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

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: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 :/

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: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.

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....