I used it when necessary, but when out of practice, it always seemed like it's default operation was to delete all my songs from my device. It's second most likely operation was to try to fill my device with my entire library. In short, it was always hard to use, impossible to trust, and generally useless for anyone with a collection of music files that existed prior to iTunes.
Agree - it's why I ditched it and used gpod (or whatever it was called back then) when I bought one of the earlyish ipods.
Back then, yeah, itunes would "cleverly" organise your stuff. It meant you had to have your music in the Music folder, and oh my goodness, if you foolishly wanted to keep it on your NAS, well, no problem, it would just move it all off the NAS and onto your hard drive. It would also get rid of any folder organisation you had, so you're now left with a load of files named by their hashes instead of artist/album/track name (or whatever).
Another weird quirk of the original itunes versions was that if you plugged your ipod into someone else's computer and tried to copy something to your ipod, it would "cleverly" decide to delete everything on it and put the music from the other computer onto it instead. There was no in-built way to copy your ipod back to your computer (unless you just wanted a bunch of horrible files named by hashes).
Then of course there was the DRM in the early itunes versions. Thankfully, Apple managed to push hard enough to get rid of that - I never wanted to be left with a drive full of bits I couldn't read, so I think I only bought about 1 track from them at that time. They were crappy 128K MP3s too, which even if you bought them now would sound better because the encoders work better, but were never a match for Flacs.
Getting off itunes and onto gpod was a godsend - suddenly I could say "copy from here to there", or "copy from there to here" or whatever and it would do what I wanted. I did manage to put my ipod into quite a lot of pain when I filled it with 320K MP3s - I guess it was optimised for 128Ks, because it used to drain the battery really fast playing back the 320Ks.
All that said, I know "ordinary people" who used itunes to buy music, and pretty much only ever had that music in their lives and ipods. For them it seemed to work out quite well. And in fairness to Apple, they did make the DRM work quite well. I guess if I'd been a bit simpler and wanted less, itunes might have worked out.
Back then, yeah, itunes would "cleverly" organise your stuff. It meant you had to have your music in the Music folder, and oh my goodness, if you foolishly wanted to keep it on your NAS, well, no problem, it would just move it all off the NAS and onto your hard drive. It would also get rid of any folder organisation you had, so you're now left with a load of files named by their hashes instead of artist/album/track name (or whatever).
Sorry, wrong!
You could have taken 5 minutes and found that there was a simple GUI checkbox that eliminated that behavior completely. You can have iTunes "Libraries" anywhere you can reach on your local network. You can even have multiple Libraries.
It would also get rid of any folder organisation you had, so you're now left with a load of files named by their hashes instead of artist/album/track name (or whatever).
Only the copy on the iDevice got the weird filenames. The copy iTunes made was in an organized, structured folder under/User/Music/iTunes Music (unless you had only filenames and no tags - I don't know what it did then).
They were crappy 128K MP3s too
The DRM-laden files from iTunes early days were at least 128-bit AAC. Which is closer to a 160Kbps MP3 in quality. You could strip the DRM without re-encoding, even if not legally.
When you make your mark in the world, watch out for guys with erasers.
-- The Wall Street Journal
It was never intuitive on Windows (Score:2)
I used it when necessary, but when out of practice, it always seemed like it's default operation was to delete all my songs from my device. It's second most likely operation was to try to fill my device with my entire library. In short, it was always hard to use, impossible to trust, and generally useless for anyone with a collection of music files that existed prior to iTunes.
Re:It was never intuitive on Windows (Score:2)
Agree - it's why I ditched it and used gpod (or whatever it was called back then) when I bought one of the earlyish ipods.
Back then, yeah, itunes would "cleverly" organise your stuff. It meant you had to have your music in the Music folder, and oh my goodness, if you foolishly wanted to keep it on your NAS, well, no problem, it would just move it all off the NAS and onto your hard drive. It would also get rid of any folder organisation you had, so you're now left with a load of files named by their hashes instead of artist/album/track name (or whatever).
Another weird quirk of the original itunes versions was that if you plugged your ipod into someone else's computer and tried to copy something to your ipod, it would "cleverly" decide to delete everything on it and put the music from the other computer onto it instead. There was no in-built way to copy your ipod back to your computer (unless you just wanted a bunch of horrible files named by hashes).
Then of course there was the DRM in the early itunes versions. Thankfully, Apple managed to push hard enough to get rid of that - I never wanted to be left with a drive full of bits I couldn't read, so I think I only bought about 1 track from them at that time. They were crappy 128K MP3s too, which even if you bought them now would sound better because the encoders work better, but were never a match for Flacs.
Getting off itunes and onto gpod was a godsend - suddenly I could say "copy from here to there", or "copy from there to here" or whatever and it would do what I wanted. I did manage to put my ipod into quite a lot of pain when I filled it with 320K MP3s - I guess it was optimised for 128Ks, because it used to drain the battery really fast playing back the 320Ks.
All that said, I know "ordinary people" who used itunes to buy music, and pretty much only ever had that music in their lives and ipods. For them it seemed to work out quite well. And in fairness to Apple, they did make the DRM work quite well. I guess if I'd been a bit simpler and wanted less, itunes might have worked out.
Re: (Score:1)
Back then, yeah, itunes would "cleverly" organise your stuff. It meant you had to have your music in the Music folder, and oh my goodness, if you foolishly wanted to keep it on your NAS, well, no problem, it would just move it all off the NAS and onto your hard drive. It would also get rid of any folder organisation you had, so you're now left with a load of files named by their hashes instead of artist/album/track name (or whatever).
Sorry, wrong!
You could have taken 5 minutes and found that there was a simple GUI checkbox that eliminated that behavior completely. You can have iTunes "Libraries" anywhere you can reach on your local network. You can even have multiple Libraries.
People need to learn to learn.
Re: (Score:2)
It would also get rid of any folder organisation you had, so you're now left with a load of files named by their hashes instead of artist/album/track name (or whatever).
Only the copy on the iDevice got the weird filenames. The copy iTunes made was in an organized, structured folder under /User/Music/iTunes Music (unless you had only filenames and no tags - I don't know what it did then).
They were crappy 128K MP3s too
The DRM-laden files from iTunes early days were at least 128-bit AAC. Which is closer to a 160Kbps MP3 in quality. You could strip the DRM without re-encoding, even if not legally.