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iTunes Disables MusicMatch
spooza writes "If you own an iPod and use it with MusicMatch on a Windows machine and then install iTunes, strange things happen: after the installation, MusicMatch is unable to communicate or even find the iPod anymore. Of course this might be a coincidence or bad programming on the Apple side, but since MusicMatch also introduced a pay-per-download service it seems not too farfetched to suspect that Apple simply took the opportunity to knock out an opponent. The funny thing is, Apple and MusicMatch cooperated before, because Apple wanted to have software that was able to work with iPod and thus not lose potential customers that want to buy an iPod but have only Windows." MusicMatch recommends deleting, then downloading and reinstalling, the MusicMatch software to reenable it.
You know, I would have thought this was simply another conspiracy theory on /. created to stir up controversy and debate. However, after reading this and this on Think Secret the other day I'm not so sure. This isn't the first not will it likely be the last transgression at this level pulled by Apple.
Then I got a mac.
,of course, the firewire ports on his laptop are 4 pin, and don't have power in them, so we had to leave the ipod plugged in for an hour or so before being able to use it.
Now I understand.
Apple is a corporation. Yes. They are out to make money. Yes.
Their way of doing so, however, is to make some rally kick ass stuff.
I *LOVE* OS X. And I"m a control freak. If I didn't have OS X, I would be using a linux desktop, no questions asked.
As it is I get a rock solid desktop that rules. In fact, I'll even go as far as to say that if you haven't sat down and really got to know OS X as a desktop, you only THINK You know what a good desktop is.
It IS that much better, in terms of user experience. Apple knows what "User experience" actually means.. to microsoft it's a buzzword. You don't know what good effortless computing can be if you haven't been using a mac.
What they say about itunes is totally true...
I bought an ipod last summer. I plugged it into my ibook. Then I opened up the manual, and started reading.. and basically every step said "If you have a mac, skip this step". When I got to the end, there was nothing for me to do.. I looked back at the laptop, and it had already done everyting.
THen my co-worker got one, and he uses windows.
It took us 5 or 6 weird dialog boxes to install MusicMatch.
Then we had to get musicmatch to import his music to it's library (which was REALLY slow, and it doesn't even move files around, just reads them). We had to reboot.
We had a few more dialog boxes for a few other components....
Then we could synchronize, which was by overwriting everything already in the ipod. And it was slow.
And,
End result:
I plugged in my ipod, and it worked. All the music I had ended up on my ipod in seconds, and it started charging up.
IT took us an hour or so of futzing around to get my co-workers to work.
It's kind of funny to see how Slashdotters race to the defense of Apple when they start acting like a monopoly, but when MS does it, the sky is falling.
Ok, on one hand you have a company a with ~5% OS marketshare writing software for another OS and specifically telling people it will disable certain other software on the system.
On the other hand, you have a company with ~95% OS marketshare bundling apps (such as a web browser) with their OS in order to crush the competition by leveraging the power of their monopoly.
Now please, explain to me how the first is anywhere near comparable to the second?
PS - If you click "Agree" on a fucking EULA, you damn well better have read it. Otherwise, you are accepting that there may have been terms in their you would have found disagreeable, but you don't care.
One of Apple's human interface guidelines is to have an Undo feature whenever the user commands a big change.
Guess what. No undo. I experimented with a feature of the program (it didn't say what "organize the MP3's" meant, and I was curious) and I couldn't undo what it did.
If it had SAID "You can't undo this!" I would have read more to figure out what it meant. However, since it was an Apple program, I assumed that they were following their own guidelines.
And I got fooked.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Yes, except Apple understands software and hardware engineering. Plus Apple has released a large portion of it's OS and compiler technology to the Open Source community.
Microsoft's stuff has the simple elegance of an elephant...with gout.
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
I could watch it in the Task Manager's "Performance" tab, as my memory consumption gradually went from about 250MB to 1GB until the sync finished.
Then I found EphPod, which is better than MusicMatch *or* iTunes....