8/7/19
9:00 am

A Look At the New Music App In macOS Catalina

One of the biggest changes that will come with macOS Catalina is the replacement of the iTunes app. The new Music app will take over management of your existing iTunes music library and it has pretty much all of the functions that iTunes had. Preview what it looks like and see what the Mac Music app can do. Catalina will be released in the fall.

Check out A Look At the New Music App In macOS Catalina at YouTube for closed captioning and more options.

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. So one of the biggest changes coming with macOS Catalina is the iTunes app is gone and in its place we've got the Music, Podcasts, and TV apps. Let's take a look at what the Music app looks like in Catalina.
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So I'm using a beta here of Catalina so things may change by the final version. If you look you'll see what looks like the iTunes app icon. The icon is pretty much the same but now it's the Music app. So we'll run that. The Music app has a nice clean look because you can tell right away it's missing some of the features of iTunes. It's basically just focused on music. So a lot of the different stuff like podcasting and to be able to rent movies and also being able to sync with your iOS devices, that's all gone and it's just focused on the music.
So the first section here has stuff for Apple Music. If you're an Apple Music subscriber, like I am on my regular account, then you can access the For You and Browse sections here. You've also got the Radio section and of course there's a couple of free radio stations that we can all listen to but the rest of it will be part of Apple Music. So that's the Apple Music section.
Then you've got your Library here. So you have similar things as to what we've seen in the past in iTunes. You've got Recently Added, you've got an Artist View which gives you a list of artists here and then you can scroll through them all and see all the different albums for each artist. You've got an Albums View. You've got a Songs view and this is highly customizable. You've got under View, Show View Options and you can decide what you see there. You can also, of course, Sort in different ways. You can click the Header field here to actually sort really quickly. So all very similar to what we're used to in iTunes. 
You can also look by Genres instead of by artists or by composers as well. You also have the iTunes Store a big major part of this. So the term iTunes isn't completely going away. It's still being used for the music store. You can go and browse through the iTunes Music Store just as before. All of your previous purchases are still going to be there for you to download. You can buy new music on a song by song or album basis. You also have the same Genius functionality that we saw in previous versions of iTunes. So you can use that if you like that. 
There's a lot of details here. For instance, we have this new view here for Up Next. So instead of it appearing as a drop down menu at the top you can now have this nice slide-in sidebar here so you can see what music is coming up next.  Of course if you're looking at songs you can click on the three dots there and you can have it play Next, you can have it play Later so you can add to your Up Next and kind of create this playlist as you go along. It's nice to have it here on the side instead. You can also go to History and see what songs you've listened to that have gone through the list.
This here is the Lyrics. So if you start a song we should normally be able to see the lyrics here. That works with Apple Music. The playback button is up here including the ability to be able to shuffle and loop through the songs. In Preferences it looks a lot like iTunes. You have the ability to have automatic downloads and sync your music library. You can also Show or Not Show things like the iTunes Store though that seems to be always on here in the beta. Playback you can do cross fades and sound check and things like that.
For Files you can set where the Library is. So for Files you can set where your Media folder is located and whether or not things are kept organized. It's all the same as in iTunes. I'm kind of getting this feeling that the Music app really is iTunes with all of the other functions besides music removed. You have Copy the files to the Media Library so you could have files that are external just like before. You can store all your music on an external drive and turn this off and have them added to the Library that way.
Import Settings you could still, when you rip a CD, set it to all the different things you want. A lot of people are afraid things like that would be missing in the Music app but they're not. They are all here. You've also got the Mini Player. So you could bring up the Mini Player in a variety of ways. You've got the Mini Player window here and you could show Up Next and History and also the Lyrics there for that similar to before. You can just switch to the Mini Player so Music goes away and you just have the Mini Player and you close the Mini Player and it comes back. That's all as before.
Also the Visualizer is certainly still there with the regular and classic settings. You can turn that on just as you had in the iTunes app. A lot of people just assumed that would go away but it's definitely still there. You can add to Playlists. You can love and dislike a song. So if you like the old rating system you can turn that back on in Preferences. Star Ratings and now you see that it appears there and you can actually rate your songs. To create Playlists you can go to New Playlist. Playlist from selection. Then once you have a Playlist you can drag and drop songs into it. So I can go back to Songs here and I could drag a song into that Playlist. Now I could also create a Smart Playlist as before. You can set all this different criteria and it automatically updates. All that functionality is still there.
So what's missing? Well, in the beta there's a really important feature that's missing. That's the ability to have multiple iTunes' Libraries. However Apple has a note about this and specifically says this is something going on in the beta. So everybody kind of feels that this will be put back into the Music app before the release of Catalina.
So some of you might be wondering how you sync music to an iPhone, an iPad or an older iPod. If you want to do that you can still do it. It's not in the Music app though like it was in iTunes. Instead it's in the Finder. I'm going to look at that in a future episode. All in all I think this is a huge improvement. It makes more sense have a dedicated music app, have all of your local music, have Apple Music, everything there in one app just like it is in iOS and leave behind the bloated iTunes app that has all sorts of different things.

Comments: 49 Responses to “A Look At the New Music App In macOS Catalina”

Howard Brazee

4 years ago

I'm looking forward for the future podcast you mentioned. iTunes is by far, the most buggy software that I use, but a lot of that is with synchronizing my devices. I remember when iTunes dropped iDevice app support. Apple did not clean up the apps on my Mac, and it did not replace the feature that allowed me to arrange my apps from my mac. I really miss that feature. Will my current iTunes settings automatically get copied to Music?

Comments: 49 Responses to “A Look At the New Music App In macOS Catalina”

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