Motherfucker, but is iTunes a dumpster fire of an app.
In the rollout of Apple Music, which of course was just shoe-horned in on top of the eleventy other disparate things iTunes already does (poorly), Apple seems to have redone the Artist/Album view in the main app:
Now. Due to endless problems getting music sorted and synced between iTunes Match (which I guess is now iTunes Cloud Drive or some shit), locally-stored music, and my iPhone, I'm hand-rebuilding my playlists because I'm a fuckin' Nazi about how I listen to music. This process involves sorting by artist/album and then working my way through each artist and dragging which songs/albums of theirs I actually want on my phone over to the playlist in the left-hand nav.
Now, due to Apple fuckery with how they store music, sometimes some tracks and/or entire albums will only be available "in the cloud". Fuck that noise, I want them stored locally on my hard drive. I want this because trying to add a "cloud" track to a playlist and then sync that playlist to the phone and actually expecting that track to just play is an exercise in torture that I've been through before and it doesn't work for shit.
So, I'll drag some tracks over and then see some that I want but need to be downloaded first. Fine, click the super-not-obvious cloud icon, which is Apple for "download this file locally". Then I work my way down the rest of available tracks for that artist, moving fast, clickin' and draggin'…
Or I would. If Apple didn't somehow decide it was a good idea to fucking redraw the artist view after every. single. song downloads. So you're three screens down, trying to click and drag, and, if you've told it to download say 24 tracks, you will be interrupted 24 times trying to drag other tracks over to the playlist. You will not know, sometimes, if a given track was actually added to your playlist successfully because iTunes will interrupt you at some point right at the point of where you release the mouse button to drop the tracks onto the list.
A privileged whine, to be sure, but it already takes FOREVER to do anything involving syncing with this bloated piece of shit and when you're trying to hand-build a playlist of ~11,000 songs, all of those interruptions add up.
What's worse is that it took me some time to figure out what the fuck it was doing because the first time this started happening, I was dragging and dropping from an artist that I have a lot of albums by, so it would reset the artist page to the very top of the list, to where both the album I was having it download from and the album I was picking from were both below the bottom of the visible list.
The only possible use-case scenario for this is "let the user know their shit is done downloading", but that's a notification I only need once, when everything I've actively submitted is done downloading. AND they already have a perfectly good method for this; iTunes will *bing* at you when all active downloads are complete. That's all I need to know. I don't need to have control of the app ripped away from me and my current chosen task broken.
What a fuckin' asshole of a program.
shawn ritchie dot com 