Music App Playlists

helge2, how is your answer relevant in any way, shape or form to the topic that I've brought up in this thread?

Let me be more precise about what is exactly that I am frustrated about in the playlist view mode of the 1.0.0.426 version of the iTunes/Music app

There used to be a list of columns that you could select such as Bit Rate, Rating, Year etc and sort albums by year.

Essentially you could view a playlist with a discography of a certain artist organised by album year with album artwork and album name displayed to the left of the playlist

It was a very convenient method of organising a large library with complete discographies of a multitude of artists

This is how Playlists used to look like in iTunes 10, 11 and 12 in Song List mode:

Since iTunes version 12 Apple removed this very convenient method of displaying playlists by default, but they still retained the option of keeping that functionality if you required it for this use case scenario

When viewing a playlist you could go the menu bar and select:

View -> As Songs

View -> Options -> Show Artwork -> Always Show, with the option of adjusting the artwork size:

Since the newest iteration of the iTunes app that is now called Music 1.0.0.426, this is how this section of the menu looks:

And this is how playlists look by default, with a redundant view of the artwork for each and every individual track:

This is the only way that you can view the playlists As Songs as of version 1.0.0.426 of the app:

Artwork in Songs mode is not displayed. This is a huge step back and is ultra annoying.

I've spent several years since iTunes 12 was released to organise my iTunes library to look properly in Playlists/Songs mode

Since version 1.0.0.426 of the app, all those efforts were essentially wasted because this is the only way that playlists can be viewed now with album artwork:

This is a frustrating and completely uncalled for feature removal

Apple coders that will read this at some point in time: please take this request seriously and reinstate the Show Artwork/Always show options in Songs view mode of Playlists. Thanks in advance

Yeah, man, I feel your viewpoint, DaHouseUK

The only time when the playlists in iTunes where properly displayed by default was when Steve Jobs was in charge.

After Jobs passed away there was plenty of other utterly damaging decisions that Apple made such as the whole interface of iOS 7 that they still never recovered from almost 7 years down the line as of October 2019

You'd think that with all of the resources that Apple has at their disposal, Mac OS should be a spaceship by now, however it still largely resembles the same rusty old unrefined, more often than not glitchy, PC like desktop that they first came up with in the late 90s. Even at version 10.15

I mean just have a look at some of the standard apps: they haven't updated the Chess icon since last decade. Plenty of other icons that look like they've been made by a 5th grader. Before the users at least had the option of changing most of the icons with applications like CandyBar and install decent icons from The Icon Factory

These days Apple's just clamping down on most of the user customisable features - seems like in a couple of years Mac OS will be like a desktop version of iOS

DaHouseUK - send in a link to your SoundCloud or other website where you can be reached at, I'd like to ask you for some longterm user opinions when we are going to be beta testing our own interpretation of the iTunes app

In version 1.0.1.37 of the Music app on Mac OS X 10.15.1 this question has still not been resolved, even though Apple listed Music app playlist workflow improvements as one of the bug fixes in the 10.15.1 update of Mac OS

This was their promise:

• Resolves issues that may occur in the Music app when displaying playlists inside folders and newly added songs in the Songs list

• Improves reliability of migrating iTunes library databases into the Music, Podcasts, and TV apps