Seriously over the most current iteration of Itunes....it lags, randomly stops playing music, and shamelessly redirects you to the store at every turn.
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Can iTunes suck anymore than it already does?
- Thread starter Cave Man
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It's a mistake using that app to manage the various IDevices. I'd like to see them break the device mgmt out of it and use it for what it once did pretty well at - managing audio content.
Agreed. One recent development has actually worked out to be an improvement, though a relatively expensive one. I shell out a monthly fee for 200gb of iCloud. A substantial part of the fraction that I'm actually using is backups of my iPhone photos. Normally I would connect the cable, open Image Capture, drag photos out and set it to delete them after copying them. Only now the delete button went missing! So I ranted at Apple support and they told me about a checkbox on the phone that was something like reduce phone storage. That was it. I freed up about 12 GB on my phone, my photos are safe in iCloud and Photos and all I had to do was check a checkbox.
Now on to iTunes. I have only launched iTunes a handful of times in my life. Recently I launched it out of desperation and made a playlist with all my Motown music. Then I selected that playlist on the phone and clicked the little cloud thing. FINALLY all my music came down to my phone so I can actually listen to it instead of hearing it skip whenever I go through one of At&t's many many many many dead spots. Actually At&t, while not as good as Verizon in the Detroit area, has been pretty good most of the places I travel. Recently I've been riding in the Slow Roll (be sure to scroll down to the Apple iPad app starring Jason, the organizer of SlowRoll). We've been going through warehouse districts of Detroit, and I've found out how badly behaved the Music app on my iPhone 6 can be with a spotty cell signal, so having iTunes make a playlist for me and forcing it to download on my phone saved me some hassle.
So what I'm saying here is I've found ways to mostly ignore iTunes by focusing on iCloud. When I buy a new iThing, I restore an iCloud backup of the iThing it replaces. Most of my content is there before I leave the Apple store. I only "get my hands dirty" with iTunes on my Mac every now and then. I'll soon be facing the whole movie thing. I've got about half a terabyte of ripped movies that handbrake claims are allegedly in iTunes compatible format. I plan to add them to iTunes, with it set to NOT clutter my Mac HDD with copies of them so I can watch them on my Apple TV. I may be back here in a week or two with a similar rant to the post before yours....
So yes iTunes even now can do a reasonably good job of managing audio content (via playlists) for me and I try very hard to ignore all of its other possible uses.
I'd like to see three pieces, honestly, minimum: bring back iSync in some form, and separate the rest of iTunes into a media player (or collection of specialized media players for different content types) and a media library management system. On the latter, being able to manage a single media library used by multiple users and/or devices should also be included.
I'm the opposite. I think they should combine everything back into a single application. Breaking iBooks out into its own app has resulted in problems updating content for me. I've had 'books' left inaccessible, or un-updated while iBooks fumbles with itself doing Ford knows what...
It seems that breaking them apart would make it even more complicated to keep all of the balls in the air, and lately, at least to me, Apple has kinda proven that it fails at that task.
What ever happened to the Jobs mantra of 'simple, elegant'?
Is WinAmp still around? Does it still work with the iPods? Anyone remember the early days?
But anyway, I've had my issues with iTunes. Rebuilding databases, having artist music disappear, having a book disappear...
It's gotten too complicated and is staggering under its own weight...
In my opinion, it feels like they're trying to intentionally make it worse. I'm normally pretty receptive to new features and updates, but iTunes always seems to irritate me more and more -- especially when we're talking about the latest changes on iOS.
Well OP, looks like Apple heard your feedback from January this year, and proved you wrong!
... by making it even worse than you thought it could have been.
well , I was just listening to some voice mail tracks 2 hours ago - but I can't get back to it after going to "Recently Added" - which was where I accessed it originally??!!
And the navigation in general
Just blows. I always felt the earlier versions on ITunes treated your music like a real
Collection. Now it seems it's just all commodities to be gotten from the ether in some indescribable way.
The whole abandonment of Cover Flie is indicative of that attitude.
This is my music- that I earnestly and even lovingly assembled into the framework of iTunes and it has
Come back and stomped all over that.
And the navigation in general
Just blows. I always felt the earlier versions on ITunes treated your music like a real
Collection. Now it seems it's just all commodities to be gotten from the ether in some indescribable way.
The whole abandonment of Cover Flie is indicative of that attitude.
This is my music- that I earnestly and even lovingly assembled into the framework of iTunes and it has
Come back and stomped all over that.
if I could sum
Up my experience with recent versions of iTunes and earlier ones - maybe 4 or 5 years ago - the feeling I gave now us that iTunes is running the show - where previously I felt I had some modicum of control over my music library.
Perhaps I'm just too old school, but I feel it's less directed towards a collector and listener and more to a grazer and consumer.
Up my experience with recent versions of iTunes and earlier ones - maybe 4 or 5 years ago - the feeling I gave now us that iTunes is running the show - where previously I felt I had some modicum of control over my music library.
Perhaps I'm just too old school, but I feel it's less directed towards a collector and listener and more to a grazer and consumer.
I don't think anything sums up the current bloat of iTunes better than the 'About iTunes' panel. Unlike other OS X apps, which only show their name and app icon, iTunes shows an XXL app icon, an Apple logo, the word "iTunes" in large letters, and a 40 line rolling list of credits.
Sorry to reply to a somewhat older post but I think iSync is back if you're willing to use iCloud to back things up. Right now I use iCloud to get photos, contacts, calendar and notes propagated across all my Macs, iThings and even ordinary web browsers. I pay for iTunes match so my tens of gigs of mp3s are available in the cloud for local caching on any of my devices. What I do use iTunes for is music discovery. I also leave iTunes running on one of my Macs so I can stream stuff to my Apple TV. This is unfortunate. I'd rather leave Plex running as it's pig enough. I also use iTunes to do a local backup of an iPhone when I'm troubleshooting and want a local backup I have absolute control over. Basically all of my uses for iTunes are rare or I leave it running unattended so I can pull my family movies up on AppleTV. So in summary, I treat iCloud as if it were iSync and I treat iTunes as something I only deal with when necessary.
False.
It was so bad for awhile I couldn't even get phones to back up.
And that was before online backups were offered through Apple.
it's just a terrible program.
Or should I say app?
I've always hated it and will never understand why it doesn't work close to perfect.
I have two movies that show up twice on every device. I've tried sixteen ways from Sunday to delete it, hide it, whatever. Even called support. No dice. Stupid. I should be able to delete duplicates from any device by selecting and hiding it. Done. I will say it worked on the worst cold buy I ever made, but damn this is just dumb.
I literally can't delete anything anymore.
Unless highlighting select song(s), right-clicking, and scrolling to select 'delete' has been abolished, I'm apparently doing something wrong. The reason I want to delete?? Well, I have multiple duplicates of a boatload of songs. My phone is literally flooded with duplicates, which makes adding new music a task. It's a serious pain in the ass.
Sometimes if I manually delete songs off the phone, individually, they stay deleted, until I connect the phone to the computer.
I've even tried deleting with the phone connected, aaaand I get nothing. What a hassle.
Here is my main peeve. This absurd horse manure of authorizing only 5 computers. I know you can deauthorize old computers by deauthorizing all of them and then authorizing the ones you still use, but it is still a bunch of crap. Then there is their proprietary file format. From now on if I can't buy music on non-protected MP3 files I just won't buy it. I bought something because they did not have it on Amazon, and it was not that expensive at all, but it is the principle of it. I am done with iTunes. I don't especially like the iTunes application either. It is bloat-ware, and it seems to have more patches and updates than all Microsoft apps combined.
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1. It's not five computers forever, it's five computers at any one time. I've reset authorizations multiple times (take a few minutes, once a year or so) without an issue. So, unless you are using five+ computers at once, you're fine.
2. Are you sure iTunes content is protected anymore? It's pretty simple to convert into MP3 if you'd like, but how is that a necessary thing at all?
3. More patches? You're kidding about this, right?
So, is there something preventing you from going to your account and clicking the "Deauthorize All" button?
iTunes music files are non-DRM'd AAC files. It's no more proprietary than MP3. It's also an ISO standard.
iTunes may have its problems, but it is probably useful to stick to real ones.
A.
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Having a limit of five devices is ridiculous in this day and age. Someone can easily exceed that limit with a MacPro, 2 iMacs, 2 MacBook Pros, iPhone, iPad, and then what? No music server, nothing, and two used devices without an iTunes music 'license'...
Patches? I wonder how many times iTunes has been rewritten. Apple, through their acquisition if Next, proved that you can 'patch' something and turn it into something else. I wonder if iTunes isn't the same 'kernel', with different shutters, doors, and plantings around the patio.
Regarding iTunes database, I have crashed the iTunes database several times. I have had to rebuild my iTunes collection several times, re-ripping each CD, one-by-one... For hours... And hours... I've had tracks disappear. I've had tracks refuse to import, like another thread in the iTunes section here.
It's rather stable, and I'm sure for the 'average user' it's just fine. I have gone in and edited the metadata through the iTunes 'Get Info' feature, and after this last major update, all of it disappeared. It *could* easily be more reliable IMO.
Is iTunes content 'protected' anymore? I don't know. I'd imagine that it's watermarked at some level, that wouldn't surprise me, but as far as DRM? Hmm... No idea. Still wouldn't surprise me if there were *something* there, but...
Still, I think iTunes, for the most part, is the best thing doing. Can it be better? I think yes. Could it be worse? It's getting there... The crazy stuff Apple has been doing to it is almost on the verge of criminal. They took an elegant sophisticated multimedia management package, and warped if into a bizarre experience from the user standpoint. It's also possible that it's just because I'm old, I have to volunteer that, but some younger people I know have complained about it getting mroe and more complex, and less and less 'intuitive'...
But you are free to disagree.
You can have 10 devices authorized, and 5 of them can be computers. So even your far-fetched scenario works.
There is no DRM on music. There is an embedded watermark (your Apple ID), but that is also the case on Amazon, Google etc. It doesn't interfere in any way, so I don't see the problem.
I am sorry for your loss, but I don't understand it. I've been using iTunes for the better part of fifteen years, and I've never had iTunes delete a file.
Sure, the iTunes database has gotten trashed once in that timeframe, and I've decided to delete it and start over again for my own reasons. But the iTunes database isn't your music - it's just a file containing information about your music.
In my experience iTunes almost never touches your actual music files. Even when it automatically fetches album art, it keeps that separate. The most obvious exception is when you manually edit metadata. It's a well designed scheme.
A.
Somehow I've hit the limit. It's inconvenient, and kinda sucks... I have a music server, and an audio distribution system for the house, and I have an iMac that I can't authorize. It's a pain.
Watermarks aren't a problem for me. But if it hooks in to a 'it's not yours to play' scheme, that kinda sucks. Once again, the music server. If it was just me living here, that's not a problem, but with two people living here, if they buy a song, and want it on the music server, we may have to buy another copy for the server. That's rather a racket for people that make money off of selling songs that will never be out of the house.
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This last big update 'touched' a lot of people's music edits.
I hate so much of the tag fluff that comes out of the CDDB system, and got my iTunes collection 'perfect', yet much, if not all of my changes disappeared over night. There were many posts here after that change...
I also posted about an entire CD of Sammy Hagar music disappearing *POOF* once. Never did find it, ended up reloading it from the music server files. I've had problems with my podcast collection lists in iTunes also, that I believe to be linked and a possible indication of more widespread corruption. Reloading the music really gets old fast. Losing pod cast episodes that aren't available from the server sucks too. But I'm glad it's working well for you. For the most part, it's been exceptional for me too, but sometimes it just goes tits up...
