iOS 7 Music App sorting issues

That's right – you can just swipe up in the Now Playing view to see the current playlist (while still having the playback controls at the top of the screen). Sorry if it was a bit unintuitive, but I think that should let you do exactly what you wanted, piflnokyd 🙂.

Thank you both relayer35 and lessthanuthink (Charles). Great. Exactly what I wanted and it was already there :-) This couldn't be easier to find -> don't be sorry. It is me who has to be sorry...

I'll add that I love the 'swipe up' function. That's how Rdio does it, and I personally much prefer it over tapping to bring up a separate page with the song list.

Wow! The last update fixed the trouble with duplicating artists! Now its ok!

Thats one problem down. Now we just need to wait for about 10 more updates to solve all the other things that have been ruined or just move on like we all did with the maps update. Haven't used apple maps since day one and don't think I ever will. I'm pretty sure I can safely add the music app to this list as apple don't have a very good track history of listening to it's users. When Apple takes a new direction it's normally for good. At least Picky came to the rescue real quick.

I DISPISE IOS 7 MUSIC APP!! It's super slow!! Took 30 seconds to back out of a song

To look for another song on iphone 5s!! Why?? And the letters are gone to select album name.

And the worthless videos doesn't keep your videos in order anymore unless you purchaced

Them from apple! I get them in a weird order like episode 7 then 4 then 8 exc.

Needs update ASAP like 6.1 it should be implemented!

I totally agree! I am extremely particular and meticulous with my iTunes library. The whole sorting issue is really bugging me!

*Dislike*

There's so much fail with this updated music interface, I do not know where to begin.

How about, for starters, give me more viewing options for landscape mode. Sitting at my desk, working all day allows for burning through quite a few playlists. Advancing to the next track now requires me to pick up the phone and rotate it into portrait where I was previously able to just advance from landscape mode. It sits in landscape because I have a cradle specifically for the purpose.

Since the developers may not be aware, I generally do not choose my music based on the thumbnail of the album cover. The current landscape wall is perfectly useless while my guitar gently weeps.

Please keep pushing me away from iTunes. It's for my own good.

It's not so much the things that are a hassle, like the automatically expanded albums when scrolling - although I hate that stuff, it's not the big problem with the new music app. It's the things that are just flat-out broken.

Like the new chronological albums sorting. I love the idea, in principle. But the release date data used is sometimes completely wrong. According to iOS 7, Queen's debut album came out just before their final album, in 1995. News to me, that! All along I thought it was released in 1973! I mean, how hard can it be? Even if the app synched release dates to what is entered in iTunes, that would be something. But it doesn't. It uses some random date (which is completely wrong) and I'm stuck with it.

And I HATE how in a lot of palces within the app, the album art is replaced with pictures pushed by Apple. I spent quite a bit of time getting nice album art for all my albums, but now 90% of it has been replaced by crappy, low-quality images pushed by Apple.

When you add up all the problems with the app, and take into account the fact litening to music was the primary thing I used my iPhone for, it's a disgrace. Maybe Apple should spend less time on flashy animations (which I bet 99% of people have turned off anyway) and focus on making apps that actually work and aren't significantly worse than what they had intiially. They did the exact same thing with maps. Who here hasn't gone out and got the Google app instead?

Talking of which, anyone know a good replacement for the music app?

Leigh Burne wrote:

It's not so much the things that are a hassle, like the automatically expanded albums when scrolling - although I hate that stuff, it's not the big problem with the new music app. It's the things that are just flat-out broken.

Like the new chronological albums sorting. I love the idea, in principle. But the release date data used is sometimes completely wrong. According to iOS 7, Queen's debut album came out just before their final album, in 1995. News to me, that! All along I thought it was released in 1973! I mean, how hard can it be? Even if the app synched release dates to what is entered in iTunes, that would be something. But it doesn't. It uses some random date (which is completely wrong) and I'm stuck with it.

And I HATE how in a lot of palces within the app, the album art is replaced with pictures pushed by Apple. I spent quite a bit of time getting nice album art for all my albums, but now 90% of it has been replaced by crappy, low-quality images pushed by Apple.

Sounds like:

1. The metadata stored in your files is wrong and likely reflects the release date of a reissue/remaster. You can fix that by setting the Year to the correct value.

2. I haven't noticed replacement of any album art. I've noticed that when viewing Artists, the Music app uses representative images downloaded presumably from iTunes rather than picking an album cover to use as an Artist image. Like lots of people, I'd rather it use an album cover for this, and I really wish it would let me pick the one to use. That would be nice. The Artist images it's currently using typically don't mean anything to me and are in some cases pretty unrecognizable.

jon8979 wrote:

Sounds like:

1. The metadata stored in your files is wrong and likely reflects the release date of a reissue/remaster. You can fix that by setting the Year to the correct value.

2. I haven't noticed replacement of any album art. I've noticed that when viewing Artists, the Music app uses representative images downloaded presumably from iTunes rather than picking an album cover to use as an Artist image. Like lots of people, I'd rather it use an album cover for this, and I really wish it would let me pick the one to use. That would be nice. The Artist images it's currently using typically don't mean anything to me and are in some cases pretty unrecognizable.

I've set the release year for these albums myself in iTunes, but the year I've entered isn't the one being used when sorting the albums in the music app. As you say, some reissue date has been used. But in these cases where it's wrong, it contradicts what I've entered myself on my laptop.

The album art replacement thing is weird. Whenever I play a song, the album art shown on the main music player screen is always the image I've uploaded. But many of the smaller images used throughout the menus, and in the panoramic album scroll view (which, by the way, is terrible compared to the old becasue now albums are shown alphabetically in a big splurge rather than one at a time by artist), are crappy ones supplied by Apple. But not all of them. It seems compeltely random and makes no sense.

Another frustrating problem I forgot to mention: for no reason at all, some songs are hidden when viewing their respective albums, and can only be found when I specifically search for them by artist or name. I think this might have something to do with tracks by artists other than the main album artist assigned to a particular album, but this wasn't a problem before the recent update, it's only started now. If I want to listen to one of these tracks whilst listening to another off of the same album, I can't just hit the album track view, top right on the main screen, and select it like I used to, because it'll be missing from there. I have to search for it through all the menus. Just one more thing that's completely broken yet worked fine before.

Leigh Burne wrote:

I've set the release year for these albums myself in iTunes, but the year I've entered isn't the one being used when sorting the albums in the music app. As you say, some reissue date has been used. But in these cases where it's wrong, it contradicts what I've entered myself on my laptop.

The album art replacement thing is weird. Whenever I play a song, the album art shown on the main music player screen is always the image I've uploaded. But many of the smaller images used throughout the menus, and in the panoramic album scroll view (which, by the way, is terrible compared to the old becasue now albums are shown alphabetically in a big splurge rather than one at a time by artist), are crappy ones supplied by Apple. But not all of them. It seems compeltely random and makes no sense.

Another frustrating problem I forgot to mention: for no reason at all, some songs are hidden when viewing their respective albums, and can only be found when I specifically search for them by artist or name. I think this might have something to do with tracks by artists other than the main album artist assigned to a particular album, but this wasn't a problem before the recent update, it's only started now. If I want to listen to one of these tracks whilst listening to another off of the same album, I can't just hit the album track view, top right on the main screen, and select it like I used to, because it'll be missing from there. I have to search for it through all the menus. Just one more thing that's completely broken yet worked fine before.

I haven't noticed any Year discrepancies, but I'll be on the lookout. I've got 575 albums on my Touch at present.

Ditto for the album art substitution. Whenever the Music app is showing a specific album, I get the art for it, and that includes the useless landscape mode.

I'm also not seeing any issue with hidden songs on albums with multiple artists, and I do use the Group by Album Artist feature.

jon8979 wrote:

I haven't noticed any Year discrepancies, but I'll be on the lookout. I've got 575 albums on my Touch at present.

Ditto for the album art substitution. Whenever the Music app is showing a specific album, I get the art for it, and that includes the useless landscape mode.

I'm also not seeing any issue with hidden songs on albums with multiple artists, and I do use the Group by Album Artist feature.

The chronology mistakes aren't exactly rampant - the example I gave for Queen is the only one I can remember off the top of my head, although I'm sure I've seen one or two others on my phone - but it makes finding that specific album a complete joke, becaue it's location is essentially compeltely random and I have to scroll through everything to find it, rather than simply knowing where it sits in the artist's chronology.

I don't use group by album artist, but I never did before on iOS 6 either, and that managed to show me every track on any given album perfectly fine. While we're at it, iOS 7 even decided to make some of my contacts invisible in the same manner - the person's name showed up if they called me or sent me a text, but they were nowhere to be found in my address book, and they wouldn't show up if I tried to type their name into the send field of a text or email. They were there before, so why have they vanished now?

Like I said, there are things about iOS 7, and the new music app in particular, that I really don't like. But these things are just flat-out broken. I wouldn't mind, but Apple don't even have the decency to give me the choice to return to iOS 6, something that actually worked, while they fix their completely broken software update (probably because everyone would swarm to return to the old).

Hello again Charles

I think I found a similar issue in Picky like DirkSchaefer. But in my case it is only showing non existing content (but not playing).

I removed an artist (Leanard Cohen) but it is still showing in the artist view with 12 songs. But when clicking on the artist, there is no album/songs visible (which is correct).

Here some details:

Ich changed the Artist-MP3-Tag from "Leonard Cohen" to "Cohen Leonard" in my Win8-PC-Folder (with Mp3tag). I removed the songs from iTunes and moved the changed MP3-Files back in. Now Picky is showing both artists in the list.

- "Leonard Cohen" as already mentioned -> empty

- "Cohen Leonard" with the correct content

BTW: This also happened with other name changes of artists (e.g. "Michael Jackson" to "Jackson Michael")

Surprisingly ;-) the original music-app from apple is showing this change correctly

Maybe this helps to solve DirkSchaefers problem as well.

Hi piflnokyd, thanks providing all those details – it'll be a lot easier to investigate that now. Apple's media library code doesn't properly notify other apps of changes anymore, so my app has to make some guesses as to whether it's actually changed – currently by checking the number of songs. So if you rename things or remove some songs and then add the same number of songs, it won't cause Picky to reload the library. I'm going to try to add some additional logic to improve this, but for the time being there's a secret way you can force the app to update: enter the URL picky://reset into Safari to launch the app and reload the music library. Hopefully this helps 🙂.

– Charles