iOS 13's Music App Sucks

> which makes me irrationally unhappy

I'm somewhat comforted to hear that others have similar reactions to music applications. I rarely ever feel myself getting angry over things, but the one thing that gets me feeling uncomfortably heated is thinking about how much worse music apps and streaming services have gotten over the years.

I think I, like many people, have a very emotional connection to music and things that get in the way of that feel like a very personal attack, even though that's not reasonable in any way.

At one point, I think I was signed up to every music stream service and had some issue or another with all of them:

* Google Play Music - nearly ideal, but incredibly buggy once I switched away from Android to iOS, and the fact that it's in perpetual "dying but not dead" frustrates me. I've also moved almost completely away from Google at this point. * YouTube Music - Takes the worst parts of Spotify and YouTube and puts them together, with no benefit over the app it's replacing. * Spotify - I find the UI infuriating after a year of trying to switch to Spotify. Every time I try to let go of control and listen to my music the Spotify way, I can feel myself getting more and more frustrated. Additionally, I don't think they understand what a queue is, their implementation of a queue never ceases to surprise and frustrate me. Playing everything by a single artist is difficult to do well, without dragging in a lot of crap, and the "This is $ARTIST" playlists are mostly awful, IMO. * Tidal - Lacking many basic features, has the same queuing issues as Spotify. * Deezer - Almost gets queuing correct, but the fact that they always try to add music to your queue when it's empty and the fact that clearing a queue still isn't possible is a non-starter. I know there's a feature to disable auto-play, auto-add music, but on three separate occasions I've tried to turn it off, with support attempting to manually turn it off for me, without it working. * Rdio - Was almost perfect, but is now dead * Amazon Music - In terms of conceptual design, works better than most, but I've mostly gotten off of Amazon's services and their app's performance was abysmal last I tried. * Apple Music - I have many of the same complaints as the author, I just can mostly overlook them as they have a weird queue that I can almost adapt to. It frustrates me once in a while, but it lets me listen to music.

Apple Music is currently my daily driver, but I still have several premium streaming accounts as I _want_ to listen to music and will happily pay for them, just unhappy with the offerings atm.

I'm not contributing a ton to the conversation this late into discussion, just sympathizing with the author that, at least with streaming services, I can very much empathize with someone who can't find a good solution to just play music.

Since, oh, 2006? That's when Spotify launched.

Legacy is, by definition, that which existed before. Unless you're starting your library right now, in the age of streaming, your library is legacy.

This article prompted me to clean up my playlists, which have been 'append only' for quite a few years, and wow. What a disaster.

First: swipe-from-right doesn't reveal a red delete button, like you'd expect. So I hit the search engine, discover you have to long-press to delete. Annoying, but okay, progress.

Now, there are some albums on my Playlist page. Which is weird, and I don't remember putting them there. But when I long-press those albums, it gives me "Add to a Playlist..", which is... weird, can you add a playlist to a playlist? Anyway, there's a "Remove.." as well, let's try that.

The option screen lets me Remove Downloads or Delete from Library. I try Remove Downloads, since this is an album I put in iTunes myself and I don't want to lose it.

This... removes the album from my phone. And keeps the Playlist. There seems to be no way to remove the playlist, and keep the album.

That is, of course, what I want to do. It's an album! It doesn't need to be a playlist!! When I want it, I go to Artists or Albums!!!

This is madness. Does anyone at Apple actually use their own software?

Yes, you can add a playlist to a playlist. I do it frequently.

If you are playing an album and choose to save to a playlist, it gives that playlist the same name (and art) as the album. What else would it do? Deleting the playlist does not delete the album, why would it?

I can definitely see your confusion, and I'm sure it could be better-designed. That said, I never have any issues, and playlists are my primary use case for Apple Music.

It will default to whichever you used last, and it's a single tap to switch. I'm not sure how it could be better designed. Two different search buttons seems like a bad idea. Ignoring your last-used to always focus on Apple's preferred option seems like a bad idea.

Last-used with a single tap to switch seems ideal to me.