Restoring Music.app to the iTunes glory days
How to make Apple Music.app almost not suck (and be better than Spotify)
If you're trying to move away from Spotify, Apple Music might not look compelling when you first open it up on your computer. When you've been steeped in Spotify for a decade, Apple Music might look like an ugly copycat, and the learned helplessness from Spotify might prevent you from discovering the library view is customizable. This isn't helped by the fact that the customization options are put in unintuitive places.
I believe human agency would be improved if software were foremost designed to be a "Tool" rather than an all-encompassing one-size-fits-all dictates-to-you-what-you-want App. Each person listens to music for different reasons, at different rates, in different settings! Default UIs are optimized for some Frankensteined "average user", not you!
I'll run through a few customizations that make it work for me, Take the parts that inspire you, leave the ones that don't.
These all work regardless of if your songs come from Apple Music's streaming library or from your own mp3s.
Library view setup
Unlike Spotify, Apple Music's table columns are customizable and moveable.
The default songs UI:
After my tweaks:
The columns can be reordered by dragging. Most columns can be toggled via the right-click menu on the column headings. Weirdly, the Album artwork column, the left-most in the screenshot above, is enabled elsewhere. It took me months before I stumbled onto it 💀. It sorts by Artist name, then by their albums chronologically, which is essential to me.
To enable, click this mysterious icon at the top-right of the app. It's like a junk drawer of functionality that Apple didn't bother to find a real home for:
Click "Show View Options" in this menu. Then enable the "Show Artwork" checkbox in the popup menu:
Correcting the Playlist view
Another confounding UI choice is playlists default to a similar-but-different uncustomizable table.
The default playlist view looks like:
Thankfully there's an (unintuitive) option to change this by clicking "View > as Songs" in the app's menu bar:
The playlist will now have the same look and functionality as the main library:
Uses for Metadata
Spotify Wrapped presents itself as a backbreaking gift that Spotify made just for you. In reality they are just dressing up very basic information that they deliberately withhold from you for the other 364 days of the year. Coincidentally, it's also the only time of year where they make you a playlist of only songs you already know, without any sprinkles of new music the company wants you to hear.
Music.app lets you use this information however you want. Want to know what you've listened to the most? Sort by the Play Count column to see for yourself! You can also create "Smart Playlists" which are filters of your music library, meaning you can:
- Make a smart playlist of songs you've added this year. If you want, sort it by Play Count to make your own constantly-updating Wrapped-like playlist.
- Make a smart playlist of songs you haven't listened to in the last 5 years. Sort by Artist and hit play. It can be exciting to reconnect with a song you had forgotten about!
- Make a smart playlist of music released during specific years. Target 1975-1980 to hear your disco songs. Target your high school years to relive your angst. Etcetera.
Create a smart playlist by selecting File > New > Smart Playlist in the app's menu bar. Some more example filters:
Why this matters to me
Apps that aren't customizable, like Spotify, impart their corporate mental model onto you. I find this particularly dangerous for apps managing something so central to one's identity as music. Uncustomizable platforms use their total control to induce the user behaviors that are profitable to them. When it comes to art and entertainment, corporate motives are always at odds with your personal human values.
Spotify's music library management UI is purposefully limited. If it wasn't, you likely would spend more time forming deeper bonds to music you already cherish. Checking out new music would become an intentional active choice for you rather than a passive constant.
My decade of being a software engineer has shown me how every large-scale app has been optimized against you for profit. The technology you use affects your behaviors, so chose your tools deliberately and customize them to how your brain works to restore a bit of your own human agency.
- zgzag