iTunes Turns 13 Today -- Continues To Be 'Awful' (qz.com)

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.

Comments

Meh

[Anonymous Coward]

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

[MightyMartian]

But it is terrible shit. That a tech company with as much money as Apple has can continue to make this steamy pile of shit even more steamy and shitty is a testament to the contempt the company has for its customers. I haven't bought anything on iTunes since 2013. When I'm out and out buying music, I just go to the Google Play store. A lot less hassle and a lot more light weight.

Re:Meh

[Anonymous Coward]

Hyperbole much? He didn't "scream" anything, and he used the "toxic hellstew" term several times in describing the several different aspects of iTunes to which it applies. Now yeah, it can be a little irritating when someone overuses a favourite term like that, but his points are well laid out and factual, so it's not particularly sensible to dismiss them over a minor style quibble, regardless of content.

Re:Meh

[Mr D from 63]

I remember installing itunes on one of my desktops so I could use a gift card and get some music, I've never been so frustrated with software in my life, from account signups through music access, it just wasn't worth all that effort to listen to 20 bucks worth of music. I uninstalled, but I think it left a stain.

Re:Meh

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

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.

Re:Meh

[Darinbob]

I don't use the store and never will. But I use the application. It's ok, not great but not terrible. It does the job, no better or worse than any competitor. All it has to do is manage podcasts, show me a list of music, and sync to my ipod.

It's real problem is that it completely redesigns itself all the time, so I refuse to update it for months or years at a time because I have to learn how to use it all over again every time I do update it. Plus it keeps pushing for other Apple products when it wants to upgrade.

But as for being huge, bloated, or whatever, then that means it is a typical Windows application. Why switch to something else which is going to be exactly the same? It's certainly better than the Windows Media Player crap.

Re:Meh

[MitchDev]

"I'd quit and become a landscaper or prostitute, something I could respect myself for doing."

You forgot "puppy kicker" and "child pornographer". Both more respectable than iTunes programmers....

Re:Meh

[nickersonm]

I have a VM I specifically use when I need to buy iTunes gift certificates. Install, buy, revert to snapshot.

Re:Meh

[epine]

It's real problem is that it completely redesigns itself all the time, so I refuse to update it for months or years at a time because I have to learn how to use it all over again every time I do update it.

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.

Re:Meh

[magarity]

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.

Re:Meh

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

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.

Re:Meh

[jellomizer]

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

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

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.

Re:Meh

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't use the store and never will. But I use the application. It's ok, not great but not terrible. It does the job, no better or worse than any competitor. All it has to do is manage podcasts, show me a list of music, and sync to my ipod.

I'm guessing you have a relatively small music collection. Syncing my iPod is the only reason I use it (because I have found nothing else that will work) and it is God awful at that. If you have a small collection and can just sync the whole thing, it's fine. But I have close to 300 gigs (that's a combination of music, podcasts and other forms of audio, not just music) and a 160 gig iPod. Trying to change what gets synced is a torturous experience. It is dog slow once you get a significant number of tracks in the library and there's no reasonable way to specify what gets included. You start with either everything selected and pare out the thousands of files you don't want, or you start with nothing selected and laboriously select what you want. If anything, the author of the article was being quite forgiving of its flaws.

Re:Meh

[Anonymous Coward]

You can't uninstall evil

Re:Meh

[Anonymous Coward]

The fundamental problem with iTunes is twofold. The first problem for Apple is it is their sole presence on the PC for most users. Therefore, they try to shove everything they can into one app to increase their presence on the PC. If you needed a separate app for movies and music, they would have lost some marketshare there and so it gets shoved into iTunes, and it goes on and on.

The second problem with iTunes is that it is from a company who has lost their soul. Apple was a shit company before Jobs came back, and it is going back to becoming a shit company. Jobs pushed innovation from what he personally wanted computers to be able to do. He didn't care that it was risky or no one had done it before. When Jobs died, the company reverted back to small minded, technically incompetent MBAs with no fucking clue what innovation is or why it is important. Thus you see the iPhone 6 was just more screen/battery/power and the latest, iPhone SE, is essentially an iPhone 4 with a little more power and memory. No 3D camera, 3D display, no IR camera, no ad-hock phone to phone to wifi voice capability, no other ground breaking innovations in the phone utility, functionality, or performance. Sure, pressure sensitive screens are nice, but they don't fundamentally change how I use my phone like it did when they added a camera, GPS, PDA, music player etc...

Re:Meh

[Anonymous Coward]

It's ok, not great but not terrible.

This is simply not true. itunes is a steaming pile of dog shit and it doesn't do the job at all. There's a damn good chance your iDevice will not be recognised by itunes and you'll have to jump through a shit tonne of hoops and spend hours trying to get the most basic of things, file fucking transfer, working.

It's a disgrace and the entire team who built this should have their hands cut off so they can never again produce such a turd.

Re: Meh

[yithar7153]

Yeah I haven't used iTunes in years. Way, way more efficient to use Rockbox and rsync for my iPod Classic.

Re:Meh

[Quirkz]

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 just skip a lot of songs instead.

Re:Meh

[Anonymous Coward]

Not many programs have to do as much as iTunes. 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. I don't know any other utility that does this much. On the PC side, I have MediaMonkey, HTC Sync, a shell prompt for fastboot and adb, all separate programs.

Not to say that iTunes can be engineered better. I also don't expect much in the way from Apple for stuff working on Windows either.

Re:Meh

[Applehu Akbar]

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

[LinuxIsGarbage]

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.

Re:Meh

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

What are you looking for that Clementine or MusicBee or Tomahawk or Miro or Audacious or one of the other million or so music player's don't provide? The only thing they're lacking, to my knowledge, is reliable iPod syncing and that's not due to lack of trying. It's due to Apple intentionally working to prevent it from happening.

Re:Meh

[omnichad]

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

[Anonymous Coward]

Okay, head on over to Amazon. They have had it for quite a while. Google Play is pretty damn friendly too. Hell even Microsoft's option isn't as bad these days.

Re:Meh

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot the part where they completely rejig the UI, seemingly on a whim, with every integer update.

Re:Meh

[Darinbob]

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).

Re:Meh

[BitZtream]

Your post is clearly fabricated or ... possibly you're just an idiot who can't remember anything from 4 months ago.

You could say what you said ... if you included major OS upgrades, but since you're implying it happens regularly, at 4 month intervals ... it can not possibly be major OS upgrades, which means ... since its easy for anyone to verify that the OS doesn't change radically during minor updates .... that you're full of shit.

Re:Meh

[Pfhorrest]

It used to exist. It was called SoundJam. Apple bought it, stapled a bunch of crap to it, and called it iTunes.

Re:Meh

[macs4all]

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.

My feeling about halfway through TFS was "What's this guy selling?"

Re:Meh

[macs4all]

But it is terrible shit. That a tech company with as much money as Apple has can continue to make this steamy pile of shit even more steamy and shitty is a testament to the contempt the company has for its customers. I haven't bought anything on iTunes since 2013. When I'm out and out buying music, I just go to the Google Play store. A lot less hassle and a lot more light weight.

I'm sure they'll miss you.

Re:Meh

[macs4all]

Not many programs have to do as much as iTunes. 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. I don't know any other utility that does this much. On the PC side, I have MediaMonkey, HTC Sync, a shell prompt for fastboot and adb, all separate programs.

Not to say that iTunes can be engineered better. I also don't expect much in the way from Apple for stuff working on Windows either.

I think you hit the nail on the head.

And the way these capabilities have evolved and intertwined makes it a virtual certainty that iTunes is a huge pile of spaghetti-code. It would be hard to imagine that NOT happening.

Re: Meh

[macs4all]

Yeah I haven't used iTunes in years. Way, way more efficient to use Rockbox and rsync for my iPod Classic.

That is, if you don't care about things like Playlists, Apple Music, iTunes Match, etc.

Re:Meh

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes--this! Long ago I stopped logging into iTunes and now I dread having to log in to do anything like manage some app data on my phone. If you think iTunes is bad on the OSX platform, just try it on Windows. I swear to god I would uninstall it and never let any iTunes software touch my hard drive if I didn't strongly prefer iPhone over Android. But what a price to pay....

Re:Meh

[gumbi west]

I own an android phone and so I know to run for the hills when I see the google brand on software. I've never seen a company that can so consistently write such crappy software.

Examples:
* When I push the power/wake up button on the phone it shows me up to three messages. I read them and then move to click one. At the same fucking time it reorders them so I end up clicking on the wrong one. WHY REORDER THEM RIGHT WHEN YOU EXPECT A CLICK!
* The google voice commands is also maddening. I push the button, it then goes to skinny "wait" mode and then goes directly to "I didn't hear you." (about 50 ms after it beeps) So I have to go back and start over. But the second time it usually goes to "listening" before it times out. Why must I push the button once, start over, then push it again? Does that make any sense?
* google maps, I just has this experience I said, "find nearby parking garages." it then identifies several garages. I click on one and, no matter which one I click, it takes me to the same damn garage. I drive away so some other garage will be the new closest garage based on the low res map, but no, I must go to this garage. Why why why? /rant

Re:Meh

[Gr8Apes]

Nah, I like Apple, I don't like iTunes.

Re:Meh

[Gr8Apes]

And if you look at something like iMazing, you'll see how to do device management right. Even Xcode's device management interface blows away the crapfest that is iTunes (not comparable features or anything, it accesses certain developer features, but those are also mostly available via iMazing)

Re:Meh

[ausekilis]

Having just recently bought an iPhone after my 1+ kept randomly restarting, I was forced into the dark world of iTunes. At one time they had the split view so you could quickly select by genre, album artist, artist, whatever... Now not only are my 10,000 songs in one big pile, but iTunes doesn't even have the decency to split up albums by disk number... So what I get for some multi-disk compilations is each disk stumbling over one another.

Fortunately, Mediamonkey is completely able to do all the things I care about... while doing it in a sane way. I still have to have iTunes installed for the assorted phone drivers (wtf apple...) but otherwise I'm completely happy to keep things going in MM.

Re:Meh

[Anonymous Coward]

dont buy apple shit, problem solved

ive been using zune app on an old second hand phone, its shit, its beyond shit, buts its my only phone so i use it to put podcasts on it and some music, i have to use that app to get files in there, theres literally no other way, do you think the concept of buying a windows phone even enters my mind??? no way, im not going thru their store, or their zune or any of their turd apps ever again, the day i have to change phones because this one broke im getting the cheapest android i can find that has sdcard support, and just put the mp3 in the folder i need and thats it, no stupid apps, no bullshit

Re:Meh

[tsa]

The fact that you care about that says more about you than about them fanbois.

Re:Meh

[Etcetera]

Ehh, I've actually been rather pleasantly surprised at the quality of the Genius picks. I also do tend to rate music more (always have) rather than just using the fav button that's available nowadays. Perhaps that gives their recommendation engine a bit more to go on. There are several artists I've actually gone out and searched for more of specifically because it came in on a Genius playlist.

Re:Meh

[Methadras]

It's just an unintuitive piece of shit. The UI alone is worthy of resurrecting Jobs just so you can punch him in the face for letting it get out that way.

Re: Meh

[cthulhu11]

Linux kids whine about iTunes but I have yet to see a cogently worded description of faults. It organizes my music and syncs it to my phone. WTF else is expected ???

Re:Meh

[metamatic]

I used to find iTunes OK, back when DAAP worked and I could just access music from my music server. Then Apple broke that, redesigned the interface several times, and crammed in yet more junk I'll never use like iPhone app management.

I got so sick of iTunes and of having three different mutually incompatible proprietary cables for our iPods that I got rid of all the iPods and replaced them with MP3 players that just mount as regular disk drives.

Now I use Vox for music playback on the Mac. Bonus: It handles FLAC, unlike sucky iTunes.

Re: Meh

[NicBenjamin]

I use it too, but I get some of the hate.

It's got a whole lot of non-playlist shit going on (movies/TV Shows, the Store, etc.) that adds bloat. I mostly use it, and it's 100-150 MB RAM Footprint, to do the same thing I used a 3-4 MB program for back in 2000. They also retool the interface every few years because fuck customers.

And if you're one of them fancy-schmancy LINUX geeks you can just get download an open source music player from the internet, which has no bloat because it plays music and literally nothing else, and never changes the interface because that would involve work on the boring part...

Re:Meh

[NicBenjamin]

Try typing whatever feature you;re looking for into the "help" menu. There'll actually be a big blue arrow pointing to wherever they moved the damn button.

Re:Meh

[Another Mouse Coward]

Gawd, I wish I had mod-points! I'd so mod you up so hard! This and the post you replied to.

Re: Meh

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like your phone is running some fucked up OEM Android. I've never had any of the issues you have and I've used at least a dozen Android devices since the days of Froyo.

Have you tried flashing Cyanogenmod?

Re:Meh

[DarthVain]

iTunes is basically why I eventually moved away from Apple. The device was fine, however iTunes was terrible.

I will admit that its functionality for backup worked well, but that was about it.

Best article title on Slashdot for years

[cloud.pt]

seriously, it's been some time I laughed so hard from a headline. A perfect fitting for "itz funny cuz itz tru"

Re:Best article title on Slashdot for years

[msmash]

Glad you like it :) I played with Quartz's headline and made some tweaks.

Re:Best article title on Slashdot for years

[shugah]

Personally, I think its a tie between Lotus Notes and iTunes are the worst software ever in any category.

Re:Best article title on Slashdot for years

[Anonymous Coward]

I would say the worst software I have used was the NOM report manager in NetBackup before it was replaced in 7.x. You wanted a report on a machine, with a date and time? Better know the -exact- order on what to set the values. Set the date after the machine, and everything resets back to square 1, and you get to search again. Of course, it only worked with a specific version of Java, so I had to keep a VM around just to access it.

The second worst was a specific vertical market appliance which required IE 6, to the point where it would execute JavaScript hacks to detect different browsers, even if the headers jived. It would not work with any version of IE before or after... just IE 6. To boot, it required an ActiveX control to be installed, which ran as admin.

The third worst was a storage array which required a specific JVM, and specific version. I had to build a virtual machine with a backlevel CentOS version whose only goal in life was to access the array's excuse of a web page to make changes.

Re: Best article title on Slashdot for years

[Anonymous Coward]

No offense Manishs but do kindly fuck off you needy gorkfukkit

Winamp

[DogDude]

iTunes is truly awful. So much so that it's banned from all of our work computers (it installs all kinds of extra crap with it). Winamp, long after it's dead, is still the best music player there is.

Re:Winamp

[PhantomHarlock]

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

[cloud.pt]

+1 for Winamp. I sense a media player war coming in this comment section. Foobar lover flaming in 3..2...

Re:Winamp

[Anonymous Coward]

foobar is better

Re: Winamp

[Anonymous Coward]

How can you ban iTunes? It's preinstalled on OS X.

Re:Winamp

[Anonymous Coward]

So last century!!!111!!!

Re: Winamp

[Anonymous Coward]

He said work computers.

Re:Winamp

[Anonymous Coward]

You'd be surprised at how many people are completely flummoxed by the whole folders and files structure of filesystems.

Re:Winamp

[Karlt1]

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

[Darinbob]

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.

Re: Winamp

[Anonymous Coward]

oh snap.

Re:Winamp

[MitchDev]

Yes, still use WinAmp to this day....

Re: Winamp

[Anonymous Coward]

Because the play list in Winamp is just a list, making a play list is very very simple. The list can then be saved and opened again later. Of course a file can appear in multiple play lists. Winamp playlist management nailed it perfectly and very few other programs (I can't think of any) have replicated that perfection.

Re: Winamp

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice troll: that's the whole point of skins. You can use one that looks like standard Windows UI, the rest of us can have something bitching. There were thousands of skins back in the day.

Re:Winamp

[PhantomHarlock]

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.

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.

Re:Winamp

[Anonymous Coward]

You keep using this world "playlist," but I don't think you know what it means... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M3U

Re:Winamp

[Anonymous Coward]

Imagine a system where a playlist was little more than a flat-file, with a relative path to the songs in said list, delimited by newlines.

As obvious as that sounds, it's probably not supported by any system.

Re:Winamp

[fuzzyf]

I wish I could still use Winamp, but I mostly use streaming now (Tidal).

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.

Re:Winamp

[tlhIngan]

Yes iTunes is bloated piece of crap and I never let my iOS device go near it.

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 Apple won't mind holding for you. iTunes normal backups back up more stuff since they include stuff Apple rather not have on their servers. Encrypted backups are best for they include everything.

The second reason is app backups. Apps disappear from the iTunes store all the time - either the developer fails to renew their iOS development certificate, the app is pulled or the developer pulls it. If you don't have a local backup of the IPA file, then if you delete the app, you can't get it back.

But if you back up the IPA file locally, then even if it's removed from the store, you can reinstall it on your devices at will.

But that's really the entire utility of iTunes nowadays that's actually useful.

Re:Winamp

[TangoMargarine]

VLC :)

They added a library section but as the guy above mentioned, I ignore it and just use the folder structure usually.

Re:Winamp

[danbert8]

I vastly preferred XMMS myself. But I didn't really get into whipping llamas...

Re:Winamp

[bv728]

So how do you create multiple playlist with the same song in multiple playlists without copying files to multiple locations?

With playlists, of course. I hate to overgeneralize, but most of the folks I know who still use players like this can't stand the Media Library approach that most modern players use - we already have an organizational system that makes it easy to find files, and may have .mp3 from back in the ID3v1 days with inaccurate or incomplete data. We may have a LOT of it. We may not want to spend hours fixing these files to make the Library work efficiently for us when we have a system that lets us build (and save!) custom playlists efficiently already.

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.

In this case, you really can't. That's a definite tradeoff, but it's one I am okay making.

Re:Winamp

[Anonymous Coward]

> You'd be surprised at how many people are completely flummoxed by the whole folders and files structure of filesystems.

Well, how about a system that supports both?

Re:Winamp

[Anonymous Coward]

The real problem with Itunes that I've encountered in a business environment is how it manages it's data.

It will cash 10s of gigabytes of information (Backups, iOS updates, iOS apps, etc) in the roaming portion of you profile appdata folder (aka %appdata% or or c:\users\\appdata\roaming) If you've got roaming profiles it causes massive issues because it syncs all that data with a fileserver every login/logout)

There's a place for that crap in your profile. It's the local portion of your profile (aka %localappdata% or c:\users\\appdata\local)

Re:Winamp

[Anonymous Coward]

"So how do you create multiple playlist with the same song in multiple playlists without copying files to multiple locations?"

WTF?

Do you even know what a playlist is? It doesn't contain the SONGS themselves, it contains REFERENCES to the songs' locations on your hard drive. Another fucking idiot.

And yes, iTunes and the iPod piece of crap both reorganise your carefully created music folders and try to use ID3 tags to organise everything - because most people are so stupid that they don't even know where their music actually IS on their own PCs, and most people don't actually LIKE music that much, they just PRETEND to 'like' it because they see everybody else doing the same...

Re:Winamp

[Anonymous Coward]

lol. mpd and a client of your choice is still the best music player.

Re:Winamp

[jspey]

That is what an .M3U playlist is. If you prefer you can make them by hand or by scripting or whatever.

Re:Winamp

[Anonymous Coward]

Winamp + pacemaker plugin set to +30 tempo >> coffee.

Re:Winamp

[Applehu Akbar]

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.

Re:Winamp

[martinX]

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.

Re:Winamp

[AmiMoJo]

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.

Re:Winamp

[Anonymous Coward]

Android has encrypted backups as well. You can either do this through Gmail backup or through Samsung Kies or whatever manufacturer of your Android phone. All your passwords and everything get backed up which is nice so I don't have to re-enter all the wifi passwords for all of the common networks I am on.

App backups can also be done on the Android platform although that is much more dependent on the app itself to support it.

Re:Winamp

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, don't do anything new or interesting. Obey, obey, obey.

Fuck you and kill yourself.

Re:Winamp

[armanox]

Finally! Another XMMS user! That was a program that I always had running once upon a time, on my Pentium I with RH 6.2....

Re:Winamp

[BitZtream]

... you are aware iTunes exports m3u on request ... RIGHT?

Re:Winamp

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably because you're a FOSStard, thus you prefer a sloppy clone of Winamp because you're not able to accept the real thing due to some bullshit philosophical grudge. As the kids used to say, "Sucks to be you!"

Re:Winamp

[Ralph Spoilsport]

I would suggest you take a look at Media Monkey. It's awesome. I've used it for 3 years now. It rocks, and can be modified with plug ins.

Re:Winamp

[Anonymous Coward]

it lets people customize it. that bothers you?

Re:Winamp

[Anonymous Coward]

It does not allow for behavior such as "play me all the music I haven't heard in a while"

This is where you glossed over the difference between 'some audio files and playlists scattered through some folders' and 'a music database'.

Re:Winamp

[jedidiah]

Really? You're talking about something that easily maps 1:1 with the physical organization of music in old brick and mortar stores.

How did these people ever manage Buzzard's Nest?

Re:Winamp

[jedidiah]

Again, one does not negate the other. You don't have to destroy the end user's method for organizing things just so you can store a little extra metadata.

Also if the "not recently played" example is all you can come up with then you're not really doing anything to fully exploit the concept. Unfortunately, a metadata "database" is only as good as the data you feed it. This may be limited by how much effort the end user is willing to put in.

Re:Winamp

[jedidiah]

Winamp was nice but nothing really to get too excited about. It was a pretty simple thing really and not that hard to clone or eclipse.

Take a xanax or something... geez.

Re:Winamp

[macs4all]

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.

Wrong. If is easy to tell iTunes not to reorganize your media files. Apparently you have never bothered to look at the Preferences that have changed hardly at all in the past 10 years. Hint: look at the "Advanced" Tab.

Re:Winamp

[cloud.pt]

But you did like Win(dows)amp right? I'm just gonna take the opportunity to say I didn't even bother with skins, the default one was the best, and I know there were good ones but why fix something that's not broken. You can't compare apps, they're different ecosystems. Man, even the unix folder structure was an anti-pattern for Winamp's usage pattern.

In any case, Winamp was the shyte because:

1. Timing: it was like the first (or first 2-3) mp3 players back in the day, certainly the first to be actually usable day to day

2. Features: the controls, the equalizer, the visualizations, the fast playlist load times no matter the size (I remember having 10's of thousands of contemporary, music, classical, OSTs on shuffle and it simply didn't hog, and all I had to do was drag and drop that big ass MUSIC folder in there. Instant joy. It didn't hog skipping, pausing, resuming songs. It had the very first REAL gapless playback which was essential for all them house/electronica compilations and/or concept albums that just needed it for the experience. The equalizer presets were just on point for most tastes and even customizing it was easy and provided UI and sound feedback necessary for noticing what you were doing (it did lag a bit, but it still is hard processing signal in real time, and it managed well)

3. that radio. Man that radio. Shoutcast still has no comparison despite falling into oblivion, and it laid the foundation for all things streaming. It might not have been the first, once again, but was THE go to radio app

But most of all, the fact we still talk about Winamp is the reason why it is, or was, so great - it was that application that didn't come bundled with your OS, but would be one of the 10 first to install and the only one you would keep magazine shareware CDs around for (even more than notepads, total commanders and zip/rar suites). It was the only app you didn't care for super updated versions because any single one would magically click to your usage. Even in the odd instances when they might have failed. E.g. when they decided to set the media library and/or the video/visualization window shown by default, cluttering your common experience, they had an easy way to remove it - a simple X on each individual window. No deep menus to go through for most important stuff. EVEN THOUGH IT WAS NOT CLUTTERED AT ALL!

Re:Winamp

[antdude]

Which version of Winap? IIRC, it got bloated too like in v3. :( At least, Nullsoft realized they frakked up and slimmed it down in v5. Apple and other companies need to do the same!

Re:Winamp

[Anonymous Coward]

has more plugins

Jesus H Christ. Plugins. Why? Just make software that doesn't suck, and you won't need plugins.

Re: Winamp

[Karlt1]

How much effort does the user need to put in? If they bought their music digitally, all of the metadata is their. If they imported from CDs, most CD ripping software for the past two decades has been able to import metadata from the Internet.

Re: Winamp

[Karlt1]

So how do Android backups handle this scenario?

In 2011, I had an iPhone 4 on running iOS 5 on AT&T. I clicked on backup to iCloud to make sure everything was backed up (not passwords, etc.).

I then opened the package on my 4s from Verizon. I turned the phone on, entered my iCloud credentials and a few minutes later, all of my apps with the app data was on my 4s. One reboot later, my iPhone 4 was deactivate from AT&T and my number was transferred to Verizon. I didn't call either company. My icons were in the same spot and the screen on my 4s looked just like my 4.

Android backups are still not universally supported and only if you have the latest OS.

Re:Winamp

[Applehu Akbar]

There used to be an Export facility in iTunes. Inexplicably, it was taken out in version 11. App Store has third-party utilities for accessing your library and pulling off songs in the MP3 format readable by car audio. Other utilities are available for cleaning up the resource-fork mess left by the first export utility on your SD card.

Re:Winamp

[macs4all]

There used to be an Export facility in iTunes. Inexplicably, it was taken out in version 11. App Store has third-party utilities for accessing your library and pulling off songs in the MP3 format readable by car audio. Other utilities are available for cleaning up the resource-fork mess left by the first export utility on your SD card.

WTF does EXPORT have to do with ORGANIZATION?

But the "Export" command was not removed, it was RENAMED to "Create New Version". Look in the File Menu (you DO run iTunes with the Show Menus feature enabled, right?). The Menu has a Sub-Menu that has "Create iPod or iPhone version", "Create AppleTV Version", and "Create MP3 Version" selections. Choose the one that you want (after selecting what you want to convert), and off you go.

BTW, I discovered that by Launching iTunes 12 on my work Win7 laptop, and it was on the first Menu I opened.

Bonus: You can also make selections and RIght-Click, and the "Create MP3 Version" is right there. Wow! What a concept, eh?!? One small caveat about Right-Click for this, I discovered that the Right-Click Contextual Menus is not available other than at the "Songs" level, but the "Create New Version" MENU will happily convert WHATEVER is Selected, so if you Select an Album (or an Artist, or a Genre) in Column View, it will convert ALL of the Songs that are "implied" by what is Selected (You DO run iTunes with the "Column Browser" Shown, right?).

And BTW, you aren't limited to creating ONLY .mp3 versions. In fact, the "Create..." command uses your "Import" settings to choose what format/bit-rate, etc. to offer for that Command. E.g., if you change your Import settings to "WAV", the "Create MP3 Version" becomes "Create WAV Version".

One other understandable caveat: "Create New Version" is only available for locally-hosted songs, not ones with the little "Cloud" symbol next to them (.m4a files). However, I WAS able to select a Death Cab song I purchased on iTunes, Right-Click, choose "Download", then, after it was on my local drive, I was able to use the "Create New Version" for that song (after it appeared as a separate song WITHOUT the Cloud symbol). So, not so bad.

In fact, the only thing I would change is that it creates the .mp3 version in the same directory as the original AAC version. I think it ought to ask where you'd like to place the new file; but oh, well. It DOES do it.

As for your whining about "Resource Forks", at this point in time, I'm not sure what you are talking about. Are you using the OS X version of iTunes, or the Windows version? I'm pretty sure that, if your SD Card/USB Stick is formatted as FAT, OS X will NOT include Resource Fork information for any files. Resource Forks have been deprecated in OS X for a while now; so I don't know what they would be doing on your external media, especially if it is formatted as FAT/FAT32. IIRC, NTFS supports metadata, like Resources; but I don't think that many SD/USB storage media is formatted for NTFS. Maybe that's why they handed the actual "Export" (file-copy) part of the operation over to the Finder/Windows Explorer; because it followed the rules regarding Resource Forks and other metadata better than what they built-into iTunes' old "Export" command(?).

Re: Winamp

[Blaskowicz]

Two reasons for skin(s) : to have something that looks good/readable, and to display a lot more songs in the playlist. It's made so that you can display all the data you need (some long titles, 50-something songs) on 1024x768 (and 1024x600) with a file manager on the side, windows not overlapping.
Can still be done in linux if you run Audacious with GTK2 GUI and e.g. an instance of pcmanfm with the side bar deactivated.

Re:Winamp

[monkeyhybrid]

Unfortunately, a metadata "database" is only as good as the data you feed it. This may be limited by how much effort the end user is willing to put in.

Adding metadata to an existing music collection can be a huge PITA. For anyone tempted by the idea of doing it for their collection, I thoroughly recommend taking a look at MusicBrainz Picard. It's a cross-platform application that can analyse your music albums and attempt to match them against entries in MusicBrainz's vast database, populating your MP3s / FLACs with appropriate ID3 tags and cover art when it finds a match. If you have a large collection, it will still take some time and effort to get right, but you'll end up with something beautifully organised afterwards.

I still keep all my music (~20,000 tunes) in a simple folder / file structure, but every album and song is tagged correctly, along with cover art, so that I can also feed it to Clementine, Kodi, DNLA servers, Google Music, etc. Best of both worlds.

Re: Winamp

[Karlt1]

Don't blame iTunes for your lack of knowing how to use it. iTunes has had an option not to keep your music exactly where you put it since day one.

On one hand you brag about being able to organize your music like you want - something iTunes has been able to do for -13 years and that you didn't need playlist. But m3u playlist can't do what smart playlist can.

Re: Winamp

[Karlt1]

Correction iTunes has had an option to keep your files in the original location since day one.

Re:Winamp

[Applehu Akbar]

Just for grins, I just actually tried doing this. Yes, the context menu action Create MP3 Version works, in the same sense that scrubbing the bathroom tile with a toothbrush will eventually get the floor clean. Each right-clicked track gets its export version plopped down inline in the source library, with nothing to indicate which is the copy and which is the original. Okay, the copy appears to be the second of each pair. When I do a Create Mp3 Version on a whole album, the converted tracks appear interleaved with the originals, just to make life really interesting. So in my output folder I manually create a subfolder for the album, and then drag converted tracks to it one by one, hoping that I get all the MP3. Then I have to separately delete each one from the library. I'm operating on an iMac under El Capitan.

A real Export dialog works like this: I select the albums I want to export, select a format, and designate an output folder. When I hit Go, the album titles are exported as subfolders containing each track in the designated format. I now have a utility that does this, which is high-rated in App Store precisely because everyone wishes that iTunes still worked this way.

Re:Winamp

[macs4all]

Just for grins, I just actually tried doing this. Yes, the context menu action Create MP3 Version works, in the same sense that scrubbing the bathroom tile with a toothbrush will eventually get the floor clean. Each right-clicked track gets its export version plopped down inline in the source library, with nothing to indicate which is the copy and which is the original. Okay, the copy appears to be the second of each pair. When I do a Create Mp3 Version on a whole album, the converted tracks appear interleaved with the originals, just to make life really interesting. So in my output folder I manually create a subfolder for the album, and then drag converted tracks to it one by one, hoping that I get all the MP3. Then I have to separately delete each one from the library. I'm operating on an iMac under El Capitan.

A real Export dialog works like this: I select the albums I want to export, select a format, and designate an output folder. When I hit Go, the album titles are exported as subfolders containing each track in the designated format. I now have a utility that does this, which is high-rated in App Store precisely because everyone wishes that iTunes still worked this way.

Are you stoned, or just stupid?

I pointed out ALL of the above in my post, including the fact that I would rather it asked where to put the copies. Or couldn't you read? I also pointed out that there was no need to convert songs one-at-a-time.

As for the "I hope I got the right ones" comment, you apparently are SO lame that you don't know that you can right click on any song, and choose "Show In Finder (show in Windows Explorer)". Hint: You might want to "Show File Extensions" in Windows (or, in OS X, you can Command-I (Get Info)) if you are in doubt as to whether a particular file is your "Converted" Type ( e.g. .mp3) or not. And yes, as far as the "Library" database goes, in my experience, the second entry of a song is the "Converted" one.

Re:Winamp

[macs4all]

Also, in Finder, you should be able to choose List View, then click the 'Type" column, and that will sort all your .mp3 files together.

I do agree with you about having to delete the Library database entries for the copies being a bit of a pain, though. But I think the "remove duplicates" or "reorganize" commands may make that easier if you have a bunch of entries to get rid of.

Most people get confused when dealing with iTunes because they don't understand that iTunes uses a separate database (Library) and "Media Store". The two are related, but are NOT the same. That's one reason why people that already have a large media collection that they have organized in some way that is not "Artist, Album", can KEEP that FILE organization, while still having iTunes PRESENT the Library entries the way it normally does. Unfortunately, almost EVERYONE who wants to do that makes the mistake of not checking out iTumes Preferences FIRST, and then watches in horror as iTunes completely reorganizes their carefully-crafted folder-tree. Personally, I REALLY wish that iTunes would either change the default on the "Keep Media Organized" Preference, or at least WARN when it detects someone adding a Folder with more than one sub-folder to the Library, and the "Keep Organized" and/or the "copy songs to iTunes Folder" Prefs. were selected. But every application has things that some people would rather be different, right?

What I have found about iTunes over the years is that, although there has been a bit of "churn" in the UI, you can usually make iTunes look/behave in the way you are used to. For example, when iTunes 11 came out with the "simplified" UI, I about went ballistic, until I found that I could easily turn "Menus" back on, and the "Column Browser" was still available. And along the way, I even found that they had added a few cool things.

But I think that we have seen the last of that level of UI changes for iTunes for awhile.

Re:Winamp

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you simply tried dragging and dropping the files from iTunes to your SD card? Seems to work just fine (on OS X at least).

Re:Winamp

[Wolfrider]

--I used to run xmms back in the day; ended up replacing it with deadbeef. I still have an alias xmms=deadbeef to start it tho, it's easier to type ;-)

And in another 13 years

[idbeholda]

iTunes will still be shit.

Re:And in another 13 years

[krisbrowne42]

And still making Apple more profit than some whole other industries.

Re:And in another 13 years

[krisbrowne42]

Let's try that again - And Apple is still making more profit from iTunes and the stores it houses that some whole other industries.

Re:And in another 13 years

[rsborg]

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 :/

Re:And in another 13 years

[Anonymous Coward]

in other words, farmers in wisconsin aren't the only ones who can make money off shit.

Re:And in another 13 years

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

iTunes will still be shit.

It'll be waaaay better after they fold systemd into it.

Re:And in another 13 years

[sconeu]

But it will still need an init system.

Re:And in another 13 years

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

But it will still need an init system.

The rumor is that systemd will eventually have an init function added to it.

Re:And in another 13 years

[avandesande]

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.

Re:And in another 13 years

[Anonymous Coward]

iTunes will still be shit.

It'll be waaaay better after they fold systemd into it.

Wait a minute? Why would you need Itunes when you can use SystemD to manage your playlists?

Re:And in another 13 years

[Hognoxious]

Like how Poland invaded Germany in 1939?

Re:And in another 13 years

[Anonymous Coward]

"more... that..."

WTF? Another AMERICAN cretin.

It's "more THAN", you ignorant American idiot.

Re:And in another 13 years

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

Like how Poland invaded Germany in 1939?

Invaded? The Germans said they were liberating Poland, and surely they wouldn't lie about something like that!

Huh?!

[__aaclcg7560]

Must be another iTunes program out there. The iTunes I'm using works fine.

Re: Huh?!

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't see what the big deal is. I use it for music only. Any new albums I get, I create a playlist titled Artist - Album name - year, drag the music files to it. Easy peasy. I even sync my iPhone with it. Nothing required, just plug it in. Everything is drag and drop.

Now if you are using it for everything then yea it's a little bloated.

But to me iTunes = music player/iPhone syncer.
Nothing else.

Re:Huh?!

[friesofdoom]

Anyone who thinks ITunes is good has never used it on a PC... The number of times I've had to tell people they can either have a fast, working computer, or they can have ITunes and an IPod, but not both - ITunes will make your $2k PC run like a paraplegic dog.

Re: Huh?!

[Anonymous Coward]

You haven't updated in 12 years? Sure iTunes v1 and even v2 was nice, but then it went downhill.

Re:Huh?!

[__aaclcg7560]

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.

Re: Huh?!

[__aaclcg7560]

Running current version on my PC. No issues whatsoever.

Re:Huh?!

[SeaFox]

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...

Re:Huh?!

[cbdougla]

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 what all the fuss is about...

Re:Huh?!

[Darinbob]

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.

Re: Huh?!

[known_coward_69]

don't even need to do that just create a smart playlist for anything with 0 plays and it will automatically populate anytime you import a new CD

Re: Huh?!

[Anonymous Coward]

The complainers are using in on Windows, and probably also having trouble that stems from trying to manage their torrented content with it.

On OSX and with music ripped from your on CDs or any media downloaded from the iTunes it works nicely.

Re:Huh?!

[Your.Master]

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.

Re: Huh?!

[xevioso]

I use it on Windows and have used it for years. The only problems I have have to do with syncing with iCloud across multiple devices, so I don't do that anymore. Otherwise it works fine and I have a HUUUGE library.

Re: Huh?!

[Anonymous Coward]

iTunes was always downhill. Cassidy & Greene SoundJam MP was far and away better. It supported more formats, and it had a much nicer interface. When Apple bought the software off of C&G, they immediately went to work making it measurably and noticeably worse.

Re:Huh?!

[Anonymous Coward]

It slow but I used iTunes for many years with a very large catalog. The power features for me were the song metadata coupled with the smart playlist feature. I had a pretty crafty mechanism to choose a mix of my favourite music, less favourite music, and music I haven't listened to - in all the right proportions - while staying fresh and not playing songs too often (also categorized by the number of stars).
That said, I have hardly even touched iTunes since getting an unlimited streaming account from Google Play. I can't say I really miss it, either.

Re:Huh?!

[ArchieBunker]

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.

Re:Huh?!

[__aaclcg7560]

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.

Re:Huh?!

[sgage]

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...

Re:Huh?!

[sgage]

I think in the last 13 years, I've purchased maybe 3 albums and half a dozen individual songs from the iTunes store. Most of my music library is stuff that I ripped from my own CD collection, or digitized from my large vinyl collection.

Re:Huh?!

[david_thornley]

I'm using it on a $700 W10 laptop. It's fine for what I use it for, although I do have to tell the update function not to install anything else periodically. Not that that's any worse than having to ensure I don't get the Yahoo browser bar or whatever every time I upgrade Java.

I'm not doing anything special. I don't know what your problem is.

Awful == Working?

[s.petry]

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.

Re:Awful == Working?

[fbobraga]

Robbing a slave owner never freed any slaves.

I'm almost sure that you are wrong in this statement :-P

Re:Awful == Working?

[LWATCDR]

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.

Re:Awful == Working?

[s.petry]

I hope you don't claim to have any knowledge or perspective on history then. People who attempted to harm slave owners by damaging property/theft resulted in slaves being worked harder. In addition to having to fix the damage or generate more revenue, there was a moral restitution aspect. Often in publicized killings and beatings of slaves, and more so if the person who committed the crime was caught acting on behalf of.

Slaves were freed by, imagine this.. freeing slaves.

Re:Awful == Working?

[s.petry]

Your anecdote is not convincing. I have never had any problems with iTunes on a PC, but if I did I would chalk it up to everything on a PC being bad. The cruft and bloat of Windows Registry is a problem with performance no matter which application we discuss. iTunes is not an exception to that rule, and can not fix the bloat that is Windows. I reload Windows about once a year, and itunes gets reloaded on the new OS. Assuming I remember my login, it picks up right where it left off pretty much. I guess it could be that I don't have thousands of albums, I have hundreds?

Re:Awful == Working?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think iTunes works as designed -- as a walled garden. if you build your a/v buying and listening habits around it is probably fine.

I see it as similar to FB. If you've been a regular ongoing user, everything probably makes sense because you've gradually adapted to each change. If you only check in occasionally, each new "experience" is a disorienting exercise in frustration.

Every once and a while I will want to play something I bought in iTunes way back when I actually bought things in iTunes. Each time I am annoyed by the fact that simply locating and playing a track takes way more time than it should.

Re:Awful == Working?

[Darinbob]

But most Windows applications do that. It's no worse than Firefox, certainly better than anything in MS Office, etc. Bloatware is the standard design paradigm for the PC. Doesn't bother me since I don't use it often; update the podcasts and sync to the ipod, and occasionally use it in the background, but it's off all the other time. I'm not addicted to having music on all the time.

Re:Awful == Working?

[RKThoadan]

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.

Re:Awful == Working?

[Quirkz]

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.

Re:Awful == Working?

[s.petry]

Oh, so if I redefine "apple" to be "banana" I can claim "banana" despite it being an apple. Great logical win!

Re:Awful == Working?

[fustakrakich]

?? What the hell....? Did iTunes free the slaves? No, it didn't. iTunes is awful...

Re:Awful == Working?

[mlts]

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 beginning, or the sync hangs indefinitely, and to get it working again, it would require a power cycle, like what happens fairly often with newer devices.

Even iTunes on iOS is beginning to smell. My music library is relegated to one small corner of the app, and oftentimes, I'm in rural areas, where attempting to stream Apple's music service will be an exercise in frustration.

Re:Awful == Working?

[TangoMargarine]

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.

Re:Awful == Working?

[AmiMoJo]

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 Apple have abandoned QuickTime on Windows, so everyone who got it just because iTunes demanded it are now vulnerable to numerous unpatched security flaws.

Re:Awful == Working?

[friesofdoom]

Googled "ITunes Cpu Usage" and that confirmed that I am not the only person with this problem (And I've had it on every PC I've used ITunes on).
https://discussions.apple.com/...
https://discussions.apple.com/...
https://discussions.apple.com/...
https://discussions.apple.com/...
I also find that it leaves 2 or 3 services running, that kill performance of the PC, when you have neither ITunes running nor the ipod plugged in.
Why am I -1 Troll? XD You are free to keep using your shitty overpriced fanboy hardware and software, enjoy wasting flops on nothing.

Surprise!

[wkwilley2]

And here I was thinking iTunes was only awful on Windows for obvious reasons.

13 years and still no purchases

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

Our family is still happily using mp3s and torrents for most of our music and video content. (I did buy a Netflix subscription about three years ago.) But the iTunes pay-as-you-go model? Not really something I'm interested in on my just-over-six-figure income with three kids and a mortgage.

Re:13 years and still no purchases

[BitZtream]

Our family is still happily using mp3s and torrents for most of our music and video content. (I did buy a Netflix subscription about three years ago.)

So you're proud of teaching your family to be a bunch of theives?

But the iTunes pay-as-you-go model?

You mean paying for the songs and videos you buy? How is this different than buying a CD or DVD at walmart or on Amazon? How is it different than buying a CD and ripping it to MP3 other than you don't have to rip it?

Have you even used iTunes cause I'm pretty sure you're treating iTunes as if its a subscription service when it isn't, there is a recently launched subscription service, but you certainly haven't be using a service thats a year or so old for the past 13 years so ... you're just talking out your ass or are you implying that you won't buy anything ever? If so, you're just a pathetic thief.

You don't have to agree to pay for shit that you believe is unfair, you can choose not to consume it. Thats not what you're doing though. You're choosing to continue to consume it and telling the content creators to fuck off. Pathetic thief.

Not really something I'm interested in on my just-over-six-figure income with three kids and a mortgage.

Ahhhh awesome ... a 1%er who's too fucking cheap to pay for the frivolous shit he steals.

You sir are a fucking asshole of the highest order, I have no doubt your 3 kids are spoiled brat assholes thanks to your outstanding moral fiber you've demonstrated today.

Best of yet ... your fucking proud of the fact that you're a huge douche bag. You should have your skull driven through by a freight locomotive.

... and that's Mac, Windows is MILES worse!

[Anonymous Coward]

My brother bought an iPod ten years ago. I did warn him about iTunes. When it died, I asked what he wanted as a replacement for his birthday... "anything that doesn't use iTunes, you were right about that one."

A complex application dumbed down

[ErichTheRed]

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

[U2xhc2hkb3QgU3Vja3M]

It was an early version of iTunes that demonstrated the first software bugs to Grace Hopper in 1946.

iTunes in 1946? Did I wake up in an alternate universe this morning?

Re:Surely that's a typo

[Anonymous Coward]

It was an early version of iTunes that demonstrated the first software bugs to Grace Hopper in 1946.

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

Re:Surely that's a typo

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably a sad attempt at humor. No setup, no development, no punchline, just a quick non-sequitur in what is otherwise a serious discussion. At least if it were implemented in iTunes, you wouldn't have been able to see it until you figured out how to activate the Humor section, which would contain all statements marked "Humor" even if there was no functional difference between them and the other statements in the article.

Re:Surely that's a typo

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah we know bugs and Grace Hopper but this joke did not land with me either, I also assumed it was a mistake of thinking about one thing and typing something different

Re:Surely that's a typo

[TangoMargarine]

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...

[friesofdoom]

Ok, so they accuse apple of "stuff(ing) an overwhelming number of new features" into ITunes, and then they say that Apple should rather have stuffed in even more useless features, like "online or social integration". WTF? That is close to the most useless feature ever, plus it would create a lot of extra confusing UI, which they are criticizing Apple for (and I don't disagree)... Buuuut, this report is BS - and I dislike apple, so I would jump on any chance to lambast them...

Drove me to this

[PopeRatzo]

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")

Re:Drove me to this

[b0bby]

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.

Re:Drove me to this

[Anonymous Coward]

Why are you even using iTunes when you are clearly spinning damaged vinyl?

Re:Drove me to this

[chispito]

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.

Re:Drove me to this

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone who has ever used iTunes on a PC doesn't understand what the point if iTunes is.

Re:Drove me to this

[PopeRatzo]

That's funny. I bought a Zune because it was a nice media player.

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.

Re:Drove me to this

[TangoMargarine]

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

Re:Drove me to this

[PopeRatzo]

Just get a Sansa, geez. They even come with a microSD slot so you can expand them, unlike iPods and Zunes.

Zunes last 10x longer than a Sansa. And they sound better. They also handle podcasts MUCH better.

Re:Drove me to this

[TangoMargarine]

So you have an 80-year-old Zune?

Re:Drove me to this

[TangoMargarine]

Or maybe you meant battery life...in which case your Zune gets you 220 hours of music play one on charge?

Rockbox benchmarks (Fuze v2)

Re:Drove me to this

[PopeRatzo]

So you have an 80-year-old Zune?

Not yet, but it'll get there.

Re:Drove me to this

[PopeRatzo]

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.

Re:Drove me to this

[TangoMargarine]

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?

Re:Drove me to this

[Anonymous Coward]

Just get a Sansa, geez.

The Starks will probably hunt me down if I do that.
After all, winter is coming.

Re:Drove me to this

[Anonymous Coward]

Nah, it's still bad. Ive been used to linux for the last 10 years, but a mac user for about 2. I know a crappy gui when I see it...

Fast forward to last week when I bought my first iTunes album. How do I play it on my phone? The Music app just has some girl chilling on a brick wall; doesn't do anything. iTunes Store is certainly not where all my music is organized, but I played it from there originally? So basically every time I want to listen to music I have to finagle the iTunes Store to open the album for me in the Music app (which seems to be the only way I can get it to do anything). It's so convoluted and stupid.

One major problem is that the basic assumption is that every Apple user has a dedicated, always-on, high-speed connection to the Internet. This is not the case for many people, and is not the case with me at home. It looks like the Music app sticks on the front page because it's waiting for Apple's servers, which never respond until I get online. So it's like I paid $9 to listen to Spotify only at work. You friggin kidding me, Apple?

Re:Drove me to this

[PopeRatzo]

. Can you get radio on your Zune?

Not only can I get radio on my Zune, but I get HD digital radio. So, here in my town, I can get two or three different stations on one frequency. I can hear Yankees games AND Red Sox games even though I don't live in New York or Boston. The radio on the Zune is one of it's nicest features.

Play games? Edit text files?

It's a media player. Why would I play games or edit text files on it? But yeah, there's a chess game and a few others on mine. I can also sync with my computer via Wi-Fi.

Re:Drove me to this

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a 64GB SDXC card, formatted as FAT32, in my Clip Zip, and it works fine, and very cheap too - £25 for the Clip Zip, and £12 (or thereabouts) for the 64GB card.

Re:Drove me to this

[Anonymous Coward]

When my iPod nano broke, I got a $200 Blu Life Play unlocked android phone, and plugged in a 64GB SD card. Like 6-8X more usable music/podcast storage and a lot of other functionality in one device. A T-mobile pay per use SIM gets me a $100/year phone. No data connection, but wifi wherever it's available. The SD card wears out after a few years and starts failing in odd ways, so I just pay the $25 and get a new one.

And I haven't had to run iTunes once since (*yay!*). I buy music on Amazon instead, as CDs or downloads, using a regular old web browser. Ubuntu can access the phone as USB storage just fine, so moving music on and pictures off is really easy. (Note that Windows 10, however, does *not* work well with the USB interface to this phone - transfers are slow and the interface likes to fail. Microsoft's USB drivers in 10 are... unfinished. So I just use Linux for all music tasks, whatever, I'd rather boot that anyway most of the time).

Totally agree with the poster who said iTunes and Lotus Notes are the two worst abortions in the history of software. Notes is systematically deleting all email older than 1 month at work... ***argh****.

Ahem

[Anonymous Coward]

If there is a "best" music player, it's MPD, not some proprietary windows shareware program, no matter how popular it was. As for itunes, the worst thing about it isn't the bloatedness or the bugginess, it's the fact that it doesn't respect your music collection. Not only does it rename and rearrange your files willy-nilly, but if I'm not mistaken, it used to automatically "upgrade" them to m4a, throwing away data in the process.

Great, just what we need...

[Anonymous Coward]

...a troll headline. Yes, iTunes has its issues, but it also does a pretty damn good job at what it sets out to do. Why is it necessary to opine in that manner and piss people off?

Computers have caught-up

[Anonymous Coward]

so now iTunes is merely so slow it makes me want to die instead of so slow it makes me want humanity to die. iTunes is worse than Hitler. It has driven people to kill while Jobs swam in cash. Swam in cash.

Every release is more awful than the last

[Anonymous Coward]

So this latest release, is literally the worst release ever. The next release, will be worse. Every release is the worst release of it's life.

Between iTunes and the new AppleTV...

[QuietLagoon]

... Apple has convinced me that I should not have my music stored, accessed and played on their infrastructure.

.
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...

[Anonymous Coward]

... Apple has convinced me that I should not have my music stored, accessed and played on their infrastructure.

I learned that lesson the first time I used iTunes and it decided to "organize" my library. I had to restore from backup after it dumped everything into a single directory because it couldn't figure out where to put things that didn't have ID3 tags.

Re:Between iTunes and the new AppleTV...

[sabbede]

I could have burned Cupertino to the ground with only my rage when that happened to me. Years later I found MusicBrainz Picard and was able to put it right.

Re:Between iTunes and the new AppleTV...

[BitZtream]

Reading the popup that told you it was going to do that was too much for you eh? Just click right through it and then bitch about it?

Mishegas? Ambushed by Yiddish again

[rsborg]

http://www.yiddish.co/mishegas...

"Insanity or craziness"

Good thing I'm a neophile linguist (in training).

Re:Mishegas? Ambushed by Yiddish again

[R3d M3rcury]

I usually spell it "Michiganer." But that's just me...

Re:Mishegas? Ambushed by Yiddish again

[PopeRatzo]

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 with a native Yiddish speaker, but I can do a lot better than most of my Jewish friends.

Does anyone actually use it?

[Kazoo the Clown]

The only thing I use iTunes for is as a backup program for my iPad, and even then, I run it in a VM sandbox that doesn't have network access, and only long enough to do the backup. And to copy MP3 files to my ipod touch. That's it. I can't imagine ever using it for anything else.

Re:Does anyone actually use it?

[Overzeetop]

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.

"Video playback is not supported on this computer"

[Anonymous Coward]

iTunes is a piece of crap for sure.

I have a GTX 970 and iTunes says "Video playback is not supported on this computer".

At least restarting iTunes makes the bug go away for a short time.

Awful?

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone ever use Sony's Sonic Stage? Hoo boy!

Sounds awful lot like the history of ms office and

[Anonymous Coward]

It's pretty clear that Apple has stopped investing into OS X and software that runs on it when they destroyed FCP, OS X server and discontinued Aperture and iPhoto. Intel seems to agree with now that they are slowing development in PC.

At least iTunes has been the vehicle to mobile devices, ms office and Windows has been the vehicle to iOS and android.

ITunes in 1946?

[t4eXanadu]

I'm confused.. The summary suggests that iTunes existed in 1946: "It was an early version of iTunes that demonstrated the first software bugs to Grace Hopper in 1946".

Can someone explain what Marco is talking about? Is that a joke? If so, it's a bad one.

Re:ITunes in 1946?

[Anonymous Coward]

the joke is in the anachronism.

cf, 'Whoosh".

PS I met Grace Hopper once at Digital Equipment Corporation in the late 1980s. She was really cool. A true proto-geek, and very witty. She told me she hated iTunes. (For the humor impaired, that last sentence was a JOKE).

Re:ITunes in 1946?

[Anonymous Coward]

Autistic humor is often cringeworthy.

Re:ITunes in 1946?

[Anonymous Coward]

Whoosh doesn't really apply here because everyone gets the anachronism. It seems likely that it was intended as a joke, it just doesn't function as a joke. Jokes are usually funny or shocking or sad or, well, anything. When the general reaction is "Is that a joke? If so, it's a bad one," it's time to hang up your stand-up comic routine and do something that will go over better, like writing code for iTunes.

Re: ITunes in 1946?

[Anonymous Coward]

It doesn't help that the sentence is grammatically malformed.

Re:ITunes in 1946?

[desdinova 216]

yes it's a bad joke

No social?!

[Anonymous Coward]

"... lack of online or social integration..."

You mean to tell me that I've successfully iTunes for 13 years, when it has one of the most important features of our time?

Never understood the iTunes hate

[Anonymous Coward]

Once I got a Mac, I switched off of a Linux Winamp look alike and never looked back. iTunes has always worked well for me. I've never had any crashes or syncing failures. The interface for determining which music you want to sync is lacking but otherwise I'm happy with it.

Re:Never understood the iTunes hate

[sabbede]

Try something else. If all you use is iTunes, on a single monitor Mac, you'll never see how woefully lacking it is.

Don't even get me started

[Squirmy McPhee]

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....

Re:Don't even get me started

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't add music through iTunes Music

I can't even seem to delete the stupid U2 album they foisted upon me

1) These can't both be true.

2) You can delete that stupid U2 album from your account.

Re:Don't even get me started

[sootman]

> My employer insists on giving me an iPhone, but
> prohibits iTunes on my company-issue laptop
> because it's such shit.

Well, the main problem is your employer is a fucking idiot. Like it or not, devices need support sometimes, and if you're going to issue a device that occasionally requires an app or an online service but not allow access to either, that's just plain dumb.

Nuke it from orbit, it's the onl...

[Snufu]

Who are we kidding, even nukes can't kill iTunes.

Re:Nuke it from orbit, it's the onl...

[avandesande]

If we pit windows 10 installer vs iTunes, which would win?

Re:Nuke it from orbit, it's the onl...

[Anonymous Coward]

No-one.

it wasn't always this bad.

[lophophore]

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 possible: a iPod Video 30GB from gen 5. It's on it's third battery, and last Summer I replaced the internal 30 GB drive with a SD card (which sadly is not easily removable.) It works better than any other player I've used, though when if finally dies I will simply stream everything from "the cloud."

Re:it wasn't always this bad.

[squiggleslash]

Now it makes sense. I stopped using the Mac some time around iTunes 4, and hadn't used iTunes since but I didn't recall iTunes ever being as awful as TFS suggests. It was very easy to quickly import CDs, make playlists, and manage an iPod, and when the iTMS (yeah, that old) came about, that didn't seem to be a problem. I liked it then, it was a whole lot nicer to use than the WinAMP derived stuff everyone else used at the time.

I wonder if an issue here is that iTunes in its current configuration is obsolete. The only reason the iTMS was ever built into it was to make downloading music automatic, but as all content is now cloud synced, there's not a whole lot of point in building a giant store within a music player app. Likewise, syncing an music player device, tablet, or phone, is more easily be done with controls on the device itself.

Perhaps it's time Apple stripped down the application, and brought it back to its roots? (And perhaps it's time the iTunes store migrated to the web, with a mobile app, just like Android does, where it belongs?)

Re:it wasn't always this bad.

[swb]

I think the tipping point was when they killed the ability to open new windows. It made it much easier to build large music playlists because you could browse the library in one window and have the playlist open in another.

Once they killed that off, it got harder to navigate a library because they also got into stupid shit like showing you giant album cover icons and generally doing the same stupid shit Netflix has done to make browsing their library awful, too.

My guess is Apple looks at it as a horrifying legacy codebase that barely manages to do phone backups and restores and organize music libraries and sell shit from the store. I suspect they will ultimately try to kill it off and force you into iCloud backups and streaming/radio only music "ownership", with maybe some optional download for doing only phone backups and restores.

Even for that it kind of sucks. It's a huge PITA to move iTunes between computers and you can't do something sane like easily export into a single file an iPhone backup.

I think in its initial incarnations it had some hope. I remember when I first installed it it seemed pretty usable and so far even letting it manage my music library hasn't been horrible, its basically as good as I would have done manually managing files and folders.

I wish they would have allowed the ability to create multiple libraries for segregating music into different categories or for creating some kind of master library if you're collect-them-all interested in some band or other but don't necessarily want 80+ live shows by one band or Christmas music or all your classical music in your "normal" library.

I'm mostly content to use it for what still works, but it keeps getting incrementally, boiling-a-frog bad.

Re:it wasn't always this bad.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's "AN Apple" and "AN iPod"...
But then, you are American, and apparently you are never taught how to use "an", or "too", "they're", "then", "that", "than", etc.

VLC

[ThatsNotPudding]

Winamp, long after it's dead, is still the best music player there is.

I'd say VLC... unless you *are* into whipping llamas.

Yet it s the most used program.....

[Anonymous Coward]

It still overshadows ALL OTHER music management programs out there massively.

What is it with all the fucking apple hate stories? This place turning into Gizmodo? Did the late Steve Jobs pee in the new slashdot staff's cheerios?

The interface does suck a bit but it sucks a lot less than anything else out there. Honestly all the freaking media managers made are steaming piles of crap. The linux ones even more so than anything on OSX or Windows.

yes I know that the iphone and the ipod dominated the world of portable music and media and thus it's interface program still dominates. but honestly why cant we get decent desktop programs like we have on mobile platforms?

Re:Yet it s the most used program.....

[danbob999]

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.

toxic hellstew

[Anonymous Coward]

toxic hellstew, you read it here first!

a steaming dungpile of mediocrity

[Anonymous Coward]

iTunes is better than everything else, but it still sucks sweaty donkey balls.

Re:a steaming dungpile of mediocrity

[sabbede]

Better than what at doing what? There are much better media player/organizers out there, whether you're talking about playback, organization, format support, technical support, ripping, appearance, usability, speed/responsiveness, and with better maintained (and open source) code. VLC, MPC-HC, Foobar... And MusicBrainz Picard is 12.8 million percent better at tagging and organizing libraries.

iTunes is better at handling iThings, but only because Apple won't allow you to use anything else.

iTunes Match is *Still* Broken

[Anonymous Coward]

With iTunes Match, if you have multiple albums with the same song, as typically can happen if you own a greatest hits alongside other albums, you only get the song in one of the albums. It's just missing out of the others. No warnings, no explanations, nothing. I recently *bought* a greatest hits from the iTunes Store, and several songs in it just weren't there, because I already owned them in other albums. Complete failure, that.

Apple isn't interested in iTunes selling more PS4s

[rsborg]

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...

Vindication

[Sir_Eptishous]

Wow, the vitriol...

And all this time I thought I was the odd one, not like iTunes.

I don't get it

[grumpyman]

I really don't understand why iTunes is so frowned upon. As a music player, yeah maybe Winamp is great but iTune is not just a player. And for the most part it is for organizing/arrrangement/sync-ing music (and app). I have a hard time finding a good alternative...

Re:I don't get it

[Anonymous Coward]

It refuses to let you add music to your ipod if an external harddrive is plugged into your computer. It won't tell you why, it just disables it.
If, during this time, the user attempts to figure out how to add music to their ipod, unaware of this unannounced limitation, using a control like "sync playlist" then their ipod is likely going to be cleaned out of everything except what they bought from the iTunes store, so unless they had all that music on their harddrive as well (let's face it, who DOESN'T use up terrabytes of harddrive space on their computer to have rips of their entire CD collection?) you can lose an entire evening to this bullshit.

Enjoy finding all those old live recordings, alternate performances, covers, etc. that you spent years accumulating from Napster, eMule, Grokster, Geocities pages, etc. Unless you've made backups of everything you ever put on your ipod, you're never getting them back! Oh, that old tribute CD that you can't even get on Amazon anymore? The one you lost in the last move, but at least you had it ripped onto your ipod? FUCKED!

Fucking Hell, it has ONE FUCKING JOB. So let's make all the "PUSH THIS BUTTON TO FUCK YOU!!!!" options as fucking ambiguous as possible, put them everywhere, and HIDE anything that might let the user know why the fuck Apple is bending them over the barrel at that moment in time, wrap it up with a resource-draining startup program that's synonymous with the term "Bloatware" and shove it up everyone's asses that just bought a $200+ mp3 player.

Yup, it sucks, but I still use it

[kazot]

iTunes has all the charm of a fat, bloated dead cow. However, it still works for me.

I live and die by metadata in iTunes. I almost exclusively use Smart Playlists to generate what I listen to. Winamp doesn't cut it for that, nor does anything else I've found. I take the time to correct all the meta data on all my music so I can do just this - that's important to me. To me this is the only way to really enjoy my music collection. If I want to listen to a single album, that's easy. If want to find all music I haven't listened to in a year that is of genre XXX, that's also easy. Show me how you can do that with anything else except iTunes or some iTunes clone. Definitely not WinAmp last I checked.

As for the iTunes clones, none of them come close to being able to run like iTunes. Try sorting by 'Album by Artist' or 'Album by Artist/Year' - I haven't found that in any of them, or if it does, it doesn't work the same. I hate to say it, but when I sorting data in iTunes, it just works perfectly for me. I get exactly the data I want IN THE ORDER I WANT. Not to mention the fact that none of them can sync to an IOS device, such as my iPod. Hell it's a Gen 2 iPod and *STILL* nothing can sync to it. I want auto-syncing of tracks and metadata - until somebody cracks the iTunes database format I'm stuck syncing with iTunes from my Mac.

Find me something that does all this and does it from OSX and I'm all over it. Until then, I'm stuck with iTunes. (Granted, I'm sticking with v10.7, anything else makes my eyes bleed and is full of crap I never use like their streaming services.)

Re:Yup, it sucks, but I still use it

[Megane]

Find me something that does all this and does it from OSX and I'm all over it.

The problem iTunes has is mostly with the Windows version. It was and has remained shit since the first Windows version. And there are a lot more Windows users around to bitch about it, when their version is significantly worse to begin with. I seem to vaguely recall that iTfW was part of a strategy Apple had to come up with an API to cross-compile OS X apps for Windows, which like all their previous strategies from the '90s and early 2Ks, ended up completely abandoned. Except, in this case, for iTunes and QuickTime, which was their "proof of concept" example.

However, even the Mac version has gotten worse over the years, interface-wise. I tend to be very conservative about OS X updates (I only recently updated from 10.6 -> 10.9 on a late-2011 17" MBP, which shipped with 10.7!), and likewise with iTunes updates. The UI changes over the years have been some serious WTF rearranging of everything. It wasn't too bad when they made it the way to load iPod, but then they wedged iTunes Music into it, then videos, then apps. And more UI changes that weren't needed for store stuff, but were just to be different than before. (Apple of the past 10 years or so has been bad about that, especially their infatuation with skeuomorphism.) Now it's this god-hub of everything Apple. Even the old Software Update is now mixed up with the App Store.

Had to demand refund due to lousy video player

[sabbede]

I like to watch TV and play games at the same time. At the time this happened, my PC was connected to my TV and to a monitor mounted on a swing arm next to the couch (it was sweet, but my lady didn't like it). Turns out, the itunes video player can't handle multiple monitors. Fullscreen on one = black screen on the other! Every other video player out there can handle such a setup, even Windows Media Player. I mentioned how absurd this was in my demand for a refund.

MPC-HC played a pirated copy just fine on my TV whilst Pillars of Eternity ran on the monitor.

That's what happens when you require people to use shit in order to do things legally.

Re:Apple isn't interested in iTunes selling more P

[avandesande]

Apparently they aren't doing such a good job at that any more.... all this tie in crap is strangling the company. For all we know iTunes could be the largest media distribution hub in the world if they followed an open model.

Make a better one!

[mveloso]

If you think it sucks donkey balls, write a competitor. It's only been the dominant music app for more than a decade.

Preach it!

[Anonymous Coward]

Too much functionality is hidden or in places you wouldn't expect

So damn true. I used to actually like iTunes, it was pretty powerful and easy to use. But they kept changing the interface to hide things. It's insane. The functionality is still there, but good luck finding it.

I take it you've never used Sharepoint...

[Nova Express]

iTunes at least has a purpose and fulfills it. Really, what is the point of Sharepoint?

Re:Software so broken it can't possibly be fixed.

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for talking about everything BUT iTunes - you fucking cretin.

"I don't know about iTunes since I've never used it"

Well piss off then, and find another thread, nobody wants to read your irrelevant crap.

I love iTunes

[heldal]

I've never understood why it's so popular to hate it. I've used it since it came to PC, and for the last few years I've had a Mac. I think it works pretty well, does what it should and looks neat. The only issue I've ever had was with the early PC version, where ejecting the CD would actually unmount it, but no biggie (that's what you get porting something from *nix I guess :))

I have all my CDs ripped and in my iTunes music collection and I purchase stuff from the Store. I also have an iPhone with which I sync music, and used an iPod back in the days with the PC version. Again, no issues. YMMV of course, but in all honesty I would believe an application that has lasted so long and with such a large user base will work pretty well for most people.

Unless you want things in a special way of course, in which case many Apple products are guaranteed to annoy you (but you knew that already).

Bug History

[Anonymous Coward]

He doesn't even get the Grace Hopper story right. What she logged was (literally) a bug in the hardware, not in the software.

Devils Advocate

[Anonymous Coward]

I picked up iTunes for watching the apple trailers after changing to the glorious 64 bit browser world. It works fine with 4GHz processor and 32 GB of memory. I really don't have any complaints.

Works for me

[Jezral]

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 of iTunes smart playlists, such as a playlist of "matching album Diablo or Torchlight, rated 3+, limited to the 25 least often played items, auto-update list after each play".

5th gen ipod touch... worthless

[Anonymous Coward]

so I have a 5th gen ipod touch.

It won't connect with itunes on windows 10

itunes on windows 7 crashes immediatly on load

all I want is to put some mp3's on my ipod - you know - the whole reason I bought the device

but no.

wtb zune :/

SOUND JAM

[martinX]

I liked it when it was Sound Jam!
http://www.macworld.com/articl...
https://www.panic.com/extras/a...

Paid good money for that software, a month before Apple took it, called it iTunes and released it for free.

Re:SOUND JAM

[Pfhorrest]

It was worth the price when you paid for it, and a month later after Apple stapled a bunch of useless shit to it and gave it away, it was worth the new price too.

iTunes is Apple's Windows Exploder

[spoot]

Once upon a time Apple purchased a wonderful little program called SoundJam. It was a great little music player. 16 years later, Apple has managed to turn a very good "one trick pony" (yes, it played music) into the cludgeiest, patchware piece of junk to come down the pike since Windows Explorer.

It slices, it dices and juliennes to perfection and it rolls on its belly like a dinosaur. The only tears you'll shed are tears of absolute and utter frustration. Apple's new Popeil iTunes O'Matic. Personally hand-crufted by the greatest snake oil Salesmanof the 21st Century!

bye itunes

[Anonymous Coward]

ecoute, a dollar or two at the app store...even shuffles (imagine that)

ipod nano gen 5

[msevior]

The iPod nano 5 gen is the peak of their Apples devices. Light, 16 GB, solid, many hours of battery life, awesome click wheel interface but even more awesome is that it is the last iPod that works with libgpod, so you don't need iTunes to run it :-)

*sigh* it was all broken with the ipod nano touch. A truly stupid device and concept. I bought a refurbished gen 5 nano's after washing my old ipod.

BTW I would never ever buy an iPhone for fear I would have to use iTunes to talk to it.

No copy paste

[hcs_$reboot]

In 2016, you still can't copy paste almost anything in that software.

being WATB's since there's no more one button..

[Uberbah]

...mice or cooperative multitasking to complain about. So the Hatebois whine about "walled gardens" in between playing games on their walled-garden consoles, and bitch about how much iTunes sucks when they've never even used the damn program.

Yes!

[garote]

Agreed. Dumping on iTunes is a popular pastime here, but personally, I've found it well suited to my needs:
1. Managing music on my modified 1TB iPod Classic
2. Playing music on my PC, or piping it to other parts of the house

On the other hand there are things about it that I totally ignore, and have shut off in the UI:
1. The entire music store
2. Movie / TV episode playback
3. All radio features
4. All "iTunes U" features

I'd be happy to see an application for list 1 that's entirely separated from the application that handles list 2. But I suspect their syncing/backup system will need a lot of alteration to support that...

Re:Apple isn't interested in iTunes selling more P

[rsborg]

Apparently they aren't doing such a good job at that any more.... all this tie in crap is strangling the company. For all we know iTunes could be the largest media distribution hub in the world if they followed an open model.

So they only have a $50B quarter and they're suddenly not "doing such a good job any more"? hahahahha

Why - really why - it's not like it's a secret how

[Anonymous Coward]

My wife and I both have an iTouch and an iPhone and, my daughter has an iTouch - iTunes seems to find it all terribly confusing and insists on attempting wacky syncs that involve loading my dirge like fave music tracks onto my wife's player filled with uptempo 'happy tracks' and my daughter loathes having stray velvet underground tracks polluting the purity of her Taylor swift only iTouch. My wife refuses point blank to even attempt using iTunes because its sooooooo unintuitive and confusing - I pour a large Chardonnay before gearing up to tackle any major transfers of files, folders and playlists - it's terrible and Apple clearly knows its terrible - they're not idiots so this is something they choose to go with - why?

The point of Sharepoint...

[Anonymous Coward]

Making money for MSFT. It's pretty good at that.

MusicBrainz Picard

[Anonymous Coward]

Picard is awesome. It takes crappily organised and badly tagged music and makes it right.