I was looking forward to iOS 10 for one main reason: I was hoping that the infuriating, vexatious, troublesome Apple Music app would be fixed, somehow. I was even prepared to put up with its new, even-more-fucking-ugly appearance if it would stop annoying me.

(I don’t like the San Francisco font that has taken over the interface of iOS. It’s just as bad as Helvetica, and I hate Helvetica.)

I’ve been complaining for a long time about the way Music shows tracks on my phone that are not on my phone, even though I have checked (and checked and checked again) the option to only show music that is on my phone. But no matter my preference: Music continued to show all music that I had ever purchased on iTunes. Quitting and restarting the app would sometimes fix the problem, but then it would just occur all over again. Telling it not to use mobile data (no need, because I only want to hear music I have already downloaded onto my phone) would also create issues, throwing up an error message telling me to connect to wifi. Why? So it could show/play music that was not on my phone, notwithstanding my preference for it not to do that.

And on and on and round and round we went. Even, sometimes, when it was only showing what was on my phone, the other phantom tracks would still be there, so that tapping on a song in the middle of the Gs would start playing a song from the middle of the Bs. Because, you know, invisible tracks.

So I had all the fingers crossed that the new Apple Music would behave itself.

I especially synched a refreshed playlist on the first day. And then the first thing I notice when I look at the playlist on my phone is a little cloud symbol. Why? Because some of the songs in the playlist are apparently not on my phone. How come? I checked the playlist: nope. These songs are not supposed to be on my phone because they’re not in the playlist.

One problem, I thought was the presence of the phantom “purchased” playlist that Music creates for itself, even though I don’t want it to. I deleted that. This seems to partially cure the phantom tracks problem – at least until you synch your phone again.

So I synched again, deleted the “Purchased” playlist. Same thing. So I deleted that whole playlist, deleted all my music off the phone, and resynched a clean, new playlist with a wired connection. Same thing. So I went through my iTunes, checking every single album for stray “whole album” ratings that were being misapplied to individual tracks. Resynched, this time limited to 800 tracks by least-often-played. Eventually, I have it: no cloud symbols, no tracks that shouldn’t be there, mainly because they’d all been played too many times before. It has taken several days.

Except: I’m out in my car and the podcasts run out and music starts to play automatically. First song to appear on the screen in the car: “All Over The World” by ELO. But it doesn’t actually play, so the phone bounces to another song, and so on.

Well, there are several things with that. First of all, “All Over the World” is not on the synched playlist. It is in my “purchased” items, but not on the phone. It’s in the cloud. Which, specifically, I have repeatedly told my phone to ignore. So we’re back with phantom purchased tracks, except, “All Over the World” is not the first on that phantom list. It is the 28th song, alphabetically, in the unwanted “purchased” playlist. So why was the phone trying to play it? It makes no fucking sense, except in a universe in which Apple are deliberately trying to wind me up.

And so the dance continues. I’m playing music in the house, thinking I’m playing from my 800-track synched playlist. But then a song comes on that I don’t really like and haven’t had in any playlist for a number of years. Yep: another phantom track playing randomly from the cloud, even though it’s not on my fucking phone.

I can’t even. So Apple music continues to be a pile of steaming ordure and yet is so deeply embedded in the system that I can’t kill it. Weeping uncontrollably, shaking with frustration, I say this: I just want to play music I have carefully collected over decades and filtered down to this one playlist that I want on my phone. I just want my phone to behave like a fucking traditional iPod. I don’t want your streaming service, I don’t want your radio, I don’t want your curated playlists, I don’t want the load of old toss that is your @connect feature.

This is so frustrating that I’ve reached the stage of barely listening to music because literally every time I try I’m confronted with this bizarre, unwelcome and unwanted behaviour. It’s like trying to get to sleep and being repeatedly woken by the cat. I want to have a good old listening session, especially to stuff I bought recently, and then some filler track from an album I bought ten years ago comes on and I just want to smash things up.

Over the past month I’ve spent more time dealing with all these problems than I have playing music.

Which is before we even get to the actual playback of the actual music I want to hear. I know all the theories about a properly random shuffle, but the truth is I prefer the “randomness” offered by an alphabetical playback of all my songs. Except, because of all these issues, Music makes this one of the hardest things you can do. Apart from playing songs that aren’t supposed to be there, it always goes to the beginning of the alphabet, forgetting where it had reached.

So, okay. If I concede that that’s impossible and just select, “Shuffle All”, what then? What happens then, as far as I can tell, is that it starts playing the same few songs over and over again – never quite reaching far enough into the playlist to play anything it hasn’t played in the last week or so. For example, I swear to you that I have heard Keef singing “Before They Make Me Run” at least five times in the past month or so, whereas about 700 other tracks haven’t popped up at all.