordPress native app drives me up the wall. I don’t want block editing. I want text and Markdown.)

Really, what I want is an iOS version of MarsEdit. But failing that: any recommendations?

Blog This Shortcut for iOS or macOS

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Blog This shortcut button image I’ve been working for the past few days on constructing a Shortcut to use for quickly sending a link and block of text to whatever blogging software I’m using on whichever device I’m on at the moment. As of today, I’ve hit a point where it does everything I wanted it to when I started playing, so I’m designating this an official “version one” release (for posterity’s sake, I suppose I can refer to the prior two versions as the alpha and beta releases).

The Shortcut is now cross-platform, with many thanks to Jason Snell for giving me exactly the final pieces I needed.

Selecting some text on a webpage and then using the Share Sheet on iOS or the Services menu on macOS will grab the webpage link and the selected text, convert it to Markdown format, convert any relative URLs in the selected text to absolute URLs, and then place the final text into a new Ulysses sheet on iOS or MarsEdit post on macOS, all ready for any final edits before publishing to your blog.

If this shortcut might be of use to you, either as-is or with some modifications for your particular needs, download, tweak if necessary, use, and (hopefully) enjoy!

Blog This service menu item on macOS MarsEdit window with shortcut output text

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Vinegar:

YouTube5 was a Safari extension back when Flash was still a thing and hated by everyone. It replaced the YouTube player (written in Flash) with an HTML <video> tag.

And now the YouTube player situation has gotten bad enough that we need another extension to fix it. That’s where Vinegar comes in. Vinegar also replaces the YouTube player (written in who-knows-what) with a minimal HTML <video> tag.

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Unclack for macOS: Unclack is the small but mighty Mac utility that mutes your microphone while you type. No more getting called out for clacking your way through a Zoom meeting on your clicky keyboard!