Flawed iTunes Stands Out Among Apple's Products

waderoush writes "On top of all the other features that it has crammed into iTunes, Apple this week added Ping, a Facebook-like social network for music discovery. It's all part of the company's plan to dominate the world of consumer media, but Xconomy argues that this time, Apple may have gone a bridge too far. iTunes, nearing its tenth birthday, started out merely as a program for ripping CDs, and has grown increasingly creaky and impenetrable as Apple has added more and more cruft, the article argues. The company won't have a stable base for its new media empire until it rebuilds iTunes from scratch — perhaps along the lines suggested by its other new product this week, the revamped Apple TV."

Cruft

[TyFoN]

Not only is itunes full of cruft, it was originally bought [wikipedia.org] from an outside developer and shoehorned into what apple wanted it to look like. It has been horrible from the get go.

iTunes...feh

[Pojut]

I'm sorry, but iTunes is a piece of crap as far as software is concerned. I don't know how smoothly it runs on a Mac, but on Windows it's nigh useless (this is on a Phenom II X4 965 with 4 gigs of RAM, btw).

The day my wife switched over to an alternate piece of software (she uses SharePod) was the day she became much happier.

Re:How Does the Same Company Make iPods and iTunes

[Manip]

iTunes 10 is an improvement. Apart from the almost useless Ping, it seems a fair bit faster. The patch notes claim performance improvements and frankly I believe them. I'd recommend it. Only downside I've seen is that the first time you try and download from iTunes Store it attempts to trick you into activating Ping (click Cancel when it asked you for personal information that "might be available to the public.").

Re:How Does the Same Company Make iPods and iTunes

[NiceGeek]

Um, you do realize that you can use Flash on a Mac right? Also you can download alternative media players to your hearts content.

Sadly true

[dr2chase]

I lit up Ping last night, it seemed to only know about music I had bought from Apple (1.4% of my library), and said "That user hasn't written any reviews" when I clicked on "My Reviews". Hel-lo? Might you suggest to me, "here's how to write a review?" "would you like to write a review?"

Or maybe, an option to harvest ratings already made (1-5 stars) from my iTunes library, instead of asking me to go wandering through the store?

The route to "review an album" goes down an interesting rabbit hole that accidentally exposes their database organization into the UI. Take an album that is not in Apple's catalog (e.g., Anderson/Burroughs/Giorno, You're the Guy I Want to Share my Money With), you get to the "write a review page" by clicking on the arrow next to a song. This then takes you to a different album containing that song, not the one you might want to review.

I realize that Apple, like everyone else, is just trying to make a buck, but you're not supposed to give the game away quite so crudely. If you don't have the album, say "sorry, we don't have the album in our store. Do you think we should, and would you like to review it anyway?"

Re:How Does the Same Company Make iPods and iTunes

[Evardsson]

Just as a heads-up - Ping is OFF by default. If you want to use it as another spam portal you have to turn it on.

At least they didn't follow the Facebook protocol: add a new insecurity, uh, "feature" and turn it on to the whole world by default.

Re:How Does the Same Company Make iPods and iTunes

[cyberfunk2]

There's no auto-opt-in for ping.. you have to turn it on manually.

Re:How Does the Same Company Make iPods and iTunes

[kevinmenzel]

If you have Windows, try Media Monkey (www.mediamonkey.com). It's NOT open source, and it's free version isn't as functional as it's non-free version, but the cost of the lifetime license as well as the MP4/AAC encoder has been worth it to me so far. They've been really good at pushing updates to sync with new versions of iOS (though I have a Classic 6G so that hasn't been an issue for me), and although they only support music right now, they will support video in the next version. It's the first alternative to iTunes that actually had me uninstalling iTunes from my system completely... I only use iTunes to "reset my iPod to factory defaults". You can write your own custom scripts to do stuff, and many are avaliable to download, it works with a LOT of WinAmp plugins, and it's skinable... though I prefer the ugly but fast and functional "Don't skin it and look like a windows app". Downsides: SOME podcasts are itms only, and check for an iTunes client version. That's ridiculous of the podcast provider, but there you go. It doesn't currently do video. It is windows only. The free version lacks some of the advanced AutoPlaylist creation. It can't currently sync an autoplaylist to an iPod as a smart playlist that dynamically changes (though to be fair, I'm not sure if that ever worked on the Classic anyway), and the AAC encoding doesn't play nice with the iPod 100% of the time, so I generally wind up doing a transcode to MP3 whenever I sync, which isn't a huge issue for me. Also there are some "niceness" fixes that could be done, but haven't so far in the name of speed... so... yeah. Not perfect, but a reasonable solution on Windows for music now, and video soon. Ebooks and apps... you'll have to boot up iTunes every so often.

Re:iTunes...feh

[Captain Splendid]

Are you serious? I'm running a 955 with 4GB too, and it's the first time in my life I haven't complained about iTunes' performance.

There's something seriously wrong with your rig if you can't run iTunes without problems using that kind of hardware.

Re:How Does the Same Company Make iPods and iTunes

[immaterial]

Perhaps they buy them because they're not as wildly misinformed as you are? Macs are not iPhones.

Macs have flash, you aren't forced to use iTunes on a Mac any more than you are on a PC (that said, the Mac version is far less shitty, though it still desperately needs a rewrite as TFA says), and "Quicktime" isn't some add-on cruft like on Windows, but rather is part of the video frameworks of the OS (but as far as playing videos goes, you can use VLC, Mplayer, Plex, whatever the hell you want).

Re:iTunes...feh

[Pojut]

I'm not talking about performance issues, I'm talking about general usage problems. Tracks will disappear and reappear on a whim, playlists would disappear (and, in one extreme case, change its own order) amongst other things.

Tried formatting the system, still continued giving her problems. Since she switched to SharePod, she hasn't had a single issue. ::shrug::

Re:How Does the Same Company Make iPods and iTunes

[foo fighter]

Don't spread FUD.

Ping is completely opt-in. The iTunes Store is completely opt-in. Even "Genius" is opt-in (since it sends your library contents and play information to Apple servers where the mixes are calculated).

And I'd add Double-Twist to the list of iTunes alternatives, especially if you have an Android phone.

Re:How Does the Same Company Make iPods and iTunes

[Darkness404]

You have to use a third party program like SharePod (http://www.getsharepod.com/) to get it to work. I had the same issue, now I just keep SharePod on a flash drive and can dump my music collection wherever. And for your second problem try ( http://www.obsessable.com/how-to/how-to-deauthorize-all-your-itunes-accounts-at-once/ [obsessable.com] ) but I haven't ever used it so your results might vary.

Re:How Does the Same Company Make iPods and iTunes

[Anonymous Coward]

a) you don't with iTunes, you use a third party software such as Senuti to get third party music off. iTunes will only sync over songs that are associates with your iTMS account.
b) you don't if the computer is dead. However, this is a non-issue. Once you reach the five computer limit you can deauthorize all of them with one click and then reauthorize the ones that are still valid. If you never reach the five computer limit you won't have to do that.

Re:iTunes bad, new iPods not much better

[Daltorak]

So happy all my stuff is in MP3 format, not Apple's proprietary format.

Huh? What proprietary format are you talking about? iTunes' standard audio format is MPEG-4 Part 14, aka ISO/IEC 14496-14:2003. It's supported out-of-the-box by Windows 7 (including streaming) and surely by other operating systems as well.

The only practical difference between Apple's implementation and the ISO standard is that Apple prefers the extension .m4a, whereas the standard states that .mp4 is the only valid extension. All this specifity in file extensions really does is help operating systems sort out whether a given file is an audio-only or multimedia file without having to read the contents. The file contents itself is the same.

Re:How Does the Same Company Make iPods and iTunes

[grub]

"iDevices" is easier to type than "my iPhone, my girlfriend's iPhone, our daughter's iPod Touch and the family iPad".

I believe in the right tool for the job no matter what the OS. If you want to go on an anti-Apple rant, feel free. Just don't use my shorthand term as an excuse for it, it's far too obvious.

Re:iTunes...feh

[gnesterenko]

YEah, it is ur computer. Dual 2GHz here as well, except more like 70GB of music. Sure it takes about 5-10seconds to load up, but once it does, its good to go. Maybe you've got too much other bloatware? Library has been corrupted a few times, but system auto-saves these corrupted copies and I am able to re-import all myplaylists/ratings both times (only happened twice in 7 years). And I'm pretty sure this has to do with the brown-out shutdowns I used to have at my old place (before buying the UPS)

Now what I hate about iTunes is its inability to deal with an ipod sized less then your music collection. Sure, you can 'uncheck' songs, but that removes them from random play in iTunes as well (stupid). Makes it VERY annoying to manage music.

"The views expressed here are mine and do not reflect the official opinion of my employer or the organization through which the Internet was accessed."

Re:Update the framework already

[maccodemonkey]

iTunes is a Cocoa app now. As of iTunes 10, it now has a NSPrincipalClass, which means it's running under the Cocoa runtime.

No doubt it still has some Carbon calls (It's based on QuickTime which is entirely Carbon, cept for QuickTime X which isn't out for Windows), but it's a Cocoa app now.

Re:How Does the Same Company Make iPods and iTunes

[SiChemist]

Flash on Android has a setting to only start flash items when you "click" on them. It's very similar to "flashblock" for firefox. So, you won't see any flash ads unless you really want to. I like being able to see video on websites that aren't youtube.

Re:How Does the Same Company Make iPods and iTunes

[carp3_noct3m]

I've used sharepod as well (anbd avoided Itunes like the plauge) but the the IOS4 breaks the sharepod's ability to sync, so am now temporarily stuck using itunes. Myabe there is an update for sharepod I've missed though.

Re:How Does the Same Company Make iPods and iTunes

[bennomatic]

I'm guessing you use a Mac. This is a program which I LOVE on the Mac and HATE on Windows. I've got a dual-core 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo based Windows machine... granted, it's running XP, but shit, if iTunes is running, everything grinds to a halt.

To that end, the same thing happens with Quicktime and Safari on my Windows machine. I'll be upgrading soon to Win7, so I have hopes that it'll run better, but at this time, Apple products on Windows *suck*.

Wow, nice troll

[Toreo asesino]

iTunes decision to use abstraction on Windows can hardly be blamed on Windows itself; it's just pure laziness on Apples' part. There's plenty of native media & drawing APIs that iTunes just can't be bothered to implement, and the result is a slow and shitty iTunes implementation on Windows. I know no other app that installs so much shit; a custom USB driver (http://www.zdnet.com/blog/apple/apple-rolls-back-usb-driver-in-itunes-8-for-windows/2270), various services, various other apps you never asked for, etc, etc. It's pure 100% bloat that seemingly only Apple seem to install; no other application I've ever seen piles in so much crap, and you blame Windows? The reality distortion field is strong in you.

Curious comparison with php; I never thought you could link the speed of a media player to that of a web-server technology until now. That aside though php is in fact faster on Windows apparently - http://blogs.iis.net/bills/archive/2006/10/31/PHP-on-IIS.aspx [iis.net]

I find it ironic that Apple call Windows out on being so slow & insecure when they are in fact one of the biggest perpetrators of shoddy coding. The whole "You must use native APIs for the genuine experience" thing going on with the iPhone, while disregarding the same rules completely for their Windows apps. Utter double standards.