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

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

[Anonymous Coward]

He said work computers.

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.

And in another 13 years

[idbeholda]

iTunes will still be shit.

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

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

iTunes will still be shit.

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

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.

Surprise!

[wkwilley2]

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

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.

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: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

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: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: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.

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.