iOS 7 Music App sorting issues

Just to add to the discussion and pretty much agree with all of the main points being raised. I delayed upgrading to IOS 7 on my iPhone 4S but finally did it last week and what a disappointment. Truly an example of fixing lots of things that weren't broke, and making things harder and less slick to use. Up there with Windows Vista...

IOS 7 I'm resigned to. Personally I think it looks as though someone threw a bucket of bleach over it. Washed out and significantly less readable. I'll get used to it in the way you get used to dodgy Windows releases. But the Music Player is umitigated crap.

I've had just about every iPod through to the iTouch and they have always been slick and fast to use, making best use of screen space and letting you get straight to what you want to hear. This is just a dog's breakfast. I'd just focus on the basic point that everyone makes, that you've got the album graphics whether you want them on or not which clutters the screen, and then it insists on showing you all the tracks of every album by an artist. Anyway, the choice of grahpics seems completely random and bizarre. Even if I could remember what the original album cover looked like, thats probably not what Apple insists on displaying

Having removed a lot of the skeumorphism in IOS7 (which I am neutral about), the guys at Apple seemed to have forgotten that including imitation album covers when we are all digitial downloading is skeumorphism at its most antique!

Please, please, please Apple - swallow your pride and go back to previous player and then work out what really needs doing to it to improve it. If Jobs had been around, this would have been a product he would efinitely have dropped in the fish tank - probably after stamping on it first. Meanwhile I'm off to find a better player. Or hang on - maybe I should go back to my iTouch and Nokia 6310!!!

Well, I haven't posted in here in a while, but it's worth a roundup after so much time has passed but the issues remain the same:

1) Many people who have large music collections, are music buffs, or collect a lot of albums by bands they like over many decades are dissatisfied with the iOS7 Music App. And rightly so. It makes finding, sorting and playing music much more time consuming and cumbersome if you have a large music collection.

2) Apple doesn't USUALLY try to make life harder for its customers, so I think it's a reasonable guess that these changes are aimed at other users -- in particular, the type of user who buys, perhaps 30 or 40 singles per year from a number of different artists. This person rarely buys full albums and doesn't collect music older than a few years ago. For THAT type of person, the changes in iOS7 make some sense. No longer does the Beyonce fan who has favorite hits from 5 different albums have to sort through all the different albums to find the song they were looking for. Now they look under Beyonce and all songs are arranged, by album, in one long list. Those people used to have to go to the trouble of making a "Beyonce Songs" playlist to make it quick and easy to get to all their Beyonce songs. Now it's us long term music lovers who have to make the playlists to keep albums separated.

Although there are a lot of us complaining in here, I suspect the people complaining about the old system -- possibly they did their complaining in Apple focus groups for the marketing department -- were greater in number, and they bought more music from the iTunes Music Store. So Apple listened to them. And probably will continue to listen to them.

So my suggestions to deal with this situation are:

1) Get used to making more playlists.

2) Check out the 3rd party app Picky which gives you back a lot of the iOS6 functionality. It's not exactly the same -- for instance it does not make it as easy to dive in to your music by genre first, which is the way I did it for years on iPods and iPhones. But once I got used to it I essentially stopped using the iOS7 Music app and moved it back a few screens on my iPhone. Meanwhile Picky is in a permanent spot at the bottom of my iPhone home screen. The developer of Picky, Charles, also monitors this thread and will respond to suggestions, so if you're looking for someone who will actually listen to what you want in a music app, I highly recommend checking it out. (I'm not connected with Picky or Charles in any way, other than that I'm a very satisfied user.)

Thoughtful response Paul and like you I have now got Picky at bottom left of screen and Music relegated to the back pages.

I can see where you are coming from but I would have thought it possible to make the player flexible enough to cater for a wider spectrum of users. Never a good idea to alienate your customer base, not least when the Android competition is snapping at your heels...

Absolutely! The Apple music app is now on the last page, with Picky at bottom right.

I'm glad this forum led me to Picky - money very well spent!

Now, what do I do on the iPad, where the Apple app is even more dire?

I've got Picky on the iPad (mini) as well where it works fine though the fonts are too big as its designed for iPhone. Charles Joseph the developer replied straight back to me that its on his list to develop a version thats optimised for iPad as well. Can't wait! Probably be sooner than an Apple Music player....

I have Picky on my iPhone, but I also have another program called Lagu that I think models the old iPhone experience better (you CAN dive into your music by choosing Genre first, for example). Nothing against Picky, and I still have both of them on my iPhone (with Music buried somewhere on the back page like many other folks), but Lagu is in one of the four "bottom spots" that don't change.

That being said, I have found Charles Joseph to be much more responsive than whoever wrote Lagu, which is significant. In particular if Charles can manage to set up a way to list playlists by ranking as well as alphabetically (so you can have a set of "favorite" playlists near the top of the list of playlists) I will be using Picky more.

Thing is, why on earth make it impossible to play a particular album via the artist screen? Surely this must be the simplest thing in the world? At the moment it's impossible to select and play an album via the artist screen - this in itself totally ruins the app. Make it easy for people with four Beyoncé songs to play them, but why on earth remove some basic functionality to do this? So the question is: can anyone recommend an app that behaves

The same As ios6 music. Lagu not quite up to the job.

We could get into a VERY long discussion of why Apple does what it does, but this isn't the place for it, and it would be kind of boring. 🙂 But I will say that Apple is famous for taking stuff away -- Firewire ports, CD drives -- before the rest of the world thinks those things are useless, but when Apple has decided they are on the way out. Yes, I realize some software functionality is a different matter, but I'm just talking general atmosphere re the way the company does things. For me, it was after the iPad got so popular and Apple started changing the Mac OS to be more like the iPad (Launchpad! What a waste of space...) that I felt something had changed a bit at Apple and they were chasing big sales and what was popular. I feel like that is the philosophy that changed the iOS7 Music App. Just my guess. I could be totally wrong.

Anyway, thanks Werebat for the tip on Lagu! Interesting, just as you say, heading into music by genre first is easy in that app. In fact I've been using Picky for so long now, I have to remember how I used the iOS6 app. 😉 Picky integrates art a little better and I like that, and Lagu seems to exclude audiobooks -- I have a bunch of playlists with language lessons as audiobooks that I play a lot, and those playlists don't show up in Lagu, but do in Picky -- but for playing music it looks pretty good.

For those who want to play albums from an artist list, I highly recommend Picky.

Now if Lagu can fix that problem where the Music App doesn't read your personal changes to album names, dates, etc... (According to Charles of Picky, that will require a change by Apple for 3rd party apps to show your individual changes.)

I'm not sure I understand about Lagu and Picky not showing personal changes to albums... I've renamed MANY songs and created fictional artists, genres, etc. on my iTunes, and both programs seem to display all of that.

Maybe you mean music that was purchased on iTunes? I have noticed some stubbornness in general with that stuff... Lagu has the tracks renamed, for example, but the album appears in the wrong... album... It's complicated because I have tweaked my organization so much. But yeah, purchased albums don't behave quite like they should.

I'm sure there are workarounds for that, like recording off of iTunes on the computer and then installing the recorded music -- but that's kind of a PITA.

Yes, sorry, I wasn't as clear as I should have been about that. Songs purchased from the iTunes Music Store show up in the Music App with the original information -- song name, album name, etc -- from the iTMS and any changes you may have made are ignored.

I'm sure that change was driven by the whole iCloud music thing Apple is trying to push people toward. Hope they change it back in an update.

Yeah, you could burn a CD and reimport it and probably get around this. Hmm, seems like a waste of time and blank CDs.

As a result, I myself don't buy music from iTMS anymore. Back to regular old commercial CDs! 👿

So the lesson is keep your music off iCloud and avoid buying it from the iTunes Store....

Not quite the consequences Apple intended I'm sure. Oh well. I always did like CDs!

Foinhaven wrote:

So the lesson is keep your music off iCloud and avoid buying it from the iTunes Store....

Not quite the consequences Apple intended I'm sure. Oh well. I always did like CDs!

In short, I'm with you on this one...

I also avoid iTMS because I don't like paying nearly CD prices for lossy (ok, maybe sometimes 1/2 as much as a CD, but still too much $ for lossy)... They "claim" high quality 256 kbps but I'm pretty sure it's 256 kbps CONSTANT bitrate... meaning most of the time, a lot of bits are wasted and for really complex passages, sometimes bits are missing and not enough...

I would buy one or two songs from an artist here or there from itunes to cover a few extra songs not on their greatest hits, or when I just couldn't get a CD copy any more. Sometimes I'd also buy greatest hits singles from an artist then I realized they were a lot better than I thought, so I went out and bought the same album (e.g. drive from R.E.M.'s automatic for the people is an example of the "not on greatest hits") because I realized I would like the entire album.

I wrote a computer program that lines up the two wav files (one from the CD, the other from itunes) and subtracts the itunes version from the CD wav and again subtract my lame encoded mp3 VBR (which btw, averages about 175 kbs, but can and sometimes goes as high as 320 kbps) version from the original wav... I did that for several purchases that way and I found my copy is often closer to the original mainly on the percussives (drums / snare / hi-hat) at about 5/8 the file size. It just sounds criper and honestly "better quality" than what I get from itunes, especially when I can hear precisely what's different... PLUS I also rip in flac so I have genuinely lossless as well at my disposal.

Not to mention, as long as I keep my CDs in a good storage environment, I am guaranteed to have ALL my music as long as I have electricity. The same can't be said of itunes if internet goes flakey and you JUST WANT to listen to that song you paid money to listen to and something bonehead stupid is stopping you like too many people crashing your ISP because they're all at home at the same time watching netflix (I had internet "brownouts" dec 17th to about the 25th, where it would be up and down spradically... most annoying...)

Thats helpful thanks Pegaudet. As long as there is not a big price difference I'll keep buying CDs. Especially with modern HiFi standards of 'ripping' to disc I'd be pretty sure that will give you the best quality. Not an issue if you just want chart hits on a playlist but important if you are a listener to more serious music!

Cheers

Foinhaven wrote:

Thats helpful thanks Pegaudet. As long as there is not a big price difference I'll keep buying CDs. Especially with modern HiFi standards of 'ripping' to disc I'd be pretty sure that will give you the best quality. Not an issue if you just want chart hits on a playlist but important if you are a listener to more serious music!

Cheers

Your're welcome Foinhaven. FWIW, mileage really does vary... Here in Canada, I think I paid $15.00ish + tax for Arcade Fire's Reflecktor album. On itunes it would be $10.00 tax included. I bought some CDs that were special imports which came out to closer to $30.00 which would be well over 3x what I could have paid on itunes. A good half of my library, I bought used (Automatic for the people was one), some as low as $3.00, but average used cost came out to $8.00. It's also more cost effective to buy the album if you like all the songs on it. Not so cost effective if you're after one or two songs on a 15 track CD.

Speaking of R.E.M.'s "Drive", I pointed out to two of my coworkers several spots I found that way, which they happened to agree was noticeable, once I pointed it out... From 2:00 mins to 2:30, on the original CD and even on my MP3 version, one of the guitar parts does not let off... you always hear one of the strings vibrate.... at times it goes da-da-da-daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa-da-da-da-daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa (each 'da' lower in pitch, the second long daaaaaaaa lower in pitch than the previous daaaaaaaaa... can't mistake it if you hear the song within that 30 second time)... In that 30 seconds, at 2:14 and also at 2:26 on the itunes version after one of those daaaaaaaaaaa for a fraction of a second, barely noticeable, just before the next da-da-da, that guitar is gone... taken out. You can't hear it. Also, at about 2:35 to 2:40, it sounds a bit muddy and not particularly clean on the itunes version.... The CD version sounds far cleaner.

For the most part, lossless is not entirely a concern for me. If I really pay attention and did an ABX test, having a hard time telling the difference between CD and compressed and played back through a range of equipment would be "good enough".... For me, good enough would be the "-V 1" setting of lame.... I have quite a bit of music and I can't spoil myself by carrying everything lossless, so I go even lossier than -V 1 and use "-V 3".... It's the lossiest transparent setting and is, I find, the sweet spot between the quality curve and the filesize curve.

Basically, I avoid itunes for two reasons. The first is as I described above, where the itunes version could be considered "not mastered the same way"... even when it comes from the "same album". The other reason deals with the percussives I mentioned earlier. Bonnie Tyler's "Holding out for a hero" on her "greatest hits" album is a good example of how too high compression can sort of kill a sound. There's so much going on in that song at times that the cymbal crash cuts out slightly earlier than on the CD to make necessary room for other things. At the end it's pretty much just the hi-hat and the actual CD is far crisper. Itunes does a good job and it's still a hi-hat, but compared side by side it sounds like the drums are in the next room. That R.E.M. song in my experience does not have enough signal complexity to warrant the cutting out or muting of the instrument like that. The reduced clarity I described from Bonnie Tyler's song happens, no matter what, because so much is going on and it's a function of any compression algorithm. Even my mp3 version has that problem, but overall it seems closer to the original than the itunes version.

In summary, if you listen to music like a wine afectionado drinks wine, forget itunes... In fact, if you can go with CD quality (e.g. flac format), that's the best. If you listen to music like many people drink wine (can't tell the difference between a $5.00 bottle and a $200.00 bottle... I can't... but then, I never drank a $200 bottle of wine), then itunes is probably right for you.

As for me, listening to and playing music (I am learning the piano and would eventually like to write my own music) is a very serious hobby and sometimes when I'm listening, I try to imagine how the musician is playing to achieve that particular sound.... is the drummer hitting the hi-hat closer to the rim, or more in the center?... What does that do to the mood? is the drummer bouncing the stick off the drum or trying to keep it from bouncing off?.... If it gets processed to the point where you can't even tell what they are doing, then what good is the compression?

Well I'm listening on a Naim system with a full set of Linn speakers so though I'm not paranoid, I know how different it can be. Shopping around (in the UK) on ebay or discount stores, usually turns up something for a competitive price. And then I can do whatever I want with it!