MP4 is definitely a video file extension, and I don't know what he's saying about adding songs to Music/iTunes, but yes in general syncing songs from Mac to iPhone has gotten pretty screwed up over the years.
Setting the bozo bit on Apple
71–80 of 185 posts
Re: Setting the bozo bit on Apple
#72The bozo bit as described is how I thought about Sony for a long time. I had a different name for it, "The idiot engineer". That for all the amazing premium quality products Sony releases, every product has at least one extremely poorly thought out area. It was like there was some designer/engineer who was the son of the CEO or something, and got to work on every project.
My favorite example of this with Sony: the WH-1000XM series noise cancelling headphones are absolutely great and they would be the only headphones I ever use if only there was a way to mute the microphone from the headphones themselves. There's even a touch-sensitive panel on the earpiece and several control options you can pick to have available through it, but mute is not one of the options.
Re: Setting the bozo bit on Apple
#73I 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
> I don’t think Music is really intended for this use case.
What do you think are the intended use cases of the operating system's proprietary audio-file-playing application?
Re: Setting the bozo bit on Apple
#74Sync'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.…
Android in the past was surprisingly terrible at copying data to/from PCs. Anyone saying it works great is using some third-party tool that requires extra setup, or they aren't syncing a lot of stuff (media libraries, and iTunes used to also sync email accounts and some other settings). Aside from the lack of a proper syncing tool like iTunes, the basic Android File Transfer was super unreliable, often failing randomly mid-transfer. In some cases, you even had to enable it with a secret combo like "go to settings and tap the model name exactly 7 times," which was seriously how you did it on some Galaxy phones.
Android was always focused on cloud stuff, which makes sense given that their biggest markets are places where most people don't have PCs, plus Google wants that halo effect from Android. I appreciated that iPhones were designed for my PC too. But iPhones were generally bad at copying any other data ad-hoc. They added AirDrop specifically for this, and... Like 90% of the time I don't see my other device, or the transfer fails. I don't even bother anymore.
Re: Setting the bozo bit on Apple
#75My biggest issue right now is that the iOS Music app has been almost completely hobbled by Apple Music (the service). I just want an app I can use to play my existing media files, but it’s always pushing you to subscribe to the service.
Especially annoying is that they have hidden the previously free access to streaming terrestrial radio stations (not the same thing as the Apple Radio subscription). You can only access them now if you know the URL, and they’re impossible to search for in the Radio tab of the app.
The business drive to push people the paid subscriptions is taking over everything else.
Re: Setting the bozo bit on Apple
#76> 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.
It is a web app but the Jellyfin music player does a good job of organizing music.
If you like listening to albums you can also keep them in your file system by artist, album, and song and have an easy time finding things.
Re: Setting the bozo bit on Apple
#77I've always hated Music.app's and iTunes's concept of a "Library". I already have a library for my media--it's organized, hierarchal, consistently named, and fully-integrated with my computer's operating system. It's called "the filesystem". I don't need the app to re-invent the concept of a filesystem on top of my existing filesystem. This isn't really limited to Apple applications, either. For a lot of applications, whenever you want to do anything more advance than "playing" a file, you have to first "add it to your Library", where the application grafts its own idea of a filesystem onto your already perfectly-good filesystem. Yuck!
Re: Setting the bozo bit on Apple
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would say this is no longer basic functionality. Personal music collections were huge in the mp3 era, but today few people care about moving music between devices. Further if you think of the complexity involved, streaming is a more “basic” task, than navigating file formats, transfer protocols, DRM, disc storage, library metadata, and more.
It’s basic in the sense that it’s conceptually trivial from the user’s point of view and therefore should just work, and not break in non-intelligible ways, given that the functionality has been made available at all. Users shouldn’t have to carefully navigate their use cases based on what the majority use cases might be. A more general point is that software should establish a clear conceptual model of the things it…
Seems to me that I might want to play an audio file somebody sent me whether it is music or not.
Re: Setting the bozo bit on Apple
#79> 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…
> .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.) mp4 is a container format, all it does is wrap some codecs and add metadata. There's no requirement that it contain video. The smart thing to do would be to inspect the mp4 and…
i've never seen mp4 containing anything else than video so it's reasonable assume they would contain video most of the time and thus have a video player as the default app.
Re: Setting the bozo bit on Apple
#80My biggest issue right now is that the iOS Music app has been almost completely hobbled by Apple Music (the service). I just want an app I can use to play my existing media files, but it’s always pushing you to subscribe to the service. Especially annoying is that they have hidden the previously free access to streaming terrestrial radio stations (not the same thing as the Apple Radio subscription). You can only acce…
Most annoying for me: the need to be connected to the internet for a lot of views.
I leave the apartment, enter the elevator, put headphones in my ears and literally cannot do anything in the Music App, because it thinks it is still connected to my WiFi. Why can’t the default views be offline first.