I 100% want iTunes. I like to listen to live music and Streaming services are pretty shit at archiving concerts.

Also, on my work laptop, I used to be able to connect my iphone through USB and use iTunes to play my music without having to sync or have the physical WAV on my machine

Now with the new Music app, I can't browse my music. I just recently had to upgrade to Catalina so maybe i'm missing something but i'm pretty pissed at that change

Some of us prefer to own and organize our own music rather than rely on streaming services. Sadly, Catalina Music isn't any less buggy than recent versions of iTunes.

Have you tried Swinsian? I recently switched to it after the Music.app became mandatory and I'm very happy with it. Small indie app with a straight forward non-subscription business model that has all the best parts of the old iTunes and is very customizable.

Don't want to advertise my blog post but if you are interested there are some screenshots here after I set everything up: https://blog.notmyhostna.me/apple-ruined-itunes-what-now/

Thank you for sharing this. As a mostly lurker on HN, I appreciate such posts and reviews since they're helpful. That someone has done comparisons on the music management apps and listed those makes life easier for others. I had been disappointed with the more recent releases of iTunes, but the replacements in Catalina, from whatever I've read about them, seem far worse.

No support for ReplayGain/Soundcheck killed this for me. I hate fiddling with volume for every single track in a playlist.

I have a (somewhat forlorn) hope that, now that Music neé iTunes is no longer a floor wax and a dessert topping, it might someday be a stable piece of software.

Recent releases from Apple don't really encourage this hope, admittedly. I wish they would formalize a tick-tock strategy for OS and core apps, pushing new features on odd years and fixing their mess on even ones.

I actually don't think that would be a good idea, because it would result in a culture of "eh, why fix the bugs in this major OS release, we have a fix-up OS release next year just for that". I don't want to end up in the same situation as that of old Windows releases, where major OS versions were nigh unusable until the Service Pack 1 release.

You may be right. I just have good memories of Snow Leopard, I suppose.

I totally forgot Apple doing this before, I think that's the time period where Apple actually followed this methodology you described. Snow Leopard was the fix-up release, while Leopard was the feature release. And yeah, agreed that Snow Leopard was a wonderful release.

I spent a bit of time over the past couple of months ripping some of my CDs that were missing, getting rid of mostly overlapping redundant libraries, and deleting missing music. There was various breakage that I suspect may have been partially related to Apple Match. But it seems to be in reasonable shape now as far as I can tell.

I got the sense that the author's main goal was running Aperture, and iTunes (and iPhoto/iWork/Logic) just kind of came along for the ride.

Just looking at known issues in the Github readme, it looks like those apps have quite a few issues. Whereas Aperture sounds like it's just about perfect except for videos.

--------

> As a Spotify user, my Mac opens iTunes when I press the Play button on my keyboard if Spotify has been not playing for X minutes (power nap?). I have to immediately kill iTunes before it begins playing a CD I bought 7 years ago.

For the past decade, one of the first things I do on a new Mac is run a script that includes the line `sudo rm -rf /Applications/iTunes.app`. There's probably a better way to stop iTunes from opening, but this one has been very effective.

From answers on Ask Different [2] for this question.

> The software Mac Media Key Forwarder [1] provides a user-friendly approach to prioritizing Spotify for your media keys. It runs in the background and gives you a few simple settings in the Mac menu bar. It just works.

> It can be downloaded and installed directly from the homepage, or by using e.g. Homebrew:

    brew cask install macmediakeyforwarder

[1]: http://milgra.com/mac-media-key-forwarder.html

[2]: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/58234/override-itu...

Apple Music, and therefore the Music.app, is still the best solution out there if you want to bring your own content and have it accessible via streaming from a number of devices. Spotify has serious limitations on bring-your-own-tracks that makes it not great for certain use cases.

There's a more fundamental question here I think. I can understand wanting to get an older, theoretically unsupported app running on Catalina, but that makes less sense re: iTunes as AFAIK no functionality was lost between Mojave and Catalina. iTunes got renamed to Music, and the syncing functionality was moved into Finder. Is the integration between those two functions _that_ critical?

If you use audiobooks then Catalina is a total disaster. You lost smart playlists, the ability edit ID3 tags, the sync to my iPod doesn’t work well anymore. Its really bad.

They remove smart playlist? They don’t understand that is one of the feature making people hanging on iTunes?

You still have smart playlists in Music.app, but that Music.app no longer handles means you can’t use smart playlists for organizing audio books.

There’s a separate Books.app now that handles both eBook and audio books and it doesn’t have a smart playlist feature that I’m aware of.

That makes me wonder if I should just manage my audiobooks with the Music app. I wonder if there are any downsides.

Can you manage Audiobooks with the Music app?

Keep in mind that iTunes and Audible audiobooks are DRM'd, so you can't necessarily just mark it as a different type of file. (The DRM is crackable, but then that's an extra step.)

Mine are all MP3.

Ah, good for you, I shouldn't have made assumptions based on the fact you were using iTunes.

I'm always sad to see how many people use DRM'd audiobook sources (like Audible) when DRM-Free options are readily available!

Music is not the same as iTunes and syncing functionality in Finder is super sketchy (via USB or WiFi)

Seems like the "right way to do it" is all iCloud syncing and we should stop clinging to our mp3s and what have you...

I haven't used a Mac in years, but I'm wondering if iTunes supports FLAC yet. Until it does, it would be a non-starter for me if I'm managing my own music collection.

beardedspice might help with your media key issue

https://github.com/beardedspice/beardedspice

or maybe you can force the key assignment with karabiner-elements

https://github.com/tekezo/Karabiner-Elements

As a non-streaming music user, yes?