iOS 7 Music App sorting issues

halo9 wrote:

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When I have my iphone 5 (ios7.0.3) running latest picky version conected to car stereo with ipod cable and I play music through it, once I hit skip forwards it starts playing the next track and then after 1-2 seconds jumps to a random song. I have reset, unplugged, replugged, restarted car, the lot and keeps happening. I try the stock app and it skips forwards and backwards fine, no isuues. Close that and go back to picky, play an album and as soon as I hit skip it plays next track and then jumps to a random song as if it is on shuffle. It is not on shuffle in either app nor the car stereo.

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Hi halo9,

That's a weird one. Do you have it connected with a standard audio cable, or through the lightning port? And are you skipping tracks from inside the app, or from the lock screen? I use Picky in the car all the time without any problems, but just with an audio cable and rarely skipping tracks. All the playback functionality in Picky just goes through the stock app, but maybe there's something wrong with Apple's public playback APIs for third-party apps when connected to a car like that… very odd.

Glad you're still liking the app though 🙂.

– Charles

Hi Charles. Using the proper lightning connector so I can use the cars nav controls, no other cables. Tested a few things for you. From the phone picky works fine, skips from within app and lock screen. I shut down picky and used native app and same again, works both ways. With native app still on I hit skip on my cars track button and skips forwards and back fine, no issues. I shut that down and go to picky and play an album and as soon as I hit skip the number goes up one and the timer starts on the cars display an I hear 2 seconds or so of the track then another song starts up. Alway a random track.

Ok, now I tried opening the native app first, then picky and played an album from picky and it is working ok. Now I can shut them both and start picky only and it works ok. I've just gone nuts. No problems now. Even though I replicated this issue about 20 times yesterday and today.

Oh well, will see how it goes. Thanks for listening. Looking forward to the next update.

PFox78 wrote:

Great question, Leigh, and sorry for taking a few days to respond. For some reason, I couldn't access these forums for a few days. It started working again today.

A week or so ago, I got a call out of the blue by an Apple representative asking about some other issues I had with the iOS 7 music app when the new OS launched (duplicate tracks showing, missing artwork, etc.). Although I fixed those issues by doing a restore, I informed the rep about this forum and all the issues we've been having.

He said he would have a look, pass this on and get back to me. I still haven't heard from him, but I will follow up within the next few days. Hopefully, the more noise they hear from us, the faster they'll make a change.

Having said that, I've absolutely been loving Picky. It's the best app. As I stated in a previous post in this thread, it's very similar to iOS 6 BUT with a more modern iOS 7 "look" and feel. The developer, Charles, who has posted in this thread, is also a great guy and very responsive. I've made a couple of requests and he's followed through on them and the app is even better now.

Believe me, it's worth way more than the 99¢ he's asking for it. Buy it without hesitation!

Thanks for the heads up. Glad to hear Apple are (hopefully) at least looking into this, although I find it hard to believe they haven't heard about these issues before, given how numerous they are. Thanks in advance for keeping us informed!

I can't believe a multi billion$$$ Co can mes up so badly in error, I have to assume that for some reason they meant to create this dreadful hash.

This along with my probs with iphoto really make me question whether to stick with apple.

Music & photos are key and they are not showing themselves to be trustworthy.

halo9 wrote:

…Ok, now I tried opening the native app first, then picky and played an album from picky and it is working ok. Now I can shut them both and start picky only and it works ok. I've just gone nuts. No problems now. Even though I replicated this issue about 20 times yesterday and today.

Wow, that sounds very strange (and frustrating!). It's sounding more and more like a bug with how Apple's third-party music app API's interact with the car control stuff – and unfortunately I don't have a car with iPhone playback control integration to test it with. Hopefully now that it's stopped happening for you it'll stay working? :\

PFox78 wrote:

First of all, there are some artists in my library with many albums. In iOS 6, accessing those artist's albums was easy. You would click on the artist tab, go to the artist and it would show a list of the albums. Then, you could choose an album and go right to those songs. In iOS 7, this has completely changed. Now, there's no longer an albums view under artists. You have to scroll song by song to get to the newer releases.

For instance, I'm a huge fan of Pearl Jam and have 60 albums of theirs (9 studio, the rest all live records). Now, to get to the latest, I have to spend 30 seconds scrolling all the way down the list. That's not efficient at all. The way it was before — you get a list of albums once you click on the artist, then click on an album to get the songs — should never have been changed.

COMPLETELY agree with you here. The changes to iOS 7 Music are so backwards, if they don't get fixed up I will have no choice but to start shopping for a different phone. We've been browsing and selecting our music like how you described since the very first iPod and then suddenly it's all different?! Similar to your situation, I have about 40 albums from Rush on my phone consisting of over 400 songs that I have to scroll through instead of the 40 albums first which is clearly far more efficient and user friendly. I also agree with those that feel we should at least have optional settings to change these things as well as things like the artist icons which in their current state result in fewer artists displayed on screen and more time scrolling. In the player itself, the buttons are all too close together down at the bottom and the scroll indicator shouldn't even be at the bottom. When I try to scan through a song now, my thumb covers up the very thing I'm trying to look at to see where I am in the track.

I'm going to give that Picky app a try because iOS 7 Music is just a total trainwreck.

Not sure if this has been posted here but the Music app complaints thread over at MacRumors is one of the longest running there. http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1601540

Been using Picky for a while and the music sorting is great. It doesn't fix the issue of my iPhone not remembering what it was playing the instant before I plugged it into my car but that's just one of the many things that Apple broke with car stereos and iOS7. At least with Picky, I can scroll back to what was playing many times faster than I can with the awful new music player.

I wish I could find one thing I liked about the music player but I simply cannot. From where I'm sitting, they broke everything that made it so great for everyday use. The sorting ***** and the car stereo functionality is broken. I never had a problem with either before iOS7 and that's all I bought the thing for. I was quite happy with a cheap phone and an iPod. For 18 months, I had the best of both with my iPhone. Now I have an expensive phone and a broken iPod. Thanks Apple.

I find Muze to be a perfect substitute for the default music player and iCatcher! Podcast app for the default podcast app.

I am not going back to the default apps.

I tried Muze and deleted it after waiting over 30 seconds for it to load my library, while its progress indicator was still on 20% or so. I tried Picky, but it takes about 13 seconds to load my library on my iPod Touch 5th gen. This happens every time after it gets swapped out, which means it will be a regular occurrence. I have about 7500 songs (33 GB worth) on my Touch at present. One good thing about the built-in Music app is that it never has any delays like this. If I were forced to recommend an app that respects album boundaries and provides a traditional Artist browsing experience, it would be Lagu, which is free, followed by Picky, but there are lots of things I'd change in both. Lagu is a lot faster at loading my library, but it still takes about six seconds.

Okay.... so... just downloaded ios7.0.4... sadly, there is no fix included.

The following may already have been said, so if so, no need to flip out on me...just wanted to pass it along

I did find a minor work around that works (although, I am the first to admit that I HATE work arounds...so I still want Apple to fix this stupid music app.)

What I did was:

• Start in Music App
• Select Artists
• Select artist I wanted to listen to
• Select a track (-it brings up a playlist of ALL of that artists songs, as we all know)
• Top right of the "Now Playing", select the bullet icon.

  this appears to allow only that particular album to be open.

• Select a different track on that album
• You should have just that particular album selected
  • Album repeat is allowed
  • When you click "back" it goes back to the artists even though you were in an album

I think the best think would be to simply click on the album name to open just that album, but for now this seems to be the simplest work around IN the Apple music app.

Cheers!

<Edited by Host>

Hi folks,

I just want to add my voice to the complaints and criticisms about the iOS7 Music App. There are several threads on these boards discussing this, but this is the longest one I've seen, so let's focus our efforts here and hope we can get Apple's attention. If this thread has hundreds of posts and is constantly at the top of the boards, maybe that will help give Apple a kick in the pants.

I have posted in some of the other discussions. For what it's worth, my full discussion (including why I think this is all being driven by Apple wanting users to move to iCloud) is in this post:https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5320298?answerId=23680645022#23680645022I also am a big fan of the alternative app Picky, as mentioned many times in this thread.

I'll try not to repeat myself at length, but I'll just mention one problem/change with iOS7 which doesn't seem to have been mentioned here.

And that is that, for music purchased from the iTunes Music Store, the music app now reads the original album name from the iTMS, not the album name as it might have been modified by the user.

I listen mostly to jazz and classical music, which means I tend to have many many albums by my favorite artists. For instance, I have 40 albums by the saxophone player Sonny Rollins. I prefer to list albums chronologically by release date. For Sonny, I have 7 albums alone released in 1956, so just listing the albums by year doesn't solve my problem. So my solution is to change the album name of each album to include the release date. For example, "1956-06-22 Saxophone Colossus". OCD, yes, but at least I can find my music easily. But if that's an album that I bought from iTunes Music Store, the Music App changes the title back to "Saxophone Colossus" (although it doesn't change the actual data; the album info still has my version when I look at it in the iTunes program on my Mac laptop). This is true even if you don't use iTunes Match (I do not) and have the "Show All Music" option turned off (I do have this setting turned off).

Very annoying! Why give me the power to change the information if you're not going to display it? For the people who listen to Justin Bieber's latest singles, they are not going to change the data, so why bother to force the names back to the original? For those of us who DO bother to change these things to make some logical sense, why not display our changes???

And what's weird is that on the iPad music app this is not the case. That app still correctly reads the data as I've modified it. (For this reason I am hoping that this is bug in the iPhone app caused by something else related to the general push toward iCloud).

I'm a big fan of Picky and I recommend it every bit as much as the others in this thread. But unfortunately it seems Picky (and the other apps I've tried) all seem to draw their album name info from the Music App itself. In other words, Picky also displays the original iTunes Music Store data, rather than my modified data.

Has anyone by chance found a good app which will use the user's data, not the iTunes Store data?

So disappointed in Apple with this music app... And good to see everyone complaining and especially that article from the New Yorker's website linked earlier in this thread.

Discovered yet another fault today - was listening to some music, and I clicked the button top right to bring up the album track view. I find that for some reason the album art is completely missing in this view, and the artist is listed as unknown, even though all these details are entered and correct in itunes and appear just fine everywhere else in the app.

Ridiculous.

Hello All,

Last week, I think, a poster to this forum said that he was in touch with an Apple representative who would get back to him about Apple's response to this very long litany of complaints.

Did Apple ever respond?

Thanks in advance.

I'm curious if Picky has been updated to show long titles with tap and hold?

Hi All,

Was so glad to come across this discussion to find that I'm not the only person tearing my hair out thanks to the iOS 7 Music app, particularly after I updated last week to 7.0.4 which has rendered the thing almost completely useless for me.

Of course I agree with most things already mentioned on this discussion (massive unnecessary images all through my lists of Artists and Albums, inability to select just one album to listen to and repeat, inability to delete a whole album in one hit, or add a whole album to a playlist, etc etc). But here are the biggest items for me personally. Note: I have already submitted this as feedback to Apple, but thought I might share with you guys as well.

1. As a person who spends upwards of three hours per day commuting between work and home (I live on the Gold Coast in Queensland, Australia and work in the capital city of Brisbane, around 100km away), listening to music during this tedious daily journey is the only thing that keeps me from committing mass murder on the road. After updating my iPhone 5 64GB from iOS 7.0.3 to 7.0.4, I found that it is no longer communicating correctly with the sound system in my car. On 7.0.3 and all versions previous right back to iOS 4.3.5 on my iPhone 4, integration with my car system was utterly seamless. As soon as I turned the car on, it would connect to the phone via Bluetooth and start playing the last song I had been listening to, right where I left off - perfect. Then if I decided to plug in my lightning-USB connector to the phone so it would play music and charge at the same time, the transition from BT Audio to iPod connection was also seamless. Now in iOS 7.0.4, this is happening:

• When I get in the car and turn it on, instead of BT Audio playing the last song I had listened to right where I left off, it would start playing a completely random song as though I had gone into the "All Songs" list and clicked shuffle - it would then show on the screen "Track 1 of 7,400" - awesome....
• When I plug the cable in, now it completely flips out and the screen in the car goes blank for a while - then it does the same as above AGAIN, picking a NEW random song to play and shuffling every single song I have on the phone.
• When I attempt to use the car bluetooth system to either use Siri or call someone, it sometimes works and sometimes just fails completely. If it does work, when the call ends the music doesn't come back on straight away like it used to, it now goes to a screen saying "Track 0 of...." and does nothing - I have to physically and illegally pick up my phone to choose a song again and it will start playing.

If these issues aren't enough to make me want to kayak across the Pacific Ocean and drive a truck through the front doors of 1 Infinite Loop Cupertino....

As a sound engineer at a live venue, one of the roles I fulfil is selecting and playing music from my iPhone when the band/entertainment takes a break. I have to identify who the audience is and what kind of music is going to keep them dancing and drinking, and create playlists on the fly on my phone to play for them through the PA system. Since updating to iOS 7.0.4, I cannot make a playlist on the phone without causing the Music app to crash unexpectedly. I will go to "Create" and start choosing songs, and after I choose about 4 or 5 songs the whole app crashes and I have to start all over again. Absolutely unacceptable and disgraceful, considering it was working perfectly fine one tiny update ago.

I really hope someone high up the food chain pays attention to this and fixes what they broke.

Cheers

Charles.