Slashdot Asks: What Did You Like/Dislike About iTunes? 131
iTunes is officially dead with the release of macOS Catalina today. Apple decided to break apart the app into separate Apple Music, Podcasts and TV apps. "Each is better at its individuals task than it was as a section within iTunes, which was teetering on collapse like the Jenga tower of various functions it supports," writes Dieter Bohn via The Verge.
"In the early days, iTunes was simply a way to get music onto Apple's marquee product, the iPod music player," reports Snopes. "Users connected the iPod to a computer, and songs automatically synced -- simplicity unheard of at the time." It was the first service to make songs available for 99 cents apiece, and $9.99 for most albums -- convincing many people to buy music legally than seek out sketchy sites for pirated downloads. "But over time, iTunes software expanded to include podcasts, e-books, audiobooks, movies and TV shows," recalls Snopes. "In the iPhone era, iTunes also made backups and synced voice memos. As the software got bloated to support additional functions, iTunes lost the ease and simplicity that gave it its charm. And with online cloud storage and wireless syncing, it no longer became necessary to connect iPhones to a computer -- and iTunes -- with a cable."
What did you like or dislike about iTunes? When you look back at the media player, what are you reminded of?
"In the early days, iTunes was simply a way to get music onto Apple's marquee product, the iPod music player," reports Snopes. "Users connected the iPod to a computer, and songs automatically synced -- simplicity unheard of at the time." It was the first service to make songs available for 99 cents apiece, and $9.99 for most albums -- convincing many people to buy music legally than seek out sketchy sites for pirated downloads. "But over time, iTunes software expanded to include podcasts, e-books, audiobooks, movies and TV shows," recalls Snopes. "In the iPhone era, iTunes also made backups and synced voice memos. As the software got bloated to support additional functions, iTunes lost the ease and simplicity that gave it its charm. And with online cloud storage and wireless syncing, it no longer became necessary to connect iPhones to a computer -- and iTunes -- with a cable."
What did you like or dislike about iTunes? When you look back at the media player, what are you reminded of?
Duplicate songs (Score:5, Funny)
Duplicate songs, from when I copied my Napster-based library of MP3s from one computer to another.
Duplicate songs, from when I copied my Napster-based library of MP3s from one computer to another. (1)
Duplicate songs, from when I copied my Napster-based library of MP3s from one computer to another - Copy
Duplicate songs, from when I copied my Napster-based library of MP3s from one computer to another - Copy (1)
one stop shopping vs. white album repurchase (Score:3)
Heh. THe most downloaded app I ever wrote is mac osx app that corralled all your duplicates. So this was never a problem after that became available. But it became superflous once itunes implmented their own Dedup.
Next you wil complain about mac osx having a 1 button mouse. Catch up!
What I likes about itunes was I had one single place I ever had to put my songs that endured, was kept up to date, and security patched by apple. I didn't have to transfer my songs to the latest greatest system. It would c
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Next you wil complain about mac osx having a 1 button mouse. Catch up!
Nobody ever complained about that. People complained that Apple shipped one button mice for the sake of appearance. And before that, people complained that Apple shipped round mice. These days, people complain about their garbage keyboards, because Apple is always fucking up input devices. They peaked in that regard in the late ADB period.
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So a) iTunes on Windows. Suck it up, that's what I use, and what I didn't like about iTunes.
b) One button mouse + Kerbal Space Program = failzors. Again, maybe there is some way to play KSP on my work-issued CrapBook Pro with just one mouse button, but I couldn't figure it out in 3 minutes. Screw it.
The MacBook mostly stays tucked in a corner when I need to do something on Keychain to support company apps, but that's about it.
Re: one stop shopping vs. white album repurchase (Score:3)
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Can't do touch pad with games like that - aggravates the wrists too much.
But wow, you're right. I never went into the settings to configure the magic mouse to work like that. Never even knew it was an option. Because the mouse itself has exactly 1 tactile button, where-as every other mouse I've used in the past 34 years has had two. So, yeah - Windows may have 5 layers of sub-menus... but I never have to go into them.
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Everybody knows: use ctrl-click for a right click if you are to poor to buy a two button mouse and on the trackpad you can also a use two finger click, too ....
Why you not just unplug a mouse from your copany super PC and put itnto your crap book is beyond me.
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So a) iTunes on Windows. Suck it up, that's what I use, and what I didn't like about iTunes.
b) One button mouse + Kerbal Space Program = failzors. Again, maybe there is some way to play KSP on my work-issued CrapBook Pro with just one mouse button, but I couldn't figure it out in 3 minutes. Screw it.
The MacBook mostly stays tucked in a corner when I need to do something on Keychain to support company apps, but that's about it.
Tap with two fingers on the trackpad to get a "Right-Click". There is a setting in System Preferences to control that gesture.
Or just use any bog-standard multibutton Mouse. MacOS has supported it since at least OS X 10.0.0
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People complained that Apple shipped one button mice for the sake of appearance.
But they were wrong.
Apple never shipped one button mice because of "Appearance". They did it because of Usability for Users unfamiliar with mice at all.
https://ux.stackexchange.com/q... [stackexchange.com]
But starting with the Mighty Mouse in 2005, Apple started shipping multi-button mice (which Macs have natively supported since at least the first version of OS X in 2001, and likely a little earlier).
https://512pixels.net/2012/11/... [512pixels.net]
So, it is really time for that meme to die, since it has been completely incorrect for nearly
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Apple never shipped one button mice because of "Appearance"
But starting with the Mighty Mouse in 2005, Apple started shipping multi-button mice
Except with the appearance of no buttons. Tell me one-button was never because of appearance for all those years - especially the later Jobs years.
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The main problem with iTunes, and most music players for that matter, is that it relied on tags. If you had a big music library organized by filename and directory you were screwed, it only cared about tags.
Even if you ripped all your music from CDs the database that iTunes used (CDDB) was complete crap. The inconsistencies for basic stuff like artist name and genera screwed up your organization.
In fact the best option was to pirate all your music instead, because the pirates set strict standards for taggin
Re: Duplicate songs (Score:1)
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You must be mixing up something. ...
iTunes uses directories for ~/myMusic/Artist/Album/Song
I never used or looked at any tagg on iTunes ...
not least because the tag editing tools in iTunes were complete crap. ...
Because no one used them
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The setting is called "Keep iTunes Media Folder Organized." Google it. It's the default, but you can turn it off. It doesn't move files per se - it creates its own copy under the iTunes Music folder (but you can also change that folder too, I think).
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That's how iTunes stores music, but it doesn't use that information when you import your library. It only looks at tags.
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The main problem with iTunes, and most music players for that matter, is that it relied on tags. If you had a big music library organized by filename and directory you were screwed, it only cared about tags.
Even if you ripped all your music from CDs the database that iTunes used (CDDB) was complete crap. The inconsistencies for basic stuff like artist name and genera screwed up your organization.
In fact the best option was to pirate all your music instead, because the pirates set strict standards for tagging and hand edited them to be correct.
Tags are so much worse than using directories and file names. For example, it's easy to typo tags but if you have a directory called "Sonata Arctica" and you put all Sonata Arctica's music in you won't lose it to a typo. It's also far faster to organize stuff that way, not least because the tag editing tools in iTunes were complete crap.
You can leave your precious directory-trees alone in iTunes.
And iTunes has pretty good tag-editing tools. It will even edit tags of multiple songs simultaneously, nicely leaving the unedited "fields" alone.
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kid3 is much nicer. Apple's tag editing tools seem functional, but they'll randomly fail to save changes and cause quirky problems with other players trying to read them. Which is ironic because I use AAC for my music files.
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Manual tagging is better than both. But XLD actually connects to better metadata services than Apple's. And it's a better ripper.
My music is thoroughly tagged AND organized by directory and filename (and these days you can automate copying one structure to the other or vice versa). But tags are multidimensional. Folders can only organize by one hierarchy. If you have music with a composer AND a performer, for example. And album art is nice (combined with folder.jpg because I do care about the folder s
Reports of iTunes death are greatly exaggerated (Score:5, Informative)
The reports of iTunes's death are greatly exaggerated.
iTunes is still what you use on Windows if you want access to Apple Music on Windows or to sync an iDevice. Apple has made no plans to change this.
What they've done is split iTunes into multiple separate apps on macOS, so instead of accessing each UI through one app, you now access the very same UIs through four different ones. (One each for music, video (called TV), Podcasts, and syncing. Syncing now being part of Finder.)
But if you hated the design of iTunes UI or found it hard to use - the new apps are the same damned thing. Just with different dock icons.
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It's the same damned code base. It's just now been split up.
iPod/iPhone sync was always a separate process. The change is that the UI is now shown in Finder and not in iTunes. But it's the exact same UI it always was, just hosted in a different window.
The Music app is the old "Music" view from iTunes. It's not actually new. They've done a few things to make the UI look a bit more colorful, but it's still essentially what people thing of when they think "iTunes" with all the same flaws and drawbacks that mak
I've still got iTunes (Score:5, Interesting)
I'll be staying on Mojave for as long as it's supported. My 32-bit apps are important to me; Apple Arcade, less so.
I find it funny that Apple (AND Google AND just about everyone else) thinks "the cloud" solves all our problems. Right now, I'm sitting in a hotel room with internet access - but for most the last 100 miles I traversed to get here, my phone consistently showed "no service".
Re:I've still got iTunes (Score:5, Insightful)
Not much I like about iTunes. I might change my "tune" when I upgrade to Catalina here shortly....as in, in an hour or so.
Like Microsoft Word, it peaked a long time ago and it just got worse and worse with every passing version as they bloated it down with more and more shit that no one ever asked for, until the point where it became virtually unusable - while simultaneously not adding functionality that would have been really useful...you know...like, uh, just mount my device's file system to the desktop like a fucking hard drive? You know, like that?
Anyway....there you go.
Re: I've still got iTunes (Score:2)
does not matter (Score:3)
File association (Score:2)
The last time I had the need to ''synch'' an iDevice to iTunes I remember how awesome the encryption of the filesystem was. No one could ever figure that out.
Has anyone had the need to use it more recently than 10 years. I do remember sometime being notified that what I had, I don't. Kudos for the notification [at least].
Re: File association (Score:2)
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.
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Agreed .. except it sucked on Mac too. If you had already existing large, well organized collection of digital music in various formats (mp3,flac, ape, etc) then iTunes was not the app for you. Actually it was was one of the worst applications I ever attempted to use. It's ridiculous default behaviors and counter intuitive interface were so frustrating. I even tried using a Mac for a year to see if buying into the whole ecosystem was needed. Nope. iTunes was an app designed with no care whatsoever for w
Re: It was never intuitive on Windows (Score:2)
Foobar and later Songbird were definitely the way to go if you had music outside of what you purchased from iTunes. I
n the old days of iTunes, you couldn't even go directly to MP3 with your purchases. Many times I burned an RW disc with new music, then ripped it to MP3 and manually named things. I really don't miss that.
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if you had music outside of what you purchased from iTunes.
There's the problem right there. Apple regularly assumes there was nothing before them.
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Agreed .. except it sucked on Mac too. If you had already existing large, well organized collection of digital music in various formats (mp3,flac, ape, etc) then iTunes was not the app for you. Actually it was was one of the worst applications I ever attempted to use. It's ridiculous default behaviors and counter intuitive interface were so frustrating. I even tried using a Mac for a year to see if buying into the whole ecosystem was needed. Nope. iTunes was an app designed with no care whatsoever for what the customer wanted. This was many years ago but I was never able to find an app on the Mac that could easily manage a very large collection of digital music in various formats so after one year of trying gave the Mac to my wife (she still likes them) and went back to Foobar 2000 on the PC.
Your objections regarding flac, ape, (and ogg) are (or at least in the case of flac, were) duly noted.
However, all of iTunes "counter intuitive interface" issues are neatly negated by the use of "Column Browser" mode. Can't imagine a more intuitive interface; especially for large collections.
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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 i
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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.
Re: It was never intuitive on Windows (Score:2)
We found the Apple fanboy!
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Nah, making bad proprietary software work the way you want is sometimes just easier than finding an open source alternative. I haven't owned an Apple device in years and I still use iTunes for music playback on the PC. It points to the same directory on my NAS that every other device or server uses.
Not all music videos.... (Score:2)
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When iTunes was unified you could. It was just a matter of changing the video "type" under its metadata. Depending on whether they still use a shared library internally. I haven't looked at any betas or anything.
Fuck Apple (Score:2)
iTunes behaves like a virus (Score:2)
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Spend 5 minutes and Google "keep itunes media folder organized" and uncheck the box. It just works. Except FLAC, because they only support their own lossless codec. But that's because there's really nobody asking for it in their customer base.
Lame (Score:2)
No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.
Looney iTunes (Score:3)
iTunes is possibly the #1 reason why I finally gave up on the entire Apple ecosystem. It's such shit.
#2 is probably the fact that if you have an old iDevice and want to put a new account and install apps on it, very often you will not be able to do so, even though the App Store has a perfectly good app that will work on that device. I'm not joking about this. You will get a message saying, "This app will only work on iOS 11x" or whatever. No way around it. UNLESS, you know someone who has an equally old iDevice with that app installed. Then, if you simply sign out of the store under your name and sign back in with your friend's account, you will be able to install the app and it will work even after you have signed back in as yourself.
The only possible reason for this is that they want you to buy a new iDevice and fuck you for trying to use a 4 year-old device on their pristine motherfucking ecosystem. The last time I brought this up, I had Apple stans jump all over me and tell me I was wrong and I had to burn up a lot of time proving it to them. So fuck the entire Apple line, and every member of the Apple board of directors, and the entire C-level suite at Apple. They'll never get another nickel from me.
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I ditched Apple for the reasons you list, and because I was tired of the way those loyal to the brand would lie to defend their favorite product. It was turning into some sort of mild cult. They're often called fanbois, but that term is used for a lot of things, but Apple loyalists are significantly more diehard than other fanbois. Kinda like Tesla haters. But I digress.
I'm now kinda bummed with the way things are going with phones. Headphone jacks, SD cards, and wireless charging were the things that
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Yeah, see, that's because you installed the apps you want when you first got the device. If you gave that iPhone 6 to a friend or loved one and they created a new Apple account and tried to install say, Facebook or Twitter or something on it, they'd get a message saying you have to have iOS 11 or later to download the app. However, if they logged in temporarily as you and installed those same apps, the App Stor
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I still haven't heard anyone defend this policy based on any grounds besides the fact that they just want you to go out and buy a new device instead of using an older one.
I'll defend it, though neither you nor I will like the answer. The developer chooses the target OS for a build. If they start supporting a newer iOS as the baseline, the old version is deprecated and may not function correctly forever. Apple doesn't want to take the blame when old apps stop working because the provider changed web APIs, so they only support the current version for new installs. That only applies when the app requires outside resources, though - not locally installed games with no advert
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The only possible reason for this is that they want you to buy a new iDevice and fuck you for trying to use a 4 year-old device on their pristine motherfucking ecosystem.
Correction: they want to kill the secondary market. If you're continuing to use your same device, it keeps working. Sell it, and it's a brick.
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You're pretty new here, so you haven't learned yet how foolish it is to challenge facts.
What I said above is absolutely, 100% true. And after iOS 12, the last workaround has now been removed. The problem affects all pre-iOS 11.x devices.
https://apple.stackexchange.co... [stackexchange.com]
https://appleinsider.com/artic... [appleinsider.com]
If you want to go check for yourself, I"ll wait here. Let us know what you find.
Ok, I'll bite, Apple. (Score:1)
This is all pretty old information, so some of this stuff may have changed, but just some bullet points that still really leave a bad taste in my mouth about Apple software all these years later:
- Insufficient control over encoding quality. I could do better with the command-line Lame encoder.
- Insufficient control over library contents. It would try to import everything whether I asked it to or not. No way to just play a damned CD without importing it as a grainy ass mp3 first. No way to play arbitrary
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The sad truth is that Windows Media Player (which I guess has been superseded in Win10 finally?) is at least a dozen times as good as iTunes. It doesn't do any of that stupid crap you complained about iTunes doing above, and it does the stuff you complained about it not doing.
Can you really not install a FLAC codec into OSX and use it from iTunes?
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Can you really not install a FLAC codec into OSX and use it from iTunes?
Like I said, that's all really old information. It is entirely possible that there is FLAC support now.
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- Insufficient control over encoding quality. I could do better with the command-line Lame encoder.
Did you even go into the preferences? You can set default bitrate and format. It's not fine-grained control, but storage is cheap these days. Just go high bitrate.
- Insufficient control over library contents. It would try to import everything whether I asked it to or not. No way to just play a damned CD without importing it as a grainy ass mp3 first. No way to play arbitrary media files it already supported without it trying to re-encode them.
Settings. See above. All of that can be solved before ever trying to use it.
- Insufficient control over encoding format. No way to use flac or raw wav files. How did you really make this less useful than winamp?
I admit - I've never wanted that. I am fine with 320Kbps AAC.
- No way to remove media once it got imported. Hey! Some of this stuff was borrowed and I didn't even have the rights to it! Now you're framing me for software piracy?!
Right-click, delete. Check the box to also delete the file. If you're going to be obstinate, it's CTRL+click if you don't have a two-button mouse.
- No control over DRM. Ok now you've got all my music files whether I wanted you to have them or not, you've re-encoded them at a loss even when it was not necessary, and now you've encrypted the whole thing and hidden it somewhere on my drive so I can't even easily use it as a backup to restore the files to other non-Apple computers where they came from?
The only DRM applies to files you bought from their store
Bullshit interface on windows (Score:2)
Having a large sync button that doesn't actually sync anything. You have to click the little phone button and then there is another sync button that copies things. That and iTunes always transcoding everything. Android and VLC play whatever you throw at it in any resolution.
Syncing was confusing (Score:2)
I'm just an old fuddy-duddy, but I never found it clear what was going to sync in what direction when changes had been made on multiple devices that had not been connected for a while. I find directories and moving files intuitive. "syncing" always seemed very complicated and non-intuitive. I had far more content than would fit on a portable device, so its not like I could have a duplicate of all my files everywhere .
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You always could have multiple libraries ...
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Why do you say that? rsync has all sorts of controls to select what directories get synced, whether older files get overwritten, whether removed files on one machine are deleted on the other. It clearly defines which direction things are moving. So with rsync I could delete the giant video files from my portable device without worrying that a "sync" will deleted them from my main store, while also moving new files I downloaded onto either device onto the other.
Nothing (Score:2)
Re: Nothing (Score:2)
It has made me a lot of money. (Score:2)
It has made me a lot of money by breaking M$ windows beyond repair over the years.
Tons of calls.. "my phone stopped syncing".. $$$$$$$!!!.
It was much worse in the early years but was never good.
Served its purpose (Score:2)
I got tons of use out of iTunes, had some pretty advanced playlists that rotated songs semi-intelligently (by today's definition, AI ;)
The ability to give stars to songs was really helpful, as were the smart playlists.
But it was pretty bloated and slow. Nowadays I stream everything and don't even access my mp3 library anymore.
On a related topic, I'd say Winamp is a hall of famer as far as music players go. It really whips the Llama's ass [youtube.com]. I just noticed there's a Winamp 5 [winamp.com].
Re: Served its purpose (Score:2)
Everything. (Score:1)
it costs money (Score:2)
It trashed my step-daughters hard drive. (Score:2)
It took me two days to recover her files when I got back into the country and reinstall the OS. She snapped the CD in two herself. Smart girl.
What was it meant to do, anyway?
Music Doesn’t Fully Sync (Score:2)
I constantly have songs grey out or pop up with can’t play in my locale. These are all ripped from my CDs you shitty app. I have to go in and flush some cache periodically and even then they don’t all sync. This shit pisses my off to no end at times.
[John]
podcasts (Score:2)
I've found no other tool that does podcasts well. I'm baffled that nothing else even comes in a close second. The drawback though is that it only works with apple devices. My ipod died, and the price for a replacement is stupidly expensive (honestly only trivially cheaper than a new one). Now I'm copying podcasts by hand and it's clumsy. I may decide to give up on that and use my iphone as a podcast device.
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gPodder is my current podcast application of choice on Windows or Linux for Science, Engineering, Astronomy, Medicine, Microbiology, Current Affairs, Humor.
I have 62 live podcasts and a similar number of terminated ones (ABC's "Stewart Garry's Starstuff" anyone?, he lives on as Stewart Garry's Spacetime, better than most of NASA's output. Jon Millers "The Rest of Everest"? a video podcast from Everest basecamp, still up on its own website and YouTube and worth downloading and watching).
So 610GB in 21,974 fi
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I use Podcast Republic on my Samsung. I don't know if its on Apple but it does well. Spotify has podcasts on it now and seems to do well with those. I don't know if it has as many as Itunes did but it has all that I listen too.
Not Much to Like (Score:2)
ITunes was bland, boring, lacked search capability and tagging, and was really crappy in terms of the ability to edit metadata. Combine that with a lot of unnecessary DRM and you get meh.
Unfortunately, the new apps are unlikely to address any of these problems for their respective content types.
Honest Trailer (Score:2)
- it's not a browser, and doesn't have the features a browser has (like a simple text copy [depending on context]....)
- it's not a browser and doesn't run on Linux
What I like is
- was ahead of its time and convenient when it was originally released, still has interesting features
- nice and convenient jukebox, mixing music
- smart playlists
- sync with iphone is (usually) flawless, and easy
- not too buggy for such a complex software
It's not winamp (Score:2)
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Did it all (Score:2)
The first commercial service that didn't suck. (Score:3)
Let's give credit where credit is due:
Steve Jobs stood up on stage and told everyone like he had told investors and the music industry that competition wasn't in the stores but on trading networks and napster. He was the first industry giant not to have his head up his ass about the truth concerning digital media.
Apple iTunes Fairplay was DRM but it was the first and only DRM that I actually found acceptable. Especially since you could rip it to mp3 with cheap and easy tools. A Euro per track was fair enough imho. I actually bought a few songs and a few albums on iTunes. Now, of course, I get them from Torrent or from Amazon as DRM-free mp3. Which is progress if you ask me.
As for players, I always liked XMMS more than iTunes, but I did use iTunes exclusively in my mac days and it wasn't all that bad.
+Coverflow, -iPhone Syncing (Score:2)
Pro: cover flow and the music driven "screen saver" animations.
Till OS X 10.6.x iTunes had a nice coverflow featue, everyone liked it. But then an automatic ninja install removed it.
So, I never upgraded iTunes beyond that.
On my 2014 MacBook I have 10.9.2 at the moment and a second disk to boot Moyave, never really used iTunes on them.
I watch my movies with VCL or Quicktime.
Cons: the ida to use it for backing up iPhones/iPads.
First time I wanted to do that I did not even know that iTunes does it, I assumed t
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Pro: cover flow and the music driven "screen saver" animations.
Yep, I was really into the visualizer feature the first year or two after it came out. Then I didn't really think about it again until last year, when I showed it to the kids, and they thought it was cool, too.
iTunes is Alive on My Laptop (Score:2)
I'm a 13" 2011 MacBook Pro owner running High Sierra -- the last macOS for my hardware. I still have a Superdrive, so I'm one of those curmudgeons that buys CDs, rips them in iTunes, and uses iTunes to load those songs onto my iPhone 8.
I also use iTunes to load my own video files and ringtones. As long as it continues to let me upload my own content to my iPhone, I'm fine with my version.
Over the years I've never had a problem with iTun
A few things (Score:2)
Most of my pet peeves are based on a Mac, not Windows version.
1 - On mac, not really supporting a non-standard location for your media library.
I know it could be moved in WIndows but it never really worked on Mac. (Its been so long since i tried, I might go back and find it never was supported on mac). Couple this with fairly small hard disks and no native support for iSCSI, it was increadibly easy to full a hard disk with itunes media. A fairly modest CD collection ripped with Apple lossless would easily f
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6 FLAC support (or lack thereof)
MP3 was a proprietary protocol, why not FLAC, which is open? NIH?
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1 - On mac, not really supporting a non-standard location for your media library.
Dude, do you seriously not know how to symlink a directory??
/some/other/location /some/other/location ~/Music/iTunes
$ mv ~/Music/iTunes
$ ln -s
Done. Solved.
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Disliked (Score:2)
oops, mis-click (Score:2)
Accidentally clicking the icon on the desktop and being held hostage for the next 45 seconds while everything went to a screeching halt, waiting impatiently to be able to kill the process.
Replaced with Rockbox to avoid itunes DB on ipod (Score:2)
As a Linux user, I had no use for it other than to install firmware. For a long time I tried various Linux apps to copy my mp3s into the itunes DB in the iPod.
Finally, I put Rockbox on my iPod and it appears as a hard drive I can copy/rsync my music as I wish with no dependencies. I can use Linux, Windows, MacOS, Chrome, android or anything else that can deal with a USB drive.
I never purchased music on iTunes, I always buy CDs and convert to MP3 at the quality I want and organized into folders the way I w
Nicer random, more bloatware, simple interface (Score:1)
... it no longer became necessary ... (Score:2)
... to connect iPhones to a computer -- and iTunes -- with a cable.
I used iTunes solely for the purpose of a local backup when changing phones. Recovery was much quicker over a tethered wire than over the Internet.
Buy my music a second time? (Score:2)
What I liked:
* Genius - making a smart playlist from my music.
* Sync my! CDs
What I disliked: Wifi Sync - never worked. and Impossible to (re)install the software at times. How many ways are there to log an error? let me count the ways.
I haven't heard what the plans are for Windows users - for which I'm one. I've been using iTunes for a long time (first with some old iPod with a click-wheel).
I own a fairly large CD collection and sync (most of) it to my phone (and Sonos lib
WTF, how do I back up my phone? NO iCLOUD (Score:2)
I'm actually distressed about this... I never backup my shit to their servers, I don't wanna. And I have gobs and gobs of pictures, way too much for their free hosted "icloud" service. Yeah, I sync them on a folder with the auto-sync thing in Windows (which barely works lately... I literally have to press the sync device option 4, 5 or more times). But I want to keep all those old pictures on my phone.
Apple is going to lose money from me... I can get a smaller storage size on my next phone if they don't mak
"Album" is not a property of a song! (Score:2)
Apple had an opportunity to fix this when they first bought the app (SoundJam) from Casady and Green.
Having a song record include a single field for "album" and a single field for "genre" means that a song can never be on more than one album or belong to more than one genre, which is idiotic from a database schema standpoint!
Re:Hacking/funding (Score:4, Funny)
Thanks. Can you hack Presidential Elections? Asking for a friend...
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Thanks. Can you hack Presidential Elections? Asking for a friend...
Donald? Is that you? Who taught you to use a computer? ... come to think of it, who taught you to read?
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Thanks. Can you hack Presidential Elections? Asking for a friend...
Can you explain the joke? I've looked at the entire context, even the AC trollage, and none of it makes any sense.
My best guess is that the opening comment you replied to was supposed to be a joke, but it wasn't sufficiently linked to the story. If it's an actual criminal organization, then Slashdot should (at a minimum) censor the phone number. (However if it was not a joke, then I'd assume an onion link at minimum... Wait, even it it was a joke?)
Re: (Score:2)
That better be an acronym and not a dumbfucked claim of pronunciation that English doesn't back.
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You wouldn't want to. The device named files after the file hash, and modifying the files doesn't update the database. I'm fairly sure that the song database is updated by iTunes rather than software on the device. At least for the old ones with no horsepower.