So I just got my new Mac and, of course, I have Mac OS 15 now (I hadn't bothered updating my old Mac). And the Music app is...an unmitigated disaster with Voice Over. My arrows and quick nav absolutely do not work with any consistency, and Voice Over seems to just jump me around the screen randomly. Has anyone else had similar issues with this, and, if so, has anyone figured out how to fix it? This is hardly even usable.
Comments
Not too bad in my experience
I only listen to random stuff queued by Apple as custom stations, but my experience in this particular use case is not that bad. What I do is play something from my library and then let Apple's algorithms queue whatever they think is relevant. If I like it I just focus the LCD section at the top and add it to my library, otherwise I just skip forward using the function key row on my keyboard. As for QuickNav I don't really use it anymore, because after Apple finally switch the Magic Keyboard to USB-c I decided to buy a custom-built iMac with the full-sized USB-c Magic Keyboard with Keypad and TouchID and the Keypad navigation made QuickNav completely irrelevant to me, so these days I have VoiceOver configured to only enable Single Key QuickNav when I perform the standard QuickNav key combination.
A note on Quick nav
If you have enabled the option "Always allow text input" under VoiceOver Utility > Commands > Quicknav, the issues you were describing can occur. I've wondered as well after I updated to macOS 15.4 from 14.7.x. Once I disabled this option, things are working fine for me.
Try to disable that option and the music app should behave correctly.
Navigating Music on Mac
Yes, keyboard navigation in Music was put together by drunk children playing with knives and fire.
VO-J flips you between the music table of whatever you have selected in the sidebar.
Go to View menu> View as Songs.
Interact with the music table. Your first letter navigation will work properly here where you can type in "Steve" and be taken to artists starting with Steve in the list, or to the song title if you're in a playlist sorted by song title.
The sidebar is its own mess.
Sorry, first letter navigation doesn't work here. You need to VO-arrows to the playlist you want. The top of the sidebar is the search field. VO-space or Command-F twice to focus on the search field. VO will tell you when this is targeted.
I use VO-Home and VO-End to take me to the top or bottom of the list and VO-arrow left or right to go up or down.
When searching, type a search term and hit return. You're immediately dropped into the search results collection view. Interact. Then Interact again. This is the Top Results section.
If you want, you can interact once and go to the other sections using VO navigation, not arrows, sorry.
VO-arrow through the list of songs or artists or whatever section you've interacted with.
Interact with each song or artist to get to the More menu and VO-space.
Playlists have a playlist header view that will likely appear and get focused if you VO-arrow out of the sidebar when a playlist is selected. again, not part of the normal playlist table, but its own thing because progress.
I have a 15 year-old iMac that still runs iTunes and works beautifully with VoiceOver. Music isn't impossible to master, but it's a different interaction methodology that breaks with all Apple convention, because progress.
Thanks for the Suggestions
Thanks to both of you. Turning off always allow text input does seem to have made a difference; this was never turned on on my old Mac, which is probably why I never considered it. VO-J only partially works. If you are in the sidebar, don't expect to get where you want to go that way. But if you have, say, selected artists in the sidebar, then selected your artist in the artists table, you can VO-J to the table of albums.
Honestly, I don't know why Apple didn't leave the old column view as an option--that was my favorite way to navigate the Music app.
Column Browser
Select songs in the sidebar and show the column browser from the view menu or with command-b.