Out With the Old, In With the New

I go way back with music on Apple devices; I owned multiple iPods going back to the iPod classic (Click Wheel), ripped 600+ physical CDs, and I joined the iTunes store in October 2003.

(Why yes, I do have 27 years of personal email archives.  Doesn't everyone?)

Today, the Library has 9,608 items using 68 GB.

This relationship has not always gone smoothly. I distinctly remember years ago after a software upgrade of my iOS device or MacOS, my iPhone had Biblical performance issues when initializing. When moving from iTunes to Apple Music, Apple broke automatically adding user ringtones to devices, and since 2015 the push for Apple Music over Libraries of user owned music has driven me nuts for years.

Consider my current iPhone settings:

Note how Apple Music is clearly set to not show.  (And no, I don't belong to it!)

However, in the actual Music App, search still shows an entire screen full of selections from Apple Music:

Quite frankly, I have no idea what the "Do Not Show Apple Music" toggle does at all.

This week, I finally sufficiently got sick of accidentally searching Apple Music instead of my own Library that I did a little research and found the iOS app Marvis Pro.  

Marvis Pro:

• reads (and updates) the user's music Library synced by the MacOS Music application.
• favors the user Library over Apple Music.
• has more powerful display options:
• displaying more information about tracks and playlists
• (for example) setting any playlist to display as Albums, not individual tracks,
• sorting
• works with various functionality in the Apple Watch Music Apple and other Bluetooth devices (like our Audi A4) to play music.  (This is similar to other apps like Spotify and Podcasts)

Now, if I could just tell my iPhone to never open the Apple Music app again …