6 ms·

... iTunes became a bucket of too many features, so apple split it up into multiple applications. Apple music is pretty much exactly the same as iTunes was with

... iTunes became a bucket of too many features, so apple split it up into multiple applications. Apple music is pretty much exactly the same as iTunes was without a bunch of non-music related features. It's silly to say ~"iTunes died" it just changed names.

dzhiurgis 7y ago
Uses same 1gig of ram and misses some key features like proper track search. Go figure how it’s an improvement...
- tambourine_man 7y ago
  >proper track search Please explain. What is is missing? I find that it works pretty well. Is was one of its main selling point at the time and its interface spread throughout the OS: Finder, Spotlight, System Preferences, etc
  - dzhiurgis 7y ago
    New search field now return album covers (yuck). Old list search feature is now under View > Show Filter Field. Disappears after app restarts...
    - tambourine_man 7y ago
      You can change that. I configured it to work as it used to. I use it as the old 2000s versions, no album cover stuff
      - dzhiurgis 7y ago
        Please, how? I was just browsing my library today and it's a tragedy how bad it got...
        tambourine_man 7y ago
        Sorry for the late reply. That's iTunes on Mojave. https://imgur.com/a/0DJml25 https://imgur.com/a/0DJml25 Haven't made the jump to Catalina just yet. Mostly because of Sizzling Keys (control iTunes from system wide keyboard shortcuts) I think the trick is to set “filter by all” on the search field, but there might be some other preference setting somewhere.
- Nextgrid 7y ago
  I know certain parts of iTunes including Apple Music are web apps. Could it be that the entire new Music app is just a web app (using their own implementation of an Electron equivalent)? That would explain the memory usage.
  - madeofpalk 7y ago
    My understanding is that they're kind of web pages. Rather than HTML/CSS/JS, they have custom elements that are rendered from the server markup.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
m463 7y ago
Probably just became to unweildy for the developers and they split it out. I can't imagine successfully staffing a giant monolithic application. I think it would be hard to get job satisfaction working on a tiny piece of an app with decades of cruft. Most apps like this are several orders of magnitude larger than say, the linux kernel.
- unlinked_dll 7y ago
  I can't imagine how a music player became such a monolithic application in the first place... But I mean that's not true. I suspect the reason it was such a behemoth was because Apple wanted it to be the gateway and gatekeeper to both acquiring media and transferring it to the device. Like Spotify manages to do quite well for itself without being the monstrosity that iTunes became. I'd guess that the foundation of Apple's garden walls is also the source of their technical debt.
morpheuskafka 7y ago
Not to mention, the standalone iTunes Store is still called that, although it is certainly less successful now that Apple Music (the service, not the app) is available. And there is as of yet no plan to move away from the iTunes app on Windows.
chmaynard 7y ago
> Apple music is pretty much exactly the same as iTunes was without a bunch of non-music related features. Hmm, not really. I took a brief look at the UI during the Catalina beta and concluded that I wanted nothing to do with it. I have spent years learning how to use iTunes well. I'm not about to throw away that investment of time and energy on a new, untested app with a different UI. I'll stick with iTunes to manage my music library. Catalina will have to wait, probably forever.
- sysbin 7y ago
  The new UI in Catalina is worse. You cannot view other albums when you have an album open, instead you have to click a button to go back for viewing all the albums again. I also think the music app takes way too much space of the screen for what it needs shown to function. Apple must not have anyone seriously working on it.
- wwweston 7y ago
  > I'm not about to throw away that investment of time and energy on a new, untested app with a different UI. Come on, now. Think of the poor product managers, the struggling UX researchers and designers. How are they going to make their careers off of minor upgrades tied down to past investments of users?
  - zentiggr 7y ago
    Jean-Baptiste Emannuel Zorg, channeled here... I'll be ready to pound your back when you choke on that cherry :)
  - chmaynard 7y ago
    When I was working at Apple, some of us had a saying: "Apple knows what you need, and we're going to give it to you – good and hard."
- WWLink 7y ago
  Speaking of that, iTunes Radio and Apple Music are TERRIBLE guis! The web-based column views are really limited and crappy. You can do so much better with web GUIs if you want to, but Apple just wanted to waste a ton of screen space.
ProfessorLayton 7y ago
This is so incredibly true and particularly frustrating on iOS where the music player + Apple Music is a complete UX mess. There are so many features that everything os buried under more and more menus. On top of that it is riddled with bugs!
- Nextgrid 7y ago
  The Music app became a complete disaster on iOS. Now it's one thing if they want to kill their new streaming service due to bad UX, but the problem is that the stand-alone music app also suffered.
Ididntdothis 7y ago
They totally destroyed the audiobooks feature. Can't edit ID3, no playlists with Catalina. It's hard to believe how they could destroy it so thoroughly.
- xnyan 7y ago
  First, I agree with you - it's bullshit they took away the features they did. That said, of all the people you know in the Apple ecosystem, how many people know/do the following: know what an id3 tag is, manage the metadata of their digital audio content, listen to audiobooks. Maybe I'm wrong, but most non-nerds I know don't and would not ever want to think about 1 and 2. Plenty of people who fall into 3, but again all people who don't like or work in tech that I know use audible or the public library or some other service. I like so much about Apple products, but my big and growing fear is that my needs and the needs of the kind of person who edits ID3 tags are constantly being subsumed by the much larger portion of their customer base that has no need and no desire be involved in anything like editing file metadata.
  - Ididntdothis 7y ago
    To some degrees I understand but I think this a dangerous path. The Mac is a tool for creators and professionals so if they make the Mac into an iPad then people will just buy iPads. Maybe that’s what Apple wants but I think it’s very dangerous to drive away the people who made you successful.
  - mercer 7y ago
    The vast majority of developers that I know use macs. And not just web developers. That's got to be a sizable userbase, considering that a growing number of non-devs that I know use crappy laptops and instead use their phones for most of their digital needs. Of course I have no idea if this is reflected in the world-wide breakdown of Mac users, but I'd be surprised if the 'programmer' category isn't sizable enough that it's kind of silly (in a typical Apple way) to ignore them.
    - xnyan 7y ago
naravara 7y ago
I do feel like They’re having some trouble with the UX though since it has to juggle 3 kinds of file management. You’ve got the obvious “manage my music files on this device” part. Then you’ve got the “manage my music files as part of this iCloud library” part. Then you’ve got “stream music from the subscription service” part. It’s actually quite hard to make playlists and stuff since, over time, people start to lose track of what form they have the rights to any particular song.
wtmt 7y ago
> It's silly to say ~"iTunes died" it just changed names. I don’t agree at all. While iTunes was feature rich and relatively stable, the replacements are relatively feature poor and quite unstable. Apple should’ve taken another year to introduce the replacements.
- kalleboo 7y ago
  It could have been much, much worse. They could have ported over the iOS Music app.
  - pmullins 7y ago
    I'm pretty sure that's exactly what they did. My understanding is that they based the macOS version on the iOS version. Explains quite a bit.
    - kalleboo 7y ago
      The macOS Catalina Music app is very much still based on iTunes. It still supports AppleScript, the preferences dialog is still a modal, it retains a bunch of subtle (not always desired) behavior in stuff like metadata edit autocomplete and multiple window support, etc, it even has the ancient legacy visualizer, it's all still iTunes. The Podcasts/TV/Books apps that got split out OTOH I believe are all iOS ports
- pixelrevision 7y ago
  “relatively stable” You didn’t use itunes much did you?

dzhiurgis 7y ago

Uses same 1gig of ram and misses some key features like proper track search. Go figure how it’s an improvement...

tambourine_man 7y ago
>proper track search Please explain. What is is missing? I find that it works pretty well. Is was one of its main selling point at the time and its interface spread throughout the OS: Finder, Spotlight, System Preferences, etc
- dzhiurgis 7y ago
  New search field now return album covers (yuck). Old list search feature is now under View > Show Filter Field. Disappears after app restarts...
  - tambourine_man 7y ago
    You can change that. I configured it to work as it used to. I use it as the old 2000s versions, no album cover stuff
    - dzhiurgis 7y ago
      Please, how? I was just browsing my library today and it's a tragedy how bad it got...
      - tambourine_man 7y ago
        Sorry for the late reply. That's iTunes on Mojave. https://imgur.com/a/0DJml25 https://imgur.com/a/0DJml25 Haven't made the jump to Catalina just yet. Mostly because of Sizzling Keys (control iTunes from system wide keyboard shortcuts) I think the trick is to set “filter by all” on the search field, but there might be some other preference setting somewhere.
Nextgrid 7y ago
I know certain parts of iTunes including Apple Music are web apps. Could it be that the entire new Music app is just a web app (using their own implementation of an Electron equivalent)? That would explain the memory usage.
- madeofpalk 7y ago
  My understanding is that they're kind of web pages. Rather than HTML/CSS/JS, they have custom elements that are rendered from the server markup.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

m463 7y ago

Probably just became to unweildy for the developers and they split it out. I can't imagine successfully staffing a giant monolithic application. I think it would be hard to get job satisfaction working on a tiny piece of an app with decades of cruft. Most apps like this are several orders of magnitude larger than say, the linux kernel.

unlinked_dll 7y ago
I can't imagine how a music player became such a monolithic application in the first place... But I mean that's not true. I suspect the reason it was such a behemoth was because Apple wanted it to be the gateway and gatekeeper to both acquiring media and transferring it to the device. Like Spotify manages to do quite well for itself without being the monstrosity that iTunes became. I'd guess that the foundation of Apple's garden walls is also the source of their technical debt.

morpheuskafka 7y ago

Not to mention, the standalone iTunes Store is still called that, although it is certainly less successful now that Apple Music (the service, not the app) is available. And there is as of yet no plan to move away from the iTunes app on Windows.

chmaynard 7y ago

> Apple music is pretty much exactly the same as iTunes was without a bunch of non-music related features. Hmm, not really. I took a brief look at the UI during the Catalina beta and concluded that I wanted nothing to do with it. I have spent years learning how to use iTunes well. I'm not about to throw away that investment of time and energy on a new, untested app with a different UI. I'll stick with iTunes to manage my music library. Catalina will have to wait, probably forever.

sysbin 7y ago
The new UI in Catalina is worse. You cannot view other albums when you have an album open, instead you have to click a button to go back for viewing all the albums again. I also think the music app takes way too much space of the screen for what it needs shown to function. Apple must not have anyone seriously working on it.
wwweston 7y ago
> I'm not about to throw away that investment of time and energy on a new, untested app with a different UI. Come on, now. Think of the poor product managers, the struggling UX researchers and designers. How are they going to make their careers off of minor upgrades tied down to past investments of users?
- zentiggr 7y ago
  Jean-Baptiste Emannuel Zorg, channeled here... I'll be ready to pound your back when you choke on that cherry :)
- chmaynard 7y ago
  When I was working at Apple, some of us had a saying: "Apple knows what you need, and we're going to give it to you – good and hard."
WWLink 7y ago
Speaking of that, iTunes Radio and Apple Music are TERRIBLE guis! The web-based column views are really limited and crappy. You can do so much better with web GUIs if you want to, but Apple just wanted to waste a ton of screen space.

ProfessorLayton 7y ago

This is so incredibly true and particularly frustrating on iOS where the music player + Apple Music is a complete UX mess. There are so many features that everything os buried under more and more menus. On top of that it is riddled with bugs!

Nextgrid 7y ago
The Music app became a complete disaster on iOS. Now it's one thing if they want to kill their new streaming service due to bad UX, but the problem is that the stand-alone music app also suffered.

Ididntdothis 7y ago

They totally destroyed the audiobooks feature. Can't edit ID3, no playlists with Catalina. It's hard to believe how they could destroy it so thoroughly.

xnyan 7y ago
First, I agree with you - it's bullshit they took away the features they did. That said, of all the people you know in the Apple ecosystem, how many people know/do the following: know what an id3 tag is, manage the metadata of their digital audio content, listen to audiobooks. Maybe I'm wrong, but most non-nerds I know don't and would not ever want to think about 1 and 2. Plenty of people who fall into 3, but again all people who don't like or work in tech that I know use audible or the public library or some other service. I like so much about Apple products, but my big and growing fear is that my needs and the needs of the kind of person who edits ID3 tags are constantly being subsumed by the much larger portion of their customer base that has no need and no desire be involved in anything like editing file metadata.
- Ididntdothis 7y ago
  To some degrees I understand but I think this a dangerous path. The Mac is a tool for creators and professionals so if they make the Mac into an iPad then people will just buy iPads. Maybe that’s what Apple wants but I think it’s very dangerous to drive away the people who made you successful.
- mercer 7y ago
  The vast majority of developers that I know use macs. And not just web developers. That's got to be a sizable userbase, considering that a growing number of non-devs that I know use crappy laptops and instead use their phones for most of their digital needs. Of course I have no idea if this is reflected in the world-wide breakdown of Mac users, but I'd be surprised if the 'programmer' category isn't sizable enough that it's kind of silly (in a typical Apple way) to ignore them.
  - xnyan 7y ago

naravara 7y ago

I do feel like They’re having some trouble with the UX though since it has to juggle 3 kinds of file management. You’ve got the obvious “manage my music files on this device” part. Then you’ve got the “manage my music files as part of this iCloud library” part. Then you’ve got “stream music from the subscription service” part. It’s actually quite hard to make playlists and stuff since, over time, people start to lose track of what form they have the rights to any particular song.

wtmt 7y ago

> It's silly to say ~"iTunes died" it just changed names. I don’t agree at all. While iTunes was feature rich and relatively stable, the replacements are relatively feature poor and quite unstable. Apple should’ve taken another year to introduce the replacements.

kalleboo 7y ago
It could have been much, much worse. They could have ported over the iOS Music app.
- pmullins 7y ago
  I'm pretty sure that's exactly what they did. My understanding is that they based the macOS version on the iOS version. Explains quite a bit.
  - kalleboo 7y ago
    The macOS Catalina Music app is very much still based on iTunes. It still supports AppleScript, the preferences dialog is still a modal, it retains a bunch of subtle (not always desired) behavior in stuff like metadata edit autocomplete and multiple window support, etc, it even has the ancient legacy visualizer, it's all still iTunes. The Podcasts/TV/Books apps that got split out OTOH I believe are all iOS ports
pixelrevision 7y ago
“relatively stable” You didn’t use itunes much did you?