It's the Splits for iTunes
Guilherme Rambo reporting for 9to5Mac:
On top of that, I’ve been able to confirm with sources familiar with the development of the next major version of macOS – likely 10.15 – that the system will include standalone Music, Podcasts, and TV apps, but it will also include a major redesign of the Books app. […]
With the standalone versions of Apple’s media apps coming to the Mac, it’s natural to ask: what about iTunes in macOS 10.15? According to sources, the next major version of macOS will still include the iTunes app. Since Apple doesn’t have a new solution for manually syncing devices such as old iPods and iPhones with the Mac, it’s natural to keep iTunes around a little longer.
We’ll see how this goes. The biggest implications are for the Music app. Podcasts, TV, and Books1 already range from terrible to non-existent. The obvious features potentially on the chopping block are metadata editing, adding your own music, and anything involving manual syncing.
For me the most important of these is adding your own music. My iTunes library has 10,560 songs in it, of that 1,715 are songs I’ve added myself using iTunes Match. That’s 16% on paper, but the that’s also by far the most listened to music in my collection.
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I actually use the books app extensively, mainly to share PDFs between devices, but I also have a handful of books and graphic novels, some purchased through the Apple Book Store. The Books app already can’t edit metadata, and you can’t select a book and right-click it to reveal it in the Finder. But you can add your own data, hopefully that bodes well for adding your own music in the new Music app. ↩︎