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> These are sent via WhatsApp so the audio recordings are mp4 files, which for some bizarre reason won't open in Music and instead open in QuickTime Player, des
by kemayo 4y ago
> These are sent via WhatsApp so the audio recordings are mp4 files, which for some bizarre reason won't open in Music and instead open in QuickTime Player, despite definitely being audio files.
.mp4 being associated with a video player seems reasonable, since it's almost always used for video. (I think the only difference between .mp4 and .m4a is the extension? It's just serving as a signal about which app should open it, really.)
> Create a new playlist, transfer some previous songs over, then try to drop the new m4a's onto the open playlist. No go. Play around for a while, figure out that the entity that accepts the drops is the TableView, not the surrounding view. So you can't drop the new files into the empty space below the songs, you have to drop them onto the existing songs.
Interestingly, this is the user winding up on the single most fiddly path because it's what felt intuitive to them. In pretty much any Music library view but the playlist view, dragging a file into the window is all you need to do. They unfortunately picked the single view where it's focused on letting you rearrange the tracks.
I'd suspect that the Music app's workflow is built around "I want to add this to my music library", whereas the author's mental model was more around "I need a list of files so they get transferred". Which are similar, but that falls apart in cases like this. Which is sort of Apple's fault for not smoothly supporting edge cases, to be sure.
- eptcyka 4y agoApple never really wanted to have the concept of files seep into iOS.
- chongli 4y agoWhich in hindsight seems extremely naïve. Files are just too damn useful a concept. Their main rival, databases, have a bunch of peculiarities that limit their generality. When people want to share information any longer than a paragraph or two, they send a file. You can’t beat files!
- zokier 4y agoOf course ultimately the distinction between files/filesystems and databases is not that clearcut; I'd argue that in many ways filesystems are just databases promoted at kernel level.
- jacobr1 4y agoI think the model they'd prefer are references. URIs to cloud resources.
- chongli 4y agoThat's what cloud providers want. I think users don't care and prefer whatever is the simplest and most reliable method. Cloud resources disappear all the time which tends to make a lot of users upset.
- miohtama 4y agoIs it discussed somewhere the ideology behind this? Users are too dumb for files? Pay extra for App Store apps just to open your own files? Prevent privacy? Security?
- danuker 4y agoI think all of the above, except they won't say it in public. They'll let you figure it out. It just works.
- fsckboy 4y agoI think layered on that, it was more the case Apple really really really never wanted to have the concept of single song music files seep into iOS, especially as it was "share with your friends" device. The revenue stream from the iTunes Store started in 2003, well preceding the iPhone.
- 10000truths 4y ago> .mp4 being associated with a video player seems reasonable, since it's almost always used for video. (I think the only difference between .mp4 and .m4a is the extension? It's just serving as a signal about which app should open it, really.) mp4 is a container format, all it does is wrap some codecs and add metadata. There's no requirement that it contain video. The smart thing to do would be to inspect the mp4 and open it in an audio player if it contains an audio stream but no video stream.
- hot_gril 4y agoFile extensions alone decide how to open something. Inspecting the data takes time, and you might be opening many at once.
- AceJohnny2 4y agoThat's actually not true on macOS (Finder), which has a much more sophisticated^H^H abstruse system https://eclecticlight.co/2022/12/24/how-does-macos-tell-the-type-of-a-file/ https://eclecticlight.co/2022/12/24/how-does-macos-tell-the-...
- hot_gril 4y agoSo if I understand correctly, if you have a file with an unknown type then change the extension to something still unknown, it'll preserve the first default editor you set for the file.
- CoolGuySteve 4y agoI used to work on this part of CoreMedia. Opening the mp4 header is fast enough that spotlight does it in the background for every supported media file on your system. For tens of thousands or even millions of files, inspecting the header only loads about an extra page into RAM per file. Or, since Apple already has the Spotlight index with this track data in it, 0 extra pages. Basically, only track information that's not already in the Spotlight DB needs to be loaded so the performance should be the same as walking the filesystem for filenames.
- saagarjha 4y agoDoes iTunes not support music videos?
- fredoralive 4y agoYes. It isn't the default player for .mp4 as it isn't really a general video player. Also, I just did a quick check, if you rename an m4a to mp4, and add it to the magic "$APPLEMUSICFOLDER/Media/Automatically Add To Music" folder, Music will import it, but give it a Media Kind metadata field as "Music" and not "Music Video" (which you get with actual video files), so it obviously does deeper inspection than just the filename.
- mynameisvlad 4y agoSure but if your default file handler for mp4 files is Quicktime (as is the default for anyone who hasn't changed it), why would you expect macOS to open mp4s in another app because of the just because it's a music video, or, in the author's case music only?