MacOS 12 Monterey

 Thoughts on installing Monterey and migrating from Mojave

Music

OK, so everything was asking for iTunes to be split up into different applications, and this is the result.  It now deals with just music, and it's pretty my the same.  I had a few scripts from Doug Scripts which I'll need to change/update to work with this but it looks OK.

Books

Great Maker, what have they done.  This is just awful.  Been running for 2 days and these are my gripes:

1. It's basically an iPad application, let's be honest
2. The list view is not a list.  It's an icon with a title.
3. You can't get information on the files. 'Get Info' retried the title, the author and possibly the cover.  You can't do anything with then, and it's just what you see normally, so what's the point. 
4. It's now the ONLY way to listen to audiobooks.  Previously iTunes stored audio books and could play them.  Now I need to migrate all of the audio books into The Books app.
1. It combines all the files into one title now.  I save a lot of radio plays/episode and this is just horrible.  You can't see home may chapters are in there or re-tag them (sine they are mpeg4 audio files, there are a lot of tags),
2. You can't view all of the tags like, author, description, comment, lyrics, date, Disc/track (which are useful for radio series)
3. The files are stored in ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.BKAgentService/Data/Documents/iBooks/Books/Audiobooks and tagged by a sha1-checksum and not the title, so it's impossible to work out what you have via the filename (the same is true for normal books, but it's still a change from the old method)

I'll be migrating to Plex audio and use Prologue on my iPhone to listen from now on.  I've been using it for a while, on and off, but not this has really convinced me to drop the Apple Ecosystem for my Audio Books/Dramas for certain.  I'll need to change my workflow, but I'll manage.  It used to be 'add to iTunes' and then let Plex look for audiobooks.  Now it'll need to be a bit more involved.  A challenge.

Workaround

To get some semblance or normality for books:

1. Downloaded the Catalina Install image from the App Store.
2. Created a Virtual Machine using VMware Fusion and installed it there.
3. Did almost no setup etc, just to get it running; No Apples ID or anything.
4. Installed VM Ware tools to I could access it better.
5. Located the Binary for Books.app under /Applications and copied it to my Monterey Macintosh and called it 'Cata-Books' instead.
6. Run 'Cata-Books' instead under Monterey to get the old functionality back.
7. Deleted the Catalina VM since it's no longer needed.
8. Breathe again.

AudioBooks

Take everything I said about Books and keep it here, then multiply by a factor.  Whereas previously I could see my Audiobook, edit some metadata, Add new episodes (for radio dramas and comedies), now it's all held under the "improved" Books program.  Can't edit meta-data, can't easily see how the books may be split up into individual files.  Most importantly, I can't specify a separate area to store these like I do for TV and Music.  They *have* to be under ~/Library unless I try something clever with symlinks and external volumes which I really do not want to do.

https://macmost.com/how-to-manage-an-audiobook-collection-in-macos-catalina.html has a good article on this.  Myself, I going to write some code to add files to the correct place based on the metadata tagged, and then  use a combination of Plex and prologue to listen on my iPhone/Ipad.  I started to do this anyway, so I just need to modify the code I wrote to add to iTunes to write to the same place as iTunes used to and they'll be picked up by Plex.  Although Plex isn't that great on searching.

Checkout the following articles as well

• The tragic case of audiobooks
• Audiobooks in the Books app
• Accessing your audio books in MacOS Catalina from reddit
• Why I don’t want to upgrade from Mac OS X 10.14 Mojave

I use MetaZ installed via homebrew to work on tags as well as my own programs to edit the tags.

Come back iTunes.

TV/Movies

Same gripes for iTunes.  List mode is a bit off and you can't separate Downloaded items versus items in the Cloud which is a bit annoying, but not a deal breaker.

PDF support

It looks like you can no longer get around the issue of protected PDFs.  My workflow used to be to get a PDF and Print to Paperless to archive it off to the Paperless program. Under older releases you could:

1. Open the file in Preview
2. Export it as another PDF
3. Close preview.
4. Open the newly created file and then ue the 'Print to Paperless' option or open it withPDFPen and the like.

None of this works any more, so to unprotect a PDF, I need to fire up an non Monterey VM, copy the file in to perform the above and the copy it out again at the end.

Annoyances

1. The Notification Centre is pretty obnoxious.
2. Don't care for 'zsh'.  I installed home-brew and am running bash/ksh from there for all of my needs.  Change my login shell back to bash.
3. Couldn't;t make a new directory called /app or /opt due to the Protection mechanism.  Had to edit /etc/synthetics.conf and add entries for the directories I wanted and then rebooted.  
4. Auidiobook - See above.  Without iTunes there is no built in way to tag both MP4/M4A/M4B and MP3 files with the same program.

Benefits

1. A clean install runs much better than my previous 6 year old base OS, which was upgraded and migrated each time.
2. All of the old Mojave binaries that I did depend on are available in later versions. Homebrew/macports are your friends in this case.
3. Installation of the printer drivers works perfectly well without any of that garbage bundles software that comes with printers.  My Brother Laser printer and Epson Scanner/Printer work perfectly well without having to install any of the vendor supplied software - and is probably more stable as well...