Kirk McElhearn, writing for Kirkville, added the album Ultimate Sinatra to his Apple Music Library. He writes:
When I started listening to it, I noticed that I wasn’t hearing all the songs that I knew. I looked at this album in iTunes, and I was surprised to see how it displays.
This is a single album, yet iTunes shows it as a number of different albums with different titles. I’ve sorted by album so each title should be grouped, but you can see there are four different titles for tracks in the first grouping. And that first group of tracks, which is hanging together as an album, has track numbers in a seemingly random order.
This is typical behavior for Apple Music when it comes to a greatest hits or collection album. Apple saves space by storing a single copy of a track in the cloud, then points all references to the same song to that stored version, even if it is not the exact same copy.
But Kirk’s problems go deeper than this. Read his post for details. What a mess.
I think Forestall was fired for less. Unfortunately, this issue has not made the headlines (yet?). It’s difficult to believe they “optimized” by keeping a single copy of a song and pointing to it from multiple albums.
Not just in the Apple Music service. The artwork is regularly missing from views of music I sync from Mac to iPad/iPhone, and then it will show in other views. When you consider that today’s Music app is also a spreadsheet-like chore to use, it is amazing how much Apple has screwed up media playback. My 2010 iPad had such a beautiful, fun to use jukebox in it that I considered buying a second iPad and using it as a dedicated home stereo. Anyone could use it with no training and it was fun. Now, I don’t even want to use Apple’s Music app because it is such a chore, my relatives literally ask me to train them on the Apple Music app, and I regret all the money I invested in iTunes.
Forestall was fired because he made stuff for users, not just for Sir Jony Ives and his design professor friends.
“It’s difficult to believe they “optimized” by keeping a single copy of a song and pointing to it from multiple albums.”
That’s not difficult to believe at all; it’s the obvious and correct thing to do, if it really is the same song (not a remaster or a live or a different real recording).
The difficulty is believing that nobody cared about the way it sorts and displays via the metadata.
Apple Music not only messed up the songs of some of my ripped CDs but also from albums I purchased from iTunes. One deluxe version suddenly showed up as standard version. A classic album was divided into two separate albums with the exact same title and details. Even after re-downloading from iTunes Store where it is listed as one album as it should be it would be imported as two albums or the pdf booklet would be separate from the music tracks. In a rock album, also bought from iTunes, two tracks were missing and would only play via streaming. I could not download them again, only restore them from a backup I fortunately had made. It really is a chore to use and not fun any more.
This makes perfect sense. Cloud storage is so darn expensive these days. AWS charges a whole 2 cents a GB.