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Apple's iTunes Is Alienating Its Most Music-Obsessed Users

81 points by adam 11y ago

tptacek 11y ago
iTunes is a tire fire. But purely in terms of content, Apple Music is probably the best streaming service, and their recommendation system is getting better. Apple also has the benefit of iTunes/Apple Music being closer to a first-class citizen on things like car bluetooth audio systems. I would be thrilled to hear that Apple is totally revamping iTunes; I swear at it at least a couple times a week. But I'm probably not going to be able to stop using it any time soon. I'm not sure I really understand the people who use alternate music player software on OS X; huge collections of downloaded music files accessed through file player software doesn't seem like where digital music is headed. I had a gigantic collection of purchased music on my computer, and it's more an annoyance now than anything else. Hating iTunes so much you can't use it makes sense to me. But then, why not just use Spotify? Anyways: predicting where this thread is inevitably heading, here's a list off the top of my head of shit that drives me nuts about iTunes: * Purchased tracks randomly grey out and become non-playable. * I'm a "Match" customer, and iTunes/iCloud/whatever doggedly insists on retaining the file-based metadata from my old MP3s, despite me not having had those MP3s in years. * Ridiculous incoherent "Playlists / For You / New / Radio / Connect / iTunes Store" menu. "For You"? * Playlists that contain both Apple Music tracks and purchased tracks flake out and vanish, which means that if you have a large collection of purchased music, playlists just don't work. * Sometimes you can link to a playlist to share it and sometimes you can't.
- CamperBob2 11y ago
  And don't forget the innovative iTunes "cloud" icon. Translation: No, you can't listen to this track until it's been downloaded from the "cloud," but fortunately for you, the 3 or 4 identical duplicate tracks in your collection will play just fine. iTunes is the only good argument I've seen for requiring software engineers to be licensed by the government.
  - happyscrappy 11y ago
    Careful what you wish for.
    - CamperBob2 11y ago
      Very true. I couldn't think of a better insult on short notice, so I went with the first one that came to mind.
- seivan 11y ago
  It gained me as a user recently. I never used it until Apple Music and with the recent Apple TV it's pretty much awesome. (Replaced Spotify) Though one of Spotify strengths were its API. Apple needs an API so people people can get different front-ends and thus pretty much kill(?) Spotify for those who dislike iTunes.
- kingbathtub 11y ago
  re: using an alternate music player with my 200 GB/ 50k song library, iTunes is absolutely unusable, and I completely abandoned it last year. Apple has crammed so much into iTunes and just bloated the hell out of it, which is unsurprising for a design philosophy that layered all their media services on top of one another. My replacement has been using Rdio and Swinsian. Rdio lets me stream most of what I have in my library as well as new releases. Swinsian is still necessary for obscure or underground music I've downloaded that aren't available on streaming services, as well as my personal vinyl rips, which make up maybe 1/5 of my library. so while music consumption is definitely moving away from downloaded files to streaming, there are still niche needs for a dedicated file player. Unfortunately, with the recent news about Rdio, I have no idea what streaming service I'm gonna migrate to. Audio nerds recommend Tidal, my family uses Spotify, so I'll probably give those two and Apple Music a trial spin and evaluate.
  - banku_brougham 11y ago
    So Swinsian is listed in the article as the only viable alternative, my problem is its a one-person shop which is a risky bet to migrate into. OTOH, I use Sublime Text...
- ryanmonroe 11y ago
  Most people who have large collections of music have a lot of files that aren't available on any streaming service. Not sure if the sound quality of these services is on par with 320kbps MP3 files either.
  - pfg 11y ago
    Apple Music does allow you to stream music that's not available on their platform. iTunes will upload them when first added, and other devices can then stream from Apple.
  - Nicolechen 11y ago
    Maybe there are some ways to convert Apple music to unprotected format and then we can enjoy them on any players as we want. I just learned about Notebunrer recently launches a Apple music converter, I prepare to try this and perhaps buy a license during black friday. I am waiting for a big deal.
- josefresco 11y ago
  * Purchased tracks randomly grey out and become non-playable.* This 1000 times. I've been through three iPhones, and continue to be baffled why some of my music becomes unplayable. I solve by syncing (again and again...), navigating endless menus and changing random values in a vain attempt to find the problem and then hoping, and praying that next time I'm in my car, all my music will be available.
  - banku_brougham 11y ago
    Me too. UX hell.
- bane 11y ago
  > I'm not sure I really understand the people who use alternate music player software on OS X; huge collections of downloaded music files accessed through file player software doesn't seem like where digital music is headed. I had a gigantic collection of purchased music on my computer, and it's more an annoyance now than anything else. I agree with you, but for those with the wherewithal, dumping all the files into a folder and pointing plex at it gives you a personal "cloud" with great capabilities, cross platform, on-the-web, mobile apps, etc.
tezza 11y ago
I am writing an iTunes replacement ( the music and library management part ). Any feature requests from HN ? Current alpha features: * Playlist resume - if you interrupt a playlist 3278 entries in, you can resume at 3278 * Music diary - track what tunes played when & where ( occasional GPS polling optional ) * Powerful music list filters * Keep track of recently played items and do not replay them for a while * Works with Spotify thanks to Spotify API for premium users * mobile app on iOS and Android Suggestions beyond this ?
- seivan 11y ago
  Does it work with Apple Music? So what defines it as an iTunes replacement? Sounds like a different Music Player, maybe I'm missing something?
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- JustSomeNobody 11y ago
  By iTunes replacement do you mean iTunes replacement or mp3 player? Don't forget the following: * Upgrade iOS on iPhone * Backup iPhone * Sync iPhotos from/to iPhone * Sync videos from/to iPhone etc.
  - tezza 11y ago
    Just the music player for start
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- navait 11y ago
  Some integration with Alfred and Quicksilver would be nice on the desktop - I never use the media player itself, but prefer to bring that up and type the song/album/artist.
- bsenftner 11y ago
  Please make it simple to just play an entire album. I'm an infrequent iTunes user because the piece of shit expects me to research who knows what to figure out how to play an entire album. It ain't obvious, and I could care less to figure it out because they'll change the interface on a whim.
Karunamon 11y ago
I'm quickly coming to the conclusion that I am one of a very small number of people on the planet that has literally no issues with iTunes' day to day functionality. This despite abusing the hell out of it: * My library is on an NFS volume, * ..accessed with two different copies of iTunes on two different OSes * ..with north of 20k songs * ..and a library that's been backed up, restored, migrated, multiple times *..all the way since ~2002 when I got the HP branded iPod and started using it to manage my music The only conclusion I can come to, computers being deterministic machines, is that a lot of people have broken computers. Perhaps iTunes needs to be more error tolerant? There's not a whole lot of ways to say "it works for me, and I don't know what you're on about" without being straight up dismissive but.. it Just Works, at least for me. Just another data point I suppose.
- smackfu 11y ago
  You don't use iTunes Match or Apple Music, so you aren't really abusing it.
  - feld 11y ago
    Yeah iTunes library on a network drive sucks balls in my opinion. SLOWWWWWW. And whenever my library gets horked and I try to re-match again it takes ages. It's just stupid.
  - Karunamon 11y ago
    I use both. I've got Beats 1 streaming in the background as we speak, and pretty much my entire library is cloud synched.
- devonkim 11y ago
  How does iTunes handle situations when your NFS volume drops off the network for you? I wind up having to restart all the time and re-match my songs back to get album covers back all the time, and it drives me up the wall. I have a slightly unstable wireless network and on a CIFS share I'm having lousy performance and it's only gotten worse over time, but it used to work much better for me in the past.
acomjean 11y ago
I use itunes daily. I really like it, they made it better recently with the miniplayer up next and such. I"m able to queue up music into a list easily anytime. Maybe its my usecase, but I find it pretty sweet. That being said, itunes match, which I pay for and is supposed to sync all of my music between machines/ iphones somehow forgot a bunch of my songs. It might be part of iCloud now. I never could figure it out, but it just worked for the longest time. I turned on iCloud match and it seems to have brought most of them back. (Come to think of it maybe it was only cloud streaming songs I bought from itunes before...) Itunes on the iphone turned into Apple Music nagware till you dig into settings and turn it off. searhing for a song would show you the Apple Music version. It was odd and jarring when your itunes match wasn't working right, but for some money you can play the song you thought you had... Actually mac osx reminds me to "upgrade my keynote by upgrading my os" every time I open it. I've been using macs a long time and this new sell to me is getting grating.
- Shivetya 11y ago
  If iTunes would remember my last view I would be happy. I tend to wanting my playlists on the side and the songs in list format on the right. Yet each time I open iTunes its in cover format or large icons or whatnot, never rhyme or reason.
seivan 11y ago
Using Ember.js as a front-end for their Music services as massive downer. Slow on a Macbook Pro 2014. React or native would have been a better choice.
- JustSomeNobody 11y ago
  If it is that noticeably slow, I seriously doubt the framework for the front end is the sole issue.
Luc 11y ago
Its casual users too. I suppose there's no point in me explaining why, since it's such a common thing. This morning I clicked a downloaded MP3 file expecting it to simply play, but nooooh...
jdlyga 11y ago
I've been looking for a better alternative to iTunes for years, like Google Music. But nothing I've used has the same features like powerful smart playlists, ratings system, and the ability to change the start and stop times of songs. But iTunes is just a mess that's getting worse and worse. I might just have to suck it up and start over.
brandon272 11y ago
iTunes generally works great for me for maintaining my collection and playback, especially when combined with my home entertainment system. Where it falls apart is Apple Music, iTunes Match and iTunes Store. - iTunes Match is too unreliable when it comes to actually matching songs. The syncing is unreliable. I have songs in my collection now that were manipulated by iTunes Match and now have incorrect artist/title entries for some reason. I routinely have an issue where a song will be purchased in iTunes Store but never shows up on other computers without me having to go through a whole process of checking for available downloads (never works), signing in, signing out, etc. which often doesn't work until a week later when the song magically shows up or just doesn't show up at all. - iTunes Store is fine for buying music, if you know what you want to buy. Apple Match and iTunes are both terrible (in my opinion) for discovering new music that actually matches my own tastes. Right now I am using both Spotify and iTunes. I use Spotify to discover new music which I then buy through the iTunes Store so that I can have it in my official iTunes-based collection. I know people who have started using Spotify as their main source of music but I have an existing collection of about 4000 songs made up of MP3's/purchased files which I wish to maintain as a single collection. Using Spotify doesn't allow me to do that. Adding songs from Apple Music to my music collection seems unpleasant because then it creates a mix of existing transportable MP3's that I can move around and Apple Music files that I have no control over. It would be great to have a "single solution" that allowed me to discover new music, purchase it and maintain/listen to my collection but I've accepted that I will probably never find that solution.
jordanlev 11y ago
Here's my dilemma with iTunes: I have about 50GB of music on my computer, an early 2007 iMac. If I want to upgrade my iPhone to iOS9, I need to update iTunes to the latest version. But the latest version doesn't run on Mac OSX 10.6... and my computer is too old to upgrade to 10.7 or higher. So if I want to have ios9 and sync music to my phone, I need to buy a new computer? Pretty upset about that.
- corin_ 11y ago
  I wonder what data Apple have on who will be affected by things like this, how many will upgrade their PC, how many will put off buying a phone, how many will leave Apple behind, and how those things balance out to impact their profits. I imagine they'd think a lot about it and made the decision that it's more profitable to not care about your use case, but would be interested to know how they approach it.
  - epmatsw 11y ago
    From a data point of one, when my grandma's old Mac Mini stopped being able to sync to or update her iPad, we ended up just caving and buying her a new Mac Mini. For the life of a computer, it really just wasn't worth the hassle.
- projct 11y ago
  iTunes Match is an option that is cheaper than buying a new mac.
  - jordanlev 11y ago
    I looked into this but iTunes Match appears to only work for official albums it "knows". I am really into live music and have a ton of concert recordings (legal -- bands that allow audience taping), and also a lot of recordings of my own music I've made with various bands. Thanks for the suggestion though, I appreciate it.
- rawTruthHurts 11y ago
  Well, it shouldn't come as a surprise, that's Apple's policy towards their products.
mattdotc 11y ago
Is iTunes responsible for this trend I'm seeing more of where the Seek Forward/Backward (Fast-Forward/Rewind) symbol is being used in place of 'Next Track' and 'Previous Track?' All other complaints aside, this, to me, is iTunes' worst offense. I don't know if there was some official standard ever, but it was at a very minimum an unofficial standard for DECADES. Now some asshole designer has decided to muddle and confuse everyone by redefining the symbol. This idea has infected PowerAmp on Android now, too. I have not seen anyone discussing this before (but I haven't looked very hard). I refuse to buy into this new definition. Am I the only one bothered by this? I can't take a music application seriously if it can't get the symbols right.
- FussyZeus 11y ago
  I've never actually noticed this. I'm pretty sure if you hold the button it still does the scrubbing though.
  - mattdotc 11y ago
    You're right, it does seek if you press and hold. Thanks for that info. I don't meant to shoot the messenger and this isn't directed at you, but this behavior makes no sense and is not intuitive to anyone who's ever listened to music on a CD (which is still A LOT of people). I couldn't care less about scrubbing; I'd do that with the little progress bar because it's quicker and more precise than guessing how long to hold a button. I really just hate that one arrogant (or ignorant) person/group decided to change the meaning of a well-understood symbol as if they were the decider for everyone else.
    - FussyZeus 11y ago
      Oh I'm not defending it at all, I'm saying the missing | at the end of the button was never something I noticed. Possibly because I converted from Windows Media Player when I got a mac and the layout of media player is basically the same for playback controls (though they got the icon right). I agree, it's dumb.
    - GFK_of_xmaspast 11y ago
stevetrewick 11y ago
Them and everyone else. I suspect iTunes' major problem is that it encapsulates all (most?) of the code for communicating with iOS devices, hence XCode upgrades requiring it to be shut down and vice versa. Hence the amazing feature bloat. This plus its age probably make it a scary ball of mud. Not sure that's enough to explain some of the UX choices - a few updates back I had to turn to google to find out they hadn't actually removed the mini player and then again to find out how to get back to the full window. Maybe it makes sense to keep all the media management functions in one place, but then there's iPhoto/Photos, iBooks and the MAS, and then the Windows version. It's like the app level equivalent of a god class.
KasianFranks 11y ago
It always has.
FussyZeus 11y ago
iTunes as an application is by far the worst UX present on a Mac or a PC, which is especially surprising considering how nice the vast majority of OS X apps are to use. You can go down the list of the recommendations Apple gives out to developers on how make what they consider great apps for OS X and iTunes breaks every single one almost as if it were intended as a use case for terrible UX. The navigation and structure changes with every movement, there are occasionally two seperate back buttons present that can either do the same thing or completely different things, the "background activity" or as I like to call it, "What you need to know is happening to your iPhone" is constantly buried beneath the currently playing track, and is not readily accessible unless you click a 8pt square down arrow, on and on... Not to mention, as an owner of multiple machines I prefer to use ownCloud to sync my various libraries. Windows and Linux this is absolutely not an issue. Because iTunes insists on owning the directory and file structure though, I can't just point it at the folder or it will literally ruin it, I have to instead keep two copies of my library on my Macbook, and occasionally use an rsync alias to move over new stuff. Thankfully I usually do all my purchasing (on Amazon MP3) on the Macbook anyway so it's of little consequence, but it's just one more irritating thing to add to the list. I'm an Apple fan, I admit, but iTunes is a fucking train wreck.
- hellofunk 11y ago
  Totally agree. I love Apple's products but iTunes is an abomination. One anecdote notes that U2's Bono complained to Jobs that it was no different than a spreadsheet... well, I'd be happy if it were halfway as useful as a good spreadsheet. Instead it has zero flexibility. There seems to be a trend in some software to prefer search functionality over other basic UI techniques for presenting information. When I have a big music library, I don't always know what I'm looking for explicitly. I want to browse my music based on my own strategy, but doing this in iTunes has never really been possible. And it's not better on the iPhone's own music app. For a company that led the world in music-listening technology, their software for it sure has always been downright awful.
  - FussyZeus 11y ago
    It's weird too, if you're looking at Playlists it looks like Excel, the only way out is to view your entire collection, but then you can't find sh!t because it gives you NO information as opposed to ALL information. Also, on the topic of playlists, removing a song from a playlist is labeled "Delete." Are you f!cking kidding Apple? This is UI Design 101!
tammer 11y ago
iTunes isn't designed for the type of users this article discusses. The real issue the author should have focused on is there is no ecosystem as progressive or stable which is still focused on users who need/want to listen to their specific copy of a song rather than a generic hosted one. I have a feeling this type of user will slowly fade out, and eventually looking at a HD filled with music (on a laptop less!) will provoke a reaction similar to the anachronistic feeling one has looking at a wall of CD's or DVD's.
GFK_of_xmaspast 11y ago
I find itunes to be just fine for dealing with a decade-old library with 20k+ songs that's been transferred between a half-dozen different computers, and it's certainly better than the terrible mp3 players I tried on linux in the last 18 months or so (banshee was the least horrible but it's random album shuffle was incredibly broken).
cgriswald 11y ago
Match. Match activated itself I don't know how many times. Removed all music from my phone so I was streaming everything. I honestly didn't notice at first except some of my music was missing (because it wasn't available on Match), and my music would inexplicably stop playing in certain areas. It screwed up all my tag edits/album art (on ~7K songs!) and because of some duplicate problem, which I have yet to resolve, my music doesn't sync properly onto my iPhone. (Among many, many other complaints about iTunes.) My only question is, if I switch to something like Swinsian (which looks nice), how do I get the music and playlists onto my iPhone? (I've also been thinking about switching to Android since iOS 9 and its updates have turned my very expensive iPhone 6 into a slow, buggy POS.)
banku_brougham 11y ago
I am one of those alienated users, and I eagerly pressed the link to discover the alternatives. To no avail. Are there viable alternative music players that can sync to iPhone?
hackaflocka 11y ago
It's 2015, and I can only load MP3s from a single Mac/PC into the music app on my iPhone. If I load MP3s from one of my other Macs/PCs, it wipes out the prior MP3s from my iPhone. Not user-friendly.
Eric_WVGG 11y ago
I’m willing to bet that iTunes (as we know it) will get phased out in OS X 10.12. Apple has a clear pattern now where they debut big ecosystem-wide changes in iOS first, and Mac about a year later. Apple Photos, the “Flat” aesthetic, Maps, etc. A proper Apple Music app for iOS replaced the old iPod app last summer; Apple Music support was wedged into iTunes because Apple couldn’t afford to punt that feature all the way out to next year. But it seems in keeping with the pattern that an iOS-style Apple Music app for OS X, which would lack iOS syncing (works against the cloud strategy), iTunes University (deserves its own app), Podcasting (ditto, and one exists on iOS), etc.
OSButler 11y ago
I made the switch to iTunes on OS X after finding out that some of the international artists I was looking for actually had a decent catalog on iTunes. Nowadays it's more of a balance act between the features I like and the annoyances it throws at me. The most recent issue, which appears to be the result of one of the last updates, is that iTunes keeps on connecting to the store in the background for some reason, even when you're just on the normal Music view and not doing anything with the store. This wouldn't really be an issue, if it wouldn't complain every 1 to 2 hours with a popup message that it's unable to fulfill the store request. However, iTunes on OS X is still only mildly annoying for me compared to the disaster that is the redesigned Music app on iOS. It took me a while just trying to figure out how to navigate it and then its features no longer match the iTunes on OS X behaviour, making it even more difficult trying to figure out how to use it. The search feature is the one I've been fighting the most with, as it no longer allows you to play the listed results like in the desktop version, so that you have to resort to custom playlists, if you are trying to play music that is not from the same artist or from the same album.
- FussyZeus 11y ago
  Oh I hate the new Music app. I have a mount for my bike's handlebar that holds my iPhone and I use it in landscape so it doesn't wiggle quite so much, and that app in landscape on a phone is pure pain to use.
- dkonofalski 11y ago
  Just FYI, if you have the Genius or Recommendation features turned on for your library, iTunes will connect to the store to grab that information. If you don't want it to do that, just sign out of the store and turn those options off (but maybe not in that order). That should stop it from trying to connect in the background.
  - OSButler 11y ago
    Thanks, I was hoping this might be it and just checked, but those settings are already disabled in my account. I would report it as a bug if I knew what caused it or had a way to reproduce it directly, but it's just a stock error message without any kind of additional information that occurs maybe once every 1-2hs.
rocky1138 11y ago
I tried iTunes back in 2004 or so and promptly killed the process and uninstalled when it started converting my MP3s to some Apple-only format. What's with that?
- Xixi 11y ago
  AAC [1] has never been an Apple format, though in 2004 it was less ubiquitous than it is now. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Audio_Coding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Audio_Coding
  - rocky1138 11y ago
    Okay, but my point was that iTunes should have just played and organized my MP3s instead of trying to re-encode them to a different format.
o_nate 11y ago
Still a happy Zune 30GB user. One nice thing about using a discontinued device is that the manufacturer doesn't keep bloating up the software. (Also you can get refurbished replacement units cheap.) I guess at some point it won't run on the latest OS, but as of Windows 10, it still works fine.
mark_l_watson 11y ago
A decade ago, I loved iTunes. I agree with other people here that it seemed to get a little less good over time, but it is still nice. About 5 years ago I switched to Amazon Music because the songs were a little less expensive and I could also play my music on my Android phone. Recently I started using Google's $10/month no advertisements on Youtube option. I then started using Google Play Music Premium and I find it good enough so I am making yet another switch in managing my music. Fortunately, changing music hosting is not that time consuming.
bohegeek 11y ago
Of course iTunes is bad, each version since 6-7 years adding layer and layer of half baked functionalities and a list of new bugs on previously working features. Unfortunately all the other music software are nowhere as good! That's really the sorry state of the music playing/managing software industry, if such thing exists.

81 points by adam 11y ago

iTunes is a tire fire. But purely in terms of content, Apple Music is probably the best streaming service, and their recommendation system is getting better. Apple also has the benefit of iTunes/Apple Music being closer to a first-class citizen on things like car bluetooth audio systems. I would be thrilled to hear that Apple is totally revamping iTunes; I swear at it at least a couple times a week. But I'm probably not going to be able to stop using it any time soon. I'm not sure I really understand the people who use alternate music player software on OS X; huge collections of downloaded music files accessed through file player software doesn't seem like where digital music is headed. I had a gigantic collection of purchased music on my computer, and it's more an annoyance now than anything else. Hating iTunes so much you can't use it makes sense to me. But then, why not just use Spotify? Anyways: predicting where this thread is inevitably heading, here's a list off the top of my head of shit that drives me nuts about iTunes: * Purchased tracks randomly grey out and become non-playable. * I'm a "Match" customer, and iTunes/iCloud/whatever doggedly insists on retaining the file-based metadata from my old MP3s, despite me not having had those MP3s in years. * Ridiculous incoherent "Playlists / For You / New / Radio / Connect / iTunes Store" menu. "For You"? * Playlists that contain both Apple Music tracks and purchased tracks flake out and vanish, which means that if you have a large collection of purchased music, playlists just don't work. * Sometimes you can link to a playlist to share it and sometimes you can't.

CamperBob2 11y ago
And don't forget the innovative iTunes "cloud" icon. Translation: No, you can't listen to this track until it's been downloaded from the "cloud," but fortunately for you, the 3 or 4 identical duplicate tracks in your collection will play just fine. iTunes is the only good argument I've seen for requiring software engineers to be licensed by the government.
- happyscrappy 11y ago
  Careful what you wish for.
  - CamperBob2 11y ago
    Very true. I couldn't think of a better insult on short notice, so I went with the first one that came to mind.
seivan 11y ago
It gained me as a user recently. I never used it until Apple Music and with the recent Apple TV it's pretty much awesome. (Replaced Spotify) Though one of Spotify strengths were its API. Apple needs an API so people people can get different front-ends and thus pretty much kill(?) Spotify for those who dislike iTunes.
kingbathtub 11y ago
re: using an alternate music player with my 200 GB/ 50k song library, iTunes is absolutely unusable, and I completely abandoned it last year. Apple has crammed so much into iTunes and just bloated the hell out of it, which is unsurprising for a design philosophy that layered all their media services on top of one another. My replacement has been using Rdio and Swinsian. Rdio lets me stream most of what I have in my library as well as new releases. Swinsian is still necessary for obscure or underground music I've downloaded that aren't available on streaming services, as well as my personal vinyl rips, which make up maybe 1/5 of my library. so while music consumption is definitely moving away from downloaded files to streaming, there are still niche needs for a dedicated file player. Unfortunately, with the recent news about Rdio, I have no idea what streaming service I'm gonna migrate to. Audio nerds recommend Tidal, my family uses Spotify, so I'll probably give those two and Apple Music a trial spin and evaluate.
- banku_brougham 11y ago
  So Swinsian is listed in the article as the only viable alternative, my problem is its a one-person shop which is a risky bet to migrate into. OTOH, I use Sublime Text...
ryanmonroe 11y ago
Most people who have large collections of music have a lot of files that aren't available on any streaming service. Not sure if the sound quality of these services is on par with 320kbps MP3 files either.
- pfg 11y ago
  Apple Music does allow you to stream music that's not available on their platform. iTunes will upload them when first added, and other devices can then stream from Apple.
- Nicolechen 11y ago
  Maybe there are some ways to convert Apple music to unprotected format and then we can enjoy them on any players as we want. I just learned about Notebunrer recently launches a Apple music converter, I prepare to try this and perhaps buy a license during black friday. I am waiting for a big deal.
josefresco 11y ago
* Purchased tracks randomly grey out and become non-playable.* This 1000 times. I've been through three iPhones, and continue to be baffled why some of my music becomes unplayable. I solve by syncing (again and again...), navigating endless menus and changing random values in a vain attempt to find the problem and then hoping, and praying that next time I'm in my car, all my music will be available.
- banku_brougham 11y ago
  Me too. UX hell.
bane 11y ago
> I'm not sure I really understand the people who use alternate music player software on OS X; huge collections of downloaded music files accessed through file player software doesn't seem like where digital music is headed. I had a gigantic collection of purchased music on my computer, and it's more an annoyance now than anything else. I agree with you, but for those with the wherewithal, dumping all the files into a folder and pointing plex at it gives you a personal "cloud" with great capabilities, cross platform, on-the-web, mobile apps, etc.

tezza 11y ago

I am writing an iTunes replacement ( the music and library management part ). Any feature requests from HN ? Current alpha features: * Playlist resume - if you interrupt a playlist 3278 entries in, you can resume at 3278 * Music diary - track what tunes played when & where ( occasional GPS polling optional ) * Powerful music list filters * Keep track of recently played items and do not replay them for a while * Works with Spotify thanks to Spotify API for premium users * mobile app on iOS and Android Suggestions beyond this ?

seivan 11y ago
Does it work with Apple Music? So what defines it as an iTunes replacement? Sounds like a different Music Player, maybe I'm missing something?
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
JustSomeNobody 11y ago
By iTunes replacement do you mean iTunes replacement or mp3 player? Don't forget the following: * Upgrade iOS on iPhone * Backup iPhone * Sync iPhotos from/to iPhone * Sync videos from/to iPhone etc.
- tezza 11y ago
  Just the music player for start
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
navait 11y ago
Some integration with Alfred and Quicksilver would be nice on the desktop - I never use the media player itself, but prefer to bring that up and type the song/album/artist.
bsenftner 11y ago
Please make it simple to just play an entire album. I'm an infrequent iTunes user because the piece of shit expects me to research who knows what to figure out how to play an entire album. It ain't obvious, and I could care less to figure it out because they'll change the interface on a whim.

Karunamon 11y ago

I'm quickly coming to the conclusion that I am one of a very small number of people on the planet that has literally no issues with iTunes' day to day functionality. This despite abusing the hell out of it: * My library is on an NFS volume, * ..accessed with two different copies of iTunes on two different OSes * ..with north of 20k songs * ..and a library that's been backed up, restored, migrated, multiple times *..all the way since ~2002 when I got the HP branded iPod and started using it to manage my music The only conclusion I can come to, computers being deterministic machines, is that a lot of people have broken computers. Perhaps iTunes needs to be more error tolerant? There's not a whole lot of ways to say "it works for me, and I don't know what you're on about" without being straight up dismissive but.. it Just Works, at least for me. Just another data point I suppose.

smackfu 11y ago
You don't use iTunes Match or Apple Music, so you aren't really abusing it.
- feld 11y ago
  Yeah iTunes library on a network drive sucks balls in my opinion. SLOWWWWWW. And whenever my library gets horked and I try to re-match again it takes ages. It's just stupid.
- Karunamon 11y ago
  I use both. I've got Beats 1 streaming in the background as we speak, and pretty much my entire library is cloud synched.
devonkim 11y ago
How does iTunes handle situations when your NFS volume drops off the network for you? I wind up having to restart all the time and re-match my songs back to get album covers back all the time, and it drives me up the wall. I have a slightly unstable wireless network and on a CIFS share I'm having lousy performance and it's only gotten worse over time, but it used to work much better for me in the past.

acomjean 11y ago

I use itunes daily. I really like it, they made it better recently with the miniplayer up next and such. I"m able to queue up music into a list easily anytime. Maybe its my usecase, but I find it pretty sweet. That being said, itunes match, which I pay for and is supposed to sync all of my music between machines/ iphones somehow forgot a bunch of my songs. It might be part of iCloud now. I never could figure it out, but it just worked for the longest time. I turned on iCloud match and it seems to have brought most of them back. (Come to think of it maybe it was only cloud streaming songs I bought from itunes before...) Itunes on the iphone turned into Apple Music nagware till you dig into settings and turn it off. searhing for a song would show you the Apple Music version. It was odd and jarring when your itunes match wasn't working right, but for some money you can play the song you thought you had... Actually mac osx reminds me to "upgrade my keynote by upgrading my os" every time I open it. I've been using macs a long time and this new sell to me is getting grating.

Shivetya 11y ago
If iTunes would remember my last view I would be happy. I tend to wanting my playlists on the side and the songs in list format on the right. Yet each time I open iTunes its in cover format or large icons or whatnot, never rhyme or reason.

seivan 11y ago

Using Ember.js as a front-end for their Music services as massive downer. Slow on a Macbook Pro 2014. React or native would have been a better choice.

JustSomeNobody 11y ago
If it is that noticeably slow, I seriously doubt the framework for the front end is the sole issue.

Luc 11y ago

Its casual users too. I suppose there's no point in me explaining why, since it's such a common thing. This morning I clicked a downloaded MP3 file expecting it to simply play, but nooooh...

jdlyga 11y ago

I've been looking for a better alternative to iTunes for years, like Google Music. But nothing I've used has the same features like powerful smart playlists, ratings system, and the ability to change the start and stop times of songs. But iTunes is just a mess that's getting worse and worse. I might just have to suck it up and start over.

brandon272 11y ago

iTunes generally works great for me for maintaining my collection and playback, especially when combined with my home entertainment system. Where it falls apart is Apple Music, iTunes Match and iTunes Store. - iTunes Match is too unreliable when it comes to actually matching songs. The syncing is unreliable. I have songs in my collection now that were manipulated by iTunes Match and now have incorrect artist/title entries for some reason. I routinely have an issue where a song will be purchased in iTunes Store but never shows up on other computers without me having to go through a whole process of checking for available downloads (never works), signing in, signing out, etc. which often doesn't work until a week later when the song magically shows up or just doesn't show up at all. - iTunes Store is fine for buying music, if you know what you want to buy. Apple Match and iTunes are both terrible (in my opinion) for discovering new music that actually matches my own tastes. Right now I am using both Spotify and iTunes. I use Spotify to discover new music which I then buy through the iTunes Store so that I can have it in my official iTunes-based collection. I know people who have started using Spotify as their main source of music but I have an existing collection of about 4000 songs made up of MP3's/purchased files which I wish to maintain as a single collection. Using Spotify doesn't allow me to do that. Adding songs from Apple Music to my music collection seems unpleasant because then it creates a mix of existing transportable MP3's that I can move around and Apple Music files that I have no control over. It would be great to have a "single solution" that allowed me to discover new music, purchase it and maintain/listen to my collection but I've accepted that I will probably never find that solution.

jordanlev 11y ago

Here's my dilemma with iTunes: I have about 50GB of music on my computer, an early 2007 iMac. If I want to upgrade my iPhone to iOS9, I need to update iTunes to the latest version. But the latest version doesn't run on Mac OSX 10.6... and my computer is too old to upgrade to 10.7 or higher. So if I want to have ios9 and sync music to my phone, I need to buy a new computer? Pretty upset about that.

corin_ 11y ago
I wonder what data Apple have on who will be affected by things like this, how many will upgrade their PC, how many will put off buying a phone, how many will leave Apple behind, and how those things balance out to impact their profits. I imagine they'd think a lot about it and made the decision that it's more profitable to not care about your use case, but would be interested to know how they approach it.
- epmatsw 11y ago
  From a data point of one, when my grandma's old Mac Mini stopped being able to sync to or update her iPad, we ended up just caving and buying her a new Mac Mini. For the life of a computer, it really just wasn't worth the hassle.
projct 11y ago
iTunes Match is an option that is cheaper than buying a new mac.
- jordanlev 11y ago
  I looked into this but iTunes Match appears to only work for official albums it "knows". I am really into live music and have a ton of concert recordings (legal -- bands that allow audience taping), and also a lot of recordings of my own music I've made with various bands. Thanks for the suggestion though, I appreciate it.
rawTruthHurts 11y ago
Well, it shouldn't come as a surprise, that's Apple's policy towards their products.

mattdotc 11y ago

Is iTunes responsible for this trend I'm seeing more of where the Seek Forward/Backward (Fast-Forward/Rewind) symbol is being used in place of 'Next Track' and 'Previous Track?' All other complaints aside, this, to me, is iTunes' worst offense. I don't know if there was some official standard ever, but it was at a very minimum an unofficial standard for DECADES. Now some asshole designer has decided to muddle and confuse everyone by redefining the symbol. This idea has infected PowerAmp on Android now, too. I have not seen anyone discussing this before (but I haven't looked very hard). I refuse to buy into this new definition. Am I the only one bothered by this? I can't take a music application seriously if it can't get the symbols right.

FussyZeus 11y ago
I've never actually noticed this. I'm pretty sure if you hold the button it still does the scrubbing though.
- mattdotc 11y ago
  You're right, it does seek if you press and hold. Thanks for that info. I don't meant to shoot the messenger and this isn't directed at you, but this behavior makes no sense and is not intuitive to anyone who's ever listened to music on a CD (which is still A LOT of people). I couldn't care less about scrubbing; I'd do that with the little progress bar because it's quicker and more precise than guessing how long to hold a button. I really just hate that one arrogant (or ignorant) person/group decided to change the meaning of a well-understood symbol as if they were the decider for everyone else.
  - FussyZeus 11y ago
    Oh I'm not defending it at all, I'm saying the missing | at the end of the button was never something I noticed. Possibly because I converted from Windows Media Player when I got a mac and the layout of media player is basically the same for playback controls (though they got the icon right). I agree, it's dumb.
  - GFK_of_xmaspast 11y ago

stevetrewick 11y ago

Them and everyone else. I suspect iTunes' major problem is that it encapsulates all (most?) of the code for communicating with iOS devices, hence XCode upgrades requiring it to be shut down and vice versa. Hence the amazing feature bloat. This plus its age probably make it a scary ball of mud. Not sure that's enough to explain some of the UX choices - a few updates back I had to turn to google to find out they hadn't actually removed the mini player and then again to find out how to get back to the full window. Maybe it makes sense to keep all the media management functions in one place, but then there's iPhoto/Photos, iBooks and the MAS, and then the Windows version. It's like the app level equivalent of a god class.

KasianFranks 11y ago

It always has.

FussyZeus 11y ago

iTunes as an application is by far the worst UX present on a Mac or a PC, which is especially surprising considering how nice the vast majority of OS X apps are to use. You can go down the list of the recommendations Apple gives out to developers on how make what they consider great apps for OS X and iTunes breaks every single one almost as if it were intended as a use case for terrible UX. The navigation and structure changes with every movement, there are occasionally two seperate back buttons present that can either do the same thing or completely different things, the "background activity" or as I like to call it, "What you need to know is happening to your iPhone" is constantly buried beneath the currently playing track, and is not readily accessible unless you click a 8pt square down arrow, on and on... Not to mention, as an owner of multiple machines I prefer to use ownCloud to sync my various libraries. Windows and Linux this is absolutely not an issue. Because iTunes insists on owning the directory and file structure though, I can't just point it at the folder or it will literally ruin it, I have to instead keep two copies of my library on my Macbook, and occasionally use an rsync alias to move over new stuff. Thankfully I usually do all my purchasing (on Amazon MP3) on the Macbook anyway so it's of little consequence, but it's just one more irritating thing to add to the list. I'm an Apple fan, I admit, but iTunes is a fucking train wreck.

hellofunk 11y ago
Totally agree. I love Apple's products but iTunes is an abomination. One anecdote notes that U2's Bono complained to Jobs that it was no different than a spreadsheet... well, I'd be happy if it were halfway as useful as a good spreadsheet. Instead it has zero flexibility. There seems to be a trend in some software to prefer search functionality over other basic UI techniques for presenting information. When I have a big music library, I don't always know what I'm looking for explicitly. I want to browse my music based on my own strategy, but doing this in iTunes has never really been possible. And it's not better on the iPhone's own music app. For a company that led the world in music-listening technology, their software for it sure has always been downright awful.
- FussyZeus 11y ago
  It's weird too, if you're looking at Playlists it looks like Excel, the only way out is to view your entire collection, but then you can't find sh!t because it gives you NO information as opposed to ALL information. Also, on the topic of playlists, removing a song from a playlist is labeled "Delete." Are you f!cking kidding Apple? This is UI Design 101!

tammer 11y ago

iTunes isn't designed for the type of users this article discusses. The real issue the author should have focused on is there is no ecosystem as progressive or stable which is still focused on users who need/want to listen to their specific copy of a song rather than a generic hosted one. I have a feeling this type of user will slowly fade out, and eventually looking at a HD filled with music (on a laptop less!) will provoke a reaction similar to the anachronistic feeling one has looking at a wall of CD's or DVD's.

GFK_of_xmaspast 11y ago

I find itunes to be just fine for dealing with a decade-old library with 20k+ songs that's been transferred between a half-dozen different computers, and it's certainly better than the terrible mp3 players I tried on linux in the last 18 months or so (banshee was the least horrible but it's random album shuffle was incredibly broken).

cgriswald 11y ago

Match. Match activated itself I don't know how many times. Removed all music from my phone so I was streaming everything. I honestly didn't notice at first except some of my music was missing (because it wasn't available on Match), and my music would inexplicably stop playing in certain areas. It screwed up all my tag edits/album art (on ~7K songs!) and because of some duplicate problem, which I have yet to resolve, my music doesn't sync properly onto my iPhone. (Among many, many other complaints about iTunes.) My only question is, if I switch to something like Swinsian (which looks nice), how do I get the music and playlists onto my iPhone? (I've also been thinking about switching to Android since iOS 9 and its updates have turned my very expensive iPhone 6 into a slow, buggy POS.)

banku_brougham 11y ago

I am one of those alienated users, and I eagerly pressed the link to discover the alternatives. To no avail. Are there viable alternative music players that can sync to iPhone?

hackaflocka 11y ago

It's 2015, and I can only load MP3s from a single Mac/PC into the music app on my iPhone. If I load MP3s from one of my other Macs/PCs, it wipes out the prior MP3s from my iPhone. Not user-friendly.

Eric_WVGG 11y ago

I’m willing to bet that iTunes (as we know it) will get phased out in OS X 10.12. Apple has a clear pattern now where they debut big ecosystem-wide changes in iOS first, and Mac about a year later. Apple Photos, the “Flat” aesthetic, Maps, etc. A proper Apple Music app for iOS replaced the old iPod app last summer; Apple Music support was wedged into iTunes because Apple couldn’t afford to punt that feature all the way out to next year. But it seems in keeping with the pattern that an iOS-style Apple Music app for OS X, which would lack iOS syncing (works against the cloud strategy), iTunes University (deserves its own app), Podcasting (ditto, and one exists on iOS), etc.

OSButler 11y ago

I made the switch to iTunes on OS X after finding out that some of the international artists I was looking for actually had a decent catalog on iTunes. Nowadays it's more of a balance act between the features I like and the annoyances it throws at me. The most recent issue, which appears to be the result of one of the last updates, is that iTunes keeps on connecting to the store in the background for some reason, even when you're just on the normal Music view and not doing anything with the store. This wouldn't really be an issue, if it wouldn't complain every 1 to 2 hours with a popup message that it's unable to fulfill the store request. However, iTunes on OS X is still only mildly annoying for me compared to the disaster that is the redesigned Music app on iOS. It took me a while just trying to figure out how to navigate it and then its features no longer match the iTunes on OS X behaviour, making it even more difficult trying to figure out how to use it. The search feature is the one I've been fighting the most with, as it no longer allows you to play the listed results like in the desktop version, so that you have to resort to custom playlists, if you are trying to play music that is not from the same artist or from the same album.

FussyZeus 11y ago
Oh I hate the new Music app. I have a mount for my bike's handlebar that holds my iPhone and I use it in landscape so it doesn't wiggle quite so much, and that app in landscape on a phone is pure pain to use.
dkonofalski 11y ago
Just FYI, if you have the Genius or Recommendation features turned on for your library, iTunes will connect to the store to grab that information. If you don't want it to do that, just sign out of the store and turn those options off (but maybe not in that order). That should stop it from trying to connect in the background.
- OSButler 11y ago
  Thanks, I was hoping this might be it and just checked, but those settings are already disabled in my account. I would report it as a bug if I knew what caused it or had a way to reproduce it directly, but it's just a stock error message without any kind of additional information that occurs maybe once every 1-2hs.

rocky1138 11y ago

I tried iTunes back in 2004 or so and promptly killed the process and uninstalled when it started converting my MP3s to some Apple-only format. What's with that?

Xixi 11y ago
AAC [1] has never been an Apple format, though in 2004 it was less ubiquitous than it is now. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Audio_Coding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Audio_Coding
- rocky1138 11y ago
  Okay, but my point was that iTunes should have just played and organized my MP3s instead of trying to re-encode them to a different format.

o_nate 11y ago

Still a happy Zune 30GB user. One nice thing about using a discontinued device is that the manufacturer doesn't keep bloating up the software. (Also you can get refurbished replacement units cheap.) I guess at some point it won't run on the latest OS, but as of Windows 10, it still works fine.

mark_l_watson 11y ago

A decade ago, I loved iTunes. I agree with other people here that it seemed to get a little less good over time, but it is still nice. About 5 years ago I switched to Amazon Music because the songs were a little less expensive and I could also play my music on my Android phone. Recently I started using Google's $10/month no advertisements on Youtube option. I then started using Google Play Music Premium and I find it good enough so I am making yet another switch in managing my music. Fortunately, changing music hosting is not that time consuming.

bohegeek 11y ago

Of course iTunes is bad, each version since 6-7 years adding layer and layer of half baked functionalities and a list of new bugs on previously working features. Unfortunately all the other music software are nowhere as good! That's really the sorry state of the music playing/managing software industry, if such thing exists.