Music app UI issues after macOS Tahoe update

This might help with your Album Art but no guarantees

Here's a workaround. Per tidbits.com (link below), you can disable Liquid Glass on a per-app basis. Stop the Music app, open the Terminal app and enter the command

defaults write com.apple.Music com.apple.SwiftUI.DisableSolarium -bool YES

then restart the Music app. This will revert the two most noxious changes to the app in my eyes: returns the controls to their rightful place at the top of the window, and restores the status bar at the bottom of the playlist in "View as Songs" mode.

You can revert to the godawful Liquid Glass nonsense by repeating the process and replacing YES with NO, if such a perverse urge should occur to you. More details about the process (and options to implement this system-wide) available at this link (many thanks to TidBits for publishing this):

Finally deduced that during the update to OS26 the music library file had become corrupted!! So binned the corrupted file and initiated a new music library file. After uploading from my hard drive 11,500 albums onto a new library file all seems well. However there are a few caveats in the new music app compared to the old one. 1) you cannot play music immediately, the app will crash. 2) You have to wait a while for all of the 'data' to load into the new music app before you can play any music without it crashing especially for a local library of this size (I haven't timed it but I leave it around half an hour from opening to be safe. However previously I could play music straight away, so this is a pain). 3) If syncing this to your iPhone, you need to be patient. when you click on the iPhone in the side bar of finder, it will appear blank for dome time. You need to leave it until all of the information is there, as in the sync button. Syncing new music will take as long as it takes dependent on the size of your local library.

Please be mindful that this only applies to a local library stored on an external drive. I do not use cloud based music, so no idea how that is behaving for other users.

Anuj_2 wrote:

Does anyone else see the music app's UI go crazy weird after updating to macOS Tahoe?

mainly with the header in the full screen where the top bar is just empty

when the queue is opened the header of that portion is stuck at a position even after scrolling through it

the music history is lost.

I don't know it's just weird and troublesome, not liking it at all, apple please do something

or just hire me, I might have a few great ideas for the music app. I can share my resume if needed XD

[Edited by Moderator]

Original Title: Music app header issue

This is a user to user community.

Not seeing the issue here—

Quit the Music .app and relaunch it holding down the Shift key and compare your results.

Call Customer Support (800) MY–APPLE (800–692–7753)

or on line https://getsupport.apple.com/

or call AppleCare Support at 1-800-APLCARE (800-275-2273)

Outside the USA—Contact Apple for support and service by phone

See a list of Apple phone numbers around the world.

Contact Apple Support - Apple Support

I only updated to Tahoe because my Mac told me I couldn't sync or backup my phone until I updated. (Which is really annoying.). Overall I don't care about liquid glass except that the graphics are pretty buggy. (On a 2023 M2 MacBook Pro.) A tip I found in general was to go to Accessibility > Display > and 'Reduce transparency', which doesn't look the best but does make things easier to read.

The Music app is driving me the most nuts, because it's like they make changes just to show they are doing something and not a change that gives any sort of benefit.

I hate the song information at the bottom (I mean, did they put Safari tab names at the bottom? Finder folder names at the bottom? Mail email message names at the bottom? No.), and I am so frustrated with the missing status bar.

I did get the Status Bar to show in my library by turning it off and back on again (...) but I can't get it to show in any of the playlists. Half the screen is useless in playlists anyway, and now it can't even show me the number of songs? WHY APPLE WHY

Also my playlist folders randomly open and close. I'm alarmed.

Thankfully my 500gb song library appears to be in tact. Thus far.

I hope we can get status bar back.

The folders bug is a stupid hassle, for sure. One workaround for now that helps a bit is to option-close the Playlists menu, then open again (no option). Usually that reopens the list all-closed. I have 10 playlist folders so the buggy behavior is definitely irksome.

I see this behavior, but this usually works: toggle shuffle off, then on again, then (usually) the playlist queue properly (re)shuffles. It's annoying that the first track is always playing, but that's a relative nit. If smart playlist shuffle was actually broken, I'd lose it, since that's 99% of my listening.

[Edited by Moderator]

I believe we are facing the same issues, just because this was the first major version of macOS to be released.

1. UI is somewhat laggy as ****, even when scrolling through a single playlist with fewer than 300 songs.
2. When double-clicking a song in a playlist, once the song finishes it does not automatically continue to the next track in that playlist as it did back in macOS Sequoia. Instead, playback just stops completely (and if shuffle + repeat is enabled, it will simply repeat the same track). Strangely, sometimes after quitting and reopening the app, the issue disappears — overall it feels very unstable.
3. The input method occasionally lags; after typing, it freezes for a few seconds and then suddenly spits out all the characters at once (most noticeable in the Music app’s search bar).
4. From time to time, opening a playlist shows a completely blank list. Closing and reopening it makes the tracks reappear.
5. I personally haven’t run into any issues with Liquid Glass so far — it’s still transparent enough to read text. That said, the overall experience is definitely not as good as it was on Sequoia.

[Edited by Moderator]

Absolutely hate this update. I have a 2022 M1 and HEAVILY rely on Apple Music for work. There’s no way I need a new MacBook after 3 years with over 130GB of storage remaining??!

1. Play/Control bar at the bottom makes zero sense. Please move it back to the top.
2. SO much wasted space on the top part of the screen when looking at a playlist (regardless of view option). We do not need to see the album artwork that large. Please make more space for the song list.
3. Playlist menu keeps expanding and opens EVERY single playlist/folder. I have over 10 years of playlists that I am having to manually close every so often. Then they open back up on their own. They will also all close at any given time. It is extremely frustrating. Please also ditch the playlist artwork preview- it makes the playlist menu look cluttered and not clean.
4. LAGGING!! Like crazy. Anytime I move a song into a playlist, delete a song, edit a song, anything… I get the “spinning wheel of death”.
5. External apps like Turnover no longer connect with the Apple Music App. Unsure if that’s an Apple issue or Turnover issue but I’ll add it to my list of grievances.
6. PLEASE add playlist times/status bar to every view. It works in Playlist View but haven’t been able to see it in Song View, which doesn’t make sense.

Very frustrated, very disappointed. None of the updates to this version of Apple Music are helpful or useful. Sorry for complaining, but wow, it’s not good.

For me there are a couple of issues that make this release awful.

1) The entire left panel is now a giant hot button for the last-used tab, so when I'm clicking, trying to bring the window to the front, I end up navigating away from the current album to "New", or "Home", with no way back to where I came from. This is absolutely infuriating, and is worse than all the other issues because it happens over and over when trying to foreground the window when just a tiny part is showing.

2) The miniplayer lacks a button to add the current track to my library. I can make the playlist visible, and then I can add the *previous* track, or the *next* track to my library, but not the current one! This is the most backwards design ever.

Were it not for (2) I could use the miniplayer instead of the mess that is now the main window, but they even broke that workaround.

I also find the play controls at the bottom of the window nonsensical, though this combines with the general lack of configuration available. I can't collapse the left side-bar. I can't choose where the play controls go. I can't make flexible decisions on what I want in the mini-player and main windows, and I can't hide tabs I don't want like "New" or re-order the ones I do want.

I also no longer have an Info option for the entire album, so seeing album art is painful. This should never have required going into info and then viewing Artwork. Double clicking the album art should show it full-size... seriously, this is basic useabilty stuff and Apple just makes it worse with each release.

The "pod" that comprises the play controls is actually quite good. I wish I could make that float and use as a kind of mini-player, as it will at least let me add a track to my library.

I don't let Apple Music anywhere near my old iTunes library of purchased songs. That was always a horror show. As such, I don't have library size performance issues, but the app is still *incredibly sluggish* on an M1 Pro with 32GB of RAM and nearly a TB of free disk. I'd imagine it was a scam to make you upgrade, but people with the latest Mac don't get any better performance.

Buttons have zero-feedback and don't respond immediately, and transitions to any tab except "New" seem to take forever...

But oh, it's so good at showing me the "New" view I *never* want to see, in a hope I'll suddenly develop a taste for whatever pop Apple is pushing today – which I never will.

Finally, there are broken "dead" items left in the menu, such as "Show Status Bar" ... I wish I could show it, but that item did nothing at all, until the latest update that grayed it out instead, which is only slightly better.

Could we at least get a hotkey for "go to current song" - maybe a button for it that sits in a consistent place and doesn't require opening a drop down?

Apple's updates to Music have failed to be improvements since the point it stopped being iTunes. It ought to be easy to make a fluid, responsive, configurable music player because there is a huge user base. Instead, we have something that feels like a browser app made with a clunky web-framework running in a window and pretending to be native.

If Apple aren't going to take this app seriously, why don't they do a proper job of opening up an API so that others can do it right?

Looks fine for me, as well. The UI has been updated, for example the playing controls and track progress bar that used to be at the top of the Music main window are now at the bottom. Shown here (Tahoe on top):

That's true in full screen as well. You can provide feedback to Apple, but this was clearly a design decision they made.

Feedback - macOS - Apple

[Edited by Moderator]

It's a buggy (and ugly) disaster. Music from my library stops after 14 seconds. Sometimes it doesn't play at all. The interface is a disaster. It makes zero sense to place the bar over the song names and artists. It literally makes me feel ill looking at it.

More worrying beyond stylistic/useability observations, are the bugs, and it feels as though no two users have the same issues! My current bugbears are:

1. If I choose an album, I can't select a specific track; no matter what I click on, track 1 restarts (even thugh the play icon highlights on the track I'm trying to play). I have to repeatedly press Next to get playback of my selected track.
2. I have a massive number of playlists, organised into playlist folders. Mac Music periodically 'un-nests' the folders, meaning I have to scroll for an eternity to find the playlist, or 'close' every folder (maybe 50 of them) to get things back under control.

I refuse to accept that Apple would allow such a bug-ridden release, which makes me worry that this is preference corruption somewhere, with no logical process to follow to get things back under control.

Oh, and when will Apple recognise that (given it considers itself to be the choice of audio professionals), that some of us have extensive collections? If anyone is wondering, it's a dog with fleas if you have 100k+ tracks, and don't even get me started on the nightmare of working with iTunes Match with such a library!!

The playlist thing is my biggest issue. I have thousands of songs and hundreds of playlists. I don't have a fix, but one thing that helped me was being able to close all open playlists and reopen what I need. It's still a major hassle no one asked for. Next to PLAYLISTS there is a drop down arrow on the right if you hover over. Click that arrow while holding down the OPTION key and it will collapse all of the folders. Click it again without holding down option and you can open everything one at a time. Fingers crossed we get a fix for this soon.

It's terrible. Not even an option to place it at the top, where it's been forever. I'm using Swinsian.

I did a safe boot, the oval area showed up, however, when restarted the Mac, it disappeared.