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Comment by sillywalk | Hacker News Reader

The Apple Music app on macos is one of the most horrible UI things I can think of.

Search: You must scroll to the top of the playlists, it's not in the toolbar and always clickable. ALSO: the switch between local/downloaded and all Apple Music is on the Other side of the Screen. It's pseudo-browse ( the back button is inline with the content, and there isn't a Forward button).

I haven't been able to find a way to not show the default view that takes up half the screen. It has an image of the album cover and some flat-ux "buttons" and a checkmark icon, plus a (...) and a 1/4 of the screen just empty.

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I don’t say this easily, but the people behind this should be fired on the spot. It’s bad. Like a showcase on how not to design an app. I could probably write a whole essay on it.

If someone from Apple happens to read this, get that staff some UX design courses, have them read “About Face : Interaction Design” a couple of times. You are not going to beat spotify with this mess.

This. And the latency of actions, of loading, it abysmal.

I don’t care that it becomes of the network being online or not. Find a way. If the network is slow or off, why should I depend on it to access my own music library navigation of any page, that could feed on cached data, and suggest a refresh, rather than forcing one?

Or are all music player that shit now?

> Or are all music player that shit now?

If you mean the streaming ones compared to things like WinAmp, yes. Slow loading of the pages that should have been cached. No direct way to search your library, as in your library only, but the entire library, not just a playlist. Less smooth fade-in/-out on play/pause than WinAmp had decades ago. If there even is offline file support, it's an afterthought. No better organization than simple Albums/Playlists (ex. no tagging system).

Different view from someone new to macOS (bought my first Mac at the end of 2022): I love Apple Music. I have disabled the online stuff because I have no subscription and just use to listen to my local MP3's. I used MusicBee on Windows before and there is no other program on macOS besides Apple Music that comes close to the simplicity of it and I have tried a lot of them. I don't need much but it's embarassing that a lot of music players can't "just play my music folder randomly".

The web version is actually pretty decent, I use it on windows from time to time and it works great!

It also has some features that the MacOS one doesn't have like, a full screen lyrics view with some nice WebGL animations.

I didn't know about the web view. At least the search area stays visible.

> full screen lyrics view

Another gripe: In the app, when using the full screen player (there is also just a fullscreen mode) the lyrics can often be unreadable depending on the background colours that display. Also, you can't change the font size.

If you think the MacOs version is bad, try the Linux version.

> the switch between local/downloaded and all Apple Music is on the Other side of the Screen

I can relate. These days I’m primarily using it to search iTunes for music to buy. Switching back to purchasing (instead of streaming) has been a renewed joy.

On macOS, the Music app downloads all purchased media as non-drmd files, which I can point whatever preferred player to for indexing and playback.

Went oldschool and built my own player in 2024 https://xenodium.com/a-tour-of-ready-player-mode

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