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Setting the bozo bit on Apple

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Re: Setting the bozo bit on Apple

#31

Post by smoldesu »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #12
jrochkind1 wrote: post #9

Sync'ing from laptop to devices, via anything but iCloud, has gotten so much worse than it used to be. It used to be pretty good -- for it's time anyway. The ecology just isn't built for actual owned media anymore. And so many people have only a phone now, so no reason to try to sync. I think this is probably true on Android too. I don't know about the Watch, or what the documented ways are to get media files on it.…

> so many people have only a phone now, so no reason to try to sync. Wait until the AR glasses come out. I pretty much guarantee that media syncing will be a huge deal, and Apple had better get their iCloud act together by then. iCloud is a shambles; and I say this as an Apple user for more than thirty years, and has pegged his career to Apple.

We've seen this before, it's a bit like the "no outside food or drink" policy at the movie theater. Apple (and Google, Microsoft, et. al) want to stop you from using your media so you're funneled into buying theirs. If people can easily play local files, it diminishes the value of a streaming/music management tool. Probably explains why Groove Music and Play Music failed, while Apple Music still has a surprisingly devout userbase.

This is one of those things that will hopefully be opened up with more standardization. There's nobody to blame but ourselves for not enforcing this earlier, and hopefully in the future opening an MP3 file won't be harder than it was in 2005.

Re: Setting the bozo bit on Apple

#32

Post by kemayo »

> These are sent via WhatsApp so the audio recordings are mp4 files, which for some bizarre reason won't open in Music and instead open in QuickTime Player, despite definitely being audio files.

.mp4 being associated with a video player seems reasonable, since it's almost always used for video. (I think the only difference between .mp4 and .m4a is the extension? It's just serving as a signal about which app should open it, really.)

> Create a new playlist, transfer some previous songs over, then try to drop the new m4a's onto the open playlist. No go. Play around for a while, figure out that the entity that accepts the drops is the TableView, not the surrounding view. So you can't drop the new files into the empty space below the songs, you have to drop them onto the existing songs.

Interestingly, this is the user winding up on the single most fiddly path because it's what felt intuitive to them. In pretty much any Music library view but the playlist view, dragging a file into the window is all you need to do. They unfortunately picked the single view where it's focused on letting you rearrange the tracks.

I'd suspect that the Music app's workflow is built around "I want to add this to my music library", whereas the author's mental model was more around "I need a list of files so they get transferred". Which are similar, but that falls apart in cases like this. Which is sort of Apple's fault for not smoothly supporting edge cases, to be sure.

Re: Setting the bozo bit on Apple

#33

Post by davidy123 »

mistrial9 wrote: post #28
pflenker wrote: post #15

> iTunes used to be if not the, then certainly a flagship app for Apple. I have used iTunes off and on for around two decades and it has never been a great or even mediocre experience. It was always bad. The author is fondly remembering a time which might never have existed.

for those that "deify" Steve Jobs, please recall the day that Jobs Apple CEO personally visited the tiny office of Audion developers, and told them "you have no chance" of marketing their fun and well-designed Mac native application.. as part of the iTunes rollout, backdrop anti-trust on MSFT over media tools.

He also promised to open source the tech behind Facetime, presumably because he could see it would create a rift in society. Now, Tim Cook dances on that rift.

Re: Setting the bozo bit on Apple

#35

Post by rib3ye »

The author needs iTunes Match. For some reason  doesn't want anyone knowing about this service but it's the only way to sync your own music in Music.app.

Of course, he could have just used Files.

Re: Setting the bozo bit on Apple

#36

Post by jprete »

pflenker wrote: post #15

> iTunes used to be if not the, then certainly a flagship app for Apple. I have used iTunes off and on for around two decades and it has never been a great or even mediocre experience. It was always bad. The author is fondly remembering a time which might never have existed.

iTunes was set up to organize and listen to a music collection instead of just showing a table of music files. That was a pretty good experience and I don’t know of any other app that does that even today.

Re: Setting the bozo bit on Apple

#37

Post by dodorama »

I don’t think Music is really intended for this use case. Maybe look at third party apps that let you play local files like Vox Music Player. If you want to stick with Music you can always subscribe to iTunes Match that will sync your local files libraries seamlessly

Re: Setting the bozo bit on Apple

#38

Post by ergonaught »

We are (were) deeply/widely invested into the whole Apple ecosystem, and they are very rapidly losing that spot in our lives/homes. Nearly every interaction has become immediately frustrating. Moving away from all of it. There's zero possibility of help with any of it, and less than zero possibility of their fixing any of it. Major bummer.

Re: Setting the bozo bit on Apple

#39

Post by smoldesu »

judge2020 wrote: post #26
pflenker wrote: post #15

> iTunes used to be if not the, then certainly a flagship app for Apple. I have used iTunes off and on for around two decades and it has never been a great or even mediocre experience. It was always bad. The author is fondly remembering a time which might never have existed.

For me, iTunes was quite good on Mac. It's the Windows experience that has always been an afterthought, for example: why is there not an option to turn off "black out other monitors when going full-screen on a movie"?

I didn't even mind it on Windows, honestly. The installation process was convoluted and it was a bit resource-heavy to run, but I liked it more than Winamp and Windows Media Player at the time. It was a flawed port, but still nice to use.

Re: Setting the bozo bit on Apple

#40

Post by eptcyka »

kemayo wrote: post #32

> These are sent via WhatsApp so the audio recordings are mp4 files, which for some bizarre reason won't open in Music and instead open in QuickTime Player, despite definitely being audio files. .mp4 being associated with a video player seems reasonable, since it's almost always used for video. (I think the only difference between .mp4 and .m4a is the extension? It's just serving as a signal about which app should op…

Apple never really wanted to have the concept of files seep into iOS.
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