iOS7 has broken Audiobooks | Hacker News Reader

iOS7 has broken Audiobooks

discussions.apple.com

59 pointslambada25 comments

It seems like the music app received some half-baked changes across the board. For example, you can no longer shuffle all music in a particular genre through the app. They added (or maybe always had) an option to shuffle through Siri ("Play some blues"), but there are some frustrating edge cases:

"Play some video game music." "I'm sorry, I can't help you with videos."

I've had to resort to creating smart playlists for most of my genres, which is highly inefficient.

I find the new interface for shuffling to be confusing as well. It's now the word "Shuffle" with a white background, which changes to "Shuffle All" with a slight pink tinge when you tap it. If tapping "Shuffle" turns shuffle on, then why would tapping "Shuffle All" turn it off? It just seems like a confusing experience.

Overall, I'm fairly happy with iOS 7. But outside of radio, the music app feels like a regression.

Also missing from Music.app: The ability to delete music from the device. Fortunately I still have some space left on my phone, but barring plugging the phone into iTunes, I don't know how to decrease the amount of music on my phone.

I'm with you: iTunes Radio is nice, but the rest of the music app feels a bit worse off.

It's in Settings -> where ever the storage button is hidden these days -> Music. However, the option is only to delete all music.

I've seen that, and I guess as an iTunes Match subscriber I can be okay with that. It's just that I was able to delete individual songs/albums/artists off the phone in previous versions, so I was anticipating that here.

I can delete songs from my iOS 7 phone by swiping. I'm not sure which settings factor into this - it's being synced with iTunes via USB, and it's logged into iCloud but I doubt that makes a difference.

Strange, I can't get the swipe behavior in the Music app. I've yet to plug the phone into iTunes since the iOS 7 update, but whenever I swipe across an album or song, it acts as if I tapped it.

Swipe right to left, not left to right.

Huh. Works for tracks and playlists, not anything else, looks like. Still, much better than nothing. Thanks!

In any list of songs, I can swipe right to left to get a Delete button. All my music is synced from iTunes.

That may be part of it; I never plug my phone into my desktop, and I get my music on my phone via iTunes Match. But whether or not I have Match enabled on the device, I'm still not able to delete tracks/albums/etc with this behavior.

Rating a song has become less convenient too:

In song view, you have to switch to album (list) view and the rating for the currently playing song is shown in the album (list) view if you tap on 'Rating' in the upper left corner.

From this album (list) view with rating, you cannot jump to the next song to rate is as well. You have to tap 'Done' in the upper right corner, tap on the next icon and repeat the above-described steps to rate the next song.

When in "Now listening to" view, tap album art. Song/album text below is switched to rating. Tap rating you want.

Wow, that's very useful – you made my day! :)

I'm listening to an audio book right now - I can select any chapter I want and it shows the chapter length fine. This has been working the second I upgraded to iOS7 the day it was released.

Have you figured out how to scrub through an individual chapter? It seems the time scrubber goes across the entire book for me, which is pretty unacceptable behavior for an audiobook.

Is that an m4b file (the "official" way), or just a collection of mp3's shoved together to form a book ("Part of a compilation")? The former has been broken (especially on iPad) since iOS 5, and the latter has many issues but at least you "can" see how many chapters there are, and select them.

See, for example, these support thread with hundreds of comments: https://discussions.apple.com/message/16397272#16397272

The sad thing is that they don't give 3rd parties access to m4b metadata (chapter name, length and cover), and they themselves have broken their Music.app's ability to parse them. So nobody else can fix this mess.

mp3's shoved together to form a book - that's probably why it works.

The default Music app is a sub-par audiobook player, as was in iOS 6. I don't consider that a cardinal sin for an app called "Music", or good cause to say that the operating system upgrade itself 'broke' a medium. Audible works as well as it ever did.

I have to say that audiobook players are an area where Android has an app that doesn't have an iOS equal - Maple Audio Player handles audiobook files about as well as you could ask, with excellent bookmarking and playback speed options.

Bit of an oversight from the Music.app team, unless they decided that it was time to trim functionality and leave it to third party apps to handle.

That would be an incredibly dumb decision, considering they sell audiobooks in the iTunes store.

I get the same feeling from iOS 7 that I did from using the first versions of OS X after using NeXTSTEP / OpenStep, so much of the cool stuff and details were missing. I still miss the menus and the Digital Librarian among other things.

Its like in the big rush, they just left things undone or looking like crud (the new icons for example).

Getting iOS 7 ready for the announced date was obviously death march. I am therefore optimistic that many of the small bugs and annoyances will get smoothed out over time … :)

They also broke podcasting in the newest version of iTunes for Windows.

The interface is worse than something even Microsoft would ever make.

They broke it on OS X too. Now you can delete the media you downloaded, but cannot delete the entry. Makes for a very cluttered "Did I watch that" interface.

Not only that, but I have several episodes from several different podcasts that continually try to download each time I refresh. I have listened to them before, and deleted them, but itunes insists I really really want to listen to them again.

I do not.

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