19 ms·

iTunes will never work well

305 points by firasd 10y ago

riffic 10y ago
iTunes is terrible on OS X too. Apple needs to throw it all out and write modular replacement apps for various functionality from the ground up.
TD-Linux 10y ago
Do you still have to use iTunes to transfer music to iPhones? Can't you just copy files over and use some other playback app on the iPhone? The author sounds makes it sound like they are "forced" to use iTunes. (disclaimer: the newest Apple product I own was manufactured in 1983)
- senoroink 10y ago
  As far as I know, yes. If there's another way, they don't make it obvious.
- ploxiln 10y ago
  There is no "copying files over" with iDevices. For a long time there was "gtkpod" / "libgpod" which reverse-engineered iPod protocol and database format to load songs on an iPod. But on later iPods it involved an extracted Apple signing key, and Apple issued (successful) DMCA takedowns on websites which provided these keys. Most pages on the gtkpod website currently appear to be defunct, probably because it's been impractical to make it work with iPhones.
- tdkl 10y ago
  Playlist sync is the #1 thing why I use iTunes on Windows for years now with Android phone. It's easy, seamless and works. Manually copying multiple GBs and keeping playlists on both devices seems asinine. Sadly I haven't found a Linux replacement which syncs music like this, probably no one is interested in making that works since everything is cloud nowadays.
- majewsky 10y ago
  > Do you still have to use iTunes to transfer music to iPhones? Don't use an iPhone myself, but if I did, I would try if KDE Connect on iOS supports file syncing over Wifi like it does on Android.
  - makomk 10y ago
    KDE Connect is Android-only, and even if there is an iOS version sometime I don't think it would ever be able to support file syncing like on Android due to Apple restrictions on filesystem access.
- slfnflctd 10y ago
  This is one of those simple things I was happiest about when I finally moved from iOS to Android. Look, it's an operating system which actually allows you to move any files you want back and forth like with any other external storage! What an amazing innovation! How did they do it?! It was like having handcuffs removed. There are many other reasons, but this is probably my biggest issue with iOS (well, this and all the hours of my life iTunes wasted while I wrestled with it to attempt something simple, such as its constant, needlessly slow & complex updates). It's intentionally broken to inconvenience us in the hopes of making more money unethically. I shudder in revulsion.
peterburkimsher 10y ago
iTunes was beautiful up to 10.7. Then they removed the column browser, disabled the Library view, and broke USB sync. I still haven't upgraded, and I'm desperate for another company to step in.
- lupin_sansei 10y ago
  Agreed. You can enable the column browser and the library view if you want though. Check the View menu.
hashkb 10y ago
This isn't constructive, just spiteful and angry. I can't tell what problem OP actually has with iTunes.
- firasd 10y ago
  Hmm… I’m not spiteful, I just don’t have any hope for improvement. iTunes has been chronically bad, I could find thousands of other articles and testimonials about that. At this point the issue is clearly endemic to the product. Constructively: everything else aside, one glaring and easily-fixed problem is the dialog boxes. No program released after 1997 should be so behind in the state of the art that it throws up modal dialogs that lock up the whole app to say pointless things like “We’re checking for updates”.
  - brandon272 10y ago
    I use iTunes every day and have never noticed this modal.
- throwanem 10y ago
  The same problems everyone else has, from the sound of it.
coralreef 10y ago
I found the new iTunes for Mac to be quite clean (12.5)
lukevers 10y ago
People always bash iTunes, but I actually use it quite often and I like it. Maybe it's just me though? The only thing that bugs me, is on iOS, when I load the music app (that's basically iTunes for iOS, right?) it shows a blank page until it can connect to the their servers to grab some data. It doesn't have a problem if I'm on wifi or a fast connection, but I'm often in places where my service is shit, and I get a white screen and can't pick what music I want to listen to. My workaround is to pull the menu up from the bottom of the screen and just hit "play" and then it usually works. But iTunes itself, I do like.
- hanklazard 10y ago
  That must-connect-to-server-before-I-show-you-your-LOCAL!-files has really pushed me over the edge. Infuriating! I've been trying out some replacment music apps, but haven't really found any great alternatives at this point. I guess the whole thing will sort itself out when I switch to android in the next few months. Someone around here put it best a few wks ago in an iPhone7 discussion: Steve Jobs is dead.
  - knodi123 10y ago
    > I guess the whole thing will sort itself out when I switch to android in the next few months. The stock android music app was, last time I punished myself by using it, terrible. This cloud integration stuff is so damn pushy. I wish there was something out there with only the features of winamp, but enough UI polish that it doesn't look like some college kid's hobby project.
    - RhodaLs 10y ago
      I don't use Android currently, but when I did, PowerAmp was a great music player. Simple interface. Would automatically find sound files wherever you put them. Played most formats including flac. Worked very well with my BT headphones. Never had a problem with it.
    - flukus 10y ago
      For a long time it was also the poster boy for how async programming is terrible. Press next twice in a row and the song that played was whichever song loaded last, sometimes after playing a bit of the one that loaded first. That's if it didn't crash of course.
trevyn 10y ago
Hah! I also literally had to Google how to play a song on repeat, but for me in the new iOS 10 Music app.
- zwily 10y ago
  I found that on accident the other day. It wasn't very discoverable, but on the whole, I'm really enjoying the UI revamp.
- jsz0 10y ago
  IIRC the location / icon for the song/album repeat toggle hasn't changed in iTunes since 11.0 in 2012 though. The menu entry for it hasn't changed in more than a decade. Music on iOS 10 was a big revamp so that's understandable but iTunes? It simply hasn't changed much or at all in 4 years. No clue how anyone could be confused about it.
- huphtur 10y ago
  Related: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tfrWqGcsMg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tfrWqGcsMg
jrcii 10y ago
I've grown very fond of a CLI media player named cmus. It's lightning fast and does everything I need with a simple interface http://matthieukeller.com/media/2015.01/2015.01.cmus.png http://matthieukeller.com/media/2015.01/2015.01.cmus.png I also keep aliases in my .bash_profile for streams like this: alias bbc='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://bbcwssc.ic.llnwd.net/stream/bbcwssc_mp1_ws-eieuk 2> /dev/null'
- mikeroher 10y ago
  That's awesome. Do you have any others??
  - jrcii 10y ago
    Sure. There are a lot of streams available on shoutcast.com, just click the download icon and copy the URL, some stations list their stream URL on the site, just google the call letters + "m3u" or "pls" etc, then there is this site which is the best directory I've found so far radioroku.com. If you use iOS there's also a great app for playing these streams called fstream. Here is my list: alias wor='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://wor-am.akacast.akamaistream.net/7/495/179680/v1/auth.akacast.akamaistream.net/wor-am 2> /dev/null' alias wgy='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://wgy-am.akacast.akamaistream.net/7/697/21577/v1/auth.akacast.akamaistream.net/wgy-am 2> /dev/null' alias npr='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://www.npr.org/streams/mp3/nprlive24.pls 2> /dev/null' alias rain='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://yp.shoutcast.com/sbin/tunein-station.pls?id=2340 2> /dev/null' alias rain2='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://yp.shoutcast.com/sbin/tunein-station.pls?id=368490 2> /dev/null' alias rain3='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQ9OWMsJBTk 2> /dev/null' alias art='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://yp.shoutcast.com/sbin/tunein-station.pls?id=366888 2> /dev/null' alias chopin='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://yp.shoutcast.com/sbin/tunein-station.pls?id=590375 2> /dev/null' alias phil='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://yp.shoutcast.com/sbin/tunein-station.pls?id=248466 2> /dev/null' alias french='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://www.listenlive.eu/franceinfo.m3u 2> /dev/null' alias fip='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://www.listenlive.eu/fip128.m3u 2> /dev/null' alias bbc='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://bbcwssc.ic.llnwd.net/stream/bbcwssc_mp1_ws-eieuk 2> /dev/null' alias 1010='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://8733.live.streamtheworld.com:80/WINSAMAAC_SC 2> /dev/null' alias ewtn='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://http.yourmuze.com/ewtn-2/mp3-128-s.mp3 2> /dev/null' alias wabc='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://8723.live.streamtheworld.com:80/WABCAMAAC_SC 2> /dev/null' alias wktu='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://wktu-fm.akacast.akamaistream.net/7/110/19973/v1/auth.akacast.akamaistream.net/wktu-fm 2> /dev/null' alias chant='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://calmradio.com/playlists-free/gregorian.pls 2> /dev/null' alias chanteurs='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://sv1.vestaradio.com:4090/ 2> /dev/null'
neilellis 10y ago
I've switched to using Plex now, I find iTunes and the Music app way to complicated to use and constantly throwing up dialog boxes when all I want to do is listen to some music. I've never truly understood how the people who gave us Safari and OS X gave us iTunes - they couldn't be more different.
- mrsteveman1 10y ago
  > I've never truly understood how the people who gave us Safari and OS X gave us iTunes - they couldn't be more different. They're almost certainly from completely separate teams, I've always heard that Apple operates like a bunch of disconnected groups that rarely ever interact with each other, perhaps that has changed recently. But regardless of the details the end result is very often as you describe, and it's odd to see happen over and over. There are certainly managers and executives working over each of those groups that should be guiding them in the right direction so that things feel like a "part of the whole".
  - flukus 10y ago
    > They're almost certainly from completely separate teams, I've always heard that Apple operates like a bunch of disconnected groups that rarely ever interact with each other, perhaps that has changed recently. Every company of non-trivial size operates like that.
    - majewsky 10y ago
      A company is usually a tree-like structure, where the branches are connected by the root node. Too bad that this particular company's root node was garbage-collected in 2011 while there were still live references to it.
      - nicky0 10y ago
        But iTunes was already shit when the root node node was still around.
- 10y ago
jheriko 10y ago
i don't understand how apple have a reputation for good ui... all of their stuff is terrible. the main problem: zero discoverablity - i need to google how to do things, then get some snotty fanboy answer about how easy and obvious it is, but there is literally no way to infer the functionality from the design. they do love to steal context too... and interrupt your flow... ... i could go on and on, but having zero-discoverability is highly unforgivable, its an entire, rock-solid argument on its own.
- askafriend 10y ago
  To be fair, even Google has terrible UI/UX these days. Just look at Google Maps or Gmail. Material design isn't that great for discoverability either.
  - flukus 10y ago
    They took away the zoom in/out floating buttons on the android maps app, managing to destroy discoverability and single handed operation.
    - striking 10y ago
      At least on my OnePlus phone, you can double-tap the screen and drag up or down to zoom in or out, like a scroll wheel. It's better than buttons, in my humble opinion.
      - ViViDboarder 10y ago
        But not discoverable. There is no visual indicator telling you about the feature. Only trial and error.
        madeofpalk 10y ago
        Not every feature needs to be immediately discoverable. The default and 'main' way of zooming is the (un)pinch gesture. Take keyboard shortcuts - they're EXTREMELY undiscoverable, but they're not required for most operations, it's more of a power-user feature.
mrsteveman1 10y ago
I'm still kinda curious why iTunes has blocked the UI thread so often for such a long time, perhaps a limitation of the overall architecture of the app combined with having webviews everywhere calling out to native code?
- giaosudau 10y ago
  This is the most annoying in Itunes I tried Apple Music but couldn't stand to wait between each click to album artist and so on. That why I switched to Spotify which is much faster and easy to use.
chiaro 10y ago
Wait, you can star-rating AND heart songs? Why? Why both?
- JoBrad 10y ago
  Probably to accommodate people who just want the like system, and people who want a more complex system.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- firasd 10y ago
  I think the heart is new while the star-ratings have always been there.
- kalleboo 10y ago
  The hearts affect Apple Music algorithms. The stars are legacy (I don't even think the new iOS Music app has a way to see/change them, or I just can't find it in that tire-fire of a UI)
- systoll 10y ago
  Stars are old; hearts are new; stars are gone by default, but you can turn them back on in the settings. Why there's no conversion factor [EG: heart = 5 stars], i don't know
  - sooheon 10y ago
    There's no reason to convert backwards if they want to phase out stars. Also, I'm guessing they hope to make the act of pressing heart an "experience" for the listener. Give everyone the joy of professing your love of a song to their algorithms. I know I got a dialog playing it up the first time I pressed the heart.
M_Grey 10y ago
This is why I still use Winamp, and now more and more, Plex.
- zamalek 10y ago
  Although I'm a proud owner of a Winamp license, I've been using AIMP over the past year or so. It's blatantly, if not purposefully, a Winamp clone but has a few excellent innovations of its own and is frequently updated. I strongly recommend it for any Winamp fans.
  - M_Grey 10y ago
    Thank you! I just checked it out, and as a long-time Winamp user (I mean... since there was first a Winamp) I see exactly what you mean and I love it.
Bud 10y ago
Interesting that every single UI example in this article is from an old version of Windows. Fuck Windows. You want iTunes to work well? You want to see Apple's real UI? Then use their real platform.
- firasd 10y ago
  Are you saying on OS X I wouldn't have gotten the inscrutable dialog saying, "You are about to start playback. Do you want to clear the 2 songs previously added to Up Next?" (I guess, all these years later, I kinda get it? But they should just have moved the song you selected to the top of the Up Next queue.)
  - Bud 10y ago
    Honestly, I don't know, about that particular detail. I haven't seen that, though. Which version of iTunes was this? Anyway, the question itself isn't that offensive, right? They want to know whether you intend to play your selected song and THEN the things in queue, or clear out the queue instead. I admit that a modal dialog is...sub-optimal here, but I'm not sure how else to do this.
  - sooheon 10y ago
    That dialog happens when you've added some songs to Up Next, then double-click on a new playlist/album. Double clicking on a playlist/album means play this song and all the ones that come after it in the album. So you've given itunes conflicting instructions. Without that dialog, there's no way of resolving the conflict without pissing someone off. > But they should just have moved the song you selected to the top of the Up Next queue. You can do this by right clicking a song, and clicking Play Next. There is no dialog for that. But imagine how frustrating it would be if they adopt your proposed behavior for someone double clicking on an album. What if I just want to clear everything and just play this album? I want to hear it now, not wait until this song ends.
- jfb 10y ago
  It's a catastrophe on Mac OS as well.
- 10y ago
sparkzilla 10y ago
I spent almost two days trying to resync my music after iTunes deleted it for no reason. It's the worst software on the planet.
- coleca 10y ago
  After I subscribed to iTunes Match, it "helpfully" reworked all of my ~4300 song iTunes library so that most of the songs where I ripped a whole CD into iTunes were now spread across various "Greatest Hits" albums from the same (or sometimes different) artist, with random cover art. And after reading Jim Dalrymple's horror stories of upgrading to Apple Music, I am fearful both of ever discontinuing my iTunes Match subscription or upgrading to Apple Music. My solution thus far has been to stop even trying to listen to music on iTunes and switch to podcasts instead (on Overcast, not Apple's horrible Podcasts app). #ThanksiTunes
  - sooheon 10y ago
    This is the one complaint I agree with. Honestly, all the so called UX problems in those tweets are eye-rollingly contrived, but there's no excuse for messing with the actual music that I own.
  - kccqzy 10y ago
    iTunes Match never messed up my library, though Apple Music certainly did.
- andymurd 10y ago
  I feel your pain. Same thing happened to me twice(!) and then it tried to delete all my Google contacts. iTunes is now second from the top on my list of software-I-will-never-use-again[0], so that means no shiny Apple devices for me. Which is a shame, because otherwise I quite like Apple stuff. [0] Of course, Lotus Notes is top of the list
- sparkzilla 10y ago
  iTunes is actually the main reason I am considering switching to Android.
jsz0 10y ago
I'm having a hard time understanding these tweets. Playing a song and adding songs to 'up next' are two different things. That dialog box has saved me multiple times. What's wrong with it? It only occurs when you are telling iTunes to do conflicting things that it cannot resolve by itself. It's a better outcome than clearing a playlist someone may have spent a lot of time working on. Software update and login dialogs? Yes those are a thing many apps include. What makes these unique or interesting? The podcasts menu seems super straight forward to me. Am I missing something here? It says exactly what it does. Contacting the iPhone update server dialog? Once upon a time Apple's servers would go down under a heavy load of people activating new iOS devices. Presumably the dialog is there to inform you there is a problem contacting the iPhone update servers. Either way I think it's long since been changed.
- firasd 10y ago
  Okay. So I’m no UX expert, just a developer and I’ve also worked in product management. I think at some point, if you work in this field, you have to develop instincts around the design and experience of things. A modal (i.e. app-locking) dialog that says “contacting the iphone software update server”, which is current behavior and not changed as far as I can tell, is so far out of the realm of acceptable in my view, that if we differ on that point, we can’t even begin a discussion about the more subtle issues… (Consider that Chrome updates itself all the time; now imagine if you launched Chrome, typed in gmail.com, and it suddenly locked up all your tabs because it was ‘contacting the Chrome software update server’.) After all, design trades in subtleties, otherwise if the discussion is just about explaining the purpose for a widget, everything in an interface can be explained, even this well-known ‘bad UI’ example: http://i.imgur.com/UJXoqwR.png http://i.imgur.com/UJXoqwR.png
  - omonra 10y ago
    I remember that file renamer program! Think it was actually rather well reviewed at the time. Didn't realize it was in some sort of bad UI hall of fame :)
  - barneybooroo 10y ago
    The Microsoft AutoUpdate client on OSX is a beautiful mess for this. doing anything else > Microsoft AutoUpdate starts bouncing in the dock > Modal "There are no updates for your Microsoft software at this time." dialog appears. Seeing as half of the updates it receives are FOR THE UPDATE CLIENT, it's incredible this behaviour hasn't been fixed in the last eight years.
javajosh 10y ago
For OSX VLC is a surprisingly good player for music and it supports FLAC. However I'm quite interested in building a dedicated OSS music player node/electron for OSX (and windows eventually).
- newscracker 10y ago
  Would you mind developing a QuickLook plugin for the latest OS X/macOS releases that could play FLAC? :) I've been breaking my head over it and don't seem to have any solutions.
  - javajosh 10y ago
    Wouldn't mind at all. Of course, that's not really in my wheelhouse...
andrewclunn 10y ago
iTunes circa 2008 was amazing. Like so many things, once they unified the bIOs and desktop OS code bases and technologies everything went to shit.
circa 10y ago
Unfortunately iTunes is still better than the competition. I also know that isn't saying much. RIP Rdio, Lala, and countless others. Hell even Beats was better!
hhsnopek 10y ago
"Spotify" just switch now and never look back
- JoBrad 10y ago
  Absolutely agree. It just doesn't work well for music I own that isn't on Spotify.
  - tonybaroneee 10y ago
    Yep, cloud sync is the only reason I still use Apple Music.
- strange_quark 10y ago
  Spotify has just as bad if not worse UX as iTunes/Apple Music. Spotify kept taking away useful features from their desktop app and promised to return them, but never did, even years later. Plus, I don't need to run another instance of Chrome and Adobe Flash which constantly consumes 5% of my CPU and a few hundred MB of RAM just to listen to some music. While still not perfect, I'm pretty happy with the newest release of iTunes and the iOS music app.
  - johansch 10y ago
    I think users like you are part of the reason iTunes is like it is. Never, ever, take away a feature. Never ever refactor the UI to simplify things.
  - rawrmaan 10y ago
    Completely disagree. Spotify has nailed the desktop/mobile music app UX like nobody ever has, and it is an absolute joy to use. Yes it's missing a few features, but nothing that's actually truly essential to just listening to music.
knodi123 10y ago
The single worst thing about itunes, in my opinion, is the way it handles duplicate songs. It has a "detect duplicates" feature, but all that does is show a list of groups of songs that it thinks are duplicates, and it has false positives! But the one thing it can't do, is detect when you've added multiple copies of the exact same file in the same directory. My music collection needs to by synced across computers, and if it refused to add the exact same file twice, then the operation would be trivial. Add mp3s to your music directory, drag and drop all files to itunes, and let it detect new songs. Since it's not, I have to do a long series of "okay, the timestamp on this file is newer than the newest added-on date in itunes.... I think.... except this directory was untarred, so it retains old timestamps, and blah blah blah..."
- labster 10y ago
  fdupes is your friend in cases like these — it finds duplicate files fast. As usual, the CLI tools are much better at solving problems than a terrible GUI like iTunes.
  - majewsky 10y ago
    You don't even need a separate tool for that: find -type f -name \*.mp3 -exec md5sum {} + \ | uniq -dDw 32
    - dangravell 10y ago
      Not all music files are MP3s. When people mean duplicates, they normally mean duplicate songs, not duplicate files (audio + metadata + headers).
    - knodi123 10y ago
      The problem isn't duplicate files, it's that iTunes has an internal list of songs, and it allows the same file to appear in the list twice. I can manage a directory of files, I just can't manage iTunes' indexing of them. I understand why you would have assumed this was a file issue, though, because the real problem is the most idiotically stupid thing ever.
chipotle_coyote 10y ago
Okay. I get annoyed by things in iTunes and think the whole application really is overdue for replacement -- I'd like to see things split up somewhat more like iOS, with a "Music" app, a "Video" app and (since this is the desktop) a device management app. But I confess that a lot of the lamentations about the UI design (not necessarily the UX design, which I'll circle back to in a moment) strike me as, well, highly overblown. I'm sorry the author couldn't figure out how to make songs repeat, for instance, but while the repeat icon has moved in newer versions of iTunes, it's literally the same icon as in the screenshot of iTunes 4 from a decade ago. (That's the earliest screenshot I could find.) And perhaps the Windows version of iTunes is uniquely horrible compared to the OS X, er, macOS version, but I can type the name of a song into search and have it instantly located; if I double-click a track name (or the big play arrow that shows up when I hover by it!) it just starts playing, but it certainly won't select a rating or a heart unless I click a star or a heart; so on and so forth. I'd really argue the biggest problem with iTunes' UX stems from the way it's still, after all this time, inexplicably modal. I've never had a problem syncing an iOS device while it's playing music, as one commenter mentioned, but there are dialog boxes it brings up that are not only UI-blocking but process-blocking, which makes iTunes kind of a mess as a headless media server. (It still plays media, but won't be able to add any until the dialog box is dismissed.) But I still cut iTunes a fair amount of slack. I've been using it for nearly as long as it's been available, I've subscribed to iTunes Match, I've subscribed to Apple Music, and I've ripped my own music library full of lossless tracks. Not only has Apple not, repeat, not, either deleted those or fiendishly replaced the files with AAC simulacra, it turns out to handle mixing my ripped tracks, purchased tracks, and "borrowed" tracks (i.e., ones that are only available in my library through the Apple Music subscription) pretty seamlessly. The introduction of Apple Music was a huge mess, admittedly, both in terms of UX and some teeth-grindingly poor song-matching algorithms (a distinct regression from iTunes Match on its own) -- but the server-side flubs seem to be straightened out now, and the current UI for Apple Music is pretty solid. But, yes, I'm sure iTunes will be rewritten. I'm also positive that when it is, there will be a veritable explosion of thinkpieces that will almost all be variants of, "Who asked for all these horrible changes? iTunes was just fine! Apple is always fixing things that weren't broken! This would never have happened if Steve Jobs were still alive!"
altitudinous 10y ago
You missed the point. iTunes is a old product holding together well. * No doubt if iTunes was designed today it would be completely different. But as a legacy product it has to satisfy legacy users that are familiar with the UI, and legacy products (this iTunes still supports 10 year old iPods and older?!!) * Say iTunes failed today. No doubt the writer would say it deserved it, and the product was a failure from the beginning. But I want to emphasise that iTunes has existed for several years now and has given many hours of pleasure for many millions of users. it works well and is a success. You are naive if you think iTunes one day will work well. It won't get better. What is going to happen with it? It is obvious. You don't have to go past Microsoft with Internet Explorer. They kept that product going for years and it was a great success. However eventually the tech aged and they replaced it with a new product, Microsoft Edge. The same will happen with iTunes.
- epistasis 10y ago
  >But as a legacy product it has to satisfy legacy users that are familiar with the UI, and legacy products (this iTunes still supports 10 year old iPods and older?!!) The UI changes so much with each release that I have no clue how to navigate any more, and don't care to learn because I'll have to relearn it all again in 12-24 months. There is no consistency, and legacy to uphold, except perhaps a legacy codebase.
- kayamon 10y ago
  > You missed the point. No he didn't. > iTunes is a old product holding together well. No it's not, it's a terrible product and always has been. > You are naive if you think iTunes one day will work well. He doesn't think that. In fact, the title of the article states the exact opposite. > What is going to happen with it? It is obvious. Yes, which is the whole point of the article.
- untog 10y ago
  > as a legacy product it has to satisfy legacy users that are familiar with the UI I cannot think of an application with a less consistent UI than iTunes. Every major version seems to present a total rethink and re-engineering of the entire UI layer. If consistency is a goal for iTunes then it has failed dramatically.
cageface 10y ago
If you're using a Mac then you should go buy yourself a copy of Swinsian now: http://swinsian.com/ http://swinsian.com/ It's a lean, fast native player that supports tons of formats, has great library management features, and omits all the bloat and confusion of iTunes.
- Dain42 10y ago
  It doesn't really matter to me, as I'm not a Macintosh user anymore, but does it have the smart playlist feature like iTunes? That's the biggest thing I miss in most music players, including my current one, Google Play Music (with my all-access).
  - ptomato 10y ago
    Yup, it does.
  - crummy 10y ago
    Not sure if you're aware but Simon Weber has a Chrome extension for smart playlists in Google Music. https://github.com/simon-weber/Autoplaylists-for-Google-Music https://github.com/simon-weber/Autoplaylists-for-Google-Musi...
kawsper 10y ago
I like iTunes, but I hate how Apple try to get me to subscribe to Apple Music both on iOS and OSX.
Twisell 10y ago
Well to be fair the title might be: iTunes will never work well ON WINDOWS. I was always wondering why I can read so much rants about a good product I've been using on a daily basis for years... Well it seams that the Windows version sucks, and what is described is really a world away from the native cocoa version on macOS.
- United857 10y ago
  Believe me, it's not much better on Mac from a UX perspective.
- forrestthewoods 10y ago
  There is no user experience difference. There hasn't been for at least 10 years. You can't put together a post that says "this is how it works on OS X" versus "how it works on Windows". Because it's the same.
pfarnsworth 10y ago
iTunes is the worst piece of software I've come across in a long time. I banned it from my computer until I upgraded to my iPhone 7. Now, the only computer with enough disk space to accommodate my backups of 256GB is my personal desktop, so I was forced to install iTunes. It's infuriating and in the 4 years that I haven't used iTunes, it hasn't gotten any better. I would love to blacklist whoever is responsible for iTunes from ever finding work again, because it's obvious they give an ounce of care about UI design or keeping their customers happy. They really don't deserve to be working in software. If they had any honor they would be thoroughly embarrassed for producing such a horrible piece of software.
- laurentdc 10y ago
  The last good iTunes I've used was on OS X 10.4 on a Mac Mini G4. There were little iGimmicks around so it would play music, sync with the iPod, that's it. From there it went downhill.
  - Dain42 10y ago
    Somewhere around 4.9 or 5.x is when I think it was best. They'd added library functionality for movies, TV, and audiobooks, which meant it was a one-stop shop for my media library on my Mac at the time. It was also still fairly lightweight, because it didn't have loads of stuff tacked on to it yet. Really, the biggest thing I miss from iTunes, as a Google Play user, are the Smart Playlists. I loved being able to pull in every song I had from a set of artists and then shuffle through that. The "radio" features from Google just doesn't do it for me. I rarely want to listen to a bunch of music that's not in my library but which is similar to something I do have there. I'd much rather self-curate what I'm listening to. But I don't think the demand is there for that as much, now. I still wish they'd at least remove the 1000 song cap on playlists, so I could manually do this.
- zepto 10y ago
  It's obviously not a delightful piece of software, but attacking the team that works on it is mean spirited. You know nothing about the constraints they work under.
deleted 10y ago
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eklavya 10y ago
I don't know about the UI or anything but it's 2016 and iTunes still makes me re-download any firmware from start in case of any network issue. So if you are downloading a 2.5 gigs file and that screws up even once in that whole download at any place, iTunes says fuck you. This becomes a problem when they screw up iOS 10 update and brick your iPhone and the only way to fix it is restoring from iTunes and then iTunes keeps giving you the middle finger.
- dx034 10y ago
  Not only that, when I had to re-download the firmware due to the failed iOS10 update, even pausing the download caused it to restart..
  - kccqzy 10y ago
    And interesting if it's downloading some purchased content from the iTunes Store, this doesn't happen. Also, those downloads don't throw a modal dialog when it's trying to "contact the server". It just seems like downloading firmware doesn't reuse existing code for downloading content.
jdeibele 10y ago
I was surprised (and pleased) to see Apple add "rename" to the file menu in Finder for El Capitan. Coming from Windows, I found the "click on a file to rename it" very unintuitive. Evidently a lot of other people did, too. Now if they'd make it so Finder always opens a window if you select Finder and a window isn't open ...
- the_other 10y ago
  Finder includes your desktop, so technically you already do have a window open.
aakarpost 10y ago
Ditto. It has a UX problem.
AJRF 10y ago
The failure of iTunes is intrinsically linked to the unsuitability of WebObjects as a modern application framework. iTunes isn’t bad because Apple is inept, far from it, but to make it fine at this point would require a rewrite and I assume at Apple there is a tradeoff between “Is this crappy to use” and “Well, does it at least work?”, with the latter being a stronger motivator (or in this case, demotivator) of change than the former.
- masklinn 10y ago
  AFAIK the vast majority of itunes is a regular cocoa application, what does webobject have to do with anything?
- kccqzy 10y ago
  WebObjects is a server side technology. iTunes doesn't directly use it.
f4stjack 10y ago
As far as I have used iTunes the only problem I see with it is trying to do EVERYTHING in a single package. It tries to be - music player - content manager (music & video) - sync manager - update manager - Apple Music client and these are the five things I can name on top of my head, without opening up the app. This is fine, but they are not honoring their boundaries. When I am listening to my music, don't mess me with the sync business. If there is a new version, put a helpful icon but only steal my focus if I click to sync tab. It's like going to a supermarket to buy a piece of candy. Sure there are meats and potatoes on the next shelves but I need my candy. Yes I can hear you overhyped sales person about the discounts but. I. Need. My. Candy. Also I cannot see the logic behind the Apple Music's integration with iTunes. I have tried to use AM with iTunes on windows and it is not a fun experience I can tell you. Spotify, even though people are grumbling about its ux, provides a smoother experience. Search, double click play, right click to save or add to a customized playlist. Or mess with that knob to download.
- yaegers 10y ago
  The problem is, they can never satify everybody. I bet you that if they ever split iTunes up in separate apps like you suggested there will also be a lot of people who dislike that approach and rant along the lines of "Why did they split it up? It was so convenient to have everything in one place. Now I have to open a multitude of apps" No matter how much sense that may make, there will be people like that. The question is, how many compared to people who want things to be plit up. Apple would be best served to conduct some polls or maybe even a nice beta programm where you can use separate apps and then give feedback if it works as intended.
  - f4stjack 10y ago
    Agreed. Satisfaction is not an objective commodity. But Apple Music really, definitively, needs its own app considering the problems it creates in people's iTunes libraries.
    - the_other 10y ago
      I agree, but doubt it will happen. Step by step, Apple are pushing their customers towards subscription services. They did it with photos first, then music. From macOS Sierra onwards they'll be doing it with the "Documents" and "Desktop" directory. iTunes has always acted as an advance party for Apple's next business experiments. It gets UI changes ahead of the OS. It gets "features" like this subscription funnelling ahead of the OS.
josteink 10y ago
> Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting iTunes, too. While a great quote, it's not entirely true. Some of us said enough is enough and ditched the iOS/Itunes ecosystem for something better. Why suffer needlessly?
- nicky0 10y ago
  And even better, with iOS 10 we can now delete the Music and iTunes apps from our phones.
  - isolli 10y ago
    Hide. Not delete, hide.
  - slig 10y ago
    Unfortunately that's not what happens. You can removed it from the Home screen [1], the app keeps using space on your phone. [1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204221 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204221
    - nicky0 10y ago
      Ah, that's interesting. Well, as long as it's not on my screen I'm happy enough. :)
forrestthewoods 10y ago
I have never seen any software turn adults into a pile of tears faster that iTunes. Trying to put music on your iPhone the night before a trip is the most god damn frustrating thing in modern software. It literally can't be done. If all you want to do is copy a few songs to your iPhone you can't fucking do it. It tries to sync your phone. Then says "warning: this will delete everything". What the fucking fuck motherfucker. I just want to copy a dozen god damn mp3 files into a file system. It's not hard! Syncing is a broken concept. There's no such thing as syncing. There's no such thing as being in sync. No PC, Mac, or iOS device of mine can ever be fully sunk. (sync'd?) The totality of "my stuff" is a venn diagram. Things on my iPhone. Things on my iPad. Things on my Macbook. I have save data shared across devices. But also save data unique to each device. I own 100Gb of music. Most of it is on my Macbook. Some of it is on my iPhone. None of it is on my iPad. I even own music downloaded to none of these devices. Those purchases exist only in the cloud. Plus god knows how many apps I've bought and since deleted. There is no such thing as syncing. No device can ever be fully sync'd. Fully up to date. The whole idea of syncing is fundamentally broken and wrong. Fuck iTunes. No iPhone of mine will ever know iTunes ever exists. I now use Spotify. I download music to my phone for trips. My phone will never be connected to any Mac or PC. If you must copy music don't use iTunes. Once upon a time I used Copytrans. It's free and gets the job done. http://www.copytrans.net/copytransmanager/ http://www.copytrans.net/copytransmanager/ (This rant brought to through the sobbing tears of my partner. Thanks iTunes. You worthless piece of shit.)
- gergles 10y ago
  Copytrans now costs $20. There is no good tool for "just put some fucking music on my iPhone" that doesn't cost money that I've ever been able to find.
tempodox 10y ago
So this dude made a couple of tweets, then he wrote a medium article about his tweets.
- kwijibob 10y ago
  I actually found this method quite readable and a pleasant surprise!
tomasandrle 10y ago
It must be really hard to maintain and add features to such a huge old application. Platforms have changed underneath it, the devices and services it connects to have come and gone, Objective C has changed a lot as well. And then there's the Windows version... Still, iTunes is crap. I hated it so much that I wrote my own music player for iOS, just to avoid using iTunes for putting music on my phone [1]. My guess is that sooner or later, iTunes will be dismantled and the features will be split into multiple smaller apps. There will be a music app that JUST plays music from the Apple Music account, a podcast app that JUST plays podcasts, a sync app that JUST helps you manage stuff on your phone etc. Some features will be removed (Internet radio, ripping & burning CDs). And of those that remain, only a few will need to keep a Windows counterpart. That way, things will be easier to maintain. [1] Tiny Player: https://itunes.apple.com/app/id1140849233 https://itunes.apple.com/app/id1140849233
- massysett 10y ago
  I think Apple would have split up iTunes long ago if it were only a Mac application, but they don't want to distribute a bunch of smaller Windows apps.
  - tomasandrle 10y ago
    Sure. Hopefuly "a bunch" could be reduced to just two: Apple Music client and iPhone sync app. The rest would be removed without a replacement (on Windows). The headphone jack removal shows that Apple is willing to make people angry about some things for a long term benefit and iTunes is imho a good candidate for the next "act of courage", heh.
    - TorKlingberg 10y ago
      Could they drop the iPhone sync app completely? These days the iPhone should be able to do all the syncing it needs directly against the internet.
      - Klathmon 10y ago
pearjuice 10y ago
I am glad people in the reality distortion field of Apple trying to defend this and throw an ad hominem regarding the author, are getting downvoted into oblivion. Maybe they will realize some day.
unwind 10y ago
I'm not an iTunes user, but the irony of posting about UI issues on a site that breaks my browser's Back button hit me pretty hard. Ouch. Please don't do that, sites.
kennell 10y ago
iTunes is beyond hopeless at this point. It needs a full rewrite, possibly split into multiple apps.
soufron 10y ago
It's so true. We used to have very simple and efficient music players such as winamp. The problem was that they were playing free mp3 that you stored on your hard drive. With regards to that, iTunes is not a music player, it's a media manager. It's all designed around buying stuff, not playing it. It makes me think of the bad dvds with non-skippable trailers we used to have 10 years ago.
bshimmin 10y ago
One interesting thing about iTunes is that it is one of the few applications I can think of which manages to irritate both power/sophisticated users (ie. everyone here) and also regular users. I'm not sure anyone actually likes it.
SCdF 10y ago
OK, so I use OSX, and I want to play mp3s that I have locally, and see them in a library format that I can search. Even maybe have album art, though I'm not fussed. Ignoring itunes, how do I do it? What is a good fast low memory music playing app with library management? If I was on Windows I'd be using Foobar2k. On OSX it seems to be either itunes, a command line app, or various bloated messes that aren't honestly better than itunes.
- ldjb 10y ago
  Have you tried Clementine? https://www.clementine-player.org https://www.clementine-player.org
- tomasandrle 10y ago
  Vox is not perfect but works fine as a player: http://coppertino.com/vox/mac http://coppertino.com/vox/mac
- aidos 10y ago
  In a similar vein, is there a general recommendation for locally web hosting your music yourself. Is it one of the plexy type setups? More OT, but what about personal photos / videos? I find the whole Apple photos experience depressing. Two examples of why - my wife and I really share a photo collection, but it's neigh on impossible for us to automatically sync all our images to one another - this weekend I made a stop motion clip with my kids by taking photos on my phone. We tried to move the images to my computer so we could put them together / edit them but were stuck waiting for the devices to sync on some sort of black magic driven schedule. Is there any general solution out there for families who want to share their content (local music collection and photos / videos taken) seamlessly?
- Keyframe 10y ago
  On OSX I quit and just use preview. I'm not even kidding.
- swiley 10y ago
  Open cubic player might have OSX support (OSX has OSS right?) Is it a mess? Yes, but it's not really bloated.
ForFreedom 10y ago
One of the features I hate in iTunes is adding music to the library. When adding songs it should create a shortcut from the music folder that is being added from rather than creating a copy of the songs in its folder. When creating a copy into the iTunes folder the storage space on the macbook is lowered.
- FussyZeus 10y ago
  I've actually just moved my entire iTunes library into my ownCloud directory and let it sync to my other systems. Windows is fine with it, just point your chosen media app at the folder and it should just ignore all of iTunes' files and grab the music. Every once in awhile I get a sync error but it never seems to affect anything and sorts itself out, going on about 8 months now with no real problems.
- andruby 10y ago
  That is why this is a setting that you can change: In iTunes Preference, under "Advanced", simply uncheck "Copy files to iTunes Media folder when adding to library" and you'll have the exact behavior you want.
rawTruthHurts 10y ago
Off topic trip to Memory Lane: http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/OSX/itunes2_erased_drives.html http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/OSX/itunes2_erased_drives.html
jharohit 10y ago
There never was and never will be a better music player than Winamp! #WinampSkins
- gdulli 10y ago
  I was happily paying $10/month to Spotify but canceled my subscription because the desktop player was so bad and incomplete. After a while I realized that attempting parity with other players was not on their to-do list. I'm not even a power user, there are many advanced and obscure features of Winamp/foobar I never used. But those products have the nuances of day to day management of playlists and usability figured out and Spotify in comparison doesn't care. It seems they'd be happier to have you use web/mobile and not even support a desktop player.
- StuffMaster 10y ago
  Foobar2000 my friend
optimuspaul 10y ago
I have never understood why there is so much hate for iTunes. I think it's fine. It does everything I need it to and probably more. Why put so much energy into debasing something?
- pwthornton 10y ago
  I think most users would agree with you. Hating on iTunes is popular with tech people, but I don't know if your average person cares. The biggest complaint I have with iTunes is that it tries to do too many things, and it would be better to break the app up. It somehow got itself into the smartphone and tablet backup business. Years ago, I wrote that iTunes should be split up into smaller apps: http://interchangeproject.org/2012/04/16/itunes-should-be-split-into-3-4-smaller-more-focused-apps/ http://interchangeproject.org/2012/04/16/itunes-should-be-sp... I don't know if I really care that much anymore, as iTunes works fine for my uses, but I'm also no longer a heavy iTunes user. I use my iPhone to play music at home and on the go. I watch movies either on my Apple TV or iPad. I mainly use iTunes to see what's new in the store. That could be a reflection of using iTunes, however.
CapitalistCartr 10y ago
I strongly prefer a Unix approach to tools: each tool does one thing, Vasili. One thing only, please. That eases understanding of what is going on. Users are better educated and troubleshooting bugs/flaws is vastly easier. I consider a corporate decision as to what my computer will do irrespective of my wishes to be a flaw.
agentgt 10y ago
Almost every cloud music app I have used has issues with the concept of a "queue" or playing a snippet of something while I am in the middle of a playlist. Spotify, Mog <defunct>, rdio, and itunes seems to never do what I want when it comes to "just checking out a song while other songs are playing". Lets say you have enqueued up a bunch of songs on Spotify or perhaps have a really good shuffled playlist god forbid you accidentally click on a song instead of queue it. Because of this annoyance at times I just give up and put on Pandora. Their song selection sucks but otherwise I think Pandora is fairly stress free UX wise.
- yoz-y 10y ago
  I really liked queueing in the original Amarok. iTunes kind of halfway gets it right with the concept of Up Next. However it seems now that in iTunes 12 it is no longer possible to queue an album at the end if there is nothing in the queue at all. I'd prefer if the action of playing an album did "put it in queue & play"
newscracker 10y ago
Apple needs to allow importing songs into the Music app on iOS from any source, not just iTunes and its own store. This has been a long standing pain point. Not everybody wants Apple Music and not everybody wants to buy music from Apple. But there are people with existing music collections who want to add them to iOS devices easily without having to use iTunes. This procedure works for iBooks, where you can add books from any source online through the share sheet. But it's not allowed for Music in 2016^, nearly 10 years since Steve Jobs wrote his Thoughts on DRM. ^: presumably due to licensing issues and/or agreements with the record labels and/or wanting a monopoly on music
- dublinben 10y ago
  If you want to manage and control your own music library, you're not Apple's intended customer. If you are inside the Apple ecosystem, they expect you to play entirely within their ecosystem. I suggest you try using an Android phone, where you can easily drag & drop any files you want, and can manage them with any program you choose.
- izacus 10y ago
  Isn't that what iTunes Match did (does?) for a fee?
  - dave5104 10y ago
    No, iTunes Match simply allows you to sync your music via iCloud. If you have a song on your computer in iTunes, Match will find the song in their catalogue and let you download that to your iPhone, or it will upload the music file from your computer and let you download that to your iPhone. It was basically a way to cut the cord, so to speak, and not have to actually sync your phone to your computer. You still need iTunes for it all to work in the end.
- Grishnakh 10y ago
  >Apple needs to allow importing songs into the Music app on iOS from any source, not just iTunes and its own store. Why? I think Microsoft "needs" to go back to the Win7 UI, or better yet just open-source their OS and shut down their company, but that's not going to happen because they don't agree with me. >Not everybody wants Apple Music and not everybody wants to buy music from Apple. So what? If you don't like having to buy all your music from Apple, then don't buy an iPhone. There's plenty of other non-Apple devices out there. People who don't want Apple Music and don't want to buy from Apple are not target customers for Apple. They don't need you; they have plenty of suckers happy to pay them $$$$ for a phone and then more $$$ to buy all their music from iTunes. >agreements with the record labels and/or wanting a monopoly on music Android phones don't have this problem, and they have music stores too, plus you can just load your own music in MP3 or Ogg format easily. On many phones, you don't even have to use USB to transfer it, because you can just copy it from your PC to an SDcard which you can then insert in the phone. Of course it's the monopoly angle: they want a monopoly on how Apple users get music, and they have one. If you don't like that, then don't buy an Apple.
newscracker 10y ago
When iTunes started, it was fine because there was only music to deal with. But with the addition of other media types in iOS devices, it's become very messy. If you have books and photos on your iOS device, there is no simple way to get these to their respective apps on the Mac (iBooks and Photos/erstwhile iPhoto). Using iTunes will do almost nothing if you aren't buying all your stuff from Apple, except backup all data (including these) into a "hidden" location. You'd have to use each of these apps every time you want to just get the latest from the iOS device to it. Apple should introduce a simple sync application that will take all photos to Photos, all books to iBooks, all apps to iTunes or some new App app (the removal of app transfer from iOS devices into iTunes is a big issue in different ways), all music to iTunes, etc., along with all the respective user-created metadata (like collections for books, favorites for photos, etc.). Most importantly, this should work for things obtained from non-Apple sources. (Sometimes I wish Apple would have interviews with users like me to understand how difficult things are and use that to improve its products)
xufi 10y ago
Using VLC with command line to listen to my playlists works great for me
gregn 10y ago
Saying "iTunes will never work well" is like saying the sky is blue. Why would anyone need a kitchen sink to copy an audio file to their device? Oh, wait, unless there is manufacturer locks, and controls put in place to steer consumers' capital flow. Oh yeah, that's why. From that perspective I would say iTunes is a smashing success. And this negative social virus has spread like gang-busters spawning countless imitators.
- Declanomous 10y ago
  This trend is why I started using Linux full time again. I'm not a die-hard believer in the Unix Philosophy, but systems designed with it in mind generally avoid the worst bloat. I feel like a similar mindset is ruining gaming as well. The best games from the past had a design that I'd compare to movies. The story and fun was self-contained and complete. If another installment was created, it was also self-contained and complete. With rise advent of microtransactions, games seem more like sitcoms or slot machines. The experience of a single episode (or pull of the lever) is a full experience, but it's intentionally designed to feel always feel slightly incomplete. I mean, the design of games now is pretty user-unfriendly. Anything that could compete with a publisher's ability to charge more for gameplay has been crippled. Simple example -- almost every game used to include god-mode cheat codes that you could use to your hearts content. Now a lot of games charge money for extra weapons and other things that used to be considered cheats, even in the single player modes. Another example is the team creation tools in EA sports franchises. You used to be able to copy and paste players from one team to another. My brother and I would create teams where every player on the team was our favorite player in Madden and FIFA and pit them against each other. That feature has been absolutely gutted in FIFA, most likely because it interfered with their Ultimate Team mode. However, they gutted it for offline play as well. I don't fault the developers and publishers trying to makee money. I do think it's really lame that modern games have intentionally locked or removed simple and historically common features in the pursuit of profit. It makes every gaming experience feel like I'm being forced to buy everything from the company store, and it sucks.
- Grishnakh 10y ago
  I can easily copy files to my Android phone with the simple "adb" command-line utility. Or, I can copy them onto an SDcard any way I please, and insert the card into my phone. iTunes is definitely a smashing success, thanks to gullible suckers who happily buy anything that Apple shovels at them.
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gjolund 10y ago
iTunes was a significant factor in me moving to Android.

305 points by firasd 10y ago

iTunes is terrible on OS X too. Apple needs to throw it all out and write modular replacement apps for various functionality from the ground up.

TD-Linux 10y ago

Do you still have to use iTunes to transfer music to iPhones? Can't you just copy files over and use some other playback app on the iPhone? The author sounds makes it sound like they are "forced" to use iTunes. (disclaimer: the newest Apple product I own was manufactured in 1983)

senoroink 10y ago
As far as I know, yes. If there's another way, they don't make it obvious.
ploxiln 10y ago
There is no "copying files over" with iDevices. For a long time there was "gtkpod" / "libgpod" which reverse-engineered iPod protocol and database format to load songs on an iPod. But on later iPods it involved an extracted Apple signing key, and Apple issued (successful) DMCA takedowns on websites which provided these keys. Most pages on the gtkpod website currently appear to be defunct, probably because it's been impractical to make it work with iPhones.
tdkl 10y ago
Playlist sync is the #1 thing why I use iTunes on Windows for years now with Android phone. It's easy, seamless and works. Manually copying multiple GBs and keeping playlists on both devices seems asinine. Sadly I haven't found a Linux replacement which syncs music like this, probably no one is interested in making that works since everything is cloud nowadays.
majewsky 10y ago
> Do you still have to use iTunes to transfer music to iPhones? Don't use an iPhone myself, but if I did, I would try if KDE Connect on iOS supports file syncing over Wifi like it does on Android.
- makomk 10y ago
  KDE Connect is Android-only, and even if there is an iOS version sometime I don't think it would ever be able to support file syncing like on Android due to Apple restrictions on filesystem access.
slfnflctd 10y ago
This is one of those simple things I was happiest about when I finally moved from iOS to Android. Look, it's an operating system which actually allows you to move any files you want back and forth like with any other external storage! What an amazing innovation! How did they do it?! It was like having handcuffs removed. There are many other reasons, but this is probably my biggest issue with iOS (well, this and all the hours of my life iTunes wasted while I wrestled with it to attempt something simple, such as its constant, needlessly slow & complex updates). It's intentionally broken to inconvenience us in the hopes of making more money unethically. I shudder in revulsion.

peterburkimsher 10y ago

iTunes was beautiful up to 10.7. Then they removed the column browser, disabled the Library view, and broke USB sync. I still haven't upgraded, and I'm desperate for another company to step in.

lupin_sansei 10y ago
Agreed. You can enable the column browser and the library view if you want though. Check the View menu.

hashkb 10y ago

This isn't constructive, just spiteful and angry. I can't tell what problem OP actually has with iTunes.

firasd 10y ago
Hmm… I’m not spiteful, I just don’t have any hope for improvement. iTunes has been chronically bad, I could find thousands of other articles and testimonials about that. At this point the issue is clearly endemic to the product. Constructively: everything else aside, one glaring and easily-fixed problem is the dialog boxes. No program released after 1997 should be so behind in the state of the art that it throws up modal dialogs that lock up the whole app to say pointless things like “We’re checking for updates”.
- brandon272 10y ago
  I use iTunes every day and have never noticed this modal.
throwanem 10y ago
The same problems everyone else has, from the sound of it.

coralreef 10y ago

I found the new iTunes for Mac to be quite clean (12.5)

lukevers 10y ago

People always bash iTunes, but I actually use it quite often and I like it. Maybe it's just me though? The only thing that bugs me, is on iOS, when I load the music app (that's basically iTunes for iOS, right?) it shows a blank page until it can connect to the their servers to grab some data. It doesn't have a problem if I'm on wifi or a fast connection, but I'm often in places where my service is shit, and I get a white screen and can't pick what music I want to listen to. My workaround is to pull the menu up from the bottom of the screen and just hit "play" and then it usually works. But iTunes itself, I do like.

hanklazard 10y ago
That must-connect-to-server-before-I-show-you-your-LOCAL!-files has really pushed me over the edge. Infuriating! I've been trying out some replacment music apps, but haven't really found any great alternatives at this point. I guess the whole thing will sort itself out when I switch to android in the next few months. Someone around here put it best a few wks ago in an iPhone7 discussion: Steve Jobs is dead.
- knodi123 10y ago
  > I guess the whole thing will sort itself out when I switch to android in the next few months. The stock android music app was, last time I punished myself by using it, terrible. This cloud integration stuff is so damn pushy. I wish there was something out there with only the features of winamp, but enough UI polish that it doesn't look like some college kid's hobby project.
  - RhodaLs 10y ago
    I don't use Android currently, but when I did, PowerAmp was a great music player. Simple interface. Would automatically find sound files wherever you put them. Played most formats including flac. Worked very well with my BT headphones. Never had a problem with it.
  - flukus 10y ago
    For a long time it was also the poster boy for how async programming is terrible. Press next twice in a row and the song that played was whichever song loaded last, sometimes after playing a bit of the one that loaded first. That's if it didn't crash of course.

trevyn 10y ago

Hah! I also literally had to Google how to play a song on repeat, but for me in the new iOS 10 Music app.

zwily 10y ago
I found that on accident the other day. It wasn't very discoverable, but on the whole, I'm really enjoying the UI revamp.
jsz0 10y ago
IIRC the location / icon for the song/album repeat toggle hasn't changed in iTunes since 11.0 in 2012 though. The menu entry for it hasn't changed in more than a decade. Music on iOS 10 was a big revamp so that's understandable but iTunes? It simply hasn't changed much or at all in 4 years. No clue how anyone could be confused about it.
huphtur 10y ago
Related: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tfrWqGcsMg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tfrWqGcsMg

jrcii 10y ago

I've grown very fond of a CLI media player named cmus. It's lightning fast and does everything I need with a simple interface http://matthieukeller.com/media/2015.01/2015.01.cmus.png http://matthieukeller.com/media/2015.01/2015.01.cmus.png I also keep aliases in my .bash_profile for streams like this: alias bbc='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://bbcwssc.ic.llnwd.net/stream/bbcwssc_mp1_ws-eieuk 2> /dev/null'

mikeroher 10y ago
That's awesome. Do you have any others??
- jrcii 10y ago
  Sure. There are a lot of streams available on shoutcast.com, just click the download icon and copy the URL, some stations list their stream URL on the site, just google the call letters + "m3u" or "pls" etc, then there is this site which is the best directory I've found so far radioroku.com. If you use iOS there's also a great app for playing these streams called fstream. Here is my list: alias wor='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://wor-am.akacast.akamaistream.net/7/495/179680/v1/auth.akacast.akamaistream.net/wor-am 2> /dev/null' alias wgy='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://wgy-am.akacast.akamaistream.net/7/697/21577/v1/auth.akacast.akamaistream.net/wgy-am 2> /dev/null' alias npr='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://www.npr.org/streams/mp3/nprlive24.pls 2> /dev/null' alias rain='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://yp.shoutcast.com/sbin/tunein-station.pls?id=2340 2> /dev/null' alias rain2='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://yp.shoutcast.com/sbin/tunein-station.pls?id=368490 2> /dev/null' alias rain3='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQ9OWMsJBTk 2> /dev/null' alias art='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://yp.shoutcast.com/sbin/tunein-station.pls?id=366888 2> /dev/null' alias chopin='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://yp.shoutcast.com/sbin/tunein-station.pls?id=590375 2> /dev/null' alias phil='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://yp.shoutcast.com/sbin/tunein-station.pls?id=248466 2> /dev/null' alias french='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://www.listenlive.eu/franceinfo.m3u 2> /dev/null' alias fip='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://www.listenlive.eu/fip128.m3u 2> /dev/null' alias bbc='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://bbcwssc.ic.llnwd.net/stream/bbcwssc_mp1_ws-eieuk 2> /dev/null' alias 1010='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://8733.live.streamtheworld.com:80/WINSAMAAC_SC 2> /dev/null' alias ewtn='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://http.yourmuze.com/ewtn-2/mp3-128-s.mp3 2> /dev/null' alias wabc='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://8723.live.streamtheworld.com:80/WABCAMAAC_SC 2> /dev/null' alias wktu='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://wktu-fm.akacast.akamaistream.net/7/110/19973/v1/auth.akacast.akamaistream.net/wktu-fm 2> /dev/null' alias chant='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://calmradio.com/playlists-free/gregorian.pls 2> /dev/null' alias chanteurs='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://sv1.vestaradio.com:4090/ 2> /dev/null'

neilellis 10y ago

I've switched to using Plex now, I find iTunes and the Music app way to complicated to use and constantly throwing up dialog boxes when all I want to do is listen to some music. I've never truly understood how the people who gave us Safari and OS X gave us iTunes - they couldn't be more different.

mrsteveman1 10y ago
> I've never truly understood how the people who gave us Safari and OS X gave us iTunes - they couldn't be more different. They're almost certainly from completely separate teams, I've always heard that Apple operates like a bunch of disconnected groups that rarely ever interact with each other, perhaps that has changed recently. But regardless of the details the end result is very often as you describe, and it's odd to see happen over and over. There are certainly managers and executives working over each of those groups that should be guiding them in the right direction so that things feel like a "part of the whole".
- flukus 10y ago
  > They're almost certainly from completely separate teams, I've always heard that Apple operates like a bunch of disconnected groups that rarely ever interact with each other, perhaps that has changed recently. Every company of non-trivial size operates like that.
  - majewsky 10y ago
    A company is usually a tree-like structure, where the branches are connected by the root node. Too bad that this particular company's root node was garbage-collected in 2011 while there were still live references to it.
    - nicky0 10y ago
      But iTunes was already shit when the root node node was still around.
10y ago

jheriko 10y ago

i don't understand how apple have a reputation for good ui... all of their stuff is terrible. the main problem: zero discoverablity - i need to google how to do things, then get some snotty fanboy answer about how easy and obvious it is, but there is literally no way to infer the functionality from the design. they do love to steal context too... and interrupt your flow... ... i could go on and on, but having zero-discoverability is highly unforgivable, its an entire, rock-solid argument on its own.

askafriend 10y ago
To be fair, even Google has terrible UI/UX these days. Just look at Google Maps or Gmail. Material design isn't that great for discoverability either.
- flukus 10y ago
  They took away the zoom in/out floating buttons on the android maps app, managing to destroy discoverability and single handed operation.
  - striking 10y ago
    At least on my OnePlus phone, you can double-tap the screen and drag up or down to zoom in or out, like a scroll wheel. It's better than buttons, in my humble opinion.
    - ViViDboarder 10y ago
      But not discoverable. There is no visual indicator telling you about the feature. Only trial and error.
      - madeofpalk 10y ago
        Not every feature needs to be immediately discoverable. The default and 'main' way of zooming is the (un)pinch gesture. Take keyboard shortcuts - they're EXTREMELY undiscoverable, but they're not required for most operations, it's more of a power-user feature.

mrsteveman1 10y ago

I'm still kinda curious why iTunes has blocked the UI thread so often for such a long time, perhaps a limitation of the overall architecture of the app combined with having webviews everywhere calling out to native code?

giaosudau 10y ago
This is the most annoying in Itunes I tried Apple Music but couldn't stand to wait between each click to album artist and so on. That why I switched to Spotify which is much faster and easy to use.

chiaro 10y ago

Wait, you can star-rating AND heart songs? Why? Why both?

JoBrad 10y ago
Probably to accommodate people who just want the like system, and people who want a more complex system.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
firasd 10y ago
I think the heart is new while the star-ratings have always been there.
kalleboo 10y ago
The hearts affect Apple Music algorithms. The stars are legacy (I don't even think the new iOS Music app has a way to see/change them, or I just can't find it in that tire-fire of a UI)
systoll 10y ago
Stars are old; hearts are new; stars are gone by default, but you can turn them back on in the settings. Why there's no conversion factor [EG: heart = 5 stars], i don't know
- sooheon 10y ago
  There's no reason to convert backwards if they want to phase out stars. Also, I'm guessing they hope to make the act of pressing heart an "experience" for the listener. Give everyone the joy of professing your love of a song to their algorithms. I know I got a dialog playing it up the first time I pressed the heart.

M_Grey 10y ago

This is why I still use Winamp, and now more and more, Plex.

zamalek 10y ago
Although I'm a proud owner of a Winamp license, I've been using AIMP over the past year or so. It's blatantly, if not purposefully, a Winamp clone but has a few excellent innovations of its own and is frequently updated. I strongly recommend it for any Winamp fans.
- M_Grey 10y ago
  Thank you! I just checked it out, and as a long-time Winamp user (I mean... since there was first a Winamp) I see exactly what you mean and I love it.

Bud 10y ago

Interesting that every single UI example in this article is from an old version of Windows. Fuck Windows. You want iTunes to work well? You want to see Apple's real UI? Then use their real platform.

firasd 10y ago
Are you saying on OS X I wouldn't have gotten the inscrutable dialog saying, "You are about to start playback. Do you want to clear the 2 songs previously added to Up Next?" (I guess, all these years later, I kinda get it? But they should just have moved the song you selected to the top of the Up Next queue.)
- Bud 10y ago
  Honestly, I don't know, about that particular detail. I haven't seen that, though. Which version of iTunes was this? Anyway, the question itself isn't that offensive, right? They want to know whether you intend to play your selected song and THEN the things in queue, or clear out the queue instead. I admit that a modal dialog is...sub-optimal here, but I'm not sure how else to do this.
- sooheon 10y ago
  That dialog happens when you've added some songs to Up Next, then double-click on a new playlist/album. Double clicking on a playlist/album means play this song and all the ones that come after it in the album. So you've given itunes conflicting instructions. Without that dialog, there's no way of resolving the conflict without pissing someone off. > But they should just have moved the song you selected to the top of the Up Next queue. You can do this by right clicking a song, and clicking Play Next. There is no dialog for that. But imagine how frustrating it would be if they adopt your proposed behavior for someone double clicking on an album. What if I just want to clear everything and just play this album? I want to hear it now, not wait until this song ends.
jfb 10y ago
It's a catastrophe on Mac OS as well.
10y ago

sparkzilla 10y ago

I spent almost two days trying to resync my music after iTunes deleted it for no reason. It's the worst software on the planet.

coleca 10y ago
After I subscribed to iTunes Match, it "helpfully" reworked all of my ~4300 song iTunes library so that most of the songs where I ripped a whole CD into iTunes were now spread across various "Greatest Hits" albums from the same (or sometimes different) artist, with random cover art. And after reading Jim Dalrymple's horror stories of upgrading to Apple Music, I am fearful both of ever discontinuing my iTunes Match subscription or upgrading to Apple Music. My solution thus far has been to stop even trying to listen to music on iTunes and switch to podcasts instead (on Overcast, not Apple's horrible Podcasts app). #ThanksiTunes
- sooheon 10y ago
  This is the one complaint I agree with. Honestly, all the so called UX problems in those tweets are eye-rollingly contrived, but there's no excuse for messing with the actual music that I own.
- kccqzy 10y ago
  iTunes Match never messed up my library, though Apple Music certainly did.
andymurd 10y ago
I feel your pain. Same thing happened to me twice(!) and then it tried to delete all my Google contacts. iTunes is now second from the top on my list of software-I-will-never-use-again[0], so that means no shiny Apple devices for me. Which is a shame, because otherwise I quite like Apple stuff. [0] Of course, Lotus Notes is top of the list
sparkzilla 10y ago
iTunes is actually the main reason I am considering switching to Android.

jsz0 10y ago

I'm having a hard time understanding these tweets. Playing a song and adding songs to 'up next' are two different things. That dialog box has saved me multiple times. What's wrong with it? It only occurs when you are telling iTunes to do conflicting things that it cannot resolve by itself. It's a better outcome than clearing a playlist someone may have spent a lot of time working on. Software update and login dialogs? Yes those are a thing many apps include. What makes these unique or interesting? The podcasts menu seems super straight forward to me. Am I missing something here? It says exactly what it does. Contacting the iPhone update server dialog? Once upon a time Apple's servers would go down under a heavy load of people activating new iOS devices. Presumably the dialog is there to inform you there is a problem contacting the iPhone update servers. Either way I think it's long since been changed.

firasd 10y ago
Okay. So I’m no UX expert, just a developer and I’ve also worked in product management. I think at some point, if you work in this field, you have to develop instincts around the design and experience of things. A modal (i.e. app-locking) dialog that says “contacting the iphone software update server”, which is current behavior and not changed as far as I can tell, is so far out of the realm of acceptable in my view, that if we differ on that point, we can’t even begin a discussion about the more subtle issues… (Consider that Chrome updates itself all the time; now imagine if you launched Chrome, typed in gmail.com, and it suddenly locked up all your tabs because it was ‘contacting the Chrome software update server’.) After all, design trades in subtleties, otherwise if the discussion is just about explaining the purpose for a widget, everything in an interface can be explained, even this well-known ‘bad UI’ example: http://i.imgur.com/UJXoqwR.png http://i.imgur.com/UJXoqwR.png
- omonra 10y ago
  I remember that file renamer program! Think it was actually rather well reviewed at the time. Didn't realize it was in some sort of bad UI hall of fame :)
- barneybooroo 10y ago
  The Microsoft AutoUpdate client on OSX is a beautiful mess for this. doing anything else > Microsoft AutoUpdate starts bouncing in the dock > Modal "There are no updates for your Microsoft software at this time." dialog appears. Seeing as half of the updates it receives are FOR THE UPDATE CLIENT, it's incredible this behaviour hasn't been fixed in the last eight years.

javajosh 10y ago

For OSX VLC is a surprisingly good player for music and it supports FLAC. However I'm quite interested in building a dedicated OSS music player node/electron for OSX (and windows eventually).

newscracker 10y ago
Would you mind developing a QuickLook plugin for the latest OS X/macOS releases that could play FLAC? :) I've been breaking my head over it and don't seem to have any solutions.
- javajosh 10y ago
  Wouldn't mind at all. Of course, that's not really in my wheelhouse...

andrewclunn 10y ago

iTunes circa 2008 was amazing. Like so many things, once they unified the bIOs and desktop OS code bases and technologies everything went to shit.

circa 10y ago

Unfortunately iTunes is still better than the competition. I also know that isn't saying much. RIP Rdio, Lala, and countless others. Hell even Beats was better!

hhsnopek 10y ago

"Spotify" just switch now and never look back

JoBrad 10y ago
Absolutely agree. It just doesn't work well for music I own that isn't on Spotify.
- tonybaroneee 10y ago
  Yep, cloud sync is the only reason I still use Apple Music.
strange_quark 10y ago
Spotify has just as bad if not worse UX as iTunes/Apple Music. Spotify kept taking away useful features from their desktop app and promised to return them, but never did, even years later. Plus, I don't need to run another instance of Chrome and Adobe Flash which constantly consumes 5% of my CPU and a few hundred MB of RAM just to listen to some music. While still not perfect, I'm pretty happy with the newest release of iTunes and the iOS music app.
- johansch 10y ago
  I think users like you are part of the reason iTunes is like it is. Never, ever, take away a feature. Never ever refactor the UI to simplify things.
- rawrmaan 10y ago
  Completely disagree. Spotify has nailed the desktop/mobile music app UX like nobody ever has, and it is an absolute joy to use. Yes it's missing a few features, but nothing that's actually truly essential to just listening to music.

knodi123 10y ago

The single worst thing about itunes, in my opinion, is the way it handles duplicate songs. It has a "detect duplicates" feature, but all that does is show a list of groups of songs that it thinks are duplicates, and it has false positives! But the one thing it can't do, is detect when you've added multiple copies of the exact same file in the same directory. My music collection needs to by synced across computers, and if it refused to add the exact same file twice, then the operation would be trivial. Add mp3s to your music directory, drag and drop all files to itunes, and let it detect new songs. Since it's not, I have to do a long series of "okay, the timestamp on this file is newer than the newest added-on date in itunes.... I think.... except this directory was untarred, so it retains old timestamps, and blah blah blah..."

labster 10y ago
fdupes is your friend in cases like these — it finds duplicate files fast. As usual, the CLI tools are much better at solving problems than a terrible GUI like iTunes.
- majewsky 10y ago
  You don't even need a separate tool for that: find -type f -name \*.mp3 -exec md5sum {} + \ | uniq -dDw 32
  - dangravell 10y ago
    Not all music files are MP3s. When people mean duplicates, they normally mean duplicate songs, not duplicate files (audio + metadata + headers).
  - knodi123 10y ago
    The problem isn't duplicate files, it's that iTunes has an internal list of songs, and it allows the same file to appear in the list twice. I can manage a directory of files, I just can't manage iTunes' indexing of them. I understand why you would have assumed this was a file issue, though, because the real problem is the most idiotically stupid thing ever.

chipotle_coyote 10y ago

Okay. I get annoyed by things in iTunes and think the whole application really is overdue for replacement -- I'd like to see things split up somewhat more like iOS, with a "Music" app, a "Video" app and (since this is the desktop) a device management app. But I confess that a lot of the lamentations about the UI design (not necessarily the UX design, which I'll circle back to in a moment) strike me as, well, highly overblown. I'm sorry the author couldn't figure out how to make songs repeat, for instance, but while the repeat icon has moved in newer versions of iTunes, it's literally the same icon as in the screenshot of iTunes 4 from a decade ago. (That's the earliest screenshot I could find.) And perhaps the Windows version of iTunes is uniquely horrible compared to the OS X, er, macOS version, but I can type the name of a song into search and have it instantly located; if I double-click a track name (or the big play arrow that shows up when I hover by it!) it just starts playing, but it certainly won't select a rating or a heart unless I click a star or a heart; so on and so forth. I'd really argue the biggest problem with iTunes' UX stems from the way it's still, after all this time, inexplicably modal. I've never had a problem syncing an iOS device while it's playing music, as one commenter mentioned, but there are dialog boxes it brings up that are not only UI-blocking but process-blocking, which makes iTunes kind of a mess as a headless media server. (It still plays media, but won't be able to add any until the dialog box is dismissed.) But I still cut iTunes a fair amount of slack. I've been using it for nearly as long as it's been available, I've subscribed to iTunes Match, I've subscribed to Apple Music, and I've ripped my own music library full of lossless tracks. Not only has Apple not, repeat, not, either deleted those or fiendishly replaced the files with AAC simulacra, it turns out to handle mixing my ripped tracks, purchased tracks, and "borrowed" tracks (i.e., ones that are only available in my library through the Apple Music subscription) pretty seamlessly. The introduction of Apple Music was a huge mess, admittedly, both in terms of UX and some teeth-grindingly poor song-matching algorithms (a distinct regression from iTunes Match on its own) -- but the server-side flubs seem to be straightened out now, and the current UI for Apple Music is pretty solid. But, yes, I'm sure iTunes will be rewritten. I'm also positive that when it is, there will be a veritable explosion of thinkpieces that will almost all be variants of, "Who asked for all these horrible changes? iTunes was just fine! Apple is always fixing things that weren't broken! This would never have happened if Steve Jobs were still alive!"

altitudinous 10y ago

You missed the point. iTunes is a old product holding together well. * No doubt if iTunes was designed today it would be completely different. But as a legacy product it has to satisfy legacy users that are familiar with the UI, and legacy products (this iTunes still supports 10 year old iPods and older?!!) * Say iTunes failed today. No doubt the writer would say it deserved it, and the product was a failure from the beginning. But I want to emphasise that iTunes has existed for several years now and has given many hours of pleasure for many millions of users. it works well and is a success. You are naive if you think iTunes one day will work well. It won't get better. What is going to happen with it? It is obvious. You don't have to go past Microsoft with Internet Explorer. They kept that product going for years and it was a great success. However eventually the tech aged and they replaced it with a new product, Microsoft Edge. The same will happen with iTunes.

epistasis 10y ago
>But as a legacy product it has to satisfy legacy users that are familiar with the UI, and legacy products (this iTunes still supports 10 year old iPods and older?!!) The UI changes so much with each release that I have no clue how to navigate any more, and don't care to learn because I'll have to relearn it all again in 12-24 months. There is no consistency, and legacy to uphold, except perhaps a legacy codebase.
kayamon 10y ago
> You missed the point. No he didn't. > iTunes is a old product holding together well. No it's not, it's a terrible product and always has been. > You are naive if you think iTunes one day will work well. He doesn't think that. In fact, the title of the article states the exact opposite. > What is going to happen with it? It is obvious. Yes, which is the whole point of the article.
untog 10y ago
> as a legacy product it has to satisfy legacy users that are familiar with the UI I cannot think of an application with a less consistent UI than iTunes. Every major version seems to present a total rethink and re-engineering of the entire UI layer. If consistency is a goal for iTunes then it has failed dramatically.

cageface 10y ago

If you're using a Mac then you should go buy yourself a copy of Swinsian now: http://swinsian.com/ http://swinsian.com/ It's a lean, fast native player that supports tons of formats, has great library management features, and omits all the bloat and confusion of iTunes.

Dain42 10y ago
It doesn't really matter to me, as I'm not a Macintosh user anymore, but does it have the smart playlist feature like iTunes? That's the biggest thing I miss in most music players, including my current one, Google Play Music (with my all-access).
- ptomato 10y ago
  Yup, it does.
- crummy 10y ago
  Not sure if you're aware but Simon Weber has a Chrome extension for smart playlists in Google Music. https://github.com/simon-weber/Autoplaylists-for-Google-Music https://github.com/simon-weber/Autoplaylists-for-Google-Musi...

kawsper 10y ago

I like iTunes, but I hate how Apple try to get me to subscribe to Apple Music both on iOS and OSX.

Twisell 10y ago

Well to be fair the title might be: iTunes will never work well ON WINDOWS. I was always wondering why I can read so much rants about a good product I've been using on a daily basis for years... Well it seams that the Windows version sucks, and what is described is really a world away from the native cocoa version on macOS.

United857 10y ago
Believe me, it's not much better on Mac from a UX perspective.
forrestthewoods 10y ago
There is no user experience difference. There hasn't been for at least 10 years. You can't put together a post that says "this is how it works on OS X" versus "how it works on Windows". Because it's the same.

pfarnsworth 10y ago

iTunes is the worst piece of software I've come across in a long time. I banned it from my computer until I upgraded to my iPhone 7. Now, the only computer with enough disk space to accommodate my backups of 256GB is my personal desktop, so I was forced to install iTunes. It's infuriating and in the 4 years that I haven't used iTunes, it hasn't gotten any better. I would love to blacklist whoever is responsible for iTunes from ever finding work again, because it's obvious they give an ounce of care about UI design or keeping their customers happy. They really don't deserve to be working in software. If they had any honor they would be thoroughly embarrassed for producing such a horrible piece of software.

laurentdc 10y ago
The last good iTunes I've used was on OS X 10.4 on a Mac Mini G4. There were little iGimmicks around so it would play music, sync with the iPod, that's it. From there it went downhill.
- Dain42 10y ago
  Somewhere around 4.9 or 5.x is when I think it was best. They'd added library functionality for movies, TV, and audiobooks, which meant it was a one-stop shop for my media library on my Mac at the time. It was also still fairly lightweight, because it didn't have loads of stuff tacked on to it yet. Really, the biggest thing I miss from iTunes, as a Google Play user, are the Smart Playlists. I loved being able to pull in every song I had from a set of artists and then shuffle through that. The "radio" features from Google just doesn't do it for me. I rarely want to listen to a bunch of music that's not in my library but which is similar to something I do have there. I'd much rather self-curate what I'm listening to. But I don't think the demand is there for that as much, now. I still wish they'd at least remove the 1000 song cap on playlists, so I could manually do this.
zepto 10y ago
It's obviously not a delightful piece of software, but attacking the team that works on it is mean spirited. You know nothing about the constraints they work under.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

eklavya 10y ago

I don't know about the UI or anything but it's 2016 and iTunes still makes me re-download any firmware from start in case of any network issue. So if you are downloading a 2.5 gigs file and that screws up even once in that whole download at any place, iTunes says fuck you. This becomes a problem when they screw up iOS 10 update and brick your iPhone and the only way to fix it is restoring from iTunes and then iTunes keeps giving you the middle finger.

dx034 10y ago
Not only that, when I had to re-download the firmware due to the failed iOS10 update, even pausing the download caused it to restart..
- kccqzy 10y ago
  And interesting if it's downloading some purchased content from the iTunes Store, this doesn't happen. Also, those downloads don't throw a modal dialog when it's trying to "contact the server". It just seems like downloading firmware doesn't reuse existing code for downloading content.

jdeibele 10y ago

I was surprised (and pleased) to see Apple add "rename" to the file menu in Finder for El Capitan. Coming from Windows, I found the "click on a file to rename it" very unintuitive. Evidently a lot of other people did, too. Now if they'd make it so Finder always opens a window if you select Finder and a window isn't open ...

the_other 10y ago
Finder includes your desktop, so technically you already do have a window open.

aakarpost 10y ago

Ditto. It has a UX problem.

AJRF 10y ago

The failure of iTunes is intrinsically linked to the unsuitability of WebObjects as a modern application framework. iTunes isn’t bad because Apple is inept, far from it, but to make it fine at this point would require a rewrite and I assume at Apple there is a tradeoff between “Is this crappy to use” and “Well, does it at least work?”, with the latter being a stronger motivator (or in this case, demotivator) of change than the former.

masklinn 10y ago
AFAIK the vast majority of itunes is a regular cocoa application, what does webobject have to do with anything?
kccqzy 10y ago
WebObjects is a server side technology. iTunes doesn't directly use it.

f4stjack 10y ago

As far as I have used iTunes the only problem I see with it is trying to do EVERYTHING in a single package. It tries to be - music player - content manager (music & video) - sync manager - update manager - Apple Music client and these are the five things I can name on top of my head, without opening up the app. This is fine, but they are not honoring their boundaries. When I am listening to my music, don't mess me with the sync business. If there is a new version, put a helpful icon but only steal my focus if I click to sync tab. It's like going to a supermarket to buy a piece of candy. Sure there are meats and potatoes on the next shelves but I need my candy. Yes I can hear you overhyped sales person about the discounts but. I. Need. My. Candy. Also I cannot see the logic behind the Apple Music's integration with iTunes. I have tried to use AM with iTunes on windows and it is not a fun experience I can tell you. Spotify, even though people are grumbling about its ux, provides a smoother experience. Search, double click play, right click to save or add to a customized playlist. Or mess with that knob to download.

yaegers 10y ago
The problem is, they can never satify everybody. I bet you that if they ever split iTunes up in separate apps like you suggested there will also be a lot of people who dislike that approach and rant along the lines of "Why did they split it up? It was so convenient to have everything in one place. Now I have to open a multitude of apps" No matter how much sense that may make, there will be people like that. The question is, how many compared to people who want things to be plit up. Apple would be best served to conduct some polls or maybe even a nice beta programm where you can use separate apps and then give feedback if it works as intended.
- f4stjack 10y ago
  Agreed. Satisfaction is not an objective commodity. But Apple Music really, definitively, needs its own app considering the problems it creates in people's iTunes libraries.
  - the_other 10y ago
    I agree, but doubt it will happen. Step by step, Apple are pushing their customers towards subscription services. They did it with photos first, then music. From macOS Sierra onwards they'll be doing it with the "Documents" and "Desktop" directory. iTunes has always acted as an advance party for Apple's next business experiments. It gets UI changes ahead of the OS. It gets "features" like this subscription funnelling ahead of the OS.

josteink 10y ago

> Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting iTunes, too. While a great quote, it's not entirely true. Some of us said enough is enough and ditched the iOS/Itunes ecosystem for something better. Why suffer needlessly?

nicky0 10y ago
And even better, with iOS 10 we can now delete the Music and iTunes apps from our phones.
- isolli 10y ago
  Hide. Not delete, hide.
- slig 10y ago
  Unfortunately that's not what happens. You can removed it from the Home screen [1], the app keeps using space on your phone. [1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204221 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204221
  - nicky0 10y ago
    Ah, that's interesting. Well, as long as it's not on my screen I'm happy enough. :)

forrestthewoods 10y ago

I have never seen any software turn adults into a pile of tears faster that iTunes. Trying to put music on your iPhone the night before a trip is the most god damn frustrating thing in modern software. It literally can't be done. If all you want to do is copy a few songs to your iPhone you can't fucking do it. It tries to sync your phone. Then says "warning: this will delete everything". What the fucking fuck motherfucker. I just want to copy a dozen god damn mp3 files into a file system. It's not hard! Syncing is a broken concept. There's no such thing as syncing. There's no such thing as being in sync. No PC, Mac, or iOS device of mine can ever be fully sunk. (sync'd?) The totality of "my stuff" is a venn diagram. Things on my iPhone. Things on my iPad. Things on my Macbook. I have save data shared across devices. But also save data unique to each device. I own 100Gb of music. Most of it is on my Macbook. Some of it is on my iPhone. None of it is on my iPad. I even own music downloaded to none of these devices. Those purchases exist only in the cloud. Plus god knows how many apps I've bought and since deleted. There is no such thing as syncing. No device can ever be fully sync'd. Fully up to date. The whole idea of syncing is fundamentally broken and wrong. Fuck iTunes. No iPhone of mine will ever know iTunes ever exists. I now use Spotify. I download music to my phone for trips. My phone will never be connected to any Mac or PC. If you must copy music don't use iTunes. Once upon a time I used Copytrans. It's free and gets the job done. http://www.copytrans.net/copytransmanager/ http://www.copytrans.net/copytransmanager/ (This rant brought to through the sobbing tears of my partner. Thanks iTunes. You worthless piece of shit.)

gergles 10y ago
Copytrans now costs $20. There is no good tool for "just put some fucking music on my iPhone" that doesn't cost money that I've ever been able to find.

tempodox 10y ago

So this dude made a couple of tweets, then he wrote a medium article about his tweets.

kwijibob 10y ago
I actually found this method quite readable and a pleasant surprise!

tomasandrle 10y ago

It must be really hard to maintain and add features to such a huge old application. Platforms have changed underneath it, the devices and services it connects to have come and gone, Objective C has changed a lot as well. And then there's the Windows version... Still, iTunes is crap. I hated it so much that I wrote my own music player for iOS, just to avoid using iTunes for putting music on my phone [1]. My guess is that sooner or later, iTunes will be dismantled and the features will be split into multiple smaller apps. There will be a music app that JUST plays music from the Apple Music account, a podcast app that JUST plays podcasts, a sync app that JUST helps you manage stuff on your phone etc. Some features will be removed (Internet radio, ripping & burning CDs). And of those that remain, only a few will need to keep a Windows counterpart. That way, things will be easier to maintain. [1] Tiny Player: https://itunes.apple.com/app/id1140849233 https://itunes.apple.com/app/id1140849233

massysett 10y ago
I think Apple would have split up iTunes long ago if it were only a Mac application, but they don't want to distribute a bunch of smaller Windows apps.
- tomasandrle 10y ago
  Sure. Hopefuly "a bunch" could be reduced to just two: Apple Music client and iPhone sync app. The rest would be removed without a replacement (on Windows). The headphone jack removal shows that Apple is willing to make people angry about some things for a long term benefit and iTunes is imho a good candidate for the next "act of courage", heh.
  - TorKlingberg 10y ago
    Could they drop the iPhone sync app completely? These days the iPhone should be able to do all the syncing it needs directly against the internet.
    - Klathmon 10y ago

pearjuice 10y ago

I am glad people in the reality distortion field of Apple trying to defend this and throw an ad hominem regarding the author, are getting downvoted into oblivion. Maybe they will realize some day.

unwind 10y ago

I'm not an iTunes user, but the irony of posting about UI issues on a site that breaks my browser's Back button hit me pretty hard. Ouch. Please don't do that, sites.

kennell 10y ago

iTunes is beyond hopeless at this point. It needs a full rewrite, possibly split into multiple apps.

soufron 10y ago

It's so true. We used to have very simple and efficient music players such as winamp. The problem was that they were playing free mp3 that you stored on your hard drive. With regards to that, iTunes is not a music player, it's a media manager. It's all designed around buying stuff, not playing it. It makes me think of the bad dvds with non-skippable trailers we used to have 10 years ago.

bshimmin 10y ago

One interesting thing about iTunes is that it is one of the few applications I can think of which manages to irritate both power/sophisticated users (ie. everyone here) and also regular users. I'm not sure anyone actually likes it.

SCdF 10y ago

OK, so I use OSX, and I want to play mp3s that I have locally, and see them in a library format that I can search. Even maybe have album art, though I'm not fussed. Ignoring itunes, how do I do it? What is a good fast low memory music playing app with library management? If I was on Windows I'd be using Foobar2k. On OSX it seems to be either itunes, a command line app, or various bloated messes that aren't honestly better than itunes.

ldjb 10y ago
Have you tried Clementine? https://www.clementine-player.org https://www.clementine-player.org
tomasandrle 10y ago
Vox is not perfect but works fine as a player: http://coppertino.com/vox/mac http://coppertino.com/vox/mac
aidos 10y ago
In a similar vein, is there a general recommendation for locally web hosting your music yourself. Is it one of the plexy type setups? More OT, but what about personal photos / videos? I find the whole Apple photos experience depressing. Two examples of why - my wife and I really share a photo collection, but it's neigh on impossible for us to automatically sync all our images to one another - this weekend I made a stop motion clip with my kids by taking photos on my phone. We tried to move the images to my computer so we could put them together / edit them but were stuck waiting for the devices to sync on some sort of black magic driven schedule. Is there any general solution out there for families who want to share their content (local music collection and photos / videos taken) seamlessly?
Keyframe 10y ago
On OSX I quit and just use preview. I'm not even kidding.
swiley 10y ago
Open cubic player might have OSX support (OSX has OSS right?) Is it a mess? Yes, but it's not really bloated.

ForFreedom 10y ago

One of the features I hate in iTunes is adding music to the library. When adding songs it should create a shortcut from the music folder that is being added from rather than creating a copy of the songs in its folder. When creating a copy into the iTunes folder the storage space on the macbook is lowered.

FussyZeus 10y ago
I've actually just moved my entire iTunes library into my ownCloud directory and let it sync to my other systems. Windows is fine with it, just point your chosen media app at the folder and it should just ignore all of iTunes' files and grab the music. Every once in awhile I get a sync error but it never seems to affect anything and sorts itself out, going on about 8 months now with no real problems.
andruby 10y ago
That is why this is a setting that you can change: In iTunes Preference, under "Advanced", simply uncheck "Copy files to iTunes Media folder when adding to library" and you'll have the exact behavior you want.

rawTruthHurts 10y ago

Off topic trip to Memory Lane: http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/OSX/itunes2_erased_drives.html http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/OSX/itunes2_erased_drives.html

jharohit 10y ago

There never was and never will be a better music player than Winamp! #WinampSkins

gdulli 10y ago
I was happily paying $10/month to Spotify but canceled my subscription because the desktop player was so bad and incomplete. After a while I realized that attempting parity with other players was not on their to-do list. I'm not even a power user, there are many advanced and obscure features of Winamp/foobar I never used. But those products have the nuances of day to day management of playlists and usability figured out and Spotify in comparison doesn't care. It seems they'd be happier to have you use web/mobile and not even support a desktop player.
StuffMaster 10y ago
Foobar2000 my friend

optimuspaul 10y ago

I have never understood why there is so much hate for iTunes. I think it's fine. It does everything I need it to and probably more. Why put so much energy into debasing something?

pwthornton 10y ago
I think most users would agree with you. Hating on iTunes is popular with tech people, but I don't know if your average person cares. The biggest complaint I have with iTunes is that it tries to do too many things, and it would be better to break the app up. It somehow got itself into the smartphone and tablet backup business. Years ago, I wrote that iTunes should be split up into smaller apps: http://interchangeproject.org/2012/04/16/itunes-should-be-split-into-3-4-smaller-more-focused-apps/ http://interchangeproject.org/2012/04/16/itunes-should-be-sp... I don't know if I really care that much anymore, as iTunes works fine for my uses, but I'm also no longer a heavy iTunes user. I use my iPhone to play music at home and on the go. I watch movies either on my Apple TV or iPad. I mainly use iTunes to see what's new in the store. That could be a reflection of using iTunes, however.

CapitalistCartr 10y ago

I strongly prefer a Unix approach to tools: each tool does one thing, Vasili. One thing only, please. That eases understanding of what is going on. Users are better educated and troubleshooting bugs/flaws is vastly easier. I consider a corporate decision as to what my computer will do irrespective of my wishes to be a flaw.

agentgt 10y ago

Almost every cloud music app I have used has issues with the concept of a "queue" or playing a snippet of something while I am in the middle of a playlist. Spotify, Mog <defunct>, rdio, and itunes seems to never do what I want when it comes to "just checking out a song while other songs are playing". Lets say you have enqueued up a bunch of songs on Spotify or perhaps have a really good shuffled playlist god forbid you accidentally click on a song instead of queue it. Because of this annoyance at times I just give up and put on Pandora. Their song selection sucks but otherwise I think Pandora is fairly stress free UX wise.

yoz-y 10y ago
I really liked queueing in the original Amarok. iTunes kind of halfway gets it right with the concept of Up Next. However it seems now that in iTunes 12 it is no longer possible to queue an album at the end if there is nothing in the queue at all. I'd prefer if the action of playing an album did "put it in queue & play"

newscracker 10y ago

Apple needs to allow importing songs into the Music app on iOS from any source, not just iTunes and its own store. This has been a long standing pain point. Not everybody wants Apple Music and not everybody wants to buy music from Apple. But there are people with existing music collections who want to add them to iOS devices easily without having to use iTunes. This procedure works for iBooks, where you can add books from any source online through the share sheet. But it's not allowed for Music in 2016^, nearly 10 years since Steve Jobs wrote his Thoughts on DRM. ^: presumably due to licensing issues and/or agreements with the record labels and/or wanting a monopoly on music

dublinben 10y ago
If you want to manage and control your own music library, you're not Apple's intended customer. If you are inside the Apple ecosystem, they expect you to play entirely within their ecosystem. I suggest you try using an Android phone, where you can easily drag & drop any files you want, and can manage them with any program you choose.
izacus 10y ago
Isn't that what iTunes Match did (does?) for a fee?
- dave5104 10y ago
  No, iTunes Match simply allows you to sync your music via iCloud. If you have a song on your computer in iTunes, Match will find the song in their catalogue and let you download that to your iPhone, or it will upload the music file from your computer and let you download that to your iPhone. It was basically a way to cut the cord, so to speak, and not have to actually sync your phone to your computer. You still need iTunes for it all to work in the end.
Grishnakh 10y ago
>Apple needs to allow importing songs into the Music app on iOS from any source, not just iTunes and its own store. Why? I think Microsoft "needs" to go back to the Win7 UI, or better yet just open-source their OS and shut down their company, but that's not going to happen because they don't agree with me. >Not everybody wants Apple Music and not everybody wants to buy music from Apple. So what? If you don't like having to buy all your music from Apple, then don't buy an iPhone. There's plenty of other non-Apple devices out there. People who don't want Apple Music and don't want to buy from Apple are not target customers for Apple. They don't need you; they have plenty of suckers happy to pay them $$$$ for a phone and then more $$$ to buy all their music from iTunes. >agreements with the record labels and/or wanting a monopoly on music Android phones don't have this problem, and they have music stores too, plus you can just load your own music in MP3 or Ogg format easily. On many phones, you don't even have to use USB to transfer it, because you can just copy it from your PC to an SDcard which you can then insert in the phone. Of course it's the monopoly angle: they want a monopoly on how Apple users get music, and they have one. If you don't like that, then don't buy an Apple.

newscracker 10y ago

When iTunes started, it was fine because there was only music to deal with. But with the addition of other media types in iOS devices, it's become very messy. If you have books and photos on your iOS device, there is no simple way to get these to their respective apps on the Mac (iBooks and Photos/erstwhile iPhoto). Using iTunes will do almost nothing if you aren't buying all your stuff from Apple, except backup all data (including these) into a "hidden" location. You'd have to use each of these apps every time you want to just get the latest from the iOS device to it. Apple should introduce a simple sync application that will take all photos to Photos, all books to iBooks, all apps to iTunes or some new App app (the removal of app transfer from iOS devices into iTunes is a big issue in different ways), all music to iTunes, etc., along with all the respective user-created metadata (like collections for books, favorites for photos, etc.). Most importantly, this should work for things obtained from non-Apple sources. (Sometimes I wish Apple would have interviews with users like me to understand how difficult things are and use that to improve its products)

xufi 10y ago

Using VLC with command line to listen to my playlists works great for me

gregn 10y ago

Saying "iTunes will never work well" is like saying the sky is blue. Why would anyone need a kitchen sink to copy an audio file to their device? Oh, wait, unless there is manufacturer locks, and controls put in place to steer consumers' capital flow. Oh yeah, that's why. From that perspective I would say iTunes is a smashing success. And this negative social virus has spread like gang-busters spawning countless imitators.

Declanomous 10y ago
This trend is why I started using Linux full time again. I'm not a die-hard believer in the Unix Philosophy, but systems designed with it in mind generally avoid the worst bloat. I feel like a similar mindset is ruining gaming as well. The best games from the past had a design that I'd compare to movies. The story and fun was self-contained and complete. If another installment was created, it was also self-contained and complete. With rise advent of microtransactions, games seem more like sitcoms or slot machines. The experience of a single episode (or pull of the lever) is a full experience, but it's intentionally designed to feel always feel slightly incomplete. I mean, the design of games now is pretty user-unfriendly. Anything that could compete with a publisher's ability to charge more for gameplay has been crippled. Simple example -- almost every game used to include god-mode cheat codes that you could use to your hearts content. Now a lot of games charge money for extra weapons and other things that used to be considered cheats, even in the single player modes. Another example is the team creation tools in EA sports franchises. You used to be able to copy and paste players from one team to another. My brother and I would create teams where every player on the team was our favorite player in Madden and FIFA and pit them against each other. That feature has been absolutely gutted in FIFA, most likely because it interfered with their Ultimate Team mode. However, they gutted it for offline play as well. I don't fault the developers and publishers trying to makee money. I do think it's really lame that modern games have intentionally locked or removed simple and historically common features in the pursuit of profit. It makes every gaming experience feel like I'm being forced to buy everything from the company store, and it sucks.
Grishnakh 10y ago
I can easily copy files to my Android phone with the simple "adb" command-line utility. Or, I can copy them onto an SDcard any way I please, and insert the card into my phone. iTunes is definitely a smashing success, thanks to gullible suckers who happily buy anything that Apple shovels at them.

deleted 10y ago

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gjolund 10y ago

iTunes was a significant factor in me moving to Android.