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Can you elaborate? I think the store is frustrating, but I've found the player itself has been pretty stable and usable for the last 6-7 years on OSX (I have 40

by blehn 16y ago

Can you elaborate? I think the store is frustrating, but I've found the player itself has been pretty stable and usable for the last 6-7 years on OSX (I have 40GB of music btw). It's a big ol' spreadsheet with instant search and drag+drop playlists.

thegreatcurve 16y ago
I find the spreadsheet-style interface pretty uninspired for something as personal as music. The linear list of albums/tracks breaks down very quickly once your library starts growing, and iTunes becomes a confusing, disorientating mess. To Apple's credit, they've been taking baby steps towards more interesting ways of browsing your library with Genius playlists and mixes, but they could and should do so much more.
- ugh 16y ago
  What are the alternatives, though? I quite like the three column browser for quickly finding music even if I only have a very fuzzy idea of what I would like right now. It scales quite well, even if you have a library with several thousand songs and a few hundred artists. Together with the hybrid cover view it doesn’t even look very much like a spreadsheet. Then there’s the grid view which also has its uses. I especially like to display albums by year which gives me a nice chronological overview. Coverflow is pretty worthless, though. I think that while iTunes gets the big picture somewhat right (at least as far as its audio library functionality is concerned) it gets many details spectacularly wrong. The UI for tagging feels ancient. Oh, and it’s modal. iTunes forces me to play column jockey. I don‘t want to change column widths just so I don’t get vertical scrollbars. iTunes should keep it all nice and tidy for me, kind of like Mail. That, and many other small details.
  - icefox 16y ago
    Amarok has some interesting UI features that are really interesting.
    - ugh 16y ago
      Like what? This is a honest question. I don't know much about Amarok but whenever I tried it, it looked completely unimpressive and like an even bigger UI clusterfuck than iTunes to me.
1010011010 16y ago
iTunes opens lots of error dialogs, loses files and fails to play tracks when it's run in an account with an nfs home directory.

by blehn 16y ago

thegreatcurve 16y ago

I find the spreadsheet-style interface pretty uninspired for something as personal as music. The linear list of albums/tracks breaks down very quickly once your library starts growing, and iTunes becomes a confusing, disorientating mess. To Apple's credit, they've been taking baby steps towards more interesting ways of browsing your library with Genius playlists and mixes, but they could and should do so much more.

ugh 16y ago
What are the alternatives, though? I quite like the three column browser for quickly finding music even if I only have a very fuzzy idea of what I would like right now. It scales quite well, even if you have a library with several thousand songs and a few hundred artists. Together with the hybrid cover view it doesn’t even look very much like a spreadsheet. Then there’s the grid view which also has its uses. I especially like to display albums by year which gives me a nice chronological overview. Coverflow is pretty worthless, though. I think that while iTunes gets the big picture somewhat right (at least as far as its audio library functionality is concerned) it gets many details spectacularly wrong. The UI for tagging feels ancient. Oh, and it’s modal. iTunes forces me to play column jockey. I don‘t want to change column widths just so I don’t get vertical scrollbars. iTunes should keep it all nice and tidy for me, kind of like Mail. That, and many other small details.
- icefox 16y ago
  Amarok has some interesting UI features that are really interesting.
  - ugh 16y ago
    Like what? This is a honest question. I don't know much about Amarok but whenever I tried it, it looked completely unimpressive and like an even bigger UI clusterfuck than iTunes to me.

1010011010 16y ago

iTunes opens lots of error dialogs, loses files and fails to play tracks when it's run in an account with an nfs home directory.