iOS7 Music Player. Am I missing something?

Try just asking Siri to play the music for you. Then you won't have to look at the app.

And, yes, in iTunes, I sort my music by album title.

Submit your feedback directly to Apple using the appropriate link on the Feedback page:

http://www.apple.com/feedback

In the meanwhile, there may be other apps in the App Store that will allow you to arrange your music the way you want. You might also see if searching using Spotlight works better for you.

I searched for other apps and couldn't find anything. This new music app is a disaster in my mind, way too busy with album art practically slapping you in the forehead every push of the button. This is exactly what they did to iTunes when it updated to 11 but with that you can adjust settings to get the old search and GUI back. They need to do that here, for example if I select "songs" and then try searching, it first pulls up artists, then albums and once it becomes specific enough, finally songs. Either that or I need to scroll all the way to the bottom to find the songs, this is a terrible system as I have WAY too many artists and albums to make this efficient when I'm looking for one specific song. I end up needing to type too many letters to find the song I want. Also, say I am looking for a song (or anything) that starts with "T" I type "T" and EVERY artist, album, and song in my library with the letter "T" anywhere in it comes up, I don't know if Apple thinks we're idiots but I can spell words well enough that this is simply tedious.

The Music app used to be easy and quick but with this new update it seems that Apple was more concerned with flashiness than utility, it's like it was built for people who can't read. Changing the way something looks is much less important to me than how well it works. I will definitely be contacting Apple Feedback and letting them know that they need to at least include the option for music to be more like it was, remove the album art from the menus if desired and search only the category (Artist, album, or song) that is currently selected.

You also can't search playlists, so if you have a large playlist. shuffle or find it manually.

Scroll with the letters on the right side.

I find that much less functional and precise than a simple search, I hate to be scrolling up and down trying to find something, it should be able to do both.

I totally agree. The new music app is a complete disaster. It also integrates very badly with iTunes.

After updating my iPhone 4 to iOS7, iTunes automatically synced some songs to my iPhone (I always manually manage the music on my iPhone, never sync, and those settings are still checked in iTunes) which are bizarrely now on the phone but not showing up in iTunes when I have my iPhone connected to my computer -- so I cannot remove these songs.

I have tried a couple of apps to replace the OS music app. Two I tried are Audyssey ($1) and Ecoute ($3). Audyssey seems pretty good but has one massive flaw -- it seems there is no way to stop it from listing all the music you have in the "cloud" (in my case, purchased from the iTunes Music Store) along with the actual music files you have moved onto your phone. Fatal flaw, alas, and a bizarre one.

The other app I tried is Ecoute. That DOES have an option in the settings to turn off the listing for your cloud music, thank god. But it has some bugginess with the play button not working until you go into the actual OS Music app and hitting play, then going back to Ecoute to hit pause to get Ecoute to take over control of the music. At least that's the case on my iPhone 4. I assume this is a problem they're working on now because they weren't ready for the new music app...

Here's a good article which at least lets you know other people feel the way you do...

http://www.jamisonfoser.com/blog/2013/09/how-apples-ios-7-is-a-disaster-for-musi c-lovers.html

By the way, the answer to the problem with songs which cannot be deleted is in this thread...

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5323762?start=15&tstart=0

Basically, you need to make note of which songs you cannot delete.

Turn on the "Show All Music" setting.

Go and download those songs completely.

Turn off the "Show All Music" setting.

Then delete them.

Full details in the linked thread.

Mind-boggling. This has cost me several hours of headaches trying to sort this out. And to think Apple became world famous because the iPod was the easiest to use music player ever made... sad, sad, sad...

I totally agree with you. Apple destroyed the music app. iPhone is much more a music device to me than a phone. And with iOS7 now to search any song or any album is a complete torture.

For example, if I just want do hear an album searching it by Artist I just cannot do it. Because if I choose Artists > Pink Floyd > The Wall > In The Flesh (the first song), the player will put all albuns and all hundred Pink Floyd songs in the 'Playing Now' list. Whyyyy????

And the shuffle icon beside album art is useless, because it has the same function of the shuffle icon located at the top of album list. So it will not shuffle the current album, but all albums. Whyyy???

I really wait an update to the Music App, the new one has absolutely no improvement.

From what I can tell playing with it for a few minutes, Ecoute is better for your purpose. IE, it's easier to play just one album. But it's still buggy and to get it to fully take control of the play/pause control after you click on a song and it starts playing in Ecoute you have to first use the Music app to hit pause, then go back to Ecoute and hit play. (Then you can use Ecoute to hit pause/play as normal). Hope that bug gets fixed fast.

This is really depressing to me. I use my iPhone to listen to music at least an hour or two a day. I might even get an iPod nano or something and just stop using my phone as a music player.

What idiocy. I shouldn't have updated. Actually, if you think back to what they've done with the iPad music player, making it far worse, and iTunes 11, making it far more focused on album artwork, then I/we should have seen this coming. Getting very worried about Apple, and I am a long long longtime fan.

Hey Paul, you might be interested in trying out Picky if you haven't yet – it's an app I made to solve many of these issues, optimized for browsing for and listening to albums (I mentioned it in another thread here: Re: iOS 7 Music App sorting issues). Right now it hides any undownloaded music, but my next update is including an option to show that stuff if you prefer. And there shouldn't be any issues with pressing play from within the app =).

Cheers,

Charles

Hi lessthanuthink/Charles -- Thanks very much for your comment and suggestion! I bought your app and I like it a lot.

For others in this thread, I recommend giving it a try as it is very simple and clean. For those whose goal is to play albums easily and quickly it is excellent.

It can't completely replace the music app for me because it doesn't list playlists, but that's ok... for playlists the music app is still acceptable for my purposes.

I would like it if Picky had a Genre listing as well. That would let me get to things a little faster as I have music in many genres. Perhaps in the next update?

Picky has a filtering function which I don't completely understand the point of. The Song filter allows you to list only artists who have a certain number of songs or fewer on your iPhone. For instance, you could see a list of artists with only 3 songs or less. But for people who listen to that kind of one-hit-wonder music, aren't they likely to have lots of those kinds of songs on their iPhone anyway? The Artist filter works the opposite way -- it allows you to show only artists with, say, 5 or more songs. Thus you can filter out those one-hit-wonders and de-clutter your artist list. Both of these are kind of useless for me as I don't listen to pop hits much. Anyway, the good news is the filter function is very unobtrusive and so I can easily ignore it. It doesn't take up a lot of screen space -- just a button in the top bar.

Charles, with Apple's bizarre redesign of the Music app, there's definitely a market opportunity. And I think that given the design direction Apple has taken with iTunes and the Music app on the iPad, I don't expect to see Apple changing direction no matter how much people complain.

I think if you did an app specifically intended for fans of classical music and jazz, world music, etc. -- who basically always listen to music in albums -- including easy access to some eq presets and options to turn off all the album art, it might be very successful. Could be just a simple variation on the app you have now.

Thanks again!

PD

Charles -- Oh and by the way, I'm actually getting some of the funkiness with the play/pause button with Picky that I also found with Ecoute and Audyssey, so I think this is a problem of the interaction with the music app itself. I've seen some issues like this with iOS6 also...

Also I discovered a weird flaw in the Music app/file listing. If I change the name of an album on the iPhone, the change shows up in iTunes (on the Mac, when the iPhone is connected), but does not show up on the iPhone itself.

As an example, let's say I use iTunes to buy an album by Pat Metheny on my iPhone. The album downloads to my phone. Now, because I have 20 plus albums by him already on my iPhone, I change the name of the albums to indicate the year -- this makes things a lot easier for me to find. So I use iTunes (on my Mac) to get-info and change the name of the album to, say, "1995 x Album Name x". But at the moment, the change shows up in the iTunes listing (again, on the Mac), but not in the listing in the Music app... nor in Picky, Ecoute or Audyssey. So there's something funky about the way that information is being handled on the iPhone... Or there's something wrong with my phone...

Oh yeah and it crashes all the time too,

And from the Control Center, it doesn't remember the last tune you were when you unplugged your headphones, so when you go back and want to start playing again from where you left off, it starts playing some other random song when you hit play from inside Control Center. That's my pet peeve with it. And I use Playlists so that I can group some things together.

The Artist - Album List - Songs set up from before was excellent, and they ruined it with this new app.