Music app for ios5 is unusable (it's so bad)

I hear you brother! Agreed...they should have addressed this long ago.

I actually did get the Music App on my original iPad to behave fairly well after some tweaks. Have a look here and see if anything helps...

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3416860?tstart=0

Two other things seemed to help as well:

1. Making my playlists smaller; 1,500 tracks or less each.

2. Reducing the size of album art that I had added myself to <1000x1000 pixels (Apple's standard is 600x600)

It's still laggy and nothing like the original iPod App, but it does work and doesn't crash now.

Also, be sure to file your thoughts directly with Apple...

http://www.apple.com/feedback/ipad.html

FWIW someone from Apple actually sent me an email after I created that thread and gave me a list of questions about my experience. I answered them all but didn't hear anything more from them. That was back in November or so, so you'd think that they would have had enough time to resolve our issues by now.

Hopefully with the announcement of the iPad3 next week an iOS upgrade will be included that will address things.

Best of luck!

Major problem for me is when I close the Music app while the album artwork is displayed, not the spreadsheet playlist; this leads to major crash when reoping Music and nothing happens and it is just locked up and useless, more useless than under normal conditions.

Complete reset is needed to get the music app to display music, etc.

Grouping of songs randomly just goes haywire as well for no reason. I have turned to leaving main computer on and using the free app "Remote" to control my music.

Apple need to keep music and video separate under different applications. Ever since the introduction of TV, Movies, videos, etc. to the music application, music features have been crushed to nothing. I only use my Ipad for music, so it has been difficult to deal with this POS app called Music.

I just want to add my 2 cents here, hoping someone from Apple actually cares to read and take some action.

I use ITunes Match with 18000+ songs. I have a Macbook Pro, iPad 2 and iPhone 4s. I have been frustraded with the iOS Music App on the daily basis. I had no problem paying the annual fee for the iTunes Match service, since I was hoping to have my music with me everywhere. But I cannot use Music App. It freezes, crashes, and works incorrectly EVERYTIME. I just cannot believe my eyes. This is as bad MobileMe services a few years ago -- USELESS!!!!

I open the Music App, and attempt to search. After 2nd or 3rd key hit, the keyboard is frozen for 10 seconds or so, and then I get a burst of characters. The serach doesn't return anything for a minute or two, and then things start appearing. Trying to select something while the search is returning results will end up in playing the wrong song, which the right song has the speaker sign beside it. Sluggish performance continues until I completely shut it down and turn on the radio.

If I chose to just go through my albums and select something without searching, I see my albums scattered into multiple albums. This issue blocks me from playing a full album, and of course Music App doesn't let you queue music - you can only select a song and say play! By the way, iTunes on Mac doesn't let you schedule a song to be played as a real-time playlist. But it at least has the iTunes DJ that can almost do something similar. Guess what? iTunes DJ doesn't appear in Music App!!!!

It almost feels like Apple has no creativity when it comes to music player apps. I don't care about beautiful album arts in the coverflow, when I cannot perform some basic actions!

By the way, as much as I hate to do this, Apple has left me no choice than thinking about migrating to the Google Music. Please please please don't let me do it!

JGhalam wrote:

I just want to add my 2 cents here, hoping someone from Apple actually cares to read and take some action.

No, they won't. This is a user-to-user forum. If you want Apple to here your complaints, use the Feedback Page:

http://www.apple.com/feedback

Thanks Meg. I actually did post a feedback at the link you mentioned, and I have already been contacted by Apple. I will post more updates, if I have resolution for my issues.

iOS 5.1 is out and the release notes do list some fixes specifically:

Genius Mixes and Genius playlists for iTunes Match subscribers

Podcast controls for playback speed and a 30-second rewind for iPad

Hopefully both of these are actually fixed as well as missing lyrics and other bugs.

It looks as though the 'Music app' is here to stay then.

I would very interested to see if 5.1 improves the stability of the app for the iPad 1.

Anyone game enough to have tried OS 5.1 yet - any reports at all? (esp for the iPad 1). After my experience with OS 5, I'm less willing to upgrade immediately, in case the potential downsides outweigh the benefits. Fox...

I have updated my iphone 4s and iPad 2, and seem to be ok. I tried Muisc App, and I can see much improvements (performance to manage itunes match is much better).

I like the fact that you can delete pictures from photo stream now! Overall so far, so good. Let you know if I run into any issues.

I've updated my iPad 1 as well as my iPhone 4 to iOS 5.1. I've used both normally since and both seem to be running fine.

Although I haven't fully put it through its paces the Music App does seem snappier. The one glitch that I did see was that two playlists were duplicated for some reason. The normal playlist appeared with the duplicate next to it, the only difference being a "1" next to the duplicate's name..."Classic Rock 1". I touched and held the duplicate playlist unitl the delete "X" appeared, deleted it and everything seems to be good.

Fingers crossed.

Having upgraded my iPad v1 to iOS 5.1, I personally think that the Music App is still as bad as it ever was - bring back the Music App from iOS 4.3.

• There are still no lyrics available... (as far as I can see ?)
• It is still terrible to listen to audio books/podcasts, using this app
• I still miss the coverflow album art navigation
• No iTunes DJ
• The interface is still extremely slow to load & navigate and is nowhere near as responsive as the original 4.3 version.

That is just a few of many things that are wrong with this app. For me it is rubbish and possibly the worst app I have on my device.

I do love iTunes match and keeping my music in the cloud, but now I have a 64gig iPad with lots of free space so I wish I had purchased the cheaper 16gig version.

So either Apple is not listening to the feedback we all submitted, or it is true that they do not want to improve this app on the ipad or iphone for fear that it will knock back the ipod sales (even further) which is clearly what has happened.

KGriff wrote:

Having upgraded my iPad v1 to iOS 5.1, I personally think that the Music App is still as bad as it ever was - bring back the Music App from iOS 4.3.

• There are still no lyrics available... (as far as I can see ?)
• It is still terrible to listen to audio books/podcasts, using this app
• I still miss the coverflow album art navigation
• No iTunes DJ
• The interface is still extremely slow to load & navigate and is nowhere near as responsive as the original 4.3 version.

That is just a few of many things that are wrong with this app. For me it is rubbish and possibly the worst app I have on my device.

I do love iTunes match and keeping my music in the cloud, but now I have a 64gig iPad with lots of free space so I wish I had purchased the cheaper 16gig version.

So either Apple is not listening to the feedback we all submitted, or it is true that they do not want to improve this app on the ipad or iphone for fear that it will knock back the ipod sales (even further) which is clearly what has happened.

Agreed on all counts. The original iPod App on the iPad and iPhone was far superior to the current Music App.

Historically Apple has never "gone back" so all we can hope for is that they clean the new Music App up and add the features we enjoyed previously.

I guess we can continue to voice our displeasure...

http://www.apple.com/feedback/ipad.html

Ok, I've upgraded to iOS 5.1, and here's my 2 cents.

1) The performance of the Music app has been improved. On the iPad 1 it's definitely smoother, more stable and more responsive.

2) Most notably, the return of 0.5x and 2.0x speed control and 30 sec rewind is great.

3) Audio from the iPad speaker seems much cleaner and louder - very nice for portable podcast listening.

4) I'm finding the linear scrubber control behavior to be much smoother, whereas before the action was terribly rough and jittery.

5) Selecting playlist, artists, songs podcast etc. seems just all 'round snappier.

6) The overall OS performance with the iPad 1 seems more stable and smoother (although it still has its bugs, I think iOS 4 was better for the iPad 1).

Now, what I don't like about the Music app:

1) Playlists and Artists still show up as an x-y grid with pictures of albums. I HATE this with a vengeance. To me, it makes it makes no sense, it's virtually unreadable, visually cluttered and horrible to navigate. Whoever thought of this model for navigation, imho has poor judgment in data presentation. To me, it's like designing a phone book with names running left to right in regular reading pattern - it's just stupid and illogical - and this is exactly what the Music app does! I would love it if they gave us the option to sort the lists vertically, or with some type of vertical branching.

Fox!

fox27 wrote:

Now, what I don't like about the Music app:

1) Playlists and Artists still show up as an x-y grid with pictures of albums. I HATE this with a vengeance.

Agreed, it would be far better to have a vertical listing as on the iPhone. If they had such a desire for the grid for the iPad, at least reserve that for landscape mode and give us a vertical list in portrait orientaion.

Overall the app seems more stable, but:

No menu selection for Compilations -- you still have to find them by album name.

The Shuffle icon: Black vs. White -- which one is Shuffle ON? (Orange = ON, but only in artwork view

No indication of what track number of total tracks is playing (i.e. how close to the end of a playlist am I?)

No way to shuffle all songs by an artist without a lot of workaround steps.

The speaker icon showing which song in the list is now playing can't make up its mind if it wants to show itself or not -- sometimes its there, but often not.

When playing a song you flip the artwork over to rate it, but the artwork flips back over when the song changes. This is a pain to keep flipping the artwork back over when you're trying to rate a collection of songs (e.g. a new album or playlist of unrated songs).

Rock!

(sorry, couldn't resist)

They will never change the app. The whole apple knows what's best then you will like it or lump it attitude is all apple has ever done. Try playing the Ricky gervais podcast. The little looks over function screen shrinks down so small you can't even read the podcast you want to play as its cut off. Also. Who knows what one you are currently playing as there's no way to tell. The album art cover over the playlist title is the worst part still. Apple without Steve jobs is really just bad. Visuals should never trump function. And that's all this is about. Who needs the former full use of the iPad screen we have. Instead , we get a transition effect instead of a useable app that take full advantage of the big screen. There's simpley no reason reading the title can't happen with such a big surface to look at. Cramp transitions in and cut out the content we are browsing. This whole music app is worthless and apple will never ever give us options. It's time to stop using my iPad for music as its too frustrating. Just gonna use my Something else. Why should it be an iPod ??