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

Baz27 wrote:

...now the bad news it is a free app but it only last 10min per day unless you pay £5.95 but it is worth it. The app is called MyTunesProHD.

I've been using SRS's MyTunes Pro on my iPhone 4 in lieu of the built-in Music App and it works quite well. I was willing to pay $4.99 just to have a crossfade option.

That said, SRS's MyTunes Pro HD (iPad version) is almost useless on my original iPad. For months the reviews on the iTunes Store have complain about the app crashing and it constantly crashes on my iPad. It won't even open the "Playlists" tab at all, just crashes.

Of course I've tried restarting and resetting my iPad, but it makes no difference, MyTunes Pro HD is very buggy.

That said MyTunes Pro HD will work on my iPad IF I don't attempt to do anything (at all) while a song is playing...but if I try to change any of the settings, open the song list tab, etc. it crashes.

Additionally it seems to have a lot of difficulty working in landscape mode. Sometimes I have to shake the iPad for the app to reorient itself…and often the music will drop out or it will crash when it does.

SRS has had several months to update this app but haven't done anything to fix it yet.

Again, the iPhone version works well, but the iPad version is just about useless IMHO. I hope SRS fixes all of the bugs, it has a lot of potential, but it's NOT ready for prime time just yet.

Also, the app is not universal, you have to buy separate iPhone and iPad versions.

So, caveat emptor!

Just curious, does this app update playcounts? That'd be important for smart playlists.

I was afraid to upgrade to i0s 5 after reading these posts.. But, once I did, I found no issues with the music app (other then being ugly) I do have some missing cover art, but I could care less about that. I only have about 500 songs on it, and while I liked the ipod.app better I am getting along with the music app. All it needs to do is play a playlist in random order while I drift off to sleep and have aweful nightmares, what more could a person ask for......

Rachael Jellicoe

Rachael Jellicoe wrote:

I was afraid to upgrade to i0s 5 after reading these posts.. But, once I did, I found no issues with the music app (other then being ugly) I do have some missing cover art, but I could care less about that. I only have about 500 songs on it, and while I liked the ipod.app better I am getting along with the music app. All it needs to do is play a playlist in random order while I drift off to sleep and have aweful nightmares, what more could a person ask for......

Rachael Jellicoe

The new Music App is working fine for me too, both on my iPad as well as my iPhone. The Music App had all sorts of issues initially, particularly with large playlists, but Apple has updated it a couple of times since then and it's adequate.

But I heartily agree, I really miss the original iPod App. This is one of the few times that I've seen Apple create a replacement that wasn't as good as or better than the original. Hopefully they'll continue to work on improvements.

rockmyplimsoul wrote:

Just curious, does this app update playcounts? That'd be important for smart playlists.

Sorry, I've never used the play count feature, so I'm not sure if MyTunes Pro (or HD) updates it. I like the app and I really hope SRS gets things ironed out so that it's at least functional.

Before this thread leads to incorrect conclusions, I just want to report that my main problem has not been fixed by any of the updates. I have a 100% reproducible crash. I go to playlist, try to swipe up or down, and the app just freezes. I can swipe up to twenty times without any response. If I press the home button to quit and then restart it, I get a gray screen, and after a few seconds the app crashes. If I start it again it works, but I still cannot scroll through my playlists. I have about 8000 songs, and one playlist has about 6000 of them. This may well be the problem, but I need that playlist on another device. And why should it be a problem?

In my opinion the original headline of this thread still stands. The "Music app" is total garbage, the worst piece of software ever produced by Apple, and they still have not fixed it. The "iPod app" had none of these problems and was superior in every respect.

Yep...totally agree about the iPod App being far superior to the current Music App.

I think you're probably right about the playlist issue. I had the same problem, some playlists were just "too large" and when I tried to access them the Music App would either freeze or crash. I finally had to divide up a few of them into smaller lists and that fixed the problem. In the end I created different playlists for my iPhone and iPad...separate from those on my Macs. But again, agreed that we shouldn't have to do that.

You can determine if that's the problem pretty easily. Connect your iDevice to iTunes, uncheck that playlist in question and sync. If the Playlist feature starts working that's likely the cause.

It's also possible that one or more songs are causing some trouble. I've also had cover art cause problems. I've even had that happen within iTunes...corrupted files or something. Once I re-ripped or downloaded them again things cleared up.

In any case, wish we had the iPod App back for sure. Best of luck and hope things work out and/or Apple gets things ironed out.

rockmyplimsoul wrote:

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

Still not available in iOS 6 ... you can only access your Compilation albums from the Albums menu, no dedicated shortcut as on iPhone or iPod.

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

Still not addressed in iOS 6.

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

It seems that this has been corrected, you can now shuffle all songs by an artist by selecting any song within the Artist menu, and if shuffle is on then all of the artist's songs will be shuffled. No "Shuffle All" button as on iPhone, but I can do without that.

HOWEVER, the correction seems to have broken something else ... if you want to play one album by an artist (in normal track order) and then stop, you can't. Playback will jump to the next album at the end of the last track of the album you selected. The only way to play one album is to select it from the Album menu. On the iPhone you can select an album from the Artist menu and it will play just that one album.

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.

Still not addressed in iOS 6, perhaps even worse since I've yet to see any indication of what track is playing (other than the tiny font at the top of the screen).

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).

Still not addressed, must be a "feature" ...

Yep, little if anything fixed.

Having to dig down so many screens to rate a song (or even see ratings) is particularly bad. I don't know why they can't just make it more like iTunes and just give an option to show song ratings in the main song lists.