Music

Music is a big part of me: Over the years, I’ve sung in choirs, played the violin (never terribly well) and can plunk tunes out on most other instruments, DJ’d alternative/goth/industrial/ebm/electronica clubs, and collected a whole lot of music.

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.

Little Audio Upgrade

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Just replaced my computer’s old Logitech Z323 2.1 (stereo plus subwoofer) computer speaker setup with a small stereo amp and two small bookshelf speakers, and even just half an hour in, with hours to go before the amp and speakers are really performing at their best, it’s already a noticeably better sound. Fuller and more well-rounded, and as a bonus, not having a subwoofer sitting on the floor of my office means I won’t bother my wife downstairs nearly as much. Well worth it!

Repairing my Music library after Apple Music Library Sync destroyed the metadata

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Today I finally finished repairing my Music (iTunes) library after it got mangled when I signed up for Apple Music (the service) a few months ago.

Apple Music has its benefits, but apparently signing up automatically activated the library sync feature, which started overwriting my local metadata with data from the cloud. I caught it before it got all the way through and figured out how to turn it off, but a large chunk of my music library lost a lot of the edits I’d made over the years. From song titles to artist names to custom artwork, covering tracks that I’d purchased from the iTunes Music Store, purchased from Bandcamp, ripped from my own CDs, or even imported from my vinyl collection. Titles and names were changes, artwork was either replaced or removed…probably somewhere between a third and a half of my 37,416 item, 285 GB music library was affected.

The only reason I was even able to repair it all was that, well, Music (and iTunes before it) has been historically tweaky for long enough that I’ve gotten into the habit of making a manual backup of my music library every so often, separate from the Time Machine backup that’s done automatically, just because I don’t trust Music not to screw something up at some point.

I also discovered that Music reads metadata from two places: the metadata embedded in the individual files, and in the “Music Library” file stored within the /user/Music/ folder. Much of the bad data that was being displayed in Music was actually being read from the “Music Library” file; apparently that was where the data from the cloud had been written. When I opened the info window on a track to fix it, Music would then read the embedded metadata from the actual track file, and the data (some of it, at least) would switch back to the correct information.

Of course, manually going through and loading every one of my 37,416 tracks wasn’t at all realistic — but the Refresh a track from its file’s metadata script from Doug’s Applescrpts allowed me to select a chunk (I was able to do as many as 600 tracks at at time without it timing out) and let the script repair the metadata in the background. There were still some final corrections that needed to be made (this trick didn’t fix the artwork that got lost or replaced, and many of the “Album Artist” fields still needed to be corrected manually), but those were easier to do once the script handled the bulk of the work.

So, a few months after signing up for Apple Music, I finally have my local library back to a useable state.

Hey, Apple? Local data should NEVER be replaced by cloud data without warning, without explanation, and without active affirmative confirmation by the user. That was years of work I could have lost, and months of work repairing it. Get this bit of your system fixed, please. This sucked.

Also, trying to write a post about my music, the application Music, the service Apple Music, and Apple the company, and make it all coherent, is not an easy thing to do. I get that iTunes was a bloated beast and needed to be split up — though, really, Music isn’t that much better, is still missing a lot of features (like a usable in-app search feature) — but did it have to be renamed so generically?

This Means Nothing

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Pet peeve: The little fake level meter animation that Music shows when a track is playing drives me up the wall. It’s just a looped animation that bears no relation to what’s actually playing. Give me real data or a static icon, but this is useless.

Five-second clip of Apple's Music app UI.

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It’s Got a Great Beat, and You Can File a Lawsuit to It: “Originality is a con: Pop music history is the history of near overlap. Ideas rarely emerge in complete isolation. In studios around the world, performers, producers and songwriters are all trying to innovate just one step beyond where music currently is, working from the same component parts. It shouldn’t be a surprise when some of what they come up with sounds similar — and also like what came before.”

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Clubbing: ‘I can’t bear the idea that there is an age at which you should stop’: I’m 46, and while I don’t get out as often as in my 20s (can’t do 3-4 nights out a week anymore), I have no intention of stopping. It’s too much a part of who I am and what I need. “Typically, clubbing loses its appeal in our early 30s; 31 is the age at which most give up, according to a 2017 survey. But for those who do keep dancing, it can be much more than just a night out. What starts as an act of teenage transgression becomes radical in middle age.”

An Old Music Meme Revisited

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For no particular reason (and certainly no good reason), resurrecting a silly little meme from a few years ago…

Some silly pointless statistics on my iTunes music library:

Linkdump for January 11th through January 23rd

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Sometime between January 11th and January 23rd, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

Linkdump for November 14th through November 29th

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Sometime between November 14th and November 29th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!