3 ms·
iTunes has become so horrible over the years that on my list of products I want to launch in my lifetime is a music player / manager. Every one I've ever seen i
by vinceguidry 10y ago
iTunes has become so horrible over the years that on my list of products I want to launch in my lifetime is a music player / manager. Every one I've ever seen is horrendous. None of them allow me to manage music in anything approaching a sane fashion. None of them allow me to add music from multiple sources, forcing me to deal with multiple entries in a dumb library.
My music library is huge, but I have no desire to listen to every single song on it. My shuffle pool is a hand-curated selection of some 500 tracks out of perhaps 10,000. I can recreate the pool when I have to but it's a phenomenal pain in the ass.
I used to do okay with the checked song feature in iTunes. But the checks are not respected by the software and there's no easy way to back them up and restore. After enough times syncing my phone to find songs that I'd unchecked magically got checked again, I switched to manual management.
I hate keeping state on my laptop but I've had to learn to put up with keeping it on my phone because Apple is just horrible at it. More than once I've lost all that state and had to recreate it. It's a skill I don't want to have to be good at.
Fucking Apple. If they can't figure this shit out, then one day I'm going to eat their lunch. It would not be hard at all to make a music app that's 10x better than their tripe.
- pbuzbee 10y agoLately I've been strongly considering making my own personal streaming system. I've spent years building a large and organized collection. I'm reluctant to switch to a streaming service because I'll lose the years of ratings, playlists, playcounts etc that I rely on, but at the same time both desktop and mobile software get worse all the time.
- cageface 10y agoI've been very happy with Swinsian: http://swinsian.com http://swinsian.com The UI is pretty utilitarian but everything seems to work.
- vinceguidry 10y agoMy music lives on my iPhone. If it can't manage device libraries then it's useless to me.
- coldtea 10y agoAdd 3-4 more similar demands from other users with different use cases, and we can see how iTunes got to be what it is...
- vinceguidry 10y agoYeah, but this is Apple we're talking about. They used to be excellent at boiling a feature set down to the essential needed for most. It's the whole reason why they got hugely successful in the first place, remember the original iPod?
- eeeeeeeeeeeee 10y agoGoogle Play has these features (upload and stream your entire library on any device) and it works great.
- vinceguidry 10y agoThe problem I had with Android was that the Bluetooth support for the Nexus device was shit. That turned out to be a much worse problem than the library management issues I'm having with Apple. If I can't even have a satisfactory experience streaming music to my car, that's just a total non-starter. It would be like a phone that could do everything but make calls, but I actually use my device way more for music than for phone calls.
- coldtea 10y agoI've tried it. Didn't like it, reverted back.