8.4 broke itunes

Why can I only access music I've purchased from iTunes when there's another 24GB of music already on my phone?

Historically, I've considered iTunes on the PC to be the worst music player application available.

Over the years, Apple has progressively made this experience worse; steadily removing what was useful and replacing those features with tools that better enable the user to access Apple products.

I didn't purchase an iPhone because I worship at the feet of Apple. I purchased it because it appeared to have a strong presence in the technological community and hence, more people creating apps [custom functionality] for the platform.

Sadly, one of the basic functions for which I use my iPhone is to both contain and playback a vast music collection. In this regard, iOS once provided a more than satisfactory experience. I would even go so far as to say that iTunes on the phone (circa iOS 2-3) was one of the best music players I had used. At some point (I believe it was iOS 5) someone with influence decided that the really cool album flip feature (found by tipping the phone into landscape view) should be replaced by an alphabetical collage of album covers that performs no usable function whatsoever. There is absolutely no correlation between the track currently playing and the albums shown. Thus, there is no immediately apparent way to view the tracks of the currently playing album while in landscape (the manner in which my phone resides under most of my listening conditions). I've found a way to show the current album list while in landscape, but it requires multiple steps and a level of intentionality that is usually not present when one fails to anticipate that turning the phone sideways will make the visual interface utterly disregard the music that the device is playing.

The other changes between iOS 5 and iOS 8.4 that progressively subtract from the overall experience are too numerous to detail here. Suffice it to say that I only installed this latest iOS update because I sincerely believed that iTunes could not possibly get worse and therefore might actually include some modifications based on user complaints rather than exclusively focusing on product marketing.

I stand corrected.

Apple didn't just make it harder to access my own music, they made it impossible.

Now, my phone has several new features by which I could avail myself of new Apple products. What my phone doesn't have is any access to the 24 GB of music that is stored on it. I'm delighted that I can see the few things I've purchased through the iTunes store over the years but that list comprises less than 1% of the music I've purchased by other means.

If there is a maximum depth to the level of aggrivations one can feel with a company or its products, iOS 8.4 has me scraping my knuckles on the bottom.