Apple May Be Planning to Break Up iTunes With New Music and Podcast Apps for Mac

[musicmachine]

Then:
iTunes and iPods was the apple experience for most of general public. it was "your" world that you controlled. Head and shoulders above the competition at the time. Nobody else offered that functionality or experience. It convinced me to eventually pay the premium price for their hardware. Absolutely NO other reason.

Now:
Streaming, texting, video services, etc.... you can do on other devices at half the price. Samsung s10 will be much cheaper 6 months after release. So why pay premium price for apple products when "THEY" have more control than user.

 

[mudflap]

I’m using it right now.

Me too. I literally use it all day every day. For 15 years.

 

[alexhardaker]

Just About My exact experience but i was on a windows pc and my hard drive crashed with music match as my music software. Then i found iTunes and was hooked on the "apple" experience. If iTunes goes i'm most likely gone from apple for good. iTunes was the reason i eventually paid the price for a MacBook pro and iPhone, no other reason.

I wouldn’t go that far. Apple stuff is still great, I’ll just miss iTunes for nostalgic reasons. Stick with Apple, trust me, you’ll know why you used Apple stuff if you leave (I briefly moved over to Windows Phone in 2013 with the Nokia 920).
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Then:
iTunes and iPods was the apple experience for most of general public. it was "your" world that you controlled. Head and shoulders above the competition at the time. Nobody else offered that functionality or experience. It convinced me to eventually pay the premium price for their hardware. Absolutely NO other reason.

Now:
Streaming, texting, video services, etc.... you can do on other devices at half the price. Samsung s10 will be much cheaper 6 months after release. So why pay premium price for apple products when "THEY" have more control than user.

iOS is still better than the competition

 

[Thomas2006]

Take iTunes back to its roots and rip out everything that is not music, music videos, Apple Music or internet radio. Podcasts get an app, movies and TV shows share an app and books (written and audio) get an app. The iTunes Store should be an online store but Apple won't to do that so it should then get its own app.

 

[Marekul]

Then:
iTunes and iPods was the apple experience for most of general public. it was "your" world that you controlled. Head and shoulders above the competition at the time. Nobody else offered that functionality or experience. It convinced me to eventually pay the premium price for their hardware. Absolutely NO other reason.

Now:
Streaming, texting, video services, etc.... you can do on other devices at half the price. Samsung s10 will be much cheaper 6 months after release. So why pay premium price for apple products when "THEY" have more control than user.

New apple isn’t for creators or free thinkers anymore. It’s for people who need curators and like being spoon fed...

 

[McG2k1]

iTunes is the reason I moved out of the apple ecosystem. I got so tired of my phone auto playing the first alphabetical song on iTunes whenever it connected to Bluetooth that I actually deleted everything off my phone. Then iTunes started automatically downloading the first song in my online library (without asking) and played that. I stopped it only by completely deleting my entire audio library from iTunes and anything connected to Apple. Never looked back.

Maybe this development will let me.

 

[Ferry74]

Although I would love iTunes (or Music, whatever it is called) to be an app just about music, I am afraid a new Music app also means the end of a lot of other things. Like syncing iPods, iTunes Match, and so on.

 

[Shirasaki]

iOS is still better than the competition

Believe me. Apple will destroy this too.

Although I would love iTunes (or Music, whatever it is called) to be an app just about music, I am afraid a new Music app also means the end of a lot of other things. Like syncing iPods, iTunes Match, and so on.

Which is what exactly Apple will do. Let’s see what macOS 11.15 will offer.

 

[tubular]

I still buy CDs. I rip them lossless and put the CD in storage. I have very little online purchased music. Maybe 2% of my collection. I will never sign up for music streaming.

Ripped some CDs just yesterday.

The beat goes on.

 

[usarioclave]

Ripped some CDs just yesterday. The beat goes on.

Funny, I just did that too. I popped a CD in and iTunes was all "Hey, do you want me to import the CD? And here's your track list."

 

[marstew73]

I don't think I'm the only one who hates streaming and who wants unlimited access to his library (even without an Internet connection). For movies, TV shows, and music, my Mac-based media center on my LAN is my hub, not iCloud.

It's fine when it works but internet is too dodgy here to rely on streaming 100% to deliver media content, I much prefer to have a local copy and deliver it over the network. Plus I have stuff that isn't and likely won't ever be available on any streaming service and who is to say they wouldn't remove content in the future to make room for other things, you're out of luck when it's no longer available.

 

[klky]

Still waiting for Apple to allow iTunes to minimize when double-clicking the title bar. Good grief.

 

[WebHead]

Although I would love iTunes (or Music, whatever it is called) to be an app just about music, I am afraid a new Music app also means the end of a lot of other things. Like syncing iPods, iTunes Match, and so on.

Yes, the demise of iTunes Match is another possibility I'm dreading. Hopefully Apple gives us plenty of notice to download our matched tracks.

 

[amaze1499]

What you say may be true; but I don't understand why you feel it's a good thing. What you're are saying is:

Nobody owns anything anymore and everyone rents things now and if that service goes away you own F-all.

Is that a future you want?

I agree to what you are saying. Still. Technically, even if we have an mp3 file on our SSD lying around, we dont own it or at least, we are also paying the hardware to use/enjoy it. Its more about the way we access the file and who is going to make money with that. But true, the control over what and how we are consuming will be handed over to external sources. And through that, dependence is created and charged for.

 

[WatchFromAfar]

I agree to what you are saying. Still. Technically, even if we have an mp3 file on our SSD lying around, we dont own it or at least, we are also paying the hardware to use/enjoy it. Its more about the way we access the file and who is going to make money with that. But true, the control over what and how we are consuming will be handed over to external sources. And through that, dependence is created and charged for.

No, if you have have a DRM-free file you own it. Saying you're paying the hardware to access it is like saying you pay a CD player to play a CD or you pay a record player to play vinyl.

 

[decafjava]

No, if you have have a DRM-free file you own it. Saying you're paying the hardware to access it is like saying you pay a CD player to play a CD or you pay a record player to play vinyl.

Which is another difference with streaming, you can download the file but once you stop paying your subscription it will be deleted.

 

[Shirasaki]

No, if you have have a DRM-free file you own it. Saying you're paying the hardware to access it is like saying you pay a CD player to play a CD or you pay a record player to play vinyl.

Yes. I agree.

Which is another difference with streaming, you can download the file but once you stop paying your subscription it will be deleted.

You still need adequate hardware to play your “subscribed” music anyway. So where is the argument of “paying hardware cost to play music”? The only extra that owner also need to pay is the storage device. But then, once sub is down, subscriber loses everything. Kinda like a trade-off.

 

[PinkyMacGodess]

This is a cop-out, a sell out, an admission that Apple can't do great software anymore.

I remember when everything was in the same app. iTunes was great. It did 'all' media, ebooks, music, podcasts, apps, TV episodes, it did it all. It handled it all pretty well too. Yeah, there were hiccups, but things worked.

After they started breaking up iTunes for the first time, it started falling apart. The iBooks app is almost unusable. I have issues on a weekly basis getting ebooks to update, and some 'books' just disappear, only to reappear just as mysteriously. Podcasts are a hot mess too. I have duplicates of podcast 'threads' on some computers. Some totally deleted podcast subscriptions still live on other computers and devices. I've had whole podcast subscriptions disappear too.

Music. I LOATH the track titles that CDDB pulls out of its bowels sometimes. In the glorious past, I could go in to iTunes and edit the track names, and rearrange things like multi-disc CD's, and change sorting and just about everything. Then an update for iTunes totally killed most (all) of my edits, and after that, I attempted to fix a bunch of tracks that were driving my crazy, only to have them disappear. I've had Apple support 'engineers' tell me that 'iTunes gets moody now', and have had to completely rerip all of my CD's at least TWICE because the damned iTunes database gets 'flaky'.

My thoughts are that iTunes signals the ineptitude of the Apple contract programmer base. They have patched and cobbled it so much over the years, that it really does need to die, but should be re-birthed into a new and more robust iTunes, the elegant app that it was, that treated all content equally, and allowed users flexibility and security. Pumping out separate apps now is just admitting defeat. Admitting they can't do 'innovation' anymore, which seems to be true ever more so.

My impression of the mess is that there are too many fingers in the iTunes database, and THAT is what they should be working on fixing. Reinventing the wheel for every media type is ridiculous, but so is using three, four, five apps written by different groups of people, combing through a single database. So is creating several separate databases cost effective?

There seems no way back to the future of what could have been.
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No, if you have have a DRM-free file you own it. Saying you're paying the hardware to access it is like saying you pay a CD player to play a CD or you pay a record player to play vinyl.

I remember one DRM protection scheme was that the device that played a CD (in that case) could 'watermark' that CD so that it would only play in that device. Would industries love to go to that for the future of digital media? Stay tuned...

(To support that watermarking idea, the industry was willing to invalidate every CD player on the planet by making the new discs unable to play on existing devices, just to make their bottom lines fatter)

 

[ipponrg]

This is a cop-out, a sell out, an admission that Apple can't do great software anymore.

I remember when everything was in the same app. iTunes was great. It did 'all' media, ebooks, music, podcasts, apps, TV episodes, it did it all. It handled it all pretty well too. Yeah, there were hiccups, but things worked.

I seem to have a different experience. iTunes has always been atrocious, more so on the PC. The app is so brittle that it made me yearn several times for a non Apple developer to take over it.

 

[return2sendai]

My nightmare is not that they chop iTunes into pieces, which is overdue, but that we'll get a vastly reduced set of music capabilities in terms of things like tag editing, sorting, and such.

I don't use Apple Music [oft-repeated Apple Music versus classical rant here] but Apple is hellbent on optimizing the Apple Music experience at the expense of any other workflow, and one false move from them on iTunes or the Remote app flushes away half a gazillion of my hours of editing metadata.

Yup. It took Apple 10 years (count them, 10 years) to put back the two page view in Pages. I say again, 10 years.

 

[daverobeson]

Not true, for instance if you're on a long transit (say, a train, a plane or a bus) and don't have access to WiFi, or only to a low-quality connection.

Also not true if you relied on Apple's (since-broken) promise of iTunes in the Cloud, where all your purchases would be available any time on any device, but then they let content owners upload an update to the file without marking it as an update and you can no longer download it. Syncing from iTunes is your only option.

 

[Calle68]

ITunes should be devoted to Music only, polished and made customizable. Every time I open it, it takes me to the same section of ridicolous pop music suggestions and I have to go through several clicks to reach the classical section, which is organized as the rap section ... C'mon! It seems to me that iTunes is a clear representation of Apple today: a Company that not only cannot innovate anymore, but also cannot stay updated.

 

[Tozovac]

About damn time. Thank you Apple if this is true!!!

And once the TV app comes out this fall, just finally get rid of iTunes altogether!

Why? How might that benefit those of us with thousands of custom music files not on Apple Music who need an uncluttered music management program?
[doublepost=1554735178][/doublepost]

Yup! It’s outdated concept too of uploading movies to a device or music when we can do it over iCloud now

Except those of us who prefer not clouding up our thousands of custom personal audio/video files.
[doublepost=1554735392][/doublepost]

Also, why am I still purchasing and watching movies and TV shows in an app called “iTunes”? None of the branding or functionality makes sense in 2019.

Why is Amazon, a shopping site, called Amazon? Has that hindered anyone’s ability to get things done there?

If something reliably works and is easy and convenient (rather than inconveniently have separate apps for syncing up music, video, podcasts, etc), why “fix” it like iTunes 12 “fixed” so much so unbelievably poorly?

 

[albebaubles]

It looks like you misunderstood me... The Space on MacBook Pro 15’, 2017, macOS 10.14.4 is not an issue, with 2TB SSD. My next MacBook Pro will have 4TB SSD, but...

Because Apple insists on 256K, I won't have enough space on the biggest iPhones they make!

Apple Music also has a limit of 75K Songs that one is allowed to Upload!

Apple Music doesn't allow us to pick which Tracks we want to Upload! If it did, maybe 256K would be less of a problem, because I'd make a Selective Choices, that I can control!


Those are some of the limitations that I am talking about!

I want My Own Music Library to be Separate from Apple Music!

Many people have their own LPs or whatever recordings on their Macs, and they want to Sync them to their iPhones! They don't want to give up a Full Control of their own Music, and let Apple Music handle it for them, and mess up their Metadata, or worse!

As many people have said, it's also wise to keep Local Backups of everything, instead of just trusting iCloud, or any kind of Cloud...

Dude, take control of your use of exclamation points.

 

[Tozovac]

Dude, take control of your use of exclamation points.

In his defense, those are perfectly fine as representations of the utter frustrations many of us have felt resulting from certain design “improvements” thrust on us by the Jony-led design team since ~2012.
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I seem to have a different experience. iTunes has always been atrocious, more so on the PC. The app is so brittle that it made me yearn several times for a non Apple developer to take over it.

It was pretty decent before iTunes 12. iTunes 12 and the ios7 music app drove me to finally seek Music app and podcast app alternatives for iOS, and I’ve never looked back.