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Comment by cygned | Hacker News Reader

While I can cope with the UI, what really drives me nuts are actual bugs. Sometimes, albums are split into two parts. Sometimes, songs are randomly missing. When downloading music, sometimes it takes forever or just doesn’t download at all. My most favorite one: when I plug the phone into my car, in 1/2 cases it stops playback (even from another app) and starts playing a random song. It’s always the same. And it’s a good song. But it is something different. Imagine you get into your car at 6am listening to a podcast and suddenly Metallica starts screaming at you.

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> Sometimes, albums are split into two parts. Sometimes, songs are randomly missing.

Add “sometimes songs are replaced by versions from compilation albums” which is also incredibly frustrating if you like to curate a library. However, all of these bugs have been present since iTunes Match launched, long before Apple Music was a thing. I have no faith they’ll ever get fixed.

My theory is that rights for songs temporarily lapse or transfer, causing the album to be removed and re-added on the back end, and the system to match things back up is wonky.

Syncing music to the Apple Watch is also incredibly unreliable. I had to deduce that songs that aren’t downloaded to the phone will never transfer to the Watch (even though the Watch has its own WiFi connection) because the transfer screen just says “syncing...” forever.

Apple Music is horrible, but the lack of a real library in Spotify (as mentioned in the article) is just about keeping me subscribed.

Honestly you can say this about just about all Apple software now. Their quality has absolutely tanked.

I also enjoy the "play random song when plug into car" feature :)

That album splitting bug has been around for years and I don't know if they'll ever fix it. It's particularly infuriating because when you look at one half the album in your library there's a button to see the whole album in Apple Music's library, and when you click on it it shows that the entire album is downloaded anyways. So the system has the information it needs to group them as one but refuses to do so.

I am not sure but I think it's related to another longstanding issue where a particular version of a song is replaced with a different version of a song (usually one from a compilation or best-of album instead of the original single or EP, etc.)

Been there. Some remixed version from a compilation replaced the original. Constant source of great pleasure.

This happens because:

1. The original app that was playing (Podcasts, Spotify, etc.) got automatically killed for whatever reason (consuming too much memory, etc.)

2. The default app for audio playback is Apple Music, so if you press play (or if your car resumes audio), that is the app that starts up.

There is no way (at least right now), to change the default app for audio playback on the phone.

And that happens in the very moment when I plug in my phone? And even if, why that song? It’s not the first one. It’s neither the last one. And it’s always that one. I haven’t even downloaded it and streaming over mobile data is disabled.

There used to be an option to let Siri "help" you play the right music at the right time, which I foolishly enabled because I thought it might make things better. It would do things like suddenly revert to something I'd been playing days before, because Friday night I was in the car and playing it, so Monday morning when I got into the car again, I must want to play that again, right? Once I figured out that was why my phone kept jumping around to seemingly-arbitrary things, I turned it off, and now my phone plays whatever I was last playing 99.9% of the time.

I don't know where that option is, or maybe it's gone with iOS 13. It was annoying.

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