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I'm tempted to say: "Such a rube! Welcome to the world." ;-) Of course there were going to be problems. I used to be a huge Apple fan, but my enthusiasm has be

by HSO 11y ago

I'm tempted to say: "Such a rube! Welcome to the world." ;-) Of course there were going to be problems. I used to be a huge Apple fan, but my enthusiasm has been badly tempered by experience. All the cloud and software-related weirdness of Apple (leave aside for the moment the mysterious hissing noise of my Mac Pro) became too much for me already a loong time ago. For example, iTunes Match completely corrupted my iTunes database but in a weird, random way that necessitated hours if not days of painstaking, manual labor to repair. Then I discovered that almost all my lossless files had been replaced by inferior substitutes, which Apple had explicitly promised would never happen. Oh, morning of joy!!! I still own Apple hardware; but caught between the scylla of Apple's incompetence and the charybdis of Google's obliviousness (if not outright evilness), I have renounced the "cloud". My main machine is airgapped and I refuse to let "the cloud" touch any of my files anymore (this is written from a "throwaway" laptop where I don't have anything except a browser and Little Snitch). It's the only way I can hang on to some sense of control over my stuff. This whole intermediation business is going too far these days.

logfromblammo 11y ago
I learned about 20 years ago how to rip and compress music files from audio CDs. Back then, it took longer to compress a .WAV to an .MP3 than it took to listen to the song, and Lame was distributed as a patch to a reference implementation. Before MP3 players were cheap enough, I would create a playlist on the PC, hook up the output from my sound card to the input of my boom box, and record to an audio cassette tape, to play it in my car. For a long time, my biggest problem with digital audio was a chronic lack of disk space. Then I acquired a family, and some of them chose to buy iOS devices. My prior experience with uploading music to a mobile device was to plug it in via USB, or insert the SD card, and just copy to the mount point. It worked for Sansa Clip. It worked for modded Nintendo DS. Then along comes the iPod and the iPad and the iPhone. Obstacle one is the proprietary 20-pin sync cable which has a habit of breaking every 3rd time you use it. Obstacle two is a lack of lightweight USB drivers to access the device's internal filesystem. You have to download and install a full-fledged iTunes program to your computer to put even one song on your iOS device. Obstacle three is iTunes user management. I, having no iOS devices, want to upload a file from my hard drive to devices belonging to other people, without syncing the entire contents of their device to my hard drive. It didn't take long for me to issue a proclamation that I would no longer be offering free technical support for any Apple devices. When the spouse has a problem with the iPhone, I suggest a trip to the Apple store or a call to the cellular network provider. I'd rather be put in the doghouse for a day than be stuck in Apple's walled garden forever. I have never trusted anyone with my data. That's why my music collection is in deep storage on the original pressed CDs, in cold storage on DVD-Rs, in warm storage as FLAC files on an external hard drive, and live copies are transcoded MP3 files, usually on hard disks and microSD cards. Now, my biggest problem is deciding which songs from my kids' CDs are good enough for me to add to my playlists. And I really like that I don't need Apple's permission to listen to them.
- joesmo 11y ago
  Yup. The iTunes ecosystem is a nightmare. The app is incredibly slow, crashes, and refuses to do basic things like find a file constantly. I have to copy files from NAS locally to transfer them to an iPod yet I can play them directly off the NAS. iTunes is such garbage, why do people expect any better from Apple Music?

by HSO 11y ago

logfromblammo 11y ago

I learned about 20 years ago how to rip and compress music files from audio CDs. Back then, it took longer to compress a .WAV to an .MP3 than it took to listen to the song, and Lame was distributed as a patch to a reference implementation. Before MP3 players were cheap enough, I would create a playlist on the PC, hook up the output from my sound card to the input of my boom box, and record to an audio cassette tape, to play it in my car. For a long time, my biggest problem with digital audio was a chronic lack of disk space. Then I acquired a family, and some of them chose to buy iOS devices. My prior experience with uploading music to a mobile device was to plug it in via USB, or insert the SD card, and just copy to the mount point. It worked for Sansa Clip. It worked for modded Nintendo DS. Then along comes the iPod and the iPad and the iPhone. Obstacle one is the proprietary 20-pin sync cable which has a habit of breaking every 3rd time you use it. Obstacle two is a lack of lightweight USB drivers to access the device's internal filesystem. You have to download and install a full-fledged iTunes program to your computer to put even one song on your iOS device. Obstacle three is iTunes user management. I, having no iOS devices, want to upload a file from my hard drive to devices belonging to other people, without syncing the entire contents of their device to my hard drive. It didn't take long for me to issue a proclamation that I would no longer be offering free technical support for any Apple devices. When the spouse has a problem with the iPhone, I suggest a trip to the Apple store or a call to the cellular network provider. I'd rather be put in the doghouse for a day than be stuck in Apple's walled garden forever. I have never trusted anyone with my data. That's why my music collection is in deep storage on the original pressed CDs, in cold storage on DVD-Rs, in warm storage as FLAC files on an external hard drive, and live copies are transcoded MP3 files, usually on hard disks and microSD cards. Now, my biggest problem is deciding which songs from my kids' CDs are good enough for me to add to my playlists. And I really like that I don't need Apple's permission to listen to them.

joesmo 11y ago
Yup. The iTunes ecosystem is a nightmare. The app is incredibly slow, crashes, and refuses to do basic things like find a file constantly. I have to copy files from NAS locally to transfer them to an iPod yet I can play them directly off the NAS. iTunes is such garbage, why do people expect any better from Apple Music?