5 ms·

Perhaps they're moving away from "Tunes"? It was a music player. Now it's a music, video, book, and app store and media center, as well as a connection hub for

by treblig 16y ago

Perhaps they're moving away from "Tunes"? It was a music player. Now it's a music, video, book, and app store and media center, as well as a connection hub for all of your accessory devices. I have a feeling that whatever they announce tomorrow will only be a proliferation of this trend. "iTunes" has got a ton of brand awareness, but we've seen them appropriately drop "Computer" from their company name and "Phone" from iOS. Still, probably a long shot.

J3L2404 16y ago
Oh to dream...
- tptacek 16y ago
  You dream of them using a different word than "Tunes"? You need to read more fiction.
  - J3L2404 16y ago
    I don't care what it's called, I dream of termination with extreme prejudice of the Carbon based, kruft-filled, all-in-one, un-Apple, sync-nightmare currently called iTunes.
    - tptacek 16y ago
      I think I might be the only person on HN who actually luv- luv- luvs iTunes, and I say this as someone who once wrote his own MP3 player interface out of extreme music-player-fussiness. The "kruft" ship sailed the minute I downloaded Firefox.
      - ErrantX 16y ago
        count me as #2, have much preferred iTunes for a good few years now.
      - jacobolus 16y ago
        Nope, not the only one. I don’t use an iPod, or an iPhone, or an TV, but I think iTunes is wonderful as a PC music player. It beats the pants off everything that came before (remember all those music player apps whose selling point was that they had pretty, customizable “skins”?), and hasn’t really been challenged by anything since. For all the talk of bloat, the changes and additions over the last few years to the main functionality have been quite restrained and user-focused: sorting by album by artist, adding a “sort by” metadata field, improving the organization of playlists, “smart” playlists, and playlist folders, views organized by album art rather than text, improvements to the column browser, &c. Even what I would call “bloaty” features like the “genius playlist” and “ping” can be easily turned off.
        tptacek 16y ago
        I have an iPhone, but I blame the iPhone for iTunes syncing, not iTunes itself.
        glhaynes 16y ago
        Agreed: most of the things I don't like about it are things that I don't think can be solved just by improvements to the iTunes app but by moving to a more cloud-based system.
        BlazingFrog 16y ago
        And that is probably why you like it so much. Because you're not forced to use it for anything and everything Apple-related on the desktop.
        jokermatt999 16y ago
        > sorting by album by artist, adding a “sort by” metadata field, improving the organization of playlists, “smart” playlists, and playlist folders, views organized by album art rather than text, improvements to the column browser, &c I don't know enough about the history of music players to say whether iTunes created those innovations (though I'd be surprised, except for the album art one), I can say for sure most any other media player these days will do those. And while the bloat can be turned off, I still found it to be have ridiculous start up time on Windows. It would take 10+ seconds just to open. I've said this on HNs before, but switching from iTunes to foobar2000 was by far the best software decision I've made, perhaps just barely behind switching from IE to Firefox. For the longest time I just took it for granted that iTunes was the best music player, but when I looked at the alternatives (pre-update Amarok, foobar2000, etc), I really found iTunes was a lot worse than I thought it was. The only feature I've come to miss are smart playlists, and I wouldn't be surprised if there's a foobar plugin for them.
      - meemo 16y ago
        I'm a fan of the way it exposes and emphasizes metadata. And it's smart playlists are awesome. Really, it's just a great organizational tool (for music). And it starts up pretty quickly on my mac (so it doesn't feel crufty).
      - jfb 16y ago
        I like some things (Genius, the smart playlists, podcasts), am indifferent to a large swath of others (the store, video, radio, DJ, home sharing, library sharing, visualization) and am brought to a white-hot nun-punching rage by the (finite but unbounded) set of bugs, warts and misfeatures. Why can't I have my view settings sticky across all the various views? Why do you INSIST on showing me the utterly useless genres by default? Why, in list mode, when reverse sorting an album by year (to, say, play your Cows collection from most recent to oldest) it reverses the track ordering? That last one, by the way, is marked "Works as Expected". Works as expected.
        tptacek 16y ago
        "Genres" is the second most important organizational tool in my library, after artist name and just before Genius.
        jfb 16y ago
        See, I use "Genre" as a free-form tagging field, for metadata that has no other home. Therefore, they are unique per artist (for the most part) and serve no useful purpose in browsing. So I never want them in my browser; I can set this for the main library, but the values are not inherited. It's like the iTunes team looked at the Finder and said .... "hmmm".
        rufo 16y ago
        That's what the Grouping field is for.
        jfb 16y ago
        It'd be a misuse of wherever I put the info. The metadata I want to preserve about my music collection is a superset of the metadata that iTunes provides for.
e1ven 16y ago
They may do this, but it likely wouldn't be so soon after the iTunes icon change a few months ago- If they were going to drop the brand, they would have done so then.. Or at least not gone through the effort to rebrand.
- lukeqsee 16y ago
  You would think that. However, this is still Apple. I wouldn't be surprised by anything.
- replicatorblog 16y ago
  They could be moving to a new generic name "iWhatever" where there are several subsections each represented with a colored circle and an icon inside. e.g. Blue Circle iTunes, iBooks is an orange circle with a book symbol, etc. Imagine these icons running vertically down the side of the new "iWhatever" client similar to the way they made the "Maximize/Minimize/Close" buttons vertical in the latest rev. This would actually be very similar to what Adobe did after it acquired Macromedia and faced the similar problem of having a jumble of apps that worked together, but lacked consistent branding and structure. They assigned everything a color and a "Periodic Table" naming convention which cohesively tied their products together. http://www.thehighcontrast.com/family-tree/ http://www.thehighcontrast.com/family-tree/ Another similarity is that most designers hated that change, just as they did the new iTunes icon!
- earnubs 16y ago
  Maybe they'll split the brand? iTunes, iMovies as seperate apps and the store on the web?
- uxp 16y ago
  However, the new icon is still a prominent music note. I would imagine they would require another icon change to signify that any iTunes name change isn't centered around music and audio.
gaiusparx 16y ago
Unlikely as they just released iTunes 10.1 last week. I don't see them pushing another iTunes client release within 2 weeks.
jacoblyles 16y ago
i?

by treblig 16y ago

J3L2404 16y ago

Oh to dream...

tptacek 16y ago
You dream of them using a different word than "Tunes"? You need to read more fiction.
- J3L2404 16y ago
  I don't care what it's called, I dream of termination with extreme prejudice of the Carbon based, kruft-filled, all-in-one, un-Apple, sync-nightmare currently called iTunes.
  - tptacek 16y ago
    I think I might be the only person on HN who actually luv- luv- luvs iTunes, and I say this as someone who once wrote his own MP3 player interface out of extreme music-player-fussiness. The "kruft" ship sailed the minute I downloaded Firefox.
    - ErrantX 16y ago
      count me as #2, have much preferred iTunes for a good few years now.
    - jacobolus 16y ago
      Nope, not the only one. I don’t use an iPod, or an iPhone, or an TV, but I think iTunes is wonderful as a PC music player. It beats the pants off everything that came before (remember all those music player apps whose selling point was that they had pretty, customizable “skins”?), and hasn’t really been challenged by anything since. For all the talk of bloat, the changes and additions over the last few years to the main functionality have been quite restrained and user-focused: sorting by album by artist, adding a “sort by” metadata field, improving the organization of playlists, “smart” playlists, and playlist folders, views organized by album art rather than text, improvements to the column browser, &c. Even what I would call “bloaty” features like the “genius playlist” and “ping” can be easily turned off.
      - tptacek 16y ago
        I have an iPhone, but I blame the iPhone for iTunes syncing, not iTunes itself.
      - glhaynes 16y ago
        Agreed: most of the things I don't like about it are things that I don't think can be solved just by improvements to the iTunes app but by moving to a more cloud-based system.
      - BlazingFrog 16y ago
        And that is probably why you like it so much. Because you're not forced to use it for anything and everything Apple-related on the desktop.
      - jokermatt999 16y ago
        > sorting by album by artist, adding a “sort by” metadata field, improving the organization of playlists, “smart” playlists, and playlist folders, views organized by album art rather than text, improvements to the column browser, &c I don't know enough about the history of music players to say whether iTunes created those innovations (though I'd be surprised, except for the album art one), I can say for sure most any other media player these days will do those. And while the bloat can be turned off, I still found it to be have ridiculous start up time on Windows. It would take 10+ seconds just to open. I've said this on HNs before, but switching from iTunes to foobar2000 was by far the best software decision I've made, perhaps just barely behind switching from IE to Firefox. For the longest time I just took it for granted that iTunes was the best music player, but when I looked at the alternatives (pre-update Amarok, foobar2000, etc), I really found iTunes was a lot worse than I thought it was. The only feature I've come to miss are smart playlists, and I wouldn't be surprised if there's a foobar plugin for them.
    - meemo 16y ago
      I'm a fan of the way it exposes and emphasizes metadata. And it's smart playlists are awesome. Really, it's just a great organizational tool (for music). And it starts up pretty quickly on my mac (so it doesn't feel crufty).
    - jfb 16y ago
      I like some things (Genius, the smart playlists, podcasts), am indifferent to a large swath of others (the store, video, radio, DJ, home sharing, library sharing, visualization) and am brought to a white-hot nun-punching rage by the (finite but unbounded) set of bugs, warts and misfeatures. Why can't I have my view settings sticky across all the various views? Why do you INSIST on showing me the utterly useless genres by default? Why, in list mode, when reverse sorting an album by year (to, say, play your Cows collection from most recent to oldest) it reverses the track ordering? That last one, by the way, is marked "Works as Expected". Works as expected.
      - tptacek 16y ago
        "Genres" is the second most important organizational tool in my library, after artist name and just before Genius.
        jfb 16y ago
        See, I use "Genre" as a free-form tagging field, for metadata that has no other home. Therefore, they are unique per artist (for the most part) and serve no useful purpose in browsing. So I never want them in my browser; I can set this for the main library, but the values are not inherited. It's like the iTunes team looked at the Finder and said .... "hmmm".
        rufo 16y ago
        That's what the Grouping field is for.
        jfb 16y ago
        It'd be a misuse of wherever I put the info. The metadata I want to preserve about my music collection is a superset of the metadata that iTunes provides for.

e1ven 16y ago

They may do this, but it likely wouldn't be so soon after the iTunes icon change a few months ago- If they were going to drop the brand, they would have done so then.. Or at least not gone through the effort to rebrand.

lukeqsee 16y ago
You would think that. However, this is still Apple. I wouldn't be surprised by anything.
replicatorblog 16y ago
They could be moving to a new generic name "iWhatever" where there are several subsections each represented with a colored circle and an icon inside. e.g. Blue Circle iTunes, iBooks is an orange circle with a book symbol, etc. Imagine these icons running vertically down the side of the new "iWhatever" client similar to the way they made the "Maximize/Minimize/Close" buttons vertical in the latest rev. This would actually be very similar to what Adobe did after it acquired Macromedia and faced the similar problem of having a jumble of apps that worked together, but lacked consistent branding and structure. They assigned everything a color and a "Periodic Table" naming convention which cohesively tied their products together. http://www.thehighcontrast.com/family-tree/ http://www.thehighcontrast.com/family-tree/ Another similarity is that most designers hated that change, just as they did the new iTunes icon!
earnubs 16y ago
Maybe they'll split the brand? iTunes, iMovies as seperate apps and the store on the web?
uxp 16y ago
However, the new icon is still a prominent music note. I would imagine they would require another icon change to signify that any iTunes name change isn't centered around music and audio.

gaiusparx 16y ago

Unlikely as they just released iTunes 10.1 last week. I don't see them pushing another iTunes client release within 2 weeks.

jacoblyles 16y ago