4 ms·

I'd have more belief in Apple software engineering genius if I didn't have to use iTunes on Vista to sync with my (otherwise wonderful) iPhone. What an awful, a

by thras 18y ago

I'd have more belief in Apple software engineering genius if I didn't have to use iTunes on Vista to sync with my (otherwise wonderful) iPhone. What an awful, awful, product. And god help you if you try to do any management of your music files outside of the program. So sure, OS X is great, I hear. But every time I put a Mac on my desk next to my Windows or Linux machine at work or at home, I get bored of it very quickly. Like Linux, like Windows, it runs multiple graphical applications at once. What else do I need an OS to do except stay out of my way?

evgen 18y ago
It could be worse. You could be a Mac user who needs to use one of Microsoft's products. There is no more worthless piece of shit in the world of computing than MS Entourage....
- ComputerGuru 18y ago
  I wholly disagree. Entourage sucks, but Excel and (particularly) Word for Mac are even better than their Windows counterparts. Word 2008 is a masterpiece. It has a number of nice features (notebook mode is great for university students).
jimbokun 18y ago
Here's the highest compliment I can pay iTunes: I hardly think about it anymore. Granted, I run iTunes on a Mac, and my main use case is just finding and downloading new podcasts and syncing them to my old iPod. But I can hardly think how iTunes could be improved to take less effort on my part. I put the iPod in the dock, iTunes launches, it syncs all the podcasts, and I just have to click the little eject icon next to the icon of my iPod to take it out and start listening to it. I think the key difference is you say you WANT to manage your music files. With iTunes, I don't even bother to manage anything, hardly. It just does the obvious thing which is almost always what I want.
- thras 18y ago
  I wish it worked that well for me. (It evidently works that well for my girlfriend, a Mac user.) But no, I don't want to manage my own music. I want, for instance, all the duplicates to go away. I want podcasts that failed to download properly and are now missing to be able to be refreshed without a bizare and undocumented shift triangle-click shift-click trick (no menu option to achieve the same!). I want my music to play every time I click on it without having to turn iTunes off and on. I want it to work with Windows Remote Desktop like every other piece of music software I've got. I want a useful search UI, instead of the stateful UI that we've got that can only search either library or store. I want to be able to flag a long audio file as "podcast" so that it can remember my place and resume without having to set up my own feed to make that happen.
  - thehigherlife 18y ago
    at least for the last one, if you goto get info, then select options. there is an option called remember playback position
  - unalone 18y ago
    You can do the last one by right-clicking and picking "Get Info." There's an option called "remember playback position"; check it and it should work. How often do you have to do an advances search? For ones you do often, just make a smart playlist. Otherwise, what kinds of searches don't work easily with a simple fast text search? I'm curious. As for the other stuff: iTunes on Windows is bad. I think it's better than some other media players (though I've heard WinAmp is better), but it's not particularly good. On a Mac, though, it's very fast. In my 50GB library, it searches near-instantly, and I really can't think of any time I've had a problem with it. So I can absolutely understand your complaint with the Windows version, and I hope they fix it, but on the Mac it's really a good program. (Good enough that no competitors have seen fit to exist, anyway, not counting the ultra-experimental Songbird.)
ejs 18y ago
This has always been a major complain for me, Itunes is a pretty horrible program, I guess it only gets excruciatingly slow with a lot of music and files to index. I used to think it was my relatively crappy machine at the time, when I tried again on another machine (2.0 GHz core2 duo, 4 GB) same disgustingly slow performance. Completely unusable. Only way to make it work without grinding to a halt is only indexing certain folder of music... great....
- modoc 18y ago
  Are you on Windows? I run iTunes on a pretty old G5, with currently 240 GB of music. It's never slow. Never hesitates.
  - watmough 18y ago
    iTunes on the Mac, and iTunes on Windows are two very different animals. With any luck iTunes 8.1 should speed things up a bit for Windows users.
    - windsurfer 18y ago
      I find that all the mac users I know are always waiting on the next update to fix some sort of problem. As an example, one of my friends cannot connect to a bluetooth network due to some bug that was introduced 2 years ago. It's too bad you can't go in there and, you know, jumble some plumbing around and get it fixed.
  - ejs 18y ago
    Those were on windows with about 600 gig music and its painful. Really I have just stopped moving much music because of this reason, plus I only have windows on an older machine I don't use much. Last time I tried to use it under virtual box on ubuntu it didn't work at all because of USB issues.
tvon 18y ago
I couldn't agree more that iTunes is a pretty horrible Windows app, I don't know anyone that ever used it as their primary music player/manager. It's a fairly stark contrast to using it on OSX, where you pretty much don't ever think about it. [edit 15 minutes later] I can't help but to quote Darby Lines (aka, The Angry Drunk): > Second, bitching that anyone is a “bad” Windows citizen is the rhetorical equivalent of arguing that one turd in a sea of shit is particularly stinky. Microsoft is a bad Windows citizen. (re-quoted from Daring Fireball: http://daringfireball.net/linked/2008/03/21/angry http://daringfireball.net/linked/2008/03/21/angry)

by thras 18y ago

evgen 18y ago

It could be worse. You could be a Mac user who needs to use one of Microsoft's products. There is no more worthless piece of shit in the world of computing than MS Entourage....

ComputerGuru 18y ago
I wholly disagree. Entourage sucks, but Excel and (particularly) Word for Mac are even better than their Windows counterparts. Word 2008 is a masterpiece. It has a number of nice features (notebook mode is great for university students).

jimbokun 18y ago

Here's the highest compliment I can pay iTunes: I hardly think about it anymore. Granted, I run iTunes on a Mac, and my main use case is just finding and downloading new podcasts and syncing them to my old iPod. But I can hardly think how iTunes could be improved to take less effort on my part. I put the iPod in the dock, iTunes launches, it syncs all the podcasts, and I just have to click the little eject icon next to the icon of my iPod to take it out and start listening to it. I think the key difference is you say you WANT to manage your music files. With iTunes, I don't even bother to manage anything, hardly. It just does the obvious thing which is almost always what I want.

thras 18y ago
I wish it worked that well for me. (It evidently works that well for my girlfriend, a Mac user.) But no, I don't want to manage my own music. I want, for instance, all the duplicates to go away. I want podcasts that failed to download properly and are now missing to be able to be refreshed without a bizare and undocumented shift triangle-click shift-click trick (no menu option to achieve the same!). I want my music to play every time I click on it without having to turn iTunes off and on. I want it to work with Windows Remote Desktop like every other piece of music software I've got. I want a useful search UI, instead of the stateful UI that we've got that can only search either library or store. I want to be able to flag a long audio file as "podcast" so that it can remember my place and resume without having to set up my own feed to make that happen.
- thehigherlife 18y ago
  at least for the last one, if you goto get info, then select options. there is an option called remember playback position
- unalone 18y ago
  You can do the last one by right-clicking and picking "Get Info." There's an option called "remember playback position"; check it and it should work. How often do you have to do an advances search? For ones you do often, just make a smart playlist. Otherwise, what kinds of searches don't work easily with a simple fast text search? I'm curious. As for the other stuff: iTunes on Windows is bad. I think it's better than some other media players (though I've heard WinAmp is better), but it's not particularly good. On a Mac, though, it's very fast. In my 50GB library, it searches near-instantly, and I really can't think of any time I've had a problem with it. So I can absolutely understand your complaint with the Windows version, and I hope they fix it, but on the Mac it's really a good program. (Good enough that no competitors have seen fit to exist, anyway, not counting the ultra-experimental Songbird.)

ejs 18y ago

This has always been a major complain for me, Itunes is a pretty horrible program, I guess it only gets excruciatingly slow with a lot of music and files to index. I used to think it was my relatively crappy machine at the time, when I tried again on another machine (2.0 GHz core2 duo, 4 GB) same disgustingly slow performance. Completely unusable. Only way to make it work without grinding to a halt is only indexing certain folder of music... great....

modoc 18y ago
Are you on Windows? I run iTunes on a pretty old G5, with currently 240 GB of music. It's never slow. Never hesitates.
- watmough 18y ago
  iTunes on the Mac, and iTunes on Windows are two very different animals. With any luck iTunes 8.1 should speed things up a bit for Windows users.
  - windsurfer 18y ago
    I find that all the mac users I know are always waiting on the next update to fix some sort of problem. As an example, one of my friends cannot connect to a bluetooth network due to some bug that was introduced 2 years ago. It's too bad you can't go in there and, you know, jumble some plumbing around and get it fixed.
- ejs 18y ago
  Those were on windows with about 600 gig music and its painful. Really I have just stopped moving much music because of this reason, plus I only have windows on an older machine I don't use much. Last time I tried to use it under virtual box on ubuntu it didn't work at all because of USB issues.

tvon 18y ago

I couldn't agree more that iTunes is a pretty horrible Windows app, I don't know anyone that ever used it as their primary music player/manager. It's a fairly stark contrast to using it on OSX, where you pretty much don't ever think about it. [edit 15 minutes later] I can't help but to quote Darby Lines (aka, The Angry Drunk): > Second, bitching that anyone is a “bad” Windows citizen is the rhetorical equivalent of arguing that one turd in a sea of shit is particularly stinky. Microsoft is a bad Windows citizen. (re-quoted from Daring Fireball: http://daringfireball.net/linked/2008/03/21/angry http://daringfireball.net/linked/2008/03/21/angry)