iTunes Turns 13 Today -- Continues To Be 'Awful' (qz.com) 267
An anonymous reader points us to a link on Quartz: On April 28, 2003, Apple started up a revolution. Enter the iTunes Music Store, unveiled with a proud flourish by a beaming Steve Jobs. It was a digital jukebox, a music distribution game-changer, a record store to end all record stores -- and it did, in fact, kill off a great number of those. [...] For 13 years -- 15 if you count the two years the program was just a file-storing service -- users have grumbled loudly about iTunes' unwieldy interface, its bloated features, its inability to simply get better. [...] Instead of trying to streamline the service over the years, Apple has opted to stuff an overwhelming number of new features -- movies, television shows, podcasts, mobile apps, and most recently, Apple Music -- into it.The report mentions the following issues with iTunes: space-sucking size, slowness, ugliness, bloatware, lack of online or social integration, a wonky back-end, music isn't even its priority. Marco Arment, who is best known for co-founding Tumblr, and creating Instapaper app, noted some development-end issues with iTunes in 2015. He wrote: [...] The iTunes Store back-end is a toxic hellstew of unreliability. Everything that touches the iTunes Store has a spotty record for me and almost every Mac owner I know. And the iTunes app itself is the toxic hellstew. iTunes has an impossible combination of tasks on its plate that cannot be done well. iTunes is the definition of cruft and technical debt. It was an early version of iTunes that demonstrated the first software bugs to Grace Hopper in 1946. Probably not coincidentally, some of iTunes' least reliable features are reliant on the iTunes Store back-end, including Genius from forever ago, iTunes Match more recently, and now, Apple Music.
Meh (Score:3, Insightful)
Not that I'm a big fan and I do use it but when a writer has to scream "It'z Teh TERBBIGEAL HELLSHTUE!!!!1111!!!!" every other sentence I'm simply not going to take them seriously. Maybe too much politics makes me cynical but I don't find a lot of value in statements that need to use more adjectives than nouns. That to me reeks of fanboyism.
Re:Meh (Score:5, Insightful)
For most Apple users, the problem with iTunes is having to use it for functions that have nothing to do with music, such as backing up iOS devices to a computer or checking to see how much free space there is on your iPhone. Whenever I upload edited pictures to my iPad to do a slideshow, that too has to go through iTunes, while the application keeps pestering me to log on to the music store account, which is not needed for this operation, over and over again.
Re:Meh (Score:5, Insightful)
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iTunes has to manage music, handle ratings, act as a downloader, manage DRM, handle device reflashing (DFU or normal), sync apps/music/media with devices, handle backups of devices, handle restores, act as a music player, act as a movie player with a remote, rip CDs, and so on.
This is exactly the problem with iTunes.
Re:Meh (Score:4, Funny)
But it is terrible shit.
Agreed 100%.
iTunes is the lamest shit in terms of software. It sucked at version 1.0 and it sucks as bad or worse today. If I had written that steaming pile of puke, I'd quit and become a landscaper or prostitute, something I could respect myself for doing. But iTunes is pure shit from the clunky craptastic UI to the bozo-level file transfer system.
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The funniest part of the original and your reply is that neither lists 'congressman' as a step up to respectability from any of those other things.
I can't be a senator, congressman, or lawyer, because my parents were married.
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The one and only time I used iTunes was when I bought an iPod Touch 4G, and it was required to use iTunes to "activate" it.
Currently I use "CopyTrans Manager" to transfer music and videos to/from the iPod. It uses iTunes drivers, but not the godawful UI, or the shitty always on processes.
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iTunes was one of the first software that was music industry approved. I am willing to bet there were a lot of compromises that Apple needed to do to get their approval. Now the industry is more tolerant, so other brands can make better software. However apple being first needs to keep compatibility, perhaps follow long term contractual agreements. And keep backwards compatibility, and designed to run on multiple platforms.
Re:Meh (Score:5, Informative)
This is even worse when your wife owns the iMac and you only sit down at the keyboard once every four months to resolve some issue or curate a heavy update/upgrade cycle.
If that program had ever worked the same way twice for me it might not boil my blood from fifty paces. Every session soon turns into another hour of "where the fuck did they hide some simple function this time?" And for what, I ask you? The program is never the least damn bit improved by all this churn, so far as I've ever noticed.
Apple has now done at least as much to harm usability as they once did to improve it. Too bad that reputational stickiness takes so darn long to overturn.
For a long time they sold us the message: control = consistency = ease_of_use.
Somehow the "control" half of the equation remains as strong as it ever was, while the "consistency" half turned into "consistency of control", with control != user_experience_betterment.
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Someone could probably make a decent pot of cash if they wrote a usable alternative to iTunes. Something straightforward, without all cruft and crap that iTunes is currently loaded with. A clean interface and a standard set of controls would be enough for me.
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That's for music buying, whereas itunes the application is for music playing and ipod syncing that just happens to have a buying function attached (kinda dumb since the web already exists).
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You forgot that you can go with Genius, which will churn for an hour and then auto-sync the list heavily weighted with all the things you don't want and very little that you do. I gave Genius a whirl once, several years ago, right before my old, half-broken old iPhone that's no good for anything except being a media player stopped syncing for whatever reason. Now it's two-thirds full of stuff I don't want to listen to, and no way to change it other than buying a new device. I'm too cheap to do that, and jus
Best article title on Slashdot for years (Score:3)
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Re:Best article title on Slashdot for years (Score:4, Insightful)
I take it you've never used Sharepoint... (Score:3, Insightful)
iTunes at least has a purpose and fulfills it. Really, what is the point of Sharepoint?
Winamp (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Winamp (Score:5, Insightful)
I continue to use Winamp to this day. I like organizing my music files directly as files and folders. I never understood the attraction of a piece of software that slurped in all your music haphazardly and piled it all together trying to rely on ID3 information to sort it out. Easy enough to create playlists in Winamp via drag and drop.
In my car I use a thumbdrive organized by folders, navigated with the car's entertainment unit. Fortunately most manufacturers are still supporting this method.
Re:Winamp (Score:4, Interesting)
So how do you create multiple playlist with the same song in multiple playlists without copying files to multiple locations?
How do you create a playlist with songs you haven't heard in the pass six months except for songs you've skipped x times? Yes iTunes is bloated piece of crap and I never let my iOS device go near it. But smart playlists and being able to view and sort your music based on metadata is not a bad thing.
Re:Winamp (Score:5, Informative)
Winamp supports playlists that are separate from the files themselves. You can drag songs into a playlist and save that playlist as a .M3U text-based file, which is a widely recognized format. [wikipedia.org]
In any case you know where all your data is and it's not wrapped up in a bloated, proprietary interface.
It's easy to edit a playlist to remove songs you're bored with, rearrange it, save multiple versions. It does not allow for behavior such as "play me all the music I haven't heard in a while" but I tend to know my collection well enough that I know what I want to hear. For those of us who grew up with album based music we already have it organized in our heads that way. I realize that this is now old school, but it's what's comfortable for me. I am guessing that this method of organizing music will die out with my generation.
In the garage I use a 15 year old throwaway laptop just to play music, and it works very well running Winamp's very light footprint.
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Which is a shame because iTunes gives iOS a couple of advantages over Android.
First, encrypted backups through iTunes backup EVERYTHING. Authentication information (which is omitted on non-encrypted backups for obvious reasons) is backed up, as is a bunch of stuff Apple would rather not have on their servers where government can obtain it by warrant.
Having a local backup is good - iCloud backs up the bare minimum - just the stuff A
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Foobar 2000 might be more up your street. WinAMP does let you make playlists, but Foobar is more powerful and has more plugins for managing your collection. You can make the kind of smart playlists you describe.
Foobar also supports bit perfect output, multiple fully customisable interfaces, tools for managing your collection like tag editors and volume equalisers etc. The biggest issue is the learning curve, but it's worth the small amount of effort.
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That is what an .M3U playlist is. If you prefer you can make them by hand or by scripting or whatever.
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The other problem with iTunes is that when you do use it for music, it imposes its own organization and won't let you organize your music your way. And if you want to do something like write out a given selection of music out to an SD card to play in your latest-model car audio, iTunes can't do that by itself. You need to bolt on two third-party utilities to make it work.
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Yes, still use WinAmp to this day....
VLC (Score:3)
I'd say VLC... unless you *are* into whipping llamas.
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I really miss the queue-in-queue feature Winamp had. I could select all music I would like to listen to for some time, and then just press q to create a queue from the playlist. Odd that nobody has copied that functionality.
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I vastly preferred XMMS myself. But I didn't really get into whipping llamas...
Re: Winamp (Score:5, Funny)
He said work computers.
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Never liked Winamp. I don't want something that spends so much time trying to look cool and edgy with lots of "skins". That's stupid, it should look like a Windows application if it is running on Windows, not try to break new and untested grounds on UI design.
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VLC :)
They added a library section but as the guy above mentioned, I ignore it and just use the folder structure usually.
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I couldn't agree more. As a Mac user, I was jealous of Windows users because they had WinAmp. Then WinAmp came to the Mac and I found it a big disappointment. A million skins, but they were all shite. A playlist system that seemed to be determined to remain file- and folder-based. I tried; I really wanted it to work. In the end, it just wasn't for me.
And in another 13 years (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:And in another 13 years (Score:5, Interesting)
And still making Apple more profit than some whole other industries.
Where's the +1, SadButTrue mod? Because as an Apple fan, I must agree wholeheartedly - iTunes could be so much better and just sucks at so many things :/
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Whoever is in charge of this business unit should be fired.
Apple isn't interested in iTunes selling more PS4s (Score:2)
Why doesn't Apple just develop a rest api for itunes and let 3rd party developers create applications for it? Then you could have it on your ps4 or whatever. For those that aren't familiar with what I am talking about this is exactly how Netflix is implemented.
Whoever is in charge of this business unit should be fired.
Well, this is "fuck the channels" Eddie Cue [1]. Good luck with changing his mind on that. And actually I think it'd be wholesale against how Apple works.
Besides, why the hell would Apple want a PS4 interface? They want to sell more AppleTVs (or iPads or whatever else). They are not a content company, they sell hardware.
[1] http://curi.us/1732-steve-jobs... [curi.us]
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Re:And in another 13 years (Score:5, Funny)
iTunes will still be shit.
It'll be waaaay better after they fold systemd into it.
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But it will still need an init system.
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But it will still need an init system.
The rumor is that systemd will eventually have an init function added to it.
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Like how Poland invaded Germany in 1939?
Huh?! (Score:3, Informative)
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You must be using iTunes 10.7 still, like me.
I don't know what I'm going to do if I ever but an iDevice that requires a newer version. That interface...
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Ditto. I use 10.7 on Windows, and it works fine. It takes a long time to load up, but other than that, it works. On Linux, I like Audacious a lot, and it accesses the iTunes music library just fine.
I am very careful to save a copy of the 10.7 installer - newer versions are pretty grotesque...
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That tells me you are using a mac. iTunes on Windows is unusable. I'm so happy my Android phone shows up as a simple USB drive without worrying about transcoding, album art, software updates, etc etc.
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That tells me you are using a mac. iTunes on Windows is unusable.
Uh, no. I'm using iTunes on Windows. I do store my media files on a FreeNAS server. Not sure if that makes a difference or not.
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Anyone who thinks ITunes is good has never used it on a PC.
I use iTunes and iPhone on my $300 PC. I'm not having any issues. But I do store the media files on my FreeNAS file server.
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I have it on my Windows desktop and laptop and use it all the time. I have no problems with performance or the way it works. I've even used it on the rare occasion I've needed to pull my old PA system out of storage and be a DJ for a friend's party or whatever.
I just don't see the big deal. I'm certainly not a fanboi and I recognize iTunes could be better but couldn't everything?
It seems to be the software that everyone loves to hate but I just don't have any complaints about it and I constantly wonder w
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For me, it eventually reaches a point where it spins on 100% of a CPU, until I disable a set of services related to iTunes. Once I disable those, iTunes is neutered and doesn't work except for USB phone sync, but the CPU is fine, which is an acceptable tradeoff.
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I use it on a PC. It's ok. Better than Windows Media Player and Winamp. But I don't use all the features. I dont' buy music online. So it just has to be a music player (easy peasy, anything can do that), it has to sync with my ipod, and it has to at least manage podcasts in a sane manner. It used to put podcasts into a special playlist but after awhile it stopped doing that which makes trying to find them when I'm driving a challenge, and that's the only major flaw I have with it.
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Awful == Working? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not a fanboi by any means. I have however used iTunes for music for at least 10 years and don't have any complaints. I buy an album, it downloads, I play music. I don't see a better Music platform out there for things like Albums and Songs, so I don't get the gripes. I ignore whining rants too, so think twice before providing your personal anecdotes.
Is Pandora better for Radio? Probably, maybe? I don't know, I listen to a radio for radio. Well actually I also occasionally use the iHeart app for radio, but mostly radio for radio. Is NetFlix or Xfinity better for videos? Probably, maybe, I watch movies on my TV or in a Theater. Is some free Tor sharing better? "free" may harm large studios who screw over musicians, but it also harms the musicians harmed by those same studios. Robbing a slave owner never freed any slaves.
People who's opinion translates to dollars have said that iTunes is something other than awful for 13 years. I'm one of them people.
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I think the issue is that ITunes is not a good music player ,video player, way to buy books, and so on. Add to that the huge size of the app.
The solution I think is simple. Break it up.
Have a store app, a music app, a video app, a book app and so on. "Apple my have a book app but I never use Apple to buy books.
Google has done this with Google Play, Google Music, Google Books, Google Newstand, and YouTube.
If I play a song in Google music and it has a Video linked to it I see an option to watch the video.
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Bingo. I have a Mac where its primary purpose in life is to sync with iDevices and maintain a music stash, copy movies downloaded, and so on. I run Google and Amazon's "music sniffers" on it, so on my Android devices, I can download files from their services onto the device and use a decent player.
I miss the iTunes and how iOS 4.x and earlier synced. When the device was syncing, it wasn't a background task. Everything stopped on the iDevice. This way, it wouldn't hose up and have to start from the begi
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Is some free Tor sharing better? "free" may harm large studios who screw over musicians, but it also harms the musicians harmed by those same studios. Robbing a slave owner never freed any slaves.
And also torrenting over Tor is pretty sleazy.
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You just use it as a basic music player and store, which means you don't feel the pain that comes with using the many, many other parts of the app. It would be better if they had separate apps to do things like manage your iPhone/iPad.
It also depends on if you are on Windows or Mac OS. The Windows version is unbelievably bloated and installs a tonne of shit you probably don't want. It's badly behaved too, using lots of background tasks, browser plugins and other system crippling crap. To cap it all off Appl
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I think the issue here is that freeing a slave without the owners permission is also known as robbing the slave owner, at least from the owners point of view. It's certainly valid to simply say that people are never property and can never be owned, but that's arguing semantics.
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How many times did you copy and paste this same comment? Regardless, I haven't experienced the same thing. I had an issue maybe 5 years ago where I couldn't run Photoshop and iTunes at the same time without the music blipping every time I performed a large operation, but otherwise I don't notice major performance issues on the PC.
The interface and features, now, that leaves something to be desired, but it's been a decade since I can remember it being a significant resource hog.
Surprise! (Score:5, Insightful)
And here I was thinking iTunes was only awful on Windows for obvious reasons.
A complex application dumbed down (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm an occasional iTunes user on both the Mac and Windows versions. I usually start using it when I'm trying to figure out why sync isn't working, or to perform a reset on a phone. My experience, similar to what I've seen with other programs, is that Apple is using the "UX" excuse to dumb down the program. The problem is that since you can manage your phones completely independent of it now, you usually go into iTunes for 2 reasons - to fix problems or to use your music collection on the local machine. In my opinion, neither of these functions are optimal. Too much functionality is hidden or in places you wouldn't expect. This is the problem with consumer-focused software; it has to be completely idiot proof and look pretty, but that makes it less functional.
I'm not defending "GUI by engineer" applications like the ones I have to support at work either. I work with one right now where the configuration part of the app is simply a massive properties tree and XML editor for a 5K+ set of data. But the other extreme is no good either. When a reasonably intelligent person has to spend several seconds trying to figure out which magic gesture or barely-visible hotspot hides the functionality you need, something's wrong.
Surely that's a typo (Score:2, Funny)
iTunes in 1946? Did I wake up in an alternate universe this morning?
Re:Surely that's a typo (Score:4, Insightful)
iTunes in 1946? Did I wake up in an alternate universe this morning?
Woosh? :)
It was a joke... To poke fun at the archaic and buggy nature of iTunes. As someone who reads slashdot, you are of course familiar with the generally accepted theory that the term 'bug' originated with work she did where they found an actual bug causing a computer problem... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper#Anecdotes
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Ditto. It reads as a guy who's got a hate-boner for this particular piece of software and wants to rip it as hard as possible while also being witty.
Okay, you really don't like it. I got that after the first two "hellstew" references. And that was just in the summary...
Something smells off to me... (Score:2)
Drove me to this (Score:4, Interesting)
I hated iTunes so much that I ran out and bought a Zune. I'm not kidding. That's how awful it is.
Maybe if a Mac was my primary machine I wouldn't mind all the iTunes mishegas so much. I don't need my portable device to be inextricably paired with an account at Apple. Screw that noise.
(Note: "mishegas" is Italian for "fuck you, Apple, I don't want quicktime for Windows")
Mishegas? Ambushed by Yiddish again (Score:2)
http://www.yiddish.co/mishegas... [yiddish.co]
"Insanity or craziness"
Good thing I'm a neophile linguist (in training).
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I usually spell it "Michiganer." But that's just me...
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I've told this story before, but when I was a young Italian-American kid growing up in Chicago's Little Italy, I heard someone say that Hollywood was run by Jews. Because I wanted to grow up to be a movie director, I figured learning Yiddish would give me a leg up. So I took some books out of the library and did my best to learn Yiddish. It was disconcerting for my parents to hear me talking like a Catskills comic at the dinner table, but they were pretty cool about it all in all. I couldn't keep up wit
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Yeah, it's pretty sad that the old version of the Zune software I have is still better than the latest iTunes on PC. I wish I could get my family off their iOS devices, but they won't budge.
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I hated iTunes so much that I ran out and bought a Zune. I'm not kidding.
That's funny. I bought a Zune because it was a nice media player.
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It's my favorite media player. I bought three Zune HD 64s because I like them so much. Two are still in the box in my drawer. I could sell them for a nice profit on ebay.
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Just get a Sansa, geez. They even come with a microSD slot so you can expand them, unlike iPods and Zunes.
Unfortunately nobody seems to know they exist. I got mine back when they still made them with a physical clickwheel day-after-Thanksgiving for like $42 (normal price 110? 120?) back in...2008? Still working.
P.S: Rockbox
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Zunes last 10x longer than a Sansa. And they sound better. They also handle podcasts MUCH better.
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So you have an 80-year-old Zune?
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Or maybe you meant battery life...in which case your Zune gets you 220 hours of music play one on charge?
Rockbox benchmarks [rockbox.org] (Fuze v2 [wikipedia.org])
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Here's what Rockbox supports with a stable version: Sansa c200, e200 and e200R series, Fuze, Clip, Clip+ and Clip Zip
Do any of those models have 64 gig of storage? How about a touchscreen?
Sansa with a Rockbox is Ford Fiesta. My Zune HD 64 is a Cadillac V-series.
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Not built in, but as I just said the Fuze and Clips have an SD card slot. A thread on the Rockbox forums suggest they should handle SDXC fine as long as you format is at FAT32.
Who the hell needs a touchscreen? The Fuze+ has a capacitive cross-shaped area thingy. The rest are analog controls like God intended ;)
Sansa with a Rockbox is Ford Fiesta. My Zune HD 64 is a Cadillac V-series.
If you're talking price, maybe. Can you get radio on your Zune? Play games? Edit text files?
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Not yet, but it'll get there.
Between iTunes and the new AppleTV... (Score:4, Interesting)
.
For music, AppleTV gen4 is a big step backwards from AppleTV gen3.
And then there's the iTunes backend which is as bad as, if not worse than, what most have been saying about it. Slow, buggy, cumbersome, bloated, really bad UI, slow, buggy, etc.
I am surprised that I have stayed with Apple's music infrastructure for this long....
Re:Between iTunes and the new AppleTV... (Score:4)
Does anyone actually use it? (Score:2)
Re:Does anyone actually use it? (Score:5, Informative)
If you've every had to rescue an iDevice...you must have iTunes installed. If you want to load any kind of media onto a device which you didn't purchase from the iTunes store (which means every single chorister who has ever gotten a learning track or anyone who has created their own music) you must have iTunes. And it is horrifically awful.
Don't even get me started (Score:5, Interesting)
My employer insists on giving me an iPhone, but prohibits iTunes on my company-issue laptop because it's such shit. Even if I wanted it on my home computer, I run Linux so it isn't even an option. And since it's a relatively new device, Apple actively breaks whatever free software works even semi-well with it. Company policy also prohibits me from using iCloud, so I can't add music through iTunes Music, I can't delete iTunes Music, I can't even seem to delete the stupid U2 album they foisted upon me. That means certain apps that can normally play music for me, can't play music, because Apple only allows them to play music via iTunes Music.
I will never spend my own money on an iPhone. The only reason I have one is because I'm paid to have it.
Unfortunately, my wife prefers Apple's music players, and we're both using Linux now. Fortunately, she prefers the ones they don't make anymore, so Linux software actually works pretty well with them. We actually just paid 45 euros to get her old Nano repaired, and we're about to get her chunky old iPod with a clickwheel repaired. It's amazing how much easier and more pleasant it is to use these old devices than it is my iPhone 5....
Nuke it from orbit, it's the onl... (Score:2)
Who are we kidding, even nukes can't kill iTunes.
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it wasn't always this bad. (Score:2)
I am by no means a Apple or Mac Fanboy, but I must say that iTunes 4 was pretty decent. I used to use it to play music as well as loading my iPod.
That was the last version that was usable. iTunes 5 sucked, and every version since has sucked harder.
Now I only start iTunes to mess with what is stored on my iPod. I should probably convert to RockBox
I will not hesitate to bitch about the new iPods, disposable pieces of crap that they are. I'm on my 2nd iPod, and I intend to keep it running as long as possibl
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Vindication (Score:2)
And all this time I thought I was the odd one, not like iTunes.
I don't get it (Score:2)
Had to demand refund due to lousy video player (Score:2)
MPC-HC played a pirated copy just f
Works for me (Score:2)
I've used iTunes on Windows for many years as a music player only, and while it definitely has some annoyances, nothing else seems to do all the things that I want:
- auto-organize its own folder
- not reorganizing external folders
- volume normalization
- smart playlists
It is oddly lacking support for Ogg Vorbis and FLAC, but you can install 3rd party support for those.
I've tried several other music players, but none seem to do all of the above. The most promising ones unfortunately lack the expressive power o
SOUND JAM (Score:2)
I liked it when it was Sound Jam!
http://www.macworld.com/articl... [macworld.com]
https://www.panic.com/extras/a... [panic.com]
Paid good money for that software, a month before Apple took it, called it iTunes and released it for free.
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It still overshadows ALL OTHER music management programs out there massively.
Yes, and Windows is the most popular OS. And IE was (is?) the most popular browser.
iTunes is still crap.
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iTunes is better at handling iThings, but only because Apple won't allow you to use anything else.
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