macOS 12 SSD issue update

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Going through a few rounds of troubleshooting with folks on the macOS community forum as well as Apple tech support regarding the SSD overheat issue has helped me determine the following things:

  • Whatever this problem is, it’s uncommon; nobody else seems to have experienced it
  • The enclosure itself isn’t to blame; it happens on both my Plugable USB 3.1gen2 and on my Sabrent dual-slot Thunderbolt enclosure
  • The overheating is only happening on the Crucial 2TB NVMe stick (that normally lives in the USB enclosure); having just the PNY stick (which lives in the Thunderbolt enclosure) doesn’t overheat, moving the PNY stick to the USB enclosure doesn’t overheat, and the Thunderbolt enclosure only overheats if I have both the PNY and the Crucial stick in it
  • The overheating stops if I unmount the drive but leave it electrically-connected
  • Mounting the drive even under macOS Recovery causes the overheat to occur just as quickly

For now I’ve moved my most critical files from the Crucial stick to my older SATA drive (which isn’t having trouble) so I can continue to work on the things that I normally do on my desktop, and my studio laptop seems to be okay with the PNY+Thunderbolt combination so I don’t think Novembeat is at risk because of that, at least.

This does mean I won’t be able to work on music from my desktop computer in the meantime, and video editing will have to be direct to NAS, which is doable, just not ideal.

Hopefully this all gets sorted out in a macOS update.

Warning about macOS 12.0 Monterey

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I’m running into a pretty severe problem with my external USB 3.1-connected NVMe drive on macOS 12.0 on my M1 mac; something in the system is causing the drive to get extremely hot (to the point of disconnecting within a few minutes) when there’s no recorded activity going to it, and also while it is connected, Blackmagic Disk Speed Test reports that it’s only capable of around 150MB/sec, which is significantly less than what it usually gets. Which tells me that something in the OS is causing the drive to go under significant load.

I tried disabling Spotlight, both from the GUI and using sudo mdutil -i off /Volumes/storage, which made no difference.

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New Mac mini

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Today I wasn’t expecting to get a lot of work done due to my brain still feeling like it’s been through a juicer, and also because my new Mac mini arrived today. So I got to go through the drudgery of reinstalling everything while also seeing the news of the world exploding around me! Hooray!

Anyway, just some random setup notes.

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Finally have iTunes Music.app + iPhone concordance

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Somewhere along the line, iOS device sync started working again.

Smart playlists still don’t sync correctly (they end up getting reshuffled when they end up on the phone), but I have a simple workaround:

  1. Have a smart playlist called Entropy Mobile with the shuffle rules I like
  2. Have a regular playlist called Entropy Queue, which is synchronized to the iPhone
  3. Occasionally copy the contents of Entropy Mobile into Entropy Queue

The nice thing about this is it’s also easier for me to curate stuff, like albums which got partially played, or where I want to move an album to happen later or whatever.

It’s still not perfect and there’s still some asinineness of smart playlists where they’re always incorrectly-shuffled when I first launch Music.app, but clearing out the list and letting it refill means it’ll be shuffled correctly. I guess the main downside is that I need to be a bit more deliberate about populating my phone with music, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

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The ongoing quagmire that is iTunes Catalina Music.app

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So, the latest issue with iTunes is that for whatever reason it’s stopped letting me actually play in a shuffle-from-library way. Which is to say, they got rid of the view where you can just see your whole library as the library, and click a “play” or “shuffle” button from there. I don’t know when it disappeared, but I know it used to be there, and now it isn’t.

It used to be that if you just had your view set to “albums” and pressed play anyway, it’d go ahead and choose something at random to play. But today it just kept on doing the same album: The Bends by Radiohead. Which is, granted, a great album, but I don’t know why it was choosing that one and that one alone, and I only felt like listening to it once, you know?

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iTunes Match kinda sucks

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So remember how I was using iTunes Match and a smart shuffle app to manage my music?

Well, that hasn’t ended up working all that well.

The smart shuffle app, in particular, is incredibly unreliable and slow, and also my iTunes Match-backed library has… Issues.

Like, a lot of songs won’t sync over because of an “unspecified error” (I assume label interference, because they’re all songs from a particular label as far as I can tell), and a lot of other songs won’t sync over because they appear as “duplicates” since like… sometimes I have more than one instance of a song across multiple albums. Best-of compilations and singles releases and so on. Sometimes it does legitimately find a duplicate I want to get rid of but most of the time it’s just… not. And even when it does, it’s a crapshoot as to which one it decides is the duplicate and which is the “real” one.

Like. My whole thing is listening to albums, not individual songs, and if a song appears in multiple albums, I want it to be played within all of those albums.

At least they seem to have figured out that there are sometimes multiple versions of a song by the same artist and on different albums (like, it never seems to show the various Past Masters versions of Beatles songs as duplicates of the album versions). (Oh I guess I talked about that last time too. Obviously this is important to me.)

I’ve also noticed that playing songs on the iPhone doesn’t update the play stats in my cloud library, and even with the enormity of my library I’m still hearing albums more frequently than I’d like.

I feel like there has got to be a better way than any of this.

Oh wait, there was one, and Apple stopped bothering to support it.

More iTunes/iPhone sync woes

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So, I’m still having the iPhone sync issue, only now it’s gotten so bad that I can’t even sync my music after doing a full factory restore of my phone. Ridiculous.

As an attempt at just getting my dang music on my phone I decided to sign up for another Apple Music trial period, figuring I’d use the iCloud Music Library sync stuff instead.

Unsurprisingly, it doesn’t really work.

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