![\"\"](\"https:\/\/eshop.macsales.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/Itunes.jpg\")
When it debuted, the iTunes music player was fast and intuitive. There was a single location for your music tracks, and you could organize them intuitively. If you made changes to a folder containing an album, it would be reflected in iTunes. There was a clear one-to-one relationship between the music you could play from within iTunes to the music you had on your Mac’s hard drive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Over the years, iTunes added more complexity, and not in a good way. It started to expand its role, by being a central repository for music, ringtones, audiobooks, and video offerings. It was still useable, but took on a lot of added bloat. When Apple moved towards its own music streaming service and rebranded iTunes as Apple Music, the expectation was that many of these pain points would get sorted. Instead, things seemed to get a lot more complicated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I’m writing this article having launched Apple Music on my Mac for the first time in two years. That’s how much I hate Apple Music: I avoid launching it whenever possible. When I have to play music, I play it using Apple Music on my iPhone. The experience on that platform is equally annoying, but like most of Apple’s recent software offerings, I have learned to live with it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now that I have offered some generalizations, it’s time for me to get more specific. I’ll preface my outline by stating that some of what I have complained about is probably a setting found within Apple Music itself. Other items are more about how Apple Music works.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Library Ownership Obscurity<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The biggest issue I have with Apple Music is that it’s not obvious to easily identify purchased music from streamed music on my Mac.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In preparing this article, I learned that there is a “Kind” column in Apple Music’s listing that identifies the classification for each track. I was able to use this classification to create a custom Playlist. Apple needs to make this easier and more obvious.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Purchased music shows up as one of three classifications:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Whereas music that is streamed from Apple Music shows as Apple Music AAC Audio file. One easy solution to make classification more obvious involves your Mac assigning color coded tags next to each track. A green coded track would indicate a purchased track, while a red coded track would represent streamed offerings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sync Library Confusion<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Inexplicably, there are some songs that Apple Music simply refuses to play. In a given album, 15 out of 16 tracks will play, but one will have a lock icon next to it, indicating that the track is not authorized. What’s interesting is that at one point, years ago, the track in question had no such issue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I have also run into issues where tracks located on my Mac won’t properly sync to my iPhone and vice versa.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Album Art<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Finding album art should simply not be an issue in 2025, but here we are. My music collection includes both official releases and bootleg albums. I can somewhat forgive Apple Music for not finding album art for a rare Jimi Hendrix concert bootleg album, but it’s absolutely unforgivable to omit album art for a popular commercial release, such as “The Doors (In Concert)”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I have run into issues where I have added custom album art for a particular album, only to have Apple Music forget altogether. The issue carries over when synching between devices. Isn’t this what Apple Intelligence should be solving?<\/p>\n\n\n\n While it’s not a hot button issue for me, several music aficionados I know are incredibly frustrated with Apple’s handling of music meta-data.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Another issue that I struggle with in Apple Music is the ability to play music videos. Despite the fact that I have downloaded them from Apple, I am unable to play them on my MacBook Pro.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Baffling.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n These are just a few issues I have experienced with Apple Music. I could go on about some of Apple’s generically unhelpful messages like “Something went wrong, please try again.” when trying to solve an issue in Apple Music, but that’s beginning to give me a headache.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In its present state, Apple Music is a loosely functional music app, with a lot of inconsistencies and overhead. The issues I have outlined above have been around for years. Some have had workarounds (both simple and complex), while others are just left as open-ended questions on Apple’s discussion board.<\/p>\n\n\n\n My needs from Apple Music are simple. I want:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Apple Music should be a delight to use. It should be the gold-standard for organizing one’s digital music library. But it’s not. And let’s be real: I can’t take Apple Intelligence seriously when there are still glaring issues that remain unaddressed in Apple Music.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Those are my thoughts on Apple Music. What are your Apple Music pet peeves? What’s on your Apple Music features wishlist?<\/em> Sound off in the comments below.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Apple Music should be the gold-standard for organizing one\u2019s digital music library. It isn\u2019t.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":286,"featured_media":97340,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"spay_email":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7597,4],"class_list":["post-97319","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-mac-tips","category-tech-tips"],"yoast_head":"\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/eshop.macsales.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/Apple_Music_main_screen.jpg\")
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/eshop.macsales.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/AppleMusic_Search_Broken.jpg\")
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/eshop.macsales.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/Album_Art_Not_Found.jpg\")
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/eshop.macsales.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/Applemusic_Wasted_Space.jpg\")