Wish List: Handoff for iTunes and Music

Dan Moren, writing for Six Colors:

Like any of the other apps it supports, Handoff should just pop up a Music app icon in your iOS device’s lock screen or the iTunes icon in your Mac’s Dock; slide or click on that, and your audio should just keep playing where you left off.

This feature would be amazing. Seems doubtful that we will get it though, at least until Apple finally decides to do something about the syncing problems that already exist between Macs and iOS devices. Mainly: I don't understand why playlists are not synced over iCloud. When I change a playlist on my iPhone, it doesn't sync to any other devices. Then I plug it into my Mac, and I get two playlists, the old version and the new version, and both have the same title except for a 1 being appended to the old one.

At the moment, I avoid plugging my iPhone in if at all possible because anytime I do, my Mac removes “Carried Away” by Passion Pit from my main playlist. I have no idea why it has picked this song, there is nothing special about it. I purchased it through iTunes. The song does successfully sync onto the phone, it just gets cut out of the playlist. Thus, every time I plug in my iPhone and sync it, i have to manually edit the playlist on my phone and add that single song back in. I've tried deleting and remaking the playlist, but the same thing occurs with the same song. In the past, I've had this problem with other songs too, and eventually it just stopped happening and they would sync properly, but I've never been able to determine the cause.

Random, unsolvable issues with syncing music have always been a problem with Apple devices, and until these longstanding issues are solved, I doubt we'll be seeing handoff for songs, as amazing of a feature as that would be. Maybe a third party music app will manage it and we won't be stuck waiting for Apple to fix problems it should have fixed years ago.