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Apple Plans End of iTunes

habosa 7y ago
I was an iTunes obsessive from 2003-2012. Then uploaded all my music to the cloud and moved on. Still miss the functionality though. Two days ago I wanted to rent a movie for an airplane, so I opened up iTunes on my Mac. I'm not kidding, in order to rent this movie I had to type in my password 8 times and confirm so many dialogs I almost gave up. If your purchase flow is that bad, you just don't care anymore. So not surprised they're gonna end it.
forrestthewoods 7y ago
Hallelujah. iTunes is the single worst piece of software I have ever used. It’s the only software I’ve seen bring someone to literal tears. And it’s done that to more than a couple of family members. May it rot in hell forever.
- lucisferre 7y ago
  > iTunes is the single worst piece of software I have ever used I mean sure it's bad, but I find it hard to take this statement literally for any HN reader. *Note that is not a comment about HN UX, just that anyone who uses software and technology extensively has to have used some pretty terrible software products in their lifetime.
  - forrestthewoods 7y ago
    I thought about it, but no I think iTunes is actually the worst. Some software is broken. It doesn’t work. But iTunes is so bloated and janky I don’t think I could design something that bad if I tried. The concept of “syncing” is completely wrong in a multi-device context Venn diagram. Plus iTunes has literally brought friends and family to tears. Actual tears. No other software has done that.
- insickness 7y ago
  As a PC user with an iphone, I loathe the fact that I have to open itunes just to transfer some music to my iphone. Let me just drag and drop instead of forcing me to into some prolonged, annoying machination.
ProfessorLayton 7y ago
Good riddance. iTunes went from one of my favorite music players, to an app I loathe to use every day at work just to listen to my Apple Music subscription. Admittedly I don't find iOS' Music app that much better, so I'm pretty wary of iTunes' upcoming replacement.
- will_pseudonym 7y ago
  I'm genuinely curious: why not use an alternative to Apple Music?
  - ProfessorLayton 7y ago
    Great question: - I'm all-in the Apple ecosystem (iPhone, Watch, ATV4K, Airport Express). So are my family members. - I'm on a family plan so $15/4 is a price that can't be beat. I do not live with the family members I share the plan with. This is relevant because: - I actually had a friend share their Spotify Family plan with me and Spotify insisted I prove I lived in the same address! Apple doesn't ask for anything beyond linking Apple IDs to a family. - The actual service/catalog provided by AM is fantastic, but overall I'm very unsatisfied with the UX of Apple's music apps.
sys_64738 7y ago
iTunes was so finicky to get music onto iPods with. I prefer mounting the drive as a folder and copying manually. Android easily does this but it feels like a struggle with iTunes. Hopefully any successor will be like Android.
dang 7y ago
This article falls loosely into the "announcement of an announcement" category, which is off topic for HN. There's no harm in waiting for the announcement itself.
vbezhenar 7y ago
Sounds like they just changing the name.
herf 7y ago
All backups have to go to iCloud now?
- saagarjha 7y ago
  > Without iTunes, customers can manage their Apple gadgets through the Music app. Presumably this will get moved into Music.
  - abstrct 7y ago
    This section was super disappointing. It sounds more like iTunes is being rebranded to Music since it’s still going to be the hub for managing iOS devices. What exactly is changing here other than the name?
    - saagarjha 7y ago
      Some of the ancillary features are getting refactored out, it seems. Plus the app might be getting a rewrite so it's not some awful C++ cross-platform hybrid?
jrs95 7y ago
I wonder if this also means the end of the WebObjects stuff currently backing iTunes, or if this stuff will just be consumed by Music now.
- jrs95 7y ago
  ...anyone want to explain why they have a problem with this? Personally I find it really interesting that a web framework that dates back to NeXT is still in production behind widely used software.
nategri 7y ago
I remember when iTunes came out for Windows ca. 2003. I had friends with Macs so I leapt at the chance to try it for myself---it just seemed lightyears ahead of whatever I was using to interface with my music library at the time (Winamp, probably). And what a long, slow, weird, decline it's been since then.
- kvark 7y ago
  Minority here, I never understood why music players shifted towards iTune-ish style of owning and re-categorizing everything in their own way... I mean, OS has a file system, why not just rely on it? Throw some searchable tags in, and you get the same abilities but without obscurity.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - mcrider 7y ago
    OS level doesn't have enough metadata. I remember tirelessly starring and categorizing my music to make smart playlists -- AFAIK you can't do that in the OS without some weird file naming schemes and a lot of extra work.
  - mullingitover 7y ago
    iTunesFS sort of gives you this. You get a read-only disk that maps to the iTunes database. Playlists are their own directories, along with artists, albums, etc.
  - sethhochberg 7y ago
    I have a lot of friends who do literally all of their work out of their "Downloads" folder - I don't know how they survive that way, but they love music players which they can just point at a directory and say "index this and make a neat library" and know that everything lives in one place. Personally, I'm in the camp who kept a manually-organized directory tree for music for years, and would still prefer that mode of working, but even among my technical friends I think I'm in the minority there. Presumably Apple was right that this is what most people prefer.
lwansbrough 7y ago
The article also mentions new tools for building cross-device apps. I hope that induces a non-superficial commitment to PWAs but sadly I wouldn’t bet on it.
- CraftThatBlock 7y ago
  I believe this is related to Marzipan, Apple's way to turn iPad apps into Mac apps. Eventually will support iPhones too
- madeofpalk 7y ago
  What do mean? Safari, on both iOS and macOS, supports most aspects of PWA (most notably, Service Workers), and has done so for quite a while.
mrgalaxy 7y ago
> Apple has pushed the iPad as a laptop replacement for years. But many pro users have noted that while the hardware is capable enough, the software is still behind. As other HN users have noted in the past, until Apple gives me access to a terminal where I can run the command line tools required for my work, I have absolutely zero interest in replacing my laptop with an iPad.
- untog 7y ago
  You are in a tiny minority. I say this as a fellow member of that minority. But our complaints have (and should have) very little to do with what Apple does or doesn't do with iPads.
  - SomeOldThrow 7y ago
    Apple is not in the business of designing tools, they are in the business of making money. We’re gonna end up using ipads regardless of our needs.
    - mostlysimilar 7y ago
      People need tools to build the apps that run on their devices, apps without which they would make significantly less money.
      - SomeOldThrow 7y ago
        People will build tools fine on Xcode for Ios or whatever, and you will have a unix app or something that gives you access to tools. Not want you want? I doubt apple gives a shit.
  - rusk 7y ago
    Except that you need developers to build an ecosystem and Apple is currently alienating them in droves. developers developera developers as a wise man once said
_bxg1 7y ago
The main factor keeping me on Deezer instead of switching to Apple Music since getting an iPhone has been "Oh god, I'd have to use iTunes on desktop". So this is a positive development.
- caiob 7y ago
  First world problems is a real thing indeed! Haha. PS.: I’m off Apple Music for the exact same reason.
psychometry 7y ago
As someone who prefers to own music and organize it how I want, this is incredibly disappointing. I have no doubt that Apple Music will include only a fraction of the features I've come to depend on.
- chrisseaton 7y ago
  If you want to organise your music how you want, why were you using iTunes in the first place - an app which organises your music for you? Surely it was already not suitable for your particular workflow and never aimed or claimed to be?
  - SomeOldThrow 7y ago
    > an app which organises your music for you How do you figure? Itunes is completely unaware of most qualities of music, in fact nearly everything unattested in metadata.
    - chrisseaton 7y ago
      I don't know how you manage your music, but when I use iTunes I just drop it on the icon and it gets filed away (organised) for me.
      - tkxxx7 7y ago
        > and it gets filed away (organised) for me This is optional, there's a "let iTunes manage my music for me" checkbox somewhere.
      - SomeOldThrow 7y ago
        Ahh I see what you’re saying and I don’t particularly care where the audio is sourced from, so long as I can’t accidentally delete it. The file system is not designed for many dimensional indexing, it just indexes by path. You need software that query to make sense of thousands of files.
  - psychometry 7y ago
bwb 7y ago
Wow, glad to hear it, but what a cool piece of software. I was so excited when it came to Windows and it helped me slowly move over to Mac which I am super happy with. Good move as the thing went from doing x to doing a-z and being so bloated. I am happy to see it streamlined into a few apps again :)
firasd 7y ago
Good move. I predicted this in my 'iTunes will never work well' post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12527098 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12527098 "At this point, whatever the causes of the product problems with iTunes and related iOS apps — feature scope, management, team structure, etc. —we can be pretty sure that the only ‘solution’ will appear when this software achieves end-of-life, the same way that the mystery of how to set recording time on VCRs was finally solved by their obsolescence."
- scarface74 7y ago
  Yes iTunes “never worked well” even though at its height it was the number one music store in the US....
  - firasd 7y ago
    Fair enough. My claim was from September 2016, predicting that it will never work well in the future (and the UX problems I highlighted were from 2010 onwards.) I think it was pretty obvious that the app will need to be unbundled (about an year after my post, Apple started removing some features from iTunes like the iOS App store). I'm sure people liked it in 2004 (although I never was blown away by it.) Also the fact that it was the #1 store can reflect music distribution agreements (and the success of iPod/iPhone) more than its prowess as a product.
wuunderbar 7y ago
I really hope the next iOS makes some sort of "leapfrog" UX change where we move away from icons on a grid for the home screen, especially for iPad. I know this may alienate and confuse some iOS users, but I trust Apple can figure out some way for this to be intuitive for their users.
- hn_throwaway_99 7y ago
  Why?
  - RickS 7y ago
    I work on cross platform design for a fortune 500. We keep our eye on this kind of thing. In conversation, the consensus among my peers was that the separation between iOS and OSX is destined to be impermanent. Phones are becoming more complex, and more integral to our every routine. But more significantly, they're raising a new generation of digital natives that have different expectations about UI and its scale, density, information architecture, onboarding, collaboration, and storage, to name a few. These mobile-first expectations are flavoring desktop software, and smoothing over the once rough edges of highly-compact power user software. Gmail's redesign, and most redesigns really, demonstrate this. Less information, displayed in a more opinionated way, with whitespace and garnish and a focus on golden-path big-brother-knows-best presentation over configuration and optimization for power users. Desktop and mobile trends are slowly converging, and I think that when it comes, that convergence from apple risks being abrupt and unapologetic. They're like that – with flash, the headphone jack, and the touch bar. They wait a long time, but when they make a move, they really rip the bandaid. I find this future to be sad and scary, for the most part. But I agree that the icon grid home screen abstraction feels more like a "because it's always been that way" thing than anything else. It's a holdover from the blackberry days. Given how far mobile apps have come in the mean time, the mobile phone's desktop/start menu is ready for some new abstractions.
    - erikpukinskis 7y ago
      I see a conversational, transactional OS leading the way to the next generation of UIs. No more cockpits. Not sure Apple has laid any groundwork for that. Amazon is positioned.
madengr 7y ago
Will I still be able to rip CDs and put them on my phone? Yes, I’m old fashioned and still only purchase on CD.
- thirdsun 7y ago
  Just use XLD to rip CDs. Since there isn’t any Mac with a disc drive left I don’t see this being migrated to the new app.
MBCook 7y ago
Just please let me keep my star ratings instead of having to switch to thumbs up/down.
CraigRood 7y ago
I'm torn on this one. Part of me loves iTunes and it does so much more than the typical user will ever realise, but the other part of me sees that iTunes is come to the end of the road and an entire rebuild of the Apple Music app needs to happen. I still miss features like iTunes DJ. It was the best way to just click play and enjoy your library, and hasn't been replaced by any player that I know of including Spotify.
6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago
I'd better still be able to access all the media I've bought on iTunes, and I'd better still be able to access it on my PC.
biql 7y ago
> The company is launching a trio of new apps for the Mac – Music, TV, and Podcasts – to replace iTunes. Nice. It's always better to have multiple programs each dedicated to a specific task than one that tries to be everything.
- derp_dee_derp 7y ago
  not nice. Apple is very open about their long term plan to convert to a media and services company. Their business plan is to 1) get you to change over to these 3 new apps now when they are free, 2) convert each to a paid monthly subscription plan once enough people use them. so soon you'll be paying for 3 things instead of being able to use iTunes like it is now.
  - chipotle_coyote 7y ago
    Apple is not splitting up the apps on macOS as part of a nefarious plan to make you pay more money. They're doing it because the apps have been split on iOS for years already: - The new Music app will have the ability to play local music, so it won't need a subscription. (Conversely, you can get an Apple Music subscription with iTunes right now.) - The TV app will likely function just like the iOS one: if you have videos in your library that are playable by it, it'll play them, no subscription. If you subscribe to a TV "channel," it'll show up there. (This presumably includes the forthcoming Apple TV+ service, but there are no details about its pricing model yet.) - Again, the Podcasts app will likely function just like the iOS one, which means it's not something that Apple is making money from. You subscribe to podcast feeds in it the same way you do in any other podcast player. To be clear, I'm not saying Apple doesn't actively have nefarious plans to make you pay more money -- I'm just saying this isn't one of them.
- JakeTheAndroid 7y ago
  This confuses me. Isn't this essentially how it already works? Like QuickTime is how you play video files and you can organize videos in QT just like you can do so with music in iTunes. I know both apps are kind of tied together, but it seems like outside of Podcasts they already have two apps doing two different things. Does this also mean they are killing QuickTime?
vondur 7y ago
If this is true, and it follows Apple normal software re-write playbook, then the new replacement will have hardly any functionality compared the current iTunes version.
- 1over137 7y ago
  Yes, if it's anything like, for example, iPhotos -> Photos.app, then they'll remove all kinds of useful things and make the UI worse.
jrochkind1 7y ago
Hm, I wonder if I'll still be able to sync music and podcasts to my iPod. My 10-plus-year-old iPod is rock solid technology, hardware and software, just keeps on working. At this point it feels like some retro SF alternate vision of the future we could have had, with simple easy to use things that never broke.
- skybrian 7y ago
  Apple just released a new iPod Touch, so it seems it will survive in some form: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/05/remember-the-ipod-apple-just-released-the-first-new-one-in-four-years/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/05/remember-the-ipod-ap...
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    iPod Touch runs iOS, though, so it might not have the same appeal.
- rusk 7y ago
  It might be the excuse I need to try out rockbox … https://www.rockbox.org https://www.rockbox.org
- koyote 7y ago
  Do you walk with your iPod in your pocket? The reason I am asking is because I am surprised yours has lasted so long. I had two and they broke within two years due to the mechanical hdd inside. (the headphones also broke, within a month each time; really put me off buying Apple products again)
  - scrooched_moose 7y ago
    The Nano/Shuffle/Touch lines (2005+) all used flash memory. I'm not aware of many issues with the Mini line either due to the much smaller hard drive.
  - jrochkind1 7y ago
    Yeah, I've got a nano 4th generation, no moving parts in there, it should last forever, or until the battery goes, but battery still going just fine for me, can play more music than I've needed without a recharge.
Silhouette 7y ago
What does this men for getting data onto and off iDevices from non-Apple equipment like Windows PCs? Apple has always stubbornly refused to support standardised formats and transfer protocols for a lot of widely useful data types, and if you didn't want to trust your data to iCloud then the PC iTunes application was one of the few other officially supported ways to move things onto or off your mobile devices. It would be great if their push to make their devices stronger candidates to replace general purpose PCs included improvements here, because iTunes on Windows is pretty bad, but it would be a concern if this actually heralds a move further in the other direction.
Razengan 7y ago
The arguments here between "file hierarchy" versus the "library/drawer/shoebox" styles of organization highlight a fundamental failing of traditional filesystems: The need to store certain content under multiple horizontal categories (or folders.) For example I will add the same song to multiple playlists, for different moods and activities, or a photo may have multiple elements that I might search for (e.g. "nature", "warm", "urban" etc.) Symlinks/Aliases are too cumbersome. Tags help alleviate this a little, but they're still a tacked-on layer instead of a core FS feature in modern OSes (even macOS has inconsistent UI support for tags and becomes unwieldy if you have hundreds of tags.)
- mixmastamyk 7y ago
  I've used playlists since the 90s, there is no technical issue preventing their use from a filesystem.
  - Razengan 7y ago
    Of course. "Playlists" are a layer over the filesystem to make up for deficiencies of a traditional filesystem. Playlist-like organization is useful for a lot of other types of content besides music, so why not bring those features back into the filesystem layer?
mac01021 7y ago
> Without iTunes, customers can manage their Apple gadgets through the Music app. For a moment, I thought it sounded like a good plan.
wtmt 7y ago
The only feature I want back is full app sync with a computer, like it used to be some years ago (both transferring from the iOS device to the computer and back from the computer to the iOS device). This was removed when app thinning was introduced, and partially retained in the iTunes version for enterprise. This saves bandwidth when managing multiple devices, makes setting up a new device a whole lot faster (than waiting for apps to download), offers control on the app versions and also helps in cases when some developer removes an app from the store because they want customers to buy another app or a differently named one.
- acolumb 7y ago
  Now, iTunes backups (which historically took up gobs of space on the tiny MacBook drives of years past,) only save app data, and restoring will take up the aforementioned bandwidth. That’s why I use an iOS 6 iPhone 5 with iTunes 11 on OS X Mavericks.
amaccuish 7y ago
If there was an iPod Classic that supported syncing with Spotify I'd be all over it.

I was an iTunes obsessive from 2003-2012. Then uploaded all my music to the cloud and moved on. Still miss the functionality though. Two days ago I wanted to rent a movie for an airplane, so I opened up iTunes on my Mac. I'm not kidding, in order to rent this movie I had to type in my password 8 times and confirm so many dialogs I almost gave up. If your purchase flow is that bad, you just don't care anymore. So not surprised they're gonna end it.

forrestthewoods 7y ago

Hallelujah. iTunes is the single worst piece of software I have ever used. It’s the only software I’ve seen bring someone to literal tears. And it’s done that to more than a couple of family members. May it rot in hell forever.

lucisferre 7y ago
> iTunes is the single worst piece of software I have ever used I mean sure it's bad, but I find it hard to take this statement literally for any HN reader. *Note that is not a comment about HN UX, just that anyone who uses software and technology extensively has to have used some pretty terrible software products in their lifetime.
- forrestthewoods 7y ago
  I thought about it, but no I think iTunes is actually the worst. Some software is broken. It doesn’t work. But iTunes is so bloated and janky I don’t think I could design something that bad if I tried. The concept of “syncing” is completely wrong in a multi-device context Venn diagram. Plus iTunes has literally brought friends and family to tears. Actual tears. No other software has done that.
insickness 7y ago
As a PC user with an iphone, I loathe the fact that I have to open itunes just to transfer some music to my iphone. Let me just drag and drop instead of forcing me to into some prolonged, annoying machination.

ProfessorLayton 7y ago

Good riddance. iTunes went from one of my favorite music players, to an app I loathe to use every day at work just to listen to my Apple Music subscription. Admittedly I don't find iOS' Music app that much better, so I'm pretty wary of iTunes' upcoming replacement.

will_pseudonym 7y ago
I'm genuinely curious: why not use an alternative to Apple Music?
- ProfessorLayton 7y ago
  Great question: - I'm all-in the Apple ecosystem (iPhone, Watch, ATV4K, Airport Express). So are my family members. - I'm on a family plan so $15/4 is a price that can't be beat. I do not live with the family members I share the plan with. This is relevant because: - I actually had a friend share their Spotify Family plan with me and Spotify insisted I prove I lived in the same address! Apple doesn't ask for anything beyond linking Apple IDs to a family. - The actual service/catalog provided by AM is fantastic, but overall I'm very unsatisfied with the UX of Apple's music apps.

sys_64738 7y ago

iTunes was so finicky to get music onto iPods with. I prefer mounting the drive as a folder and copying manually. Android easily does this but it feels like a struggle with iTunes. Hopefully any successor will be like Android.

dang 7y ago

This article falls loosely into the "announcement of an announcement" category, which is off topic for HN. There's no harm in waiting for the announcement itself.

vbezhenar 7y ago

Sounds like they just changing the name.

herf 7y ago

All backups have to go to iCloud now?

saagarjha 7y ago
> Without iTunes, customers can manage their Apple gadgets through the Music app. Presumably this will get moved into Music.
- abstrct 7y ago
  This section was super disappointing. It sounds more like iTunes is being rebranded to Music since it’s still going to be the hub for managing iOS devices. What exactly is changing here other than the name?
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    Some of the ancillary features are getting refactored out, it seems. Plus the app might be getting a rewrite so it's not some awful C++ cross-platform hybrid?

jrs95 7y ago

I wonder if this also means the end of the WebObjects stuff currently backing iTunes, or if this stuff will just be consumed by Music now.

jrs95 7y ago
...anyone want to explain why they have a problem with this? Personally I find it really interesting that a web framework that dates back to NeXT is still in production behind widely used software.

nategri 7y ago

I remember when iTunes came out for Windows ca. 2003. I had friends with Macs so I leapt at the chance to try it for myself---it just seemed lightyears ahead of whatever I was using to interface with my music library at the time (Winamp, probably). And what a long, slow, weird, decline it's been since then.

kvark 7y ago
Minority here, I never understood why music players shifted towards iTune-ish style of owning and re-categorizing everything in their own way... I mean, OS has a file system, why not just rely on it? Throw some searchable tags in, and you get the same abilities but without obscurity.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- mcrider 7y ago
  OS level doesn't have enough metadata. I remember tirelessly starring and categorizing my music to make smart playlists -- AFAIK you can't do that in the OS without some weird file naming schemes and a lot of extra work.
- mullingitover 7y ago
  iTunesFS sort of gives you this. You get a read-only disk that maps to the iTunes database. Playlists are their own directories, along with artists, albums, etc.
- sethhochberg 7y ago
  I have a lot of friends who do literally all of their work out of their "Downloads" folder - I don't know how they survive that way, but they love music players which they can just point at a directory and say "index this and make a neat library" and know that everything lives in one place. Personally, I'm in the camp who kept a manually-organized directory tree for music for years, and would still prefer that mode of working, but even among my technical friends I think I'm in the minority there. Presumably Apple was right that this is what most people prefer.

lwansbrough 7y ago

The article also mentions new tools for building cross-device apps. I hope that induces a non-superficial commitment to PWAs but sadly I wouldn’t bet on it.

CraftThatBlock 7y ago
I believe this is related to Marzipan, Apple's way to turn iPad apps into Mac apps. Eventually will support iPhones too
madeofpalk 7y ago
What do mean? Safari, on both iOS and macOS, supports most aspects of PWA (most notably, Service Workers), and has done so for quite a while.

mrgalaxy 7y ago

> Apple has pushed the iPad as a laptop replacement for years. But many pro users have noted that while the hardware is capable enough, the software is still behind. As other HN users have noted in the past, until Apple gives me access to a terminal where I can run the command line tools required for my work, I have absolutely zero interest in replacing my laptop with an iPad.

untog 7y ago
You are in a tiny minority. I say this as a fellow member of that minority. But our complaints have (and should have) very little to do with what Apple does or doesn't do with iPads.
- SomeOldThrow 7y ago
  Apple is not in the business of designing tools, they are in the business of making money. We’re gonna end up using ipads regardless of our needs.
  - mostlysimilar 7y ago
    People need tools to build the apps that run on their devices, apps without which they would make significantly less money.
    - SomeOldThrow 7y ago
      People will build tools fine on Xcode for Ios or whatever, and you will have a unix app or something that gives you access to tools. Not want you want? I doubt apple gives a shit.
- rusk 7y ago
  Except that you need developers to build an ecosystem and Apple is currently alienating them in droves. developers developera developers as a wise man once said

_bxg1 7y ago

The main factor keeping me on Deezer instead of switching to Apple Music since getting an iPhone has been "Oh god, I'd have to use iTunes on desktop". So this is a positive development.

caiob 7y ago
First world problems is a real thing indeed! Haha. PS.: I’m off Apple Music for the exact same reason.

psychometry 7y ago

As someone who prefers to own music and organize it how I want, this is incredibly disappointing. I have no doubt that Apple Music will include only a fraction of the features I've come to depend on.

chrisseaton 7y ago
If you want to organise your music how you want, why were you using iTunes in the first place - an app which organises your music for you? Surely it was already not suitable for your particular workflow and never aimed or claimed to be?
- SomeOldThrow 7y ago
  > an app which organises your music for you How do you figure? Itunes is completely unaware of most qualities of music, in fact nearly everything unattested in metadata.
  - chrisseaton 7y ago
    I don't know how you manage your music, but when I use iTunes I just drop it on the icon and it gets filed away (organised) for me.
    - tkxxx7 7y ago
      > and it gets filed away (organised) for me This is optional, there's a "let iTunes manage my music for me" checkbox somewhere.
    - SomeOldThrow 7y ago
      Ahh I see what you’re saying and I don’t particularly care where the audio is sourced from, so long as I can’t accidentally delete it. The file system is not designed for many dimensional indexing, it just indexes by path. You need software that query to make sense of thousands of files.
- psychometry 7y ago

bwb 7y ago

Wow, glad to hear it, but what a cool piece of software. I was so excited when it came to Windows and it helped me slowly move over to Mac which I am super happy with. Good move as the thing went from doing x to doing a-z and being so bloated. I am happy to see it streamlined into a few apps again :)

firasd 7y ago

Good move. I predicted this in my 'iTunes will never work well' post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12527098 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12527098 "At this point, whatever the causes of the product problems with iTunes and related iOS apps — feature scope, management, team structure, etc. —we can be pretty sure that the only ‘solution’ will appear when this software achieves end-of-life, the same way that the mystery of how to set recording time on VCRs was finally solved by their obsolescence."

scarface74 7y ago
Yes iTunes “never worked well” even though at its height it was the number one music store in the US....
- firasd 7y ago
  Fair enough. My claim was from September 2016, predicting that it will never work well in the future (and the UX problems I highlighted were from 2010 onwards.) I think it was pretty obvious that the app will need to be unbundled (about an year after my post, Apple started removing some features from iTunes like the iOS App store). I'm sure people liked it in 2004 (although I never was blown away by it.) Also the fact that it was the #1 store can reflect music distribution agreements (and the success of iPod/iPhone) more than its prowess as a product.

wuunderbar 7y ago

I really hope the next iOS makes some sort of "leapfrog" UX change where we move away from icons on a grid for the home screen, especially for iPad. I know this may alienate and confuse some iOS users, but I trust Apple can figure out some way for this to be intuitive for their users.

hn_throwaway_99 7y ago
Why?
- RickS 7y ago
  I work on cross platform design for a fortune 500. We keep our eye on this kind of thing. In conversation, the consensus among my peers was that the separation between iOS and OSX is destined to be impermanent. Phones are becoming more complex, and more integral to our every routine. But more significantly, they're raising a new generation of digital natives that have different expectations about UI and its scale, density, information architecture, onboarding, collaboration, and storage, to name a few. These mobile-first expectations are flavoring desktop software, and smoothing over the once rough edges of highly-compact power user software. Gmail's redesign, and most redesigns really, demonstrate this. Less information, displayed in a more opinionated way, with whitespace and garnish and a focus on golden-path big-brother-knows-best presentation over configuration and optimization for power users. Desktop and mobile trends are slowly converging, and I think that when it comes, that convergence from apple risks being abrupt and unapologetic. They're like that – with flash, the headphone jack, and the touch bar. They wait a long time, but when they make a move, they really rip the bandaid. I find this future to be sad and scary, for the most part. But I agree that the icon grid home screen abstraction feels more like a "because it's always been that way" thing than anything else. It's a holdover from the blackberry days. Given how far mobile apps have come in the mean time, the mobile phone's desktop/start menu is ready for some new abstractions.
  - erikpukinskis 7y ago
    I see a conversational, transactional OS leading the way to the next generation of UIs. No more cockpits. Not sure Apple has laid any groundwork for that. Amazon is positioned.

madengr 7y ago

Will I still be able to rip CDs and put them on my phone? Yes, I’m old fashioned and still only purchase on CD.

thirdsun 7y ago
Just use XLD to rip CDs. Since there isn’t any Mac with a disc drive left I don’t see this being migrated to the new app.

MBCook 7y ago

Just please let me keep my star ratings instead of having to switch to thumbs up/down.

CraigRood 7y ago

I'm torn on this one. Part of me loves iTunes and it does so much more than the typical user will ever realise, but the other part of me sees that iTunes is come to the end of the road and an entire rebuild of the Apple Music app needs to happen. I still miss features like iTunes DJ. It was the best way to just click play and enjoy your library, and hasn't been replaced by any player that I know of including Spotify.

6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago

I'd better still be able to access all the media I've bought on iTunes, and I'd better still be able to access it on my PC.

biql 7y ago

> The company is launching a trio of new apps for the Mac – Music, TV, and Podcasts – to replace iTunes. Nice. It's always better to have multiple programs each dedicated to a specific task than one that tries to be everything.

derp_dee_derp 7y ago
not nice. Apple is very open about their long term plan to convert to a media and services company. Their business plan is to 1) get you to change over to these 3 new apps now when they are free, 2) convert each to a paid monthly subscription plan once enough people use them. so soon you'll be paying for 3 things instead of being able to use iTunes like it is now.
- chipotle_coyote 7y ago
  Apple is not splitting up the apps on macOS as part of a nefarious plan to make you pay more money. They're doing it because the apps have been split on iOS for years already: - The new Music app will have the ability to play local music, so it won't need a subscription. (Conversely, you can get an Apple Music subscription with iTunes right now.) - The TV app will likely function just like the iOS one: if you have videos in your library that are playable by it, it'll play them, no subscription. If you subscribe to a TV "channel," it'll show up there. (This presumably includes the forthcoming Apple TV+ service, but there are no details about its pricing model yet.) - Again, the Podcasts app will likely function just like the iOS one, which means it's not something that Apple is making money from. You subscribe to podcast feeds in it the same way you do in any other podcast player. To be clear, I'm not saying Apple doesn't actively have nefarious plans to make you pay more money -- I'm just saying this isn't one of them.
JakeTheAndroid 7y ago
This confuses me. Isn't this essentially how it already works? Like QuickTime is how you play video files and you can organize videos in QT just like you can do so with music in iTunes. I know both apps are kind of tied together, but it seems like outside of Podcasts they already have two apps doing two different things. Does this also mean they are killing QuickTime?

vondur 7y ago

If this is true, and it follows Apple normal software re-write playbook, then the new replacement will have hardly any functionality compared the current iTunes version.

1over137 7y ago
Yes, if it's anything like, for example, iPhotos -> Photos.app, then they'll remove all kinds of useful things and make the UI worse.

jrochkind1 7y ago

Hm, I wonder if I'll still be able to sync music and podcasts to my iPod. My 10-plus-year-old iPod is rock solid technology, hardware and software, just keeps on working. At this point it feels like some retro SF alternate vision of the future we could have had, with simple easy to use things that never broke.

skybrian 7y ago
Apple just released a new iPod Touch, so it seems it will survive in some form: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/05/remember-the-ipod-apple-just-released-the-first-new-one-in-four-years/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/05/remember-the-ipod-ap...
- saagarjha 7y ago
  iPod Touch runs iOS, though, so it might not have the same appeal.
rusk 7y ago
It might be the excuse I need to try out rockbox … https://www.rockbox.org https://www.rockbox.org
koyote 7y ago
Do you walk with your iPod in your pocket? The reason I am asking is because I am surprised yours has lasted so long. I had two and they broke within two years due to the mechanical hdd inside. (the headphones also broke, within a month each time; really put me off buying Apple products again)
- scrooched_moose 7y ago
  The Nano/Shuffle/Touch lines (2005+) all used flash memory. I'm not aware of many issues with the Mini line either due to the much smaller hard drive.
- jrochkind1 7y ago
  Yeah, I've got a nano 4th generation, no moving parts in there, it should last forever, or until the battery goes, but battery still going just fine for me, can play more music than I've needed without a recharge.

Silhouette 7y ago

What does this men for getting data onto and off iDevices from non-Apple equipment like Windows PCs? Apple has always stubbornly refused to support standardised formats and transfer protocols for a lot of widely useful data types, and if you didn't want to trust your data to iCloud then the PC iTunes application was one of the few other officially supported ways to move things onto or off your mobile devices. It would be great if their push to make their devices stronger candidates to replace general purpose PCs included improvements here, because iTunes on Windows is pretty bad, but it would be a concern if this actually heralds a move further in the other direction.

Razengan 7y ago

The arguments here between "file hierarchy" versus the "library/drawer/shoebox" styles of organization highlight a fundamental failing of traditional filesystems: The need to store certain content under multiple horizontal categories (or folders.) For example I will add the same song to multiple playlists, for different moods and activities, or a photo may have multiple elements that I might search for (e.g. "nature", "warm", "urban" etc.) Symlinks/Aliases are too cumbersome. Tags help alleviate this a little, but they're still a tacked-on layer instead of a core FS feature in modern OSes (even macOS has inconsistent UI support for tags and becomes unwieldy if you have hundreds of tags.)

mixmastamyk 7y ago
I've used playlists since the 90s, there is no technical issue preventing their use from a filesystem.
- Razengan 7y ago
  Of course. "Playlists" are a layer over the filesystem to make up for deficiencies of a traditional filesystem. Playlist-like organization is useful for a lot of other types of content besides music, so why not bring those features back into the filesystem layer?

mac01021 7y ago

> Without iTunes, customers can manage their Apple gadgets through the Music app. For a moment, I thought it sounded like a good plan.

wtmt 7y ago

The only feature I want back is full app sync with a computer, like it used to be some years ago (both transferring from the iOS device to the computer and back from the computer to the iOS device). This was removed when app thinning was introduced, and partially retained in the iTunes version for enterprise. This saves bandwidth when managing multiple devices, makes setting up a new device a whole lot faster (than waiting for apps to download), offers control on the app versions and also helps in cases when some developer removes an app from the store because they want customers to buy another app or a differently named one.

acolumb 7y ago
Now, iTunes backups (which historically took up gobs of space on the tiny MacBook drives of years past,) only save app data, and restoring will take up the aforementioned bandwidth. That’s why I use an iOS 6 iPhone 5 with iTunes 11 on OS X Mavericks.

amaccuish 7y ago

If there was an iPod Classic that supported syncing with Spotify I'd be all over it.