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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 functiona

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.
- Karunamon 11y ago
  The last time this happened, it just started marking the songs missing (they got a little (!) symbol). I restarted iTunes, and it complained of the library not being found. Fixed the mount, fired it back up, and played the missing songs again. You have to try playing those again if you want the songs to come up in shuffle, since it's the only way to clear the "missing" status.
mattkevan 11y ago
Agreed. I've been using iTunes daily since it first came out back in 2001, and I really don't see what all the hate is about. Like you I've not treated it well – I've migrated the library across at least four computers, backed it up, restored it, and it's even been used by two computers simultaneously on a shared drive – and it's always worked fine. The UX is also fine, even with Apple Music turned on. It does a lot of things, but it's still the best music player out there. Every time I've tried to use something else, a missing or not well implemented bit of functionality has always brought me back to it. Apple probably should have split the iPod/iOS/app management functionality into a separate utility, but iOS devices are now completely stand-alone, so they could drop all that stuff without issue. And Apple Music is fantastic - it nailed my musical tastes way more accurately than Spotify, and I've used Spotify for years. The playlists it suggested were almost spookily good. I tried Google Music on my phone for a while, and really didn't get on with it. Like all the Play services, it felt clunky and didn't have the polish it should. Using it felt like work.
- bsenftner 11y ago
  The hate is from people that do not use it daily; the interface is far from intuitive for infrequent users, their help is a joke, and when all you want is to listen to music quickly and get back to what you actually are doing, iTunes completely fails.

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.

Karunamon 11y ago
The last time this happened, it just started marking the songs missing (they got a little (!) symbol). I restarted iTunes, and it complained of the library not being found. Fixed the mount, fired it back up, and played the missing songs again. You have to try playing those again if you want the songs to come up in shuffle, since it's the only way to clear the "missing" status.

mattkevan 11y ago

Agreed. I've been using iTunes daily since it first came out back in 2001, and I really don't see what all the hate is about. Like you I've not treated it well – I've migrated the library across at least four computers, backed it up, restored it, and it's even been used by two computers simultaneously on a shared drive – and it's always worked fine. The UX is also fine, even with Apple Music turned on. It does a lot of things, but it's still the best music player out there. Every time I've tried to use something else, a missing or not well implemented bit of functionality has always brought me back to it. Apple probably should have split the iPod/iOS/app management functionality into a separate utility, but iOS devices are now completely stand-alone, so they could drop all that stuff without issue. And Apple Music is fantastic - it nailed my musical tastes way more accurately than Spotify, and I've used Spotify for years. The playlists it suggested were almost spookily good. I tried Google Music on my phone for a while, and really didn't get on with it. Like all the Play services, it felt clunky and didn't have the polish it should. Using it felt like work.

bsenftner 11y ago
The hate is from people that do not use it daily; the interface is far from intuitive for infrequent users, their help is a joke, and when all you want is to listen to music quickly and get back to what you actually are doing, iTunes completely fails.