iOS 7 Music App sorting issues

I'm not sure that reitterating what's already been said here would do any good, but I nevertheless would like to add my 2¢. I assume that the threads with the most replies get read by people at Apple. So; when your interface design team gets back from vacation, please have them fix this. Please.

Please tell me if I'm crazy but I think at some point during iOS 6 Apple changed the Back/Play-Pause/Forward buttons so that they were more spread apart on the screen (both in the lock screen and the app itself). This was a very nice change as you didn't have to be so careful about accidentally pressing forward or back with your thumb when you meant to tap pause. Is it just me or are the buttons closer together again in iOS 7? If so, this is yet another in the laundry list of things I'd like to see them fix.

zornie wrote:

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

Hi zornie, I've been putting the final touches on a big update I've been working on but I'm not sure if that's going to make it in – I'm definitely keeping it in mind for the next update though! And there is a slight chance I could try to squeeze it into this one, hmm…

Paul Duke1 wrote:

…

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.

…

Paul, I read your post the other day and was surprised by that bug, but low and behold, I saw it myself with one of my albums yesterday. I tried a bunch of things behind the scenes to try to get the user-modified title for it, but couldn't find any way to access that info – the system only returns the original iTMS title. Very strange, and very annoying, and something that third-party app developers aren't going to be able to fix, unfortunately.

Thanks for your reply Charles (AKA lessthanuthink). I'm glad to get some straight information on this -- and also glad to hear confirmation about this "feature" (bug?) from another user. As I have mentioned, this weird quirk with changing the names of albums back to the iTunes Music Store name does NOT happen on my iPad mini (which is also running 7.0.4). So I remain hopeful this really is a bug and Apple will catch this and fix it in an update soon. But I am just as worried, I have to say, that they will change the iPad music app to match the bug in the iPhone app.

In addition to sending in feedback a couple of times, I also decided, based on some of the entries there, to personally contact Apple support about this. I went through the support options and the phone call option seemed to require sending a note to have them call me, so I opted for the online chat. I chatted with a support person, explained the problem in brief, and the support person said she would send my notes as... feedback. No comments about passing information on to a "senior engineer" and such, as others have reported here. Do you guys recommend I arrange for a real phone call? Is that the only way to get phone support these days? Set a time and they call you back?

dear Charles

thank you for Picky, it is now the only way for me to listen to music on my iphone.

i do have some issues with the iphone (4) performance when playing music,

but i am not sure if you can do much about it as third-party developer:

1. it take few good seconds after i select a track and before music starts, yes ios7 is slow on iphone 4..

2. when listing to music on my car thru bluetooth and a call comes, some times after the call ends

it will resume playing and sometimes it won't.

3. this one is easy: the only thing they did right on ios7 music app (really the rest is so crappy) is to

have some kind of visual indicator in the album view for the track that is being play at the moment.

this feature along with the scrolling long title names will be great.

so, many thanks

take care

Just to keep the annoyance bubbling at full boil I'm going to mention something related which I just discovered.

I have an app called "VideoPix" which specifically makes it easy to watch videos at slow-speed or frame by frame for those who want to analyze their kids' softball swings or their own golf swings, that sort of thing. I haven't used it in a while -- not since iOS6 -- and I just noticed that now the "video library" is listing ALL videos I have EVER purchased from the iTunes Music Store, not just the videos I actually have on my iPad. Since in my case this includes two seasons of "Mad Men" purchased on iTMS (which includes not just the episodes but some extras for each episode like interviews with the writers and actors) that means I have well over 50 videos I have to sort through to find the actual one that is on my iPad and I want to analyze.

iCloud/iTunes is the culprit again.

And by the way, regarding video I came across some posts with people trying to figure out how to play their videos continuously -- for instance there are a lot of parents who want to line up a bunch of half-hour videos for their kids to watch on a trip, etc. But in iOS6, I think it was, Apple took away the ability to make a video playlist, and with iOS7, Apple has removed some workarounds people figured out to beat that restriction, so that now there is now way to play videos continuously without 3rd party apps. This really made me laugh because at the same time they are making it harder to watch a couple of episodes of "Friends" in a row in the video app, over in the Music app they are driving people crazy by making it much harder to just play or shuffle one Beatles album rather than listen continuously to every Beatles song on your iPhone or iPad.

Increasingly Apple seems like an ornery Uncle that seems to do things specifically to annoy you. Where is the Apple of old that delighted you by making things so easy and always anticipating how you really wanted to use the device to listen to music or be entertained???

I strictly use Picky for music playing on my iPhone now. Thanks to the developer of this useful app. Apple should thank him too ... music is a major element of my mobile device usage and i was looking at other options (ie android, iphone plus spotify app & minus itunes usage/purchases, etc.).

Hello,

I just get the Picky app and notice the advantages over the native music app, yet there are still some things that I dislike about it:

1. The lack of a "Albums" Tab. It's really useful because I just can't find some of them in the Artists tab because they are compilations of various artists.
2. The lack of coverflow. If you plan to add, please let the sorting be customizeble, like Artist -> Title | Title | Artist -> Release Date and so on.
3. The not useable Playlists. I use Smart Playlists to group all albuns of a label together (I listen a lot of electronic music and labels are important here). For example: I have a playlist for all albuns released under Monstercat label. Right now I have 209 songs of this label that are split into 15 albuns. In the Picky app it show song by song. It's **** hard to find the one I want listen, and how it's a label of lots of artists, I hardly remember their name, just the album and somewhat the position. Have the option of sort by albuns like we have in the OS X iTunes would be just terrific.

Beside those problems, the Picky app is really useful. The Picklist idea is really AWESOME, and the genre Filter is also great! If those problems will be fixed, wow, that would be godsend!

Thank you for reading this.

For me, iOS 7 is the clearest sign yet that Jobs is not around - nothing left the building in that state.

As an avid iPod user I bought the iPhone to save space in the pocket. It was a costly solution but the iPod changed how we listen to music on the go. One of the greatest assets in the beginning was that it was "also an iPod".

Never in all my time of using MacBooks and iPods and iPhones and iPads has an Apple product felt so unfinished as iOS7. Aside from all the patches shot out to fix the holes within the first few months, the Music app SIMPLY HAS NOT BEEN DESIGNED FOR THE IPAD.

The new album grid makes it to 4" iPhone screen but not the bigger screens - where's the logic in that? iPhone has all letters in alphabet to scroll through, ipad has half - why?! I defend Apple to the hills for the most part but the iPad music app is shockingly poor - I can't think of one single improvement over the previous iteration and this thread is testament to the degradation.

Now, pick yourself up, stick to what Apple does best, and then build on that. Don't go all MS Vista on us!

The Apple of old died on October 5, 2011.

Can't wait for the next avant-guard innovator.

Hello,

I myself stayed on ios 6 because of the redesign of the music app. The music app on ios 7 was designed for people who have 200 songs and play them randomly but not for music lovers.

I have 2 suggestions for the music app in ios 7.1 :

1. I prefer to find a particular album by selecting "genres" then the album. In IOS6, since ipod 1, and even in the itunes store, this was the normal path. However with IOS7, once selecting "genres," I can only view a list of artists, not albums; and if I select albums, I get all albums from A1A down, in every genre. My suggestion is to let the user chose how he can browse his music library.

2. The file size of the itunes match song is too high. Let the use chose the bitrate of the songs downloaded from itunes match.

Thank you for reading this.

I'm slow to reply here, but I'm in the same situation. I absolutely hate how all albums are lumped under artist. To make matters worse, when they updated the Remote app, they made the same change. Apple has made it difficult to listen to music, IMHO. I really hope this gets fixed in 7.1.

Thanks again to everyone who's posted feedback about Picky, it's been really helpful. I thought I'd pop in with a list of what's new in the update I've just submitted to Apple:

‣ Picky now includes a list of all your albums, which you can easily filter by number of tracks, by genre, or by multiple genres. There's even a shuffle button so that you can shuffle your filtered list one album at a time.

‣ You can now choose how to sort artists' album lists: by title, by release date from oldest-to-newest, or by release date from newest-to-oldest.

‣ If you're using the 'Artist' or 'Album Artist' grouping options the Artists list will take iTunes' 'sort artist' and 'sort album artist' fields into account.

‣ The album and playlist detail views now have handy shuffle buttons.

‣ The Artists list now also lists the number of albums each artist has.

‣ Artist, album, and song filtering options now go up to 30.

‣ Tapping-and-holding on the Now Playing view's back button now takes you all the way back to where you started from.

‣ Sorting has been improved to better handle titles and names that start with punctuation.

‣ Various small bugs and crashes have been fixed.

The update should be available within the next week or two, and I'll be starting work on another update shortly. I'm hoping to include even more of your suggestions 🙂.

Cheers,

Charles

Charles, you are awesome!! Thanks for adding the album sorting options. Quite an impressive sounding update!