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

No.

iOS5? Great.

iOS5 iPad Music app? One of the worst apps Apple has ever produced. Even the iPhone iOS5 Music app is fine.

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

I just left feedback, I advise evreyone to do the same.

Seriously, that is one awful app "update".

I sent feedback as well. I have no idea what they were thinking. I suppose it still performs the function of playing music, but it's awful for music management now, and they removed the ability to use playlists for navigation while editing playlists. The faux old radio look is pretty bad, but what's really killing me is the navigation stuff. I keep a lot of playlists on my iPad, and not being able to see the list of playlists and the contents of the currently selected one at the same time just *****.

And the weirdest part is that this Music app has more features on the iPod Touch and iPhone than on the iPad.

I would love to know what Apple had in mind here, unless it's simply an error.

I agree, it *****. I thought TUAW's post summed it up well: iOS 5 features: Changes in Music app for iPad | TUAW - The ...

Also, why is there still no Shuffle by Album option???

Glad to see TUAW wrote it up, hopefully plenty of user feedback and some press shining a light on it will get Apple to make the fixes the app badly needs.

together with iOS 5 Music.app on iPad doesn't support audiobook chapters and Since iOS5 audiobooks only play a chapter at a time. It would appear that Apple Software Engineering assigned a small team in training to develop a new Music app for the iPad and they didn't have sufficient supervision. Normally a product manager has a checklist of features and functionality for a product element such as the Music app on the iPad and then Q/A verifies that the product of engineering meets the requirements.

There's just so much totally wrong with the Music app that it must have been ignored by the usual processes that ensure excellence of design and engineering at Apple. Almost as if no one really gave a darn but that's so un-Apple like -;)

Let's hope ZDNet and CNet and others get on the story as well.

See more at iOS 5 features: Changes in Music app for iPad | TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog

Does anyone know a good alternative in the app store? I searched but could only find iphone music player apps, nothing really for the ipad.

By the way, I did send feedback to Apple, I hope everybody does who is not happy with this music player app.

Thanks.

I found a list of Audiobook apps: Best Universal Audio Book Apps: iPad/iPhone Apps AppList I haven't looked at these myself so I don't know if there's really any good ones there.

And I second that everyone who is concerned about the Music app on iPad or otherwise should submit there concerns at http://www.apple.com/feedback/ipad.html.

Amen to all that has been said. Bad UI design is one thing, but horrible performace and totally missing features is totally unacceptable. All podcasts are playing in 1/2 speed mode and there is no way to fix them. No way to list chapters, etc. This is ridiculous. Steve Jobbs would be wringing necks.

I totally agree with you guys here. I even found that I can't rate indivdual songs anymore. If I try to rate the current playing song it rates all songs in the album. Even more, I have different songs with different ratings in my iTunes libary but when the songs syncronize to the iPad they show all up with the same rating.

I was hoping for an option to move the current playing song to a playlist, but it got even worse now to work with playlists from the iPad. Would that be so difficult to design into the app...? Just press and hold the currently playing song and give me the option to move into a playlist on the go, on I have created or even a new one. This is a real bugger 😠

DaniStein wrote:

I totally agree with you guys here. I even found that I can't rate indivdual songs anymore. If I try to rate the current playing song it rates all songs in the album. Even more, I have different songs with different ratings in my iTunes libary but when the songs syncronize to the iPad they show all up with the same rating.

I had this problem when I first updated iOS but it's working OK now, you might need to restart the iPad or something like that. Not sure what caused it to fix itself on mine.

Agreed about the playlists, before you could see the playlists on the left side of the screen. I was hoping they'd add some kind of feature where you could drag songs over (two or three finger drag to differentiate from scrolling?). Or like you say, a menu on the currently playing song. But no dice.

Thanks for trying to help me on this. However, restarting the iPad was the first thing I did and as this wasn't working I did a complete restore which didn't help either.

Playing with the app I find even more and more buggs... Now I see that it does sync all songs from my iTunes libary to the iPad even if in the options I have chosen "only sync checked songs and video".

By the way I agree that it would have been a nice feature to be able to drag songs into the playlists directly (as those still where in their column on the left, looks like this is over and gone now).

Wow... if syncing my iPad starts screwing with my song ratings, I'll be furious (and will probably have to get rid of the bloody thing). I'm getting towards 20,000 songs in my library -- without ratings and smart playlists, that's totally unmanageable. That goes beyond inconvenient and bad user experience. Note to self: start backing up my iTunes library regularly.