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.