Apple Music Player

I have a love hate relationship with Apple. Most of the time, their hardware and software is great, but expensive compared to PC alternatives. Other times, they just suck. Most of the issues I have had is related to software updates, either on my Mac or on iOS devices. It is as if Apple does not test their software releases and updates. Each time I have a problem and Google, there are a ton of hits as every user seems to have the same problems. Why were not these widespread issues caught in software quality assurance before release?

Just now, I opened the Music/iTunes application and all my imported music is gone, all 43 GB of MP3’s. The only items showing are songs I purchased from the iTunes store. Since I still have almost no room on the Mac HDD, the files are obviously still on the computer. Why did Music drop the library? No idea, but it appears to be common after a Catalina OS X update. I am reimporting the library XML file that is in the music folder to see if it helps. I also noticed that the app reset the directory path to the Music folder. I definitely did not do that. Why would the software reset the path itself?

Even worse, each time I Google a problem, there is almost never a response from Apple. There are lots of users giving mostly useless advice, including restart, reset, or even a factory reset. That is not a solution if I have to rebuild the entire computer’s software library. In this case, I have a lot of playlists that took a lot of time to organize. It looks like Music is reimporting all the songs again; hopefully I did not lose all my playlists since they also auto-sync to my iPhone and iPad.

==========

Dang it! Music finished importing the last library file and of course, it is not right. There are missing playlists, and the computer said it could not restore some of the files because they are missing. It does not tell me which files are missing either. The worst part, the “recently added” part is all messed up. The list used to show when I imported songs/albums going back years. This is very helpful when I want to check out music that was more recently imported versus stuff that has been on my computer for awhile. Now, everything shows being added “today” and seems to be in random order. I guess it is time to back up all my MP3 files to my NAS and start over. I am now actively looking for an alternative to Apple’s Music app. Hopefully I can find something better that will support iOS devices too.