Review of Garage Band, Podcasts & Music – GarageBand Review

Apple provides one of the best content creation apps for podcasts and music, GarageBand, but destroys it by providing two of the worst content playback apps ever conceived: Music and Podcasts, which are so bad that Apple has disabled reviews of them in the App store. How to make Podcasts and Music worthy of GarageBand: toss out the latest versions of the interface and return to the original user experience, then just squash bugs rather than remove features without silly preconceived notions of what “most users” do when playing podcasts. I play podcasts as I go to sleep. Before iOS 11, if I nodded off before an episode completed, I could just mark the episode as “unplayed” the next day and scrub to the last thing I remembered. I could leave “delete played” on safely and not worry about manually deleting episodes. Now, the following tasks are all impossible: manually marking played or unplayed manually rearranging the “up next queue” manually moving episodes to a playlist and rearranging them manually seeing played episodes in a station At this point, Apple might be better off not providing any podcast app and just let third parties take over the space. There are similar problems with the Music app. I updated to iOS 11, verified all my songs were still available, then went on a trip. Only then did I discover Apple had summarily decided I didn’t need to keep my own songs in local storage and had moved them all to the cloud, where I couldn’t play them on the go. Now will someone please explain to the geniuses at Apple why people originally bought iPods in the first place: YOU CAN’T GET INTERNET ACCESS EVERYWHERE so you need your music in local storage. Seriously, I’ve never seen any company so completely revolutionize an industry and then become more inept than 99% of their competitors at the mission-critical functions. Apple I don’t need curation at all. I need you to leave my stuff where I put it and let me control the order I play it. Period. I know it’s against your nature, but STOP micromanaging how I play content. I have dusted off the old portable CD-MP3 player and found it much more capable than Apple’s best playback apps. Take this as constructive criticism of your complete and utter failure, then come back with something better.
Review by Lithmac on GarageBand.