Using the inbuilt music application on the Mac

I'm not a heavy user of the Music app, but I could try to give you a couple pointers. Are you using Apple Music or a local music library?

Here's my constructive response to your message.

Using Music on Mac is easy, but there are some VoiceOver navigation speed bumps that slow things down.

There are two primary areas you'll interact with: The sidebar and the music table.

Navigate to the sidebar. This is what holds your music categories and playlists. Interact. You will need to VO up and down through this list, as just the arrows or first letter navigation won't work.

The second area is the song list or grid depending on which category you have selected in the sidebar. You can flip between with two with VO-J.

To start, select the Songs category in the sidebar. VO-J. This is a list of every song in the Music app. You can either:
• Interact and VO up and down through the list. VoiceOver will read the entire row. you can customize this view by pressing Command-J.
• Interact. Focus on the song title field so VoiceOver reads out only the song title. Arrow up and down or type the first few letters of the artist's name. Focus SHOULD move to the correct row where you can hit return to start playback. This doesn't always work because Music is still a hot mess with VoiceOver, but you can command-tab away and then back to see if this will work.

Option-space will turn on Genius Shuffle which is nice if you want songs from a particular genre to randomly be served to you.

Hope this is enough to get you started.

Apple music on Mac is really messy and quite difficult to use. I suggest writing to Apple Accessibility team and the more of us write, the chances for the better might be greater. Thank you Kevin for your hints.

I have my own music library. Occasionally, I'd like to add to my collection by making a purchase from the iTunes store.

How to do this with VoiceOver is not at all obvious. I expect to press Command+F, enter my search term, and be taken to a list of search results. But the search results seem to depend on a number of factors, and configuring these settings isn't at all intuitive. It seems like the search field is in the sidebar, and after I perform the search and navigate out, I end up selecting something else in the sidebar instead, such as a playlist. I get so frustrated by one failed attempt after another, I simply give up.

I don't like buying MP3s from Amazon for a similar reason. After my purchase, they make it nearly impossible to download the MP3 files. But if the MacOS Music app is unusable, then I have to consider alternatives. I can't help but wonder if both Apple and Amazon make it difficult to find and buy individual albums simply because they'd rather sell their more profitable subscription service. But I'm starting to rant now. Time to shut it down. LOL.

If someone could provide some guidance on how to use the MacOS Music app to search the iTunes store using VoiceOver, I'd appreciate it. Or, if there's a more intuitive interface, let me know.

I might have a solution on how to search. Here's what I've got.

1. Open the Music app. Press Command+F.
2. In the search box, enter an artist, e.g., Brian Eno. Press Enter.
3. VoiceOver will not say anything. But there might be a sound effect indicating web content has loaded. it depends entirely on which radio button is selected.
4. Stop interacting with VO+Shift+Up arrow. I didn't know I was interacting. But if I skip this step, subsequent navigation commands will occur within the sidebar, and I must be outside the sidebar. So I don't ask questions, I just stop interacting.
5. VO+Right takes me immediately to Web Content. Just past that are several radio buttons. In my case, I want the search results for iTunes Store, so I check to make sure that button is selected.
6. VO+Left back to the Web Content and interact with it.

At this point, I can browse the Web Content. And since I searched for Brian Eno, I am likely to find several albums. Unfortunately, they aren't arranged as a list, so I can't jump to them with VO+Command+X. Instead, I use VO+Right until I eventually find the albums.

Next, here's what I do to demo different albums and purchase one.

1. VO+Right to an interesting album and select it.
2. Album songs are arranged as a table, which I jump to with VO+Command+T, though for some reason, I must navigate past the sidebar again, and even Web Content comes up as one of the tables I must navigate past, which seems very odd.
3. Once in the table, I can VO+Down through the list of songs, and just left of each song, there's a preview toggle that plays a sample.
4. But I'm not interested in this album, so I press Command+Left Bracket to return to the search results list of albums. Unfortunately, this jumps focus to some other place in the app, so I need to find Web Content again and interact with it. I've done this enough times now that I use the VO+U web rotor, arrow to the Windows Spots menu, and Down arrow to Web Content.
5. I find and select another album, play the samples, and decide to buy.
6. There's a Buy button, but the button contains lots of other text, so I must listen carefully to find it. I've found it helpful to use the VO+U web rotor, arrow to Form Controls, and type B U Y.
7. I'm prompted to sign in with Apple ID and password, but there's no place to enter the password. All I can do is select the Buy button.
8. Okay, now it's prompting for a password. However, Apple Keychain doesn't seem to work, which is odd, because Keychain is an Apple product, and I'm signing into an Apple site from an Apple app. It feels really odd that Keychain works everywhere except when signing in to Apple. So I manually enter my password.
9. Click Buy. This feels weird too, because it's the third time I've had to click something that says Buy, and I wonder if I'm accidentally buying three copies of the album.

Well, that's my experience. I hope it helps someone, if nothing else, it will at least let others realize they are not hallucinating, the interface really is this klunky.

Well, I thought I had something that worked. But, right after that post, I pressed Command+F to perform another search. I heard VoiceOver say "target search field," but I could not enter any text into it. I tried selecting, interacting, etc. But when I typed, I heard only thunks.

This interface remains an enigma.

Hi Paul,

Your issues sound unique to the way you have VoiceOver set up or the way Music/Mac OS is configured.

If you're subscribed to Apple Music, you have a choice to download from Apple Music or purchase from the iTunes Store. There is a reason to do the latter if you're already an Apple Music subscriber—mainly to move your music off of your machine and onto something else that is not Apple's.

Hit Command-F to search. This may need to be done twice so you don't hear an error sound when searching.
Interact with the collection view that pops up for artists, songs or albums.
In each entry, you'll find a More button. Activate it and you'll see Show in iTunes Store.
From there, you can navigate to the table and preview as you could when iTunes was not broken.
Here, you can buy and preview to your heart's content.

As for the account issues, you may need to sign in from the Account menu and go through the 2SV process to ensure your Mac is registered for Music purchases. From there, you should be able to simply hit Touch ID to buy or type in your password if you have an older Mac. You will need to enter your password the first time. Subsequent purchases in the next 15 minutes won't require a password.

I've had a Mac since 2009 and I only recently reset VoiceOver to defaults and reset many of my system settings to their defaults after transferring between 3 different machines. It was a mess. This cleared up a bunch of issues I had with Music including VO-J jumping between sidebar and songs table.

There is a way to turn off Apple Music in the Preferences so you will only see iTunes. Hit Command-, (comma). It should be in the General tab.

Finally, Apple's Music team seems like they don't understand how VoiceOver is supposed to work. This makes me think that their dev squads are not following their own guidelines depending on which team you're on. As an example, up/down arrow should move your selection in the sidebar—it doesn't. First letter navigation should work in the sidebar—it doesn't. But it will in the songs table. Make it make sense, Apple!

Hope this is helpful.

Take me through it a step at a time, Kevin, because I can't find the collection view you mentioned.

So let's start right after pressing Command+F.
Then let's say you type "David".
Do you press Enter?

If I type David, and if I don't press Enter, I have discovered that I can down arrow, and select from many Davids, including David Baldacci, David Byrne, and David Bowie. But this is just a list of autocompletions, so I still don't see how I get to any collection view.

Thanks for the tip about pressing Command+F twice. This seems to be required after performing my first search.

Is it just me, or does your VoiceOver focus seem to jump randomly? I think it's going to the first element or control in the app, but there's no way for me to know for certain, with everything so heavily nested.

Good call on turning off Apple Music in settings. I owe you a coffee for that one.

I just tried searching the iTunes Store with Apple Music turned off, and I didn't get a collection, only the web content. Perhaps the collection only appears for Apple Music subscribers?

For me, searching the store worked as expected, where I pressed Command-F to jump to the search field, typed the name of an artist and pressed return, immediately stopped interacting with the sidebar table, and pressed VO-Right-Arrow to locate the web content. Once I interacted with the web content, it appeared largely like a webpage, with headings for result categories like albums, songs, etc.

Option-Enter from the search field always searches the iTunes Store.

Not that it will help you at this late stage, but it might help some other soul. Apple's hostility to buying music really is something; they're probably trying to delegitimise it altogether so they can get rid of it. But this command will always work, irrespective of which options you have set in Settings.