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

Huh?!

[__aaclcg7560]

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

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: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: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.