Songs View Jumping to Random Spots After Action

Apple has made viewing your library in song view as difficult as possible. This bug has put me over my limit. In addition to the random jumping, the following changes have been killing me slowly and after 20 years of sticking with it, I'm now looking for an alternative:

• (as mentioned by others) Command+L goes to song playing but changes view to album view, so it's kinda useless if you're viewing as songs. This worked in iTunes.
• No ability to view album artwork in song view (visual queues are super helpful). This was available in iTunes.
• Standard search goes to album view. Song search (aka filtering) is not nearly as easily accessible. Again, this worked in iTunes.
• Cannot rename playlist via right-click. Only in the (oversized) header. This also worked in iTunes.
• A way to choose the default view of playlists, rather than having to change each one.

Basically, Apple Music feels like a big downgrade, and buggy AF. Ironic because iTunes was spun off into separate apps because it was so bloated : (

You can get Albums in Song view by hitting Command J and clicking on Show Artwork at the top, Always Show, and I slide Artwork Size all the way to the right for the largest album image. I also close the Album by Artist column (where the covers show) all the way to the left so it just shows the cover.

I found that If you do the adjustments to the song when it’s in steam mode, if the position jumps, it will jump somewhere in view. After you have rated or hearted the song, you then download the song without further issues. Although the mechanics are essentially the same, it’s much less cumbersome than to download the song and subsequently begin to rate it or heart it.

Having exactly the same issue. Have spoken to Apple on numerous occasions (about three hours over six phone calls) and they seem as bewildered as myself. Very frustrating. I'm a dj and I have a lot of songs so I need to be able to find duplicates or mixes of individual tracks quickly - I can no longer do that without the whole thing jumping to some random point in my collection. Before I would highlight a song, enter title and all songs of that title would be listed at the top. Not anymore, at first it would appear at the bottom but now not even that.

It has recently got worse. When I delete a song or put a track in a playlist it does the jumping business again. It's made Apple Music pretty useless for me.

Sometimes clicking on the line in the field before the field being edited it may not jump. In my case it almost always jumps to the very end of the library, sometimes after a pause of a few seconds it jumps back. Most times I have to scroll back to the line edited which remains highlighted, fortunately, but scrolling thru hundreds of songs to get there is tedious. And when I was applying artwork to 40 songs, the program also selected all the songs below the 40 (offscreen and not noticed) and changed all the art and took me 4 hours to correct (no undo available). And Music does not permit direct editing of playlist names, only on the playlist listing which means moving your pointer to the right and editing before moving back to the next playlist to edit that name. And some dialog/edit boxes launch into the same position, covering up part of your playlist and while you can move it, the next time it is back in the same spot and no memory of where you last put it, requiring you to move it again. I have not found a set of actions to have a consistent response. Music is definitely a very poor replacement for iTunes, more labor intensive for simple tasks, not ready for users that edit text and import CD's and music files and make unique play lists. And it takes a long time to quit. I run Music on a MacStudio and Monterey 12.4 and iTunes on my iMac with HiSierra is a better program with none of these bugs.

Yeah, it's hard to search for info on many Mac apps since they use generic names. Mail & Music are the worst. Safe Mode is also hard to search because searches bring up rebooting, restarting, and the band Safe Mode, etc.

I've never used any iTunes/Music plug-ins, but I noticed that opening Music in Safe Mode stopped the playlists from jumping around... but it also seemed to prevent me from being able to download music from Apple Music.

I've had this issue of playlists jumping around for years, but it seems like it's gotten significantly worse recently. I'm running the latest update of Monterrey on a late 2014 Mac Mini, but above, people have mentioned having the problem with new M1 Macs too. I have no reason to believe a Monterrey update will solve the problem at all.

[Edited by Moderator]

sadly the only way to... uh... I guess use apple music is to use the web version, which I think has no spacial audio

I am having the same issue, and Apple tech said reboot in safe-mode and see if it is still happening. I told him, funny how it happened at the same moment I upgraded to Monterey. He wanted screen recordings, and acted as if this was the first time he heard of it.

All of my Apple Music columns jump to the top or bottom of the list instead of the selected category. Example if I am trying to categorize by year, it will jump to 2021(the top) or no year (the bottom).

Very frustrating. Also a little wonky when trying to rate or love songs, jumps around like a super sensitive mouse pad. Also still dealing with the occasionally cut off song at 15 seconds. If it is not one thing, its the other.

Yup, same deal here. As well, when I do a CMD-L to locate the current track in the list view, instead of just scrolling to it, it jumps me into album view where there's no rating column, or any of the other data that I might want to peek at. Very frustrating!

Add me to the pile of people experiencing this too. And the most annoying part of it is that I've discovered it while going through fixing the roughly 1,000 tracks that had their ratings and other custom info messed up or deleted in the "upgrade" to Monterey. Despite being a longtime Apple fanboy (and past employee) who typically updated software almost immediately, I'd feared this kind of thing happening when moving my huge, well-curated library from iTunes to Music. Having not heard any real horror stories over the past couple of years, I crossed my fingers and made the jump. Now I wish I'd trusted my instincts and carefully made backup playlists (eg. all songs rated 3 stars, all songs with "Full Album" in comments* etc.) so I could fix these quickly. It's bad enough I have to fix all this in the first place but the constant jumping from where I'm working to some random spot in the song list is driving me up the wall.

*By the way, if anyone's wondering why I do tags like this, it's because I hate how Apple treats every title as an "album", doesn't distinguish singles and doesn't have an obvious way to distinguish complete albums from those you've just plucked a track or two from. This was my way of isolating complete albums that better resemble my old CD collection in a Smart Playlist. I know, I know... I should just get with the times and accept Apple's way of sorting things but I just... can't.

Lossless playback: maybe not, iTunes Match syncing: who knows, maybe?

I am using lossless playback to Sonos speakers, not of Apple Music but instead of locally-stored owned CDs that we ripped to Apple Lossless (ALAC).

I have 2 distinct macOS local accounts:

• one with the Apple Music service, for the purpose of listening to just about anything,
• another one with that 30K-song library without Apple Music service nor iTunes Match that I stopped using because it proved too unpredictable, and also for the purpose of being able to sync that local library to our iPhones (instead of badly-matched Music cloud tracks).

Strangely enough, the jumping problem in Songs view occurred on both macOS accounts, then seemed to stop in both accounts around the same time, as if they had shared a common problem, then not.

I had initially come to this thread to report & seek some help, and as I had prepared my initial post, I thought I should check again the problem and saw it had stopped. It doesn’t seem like I found the reason, sadly, but I’m happy to discuss any difference in configuration or environment if that may help.

I am having this issue as well for me when I double click on a song in song list randomly and not always after I click on the song

iTunes will scroll several pages past the song while its playing this makes iTunes for me unusable I have around 40,000 songs! Many purchased!! No response from Apple/

So I noticed today that I do not have the problem on my MacBook Pro M1 just the iMac Pro ? The only difference other than my iMac is not m1

is my iTunes library in my iMac is on a separate hard drive ? I wonder if this leads to the issue? downloaded Monterey latest version did not help :(. Apple support wants me to reload the system software but thats a lot of effort if the bug is know internally ?