I don’t agree at all. While iTunes was feature rich and relatively stable, the replacements are relatively feature poor and quite unstable. Apple should’ve taken another year to introduce the replacements.
The Podcasts/TV/Books apps that got split out OTOH I believe are all iOS ports
Hmm, not really. I took a brief look at the UI during the Catalina beta and concluded that I wanted nothing to do with it. I have spent years learning how to use iTunes well. I'm not about to throw away that investment of time and energy on a new, untested app with a different UI. I'll stick with iTunes to manage my music library. Catalina will have to wait, probably forever.
Fortunately, that disappearance was only temporary. It returned in 10.15.2.
Select "Songs" in the left sidebar, and a "Column Browser" submenu will be added to the View menu. Turn it on (⌘B), and you get a nice, no-nonsense, high information density view of your collection, letting you quickly filter by genre, artist, and album. Right click on a column heading and you can add columns for composer and grouping or remove columns.
Come on, now. Think of the poor product managers, the struggling UX researchers and designers. How are they going to make their careers off of minor upgrades tied down to past investments of users?
I can't imagine successfully staffing a giant monolithic application. I think it would be hard to get job satisfaction working on a tiny piece of an app with decades of cruft.
Most apps like this are several orders of magnitude larger than say, the linux kernel.
But I mean that's not true. I suspect the reason it was such a behemoth was because Apple wanted it to be the gateway and gatekeeper to both acquiring media and transferring it to the device.
Like Spotify manages to do quite well for itself without being the monstrosity that iTunes became. I'd guess that the foundation of Apple's garden walls is also the source of their technical debt.
That said, of all the people you know in the Apple ecosystem, how many people know/do the following: know what an id3 tag is, manage the metadata of their digital audio content, listen to audiobooks. Maybe I'm wrong, but most non-nerds I know don't and would not ever want to think about 1 and 2. Plenty of people who fall into 3, but again all people who don't like or work in tech that I know use audible or the public library or some other service.
I like so much about Apple products, but my big and growing fear is that my needs and the needs of the kind of person who edits ID3 tags are constantly being subsumed by the much larger portion of their customer base that has no need and no desire be involved in anything like editing file metadata.
You could say the same thing about using the Terminal.app - removing everything but the most widely and commonly used features is a foolish strategy. The sum of all niche audiences still makes up a significant user base.
That said, even as someone that carefully maintains a rather large and growing local music collection I'd almost agree with you and be fine with a stripped down Apple Music app since anyone serious about that interest probably uses one of the superior and more in-depth music management options out there. However iTunes/Apple Music is still required to sync that music to your iOS device. So while I'd have no problem completely replacing iTunes/Music.app with any of the more feature-complete options I can't. I have to use it, even if it's just for syncing and apparently it has lost quite a few features since Catalina (haven't upgraded yet).
In other words: If Apple doesn't care about the kind of users that maintains a local music library they shouldn't hold them hostage by only allowing to sync said library via their otherwise barebone app. It just means I have to manage my content in 2 locations.
Of course I have no idea if this is reflected in the world-wide breakdown of Mac users, but I'd be surprised if the 'programmer' category isn't sizable enough that it's kind of silly (in a typical Apple way) to ignore them.
It’s hard for me to believe that Apple is or even can dedicate the resources I want want to the laptop/desktop line when iPhones alone make 80% of their revenue. I’ve mostly switched to linux with a windows box when needed.
You’ve got the obvious “manage my music files on this device” part. Then you’ve got the “manage my music files as part of this iCloud library” part. Then you’ve got “stream music from the subscription service” part. It’s actually quite hard to make playlists and stuff since, over time, people start to lose track of what form they have the rights to any particular song.
Please explain. What is is missing? I find that it works pretty well. Is was one of its main selling point at the time and its interface spread throughout the OS: Finder, Spotlight, System Preferences, etc
I use it as the old 2000s versions, no album cover stuff
I was just browsing my library today and it's a tragedy how bad it got...
Haven't made the jump to Catalina just yet. Mostly because of Sizzling Keys (control iTunes from system wide keyboard shortcuts)
I think the trick is to set “filter by all” on the search field, but there might be some other preference setting somewhere.