Why are so many saying they hope whatever replaces iTunes will be good? Isn't what's replacing iTunes the Music app we have been using on our iPhones for like a year already?
Heck no. About all you can do with that iOS Music app is play music on the mobile device (stream it or download it or reference previously downloaded content) and mess around with your playlists a little -- create them, edit content, rearrange play order. Most importantly, the iOS app Music is not a tool for managing track metadata.
iTunes (and one would expect the same of the new desktop/laptop version of "Music" app) also plays back music, of course. But it is far more powerful than the iOS app. It allows you to manage the metadata associated with the tracks at a granular or collective level: name tracks the way you want them displayed in playback, handle other metadata track-by-track or in groups: manage genre assignments, manage metadata for compilation album content however you may prefer, create groups and categories for related tracks, create smart playlists, create folders for groups of playlists having certain attributes in common, access the views, tools and scripts needed to manage collections of different kinds of music according to user preference.
Compared to creating and managing content of a playlist on an iOS device, the same function in iTunes has far more flexibility and ease of use.
And (so far) iTunes, and one hopes its replacement, allows the user to manage transfer of content stored in laptop/desktop libraries on multiple mobile devices individually: loading and reloading each on a manual basis or syncing each one automatically to specified playlists, or even letting the app manage reloads according to device storage capability with the user merely indicating certain high-level preferences for content selection.
For anyone with a large collection of music (and especially the various subgenres of "classical" music, not having iTunes functions available would mean the user would pretty much
have to find another app to manage the metadata. On mobile devices, the in-playback info available about a track is pretty limited and --except for association to playlists-- cannot be edited on that mobile device from within the iOS music app.
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Ok for those that refuse to actually read, Itunes is being renamed to music and all the functions of itunes will be part of that. Podcasts and Tv, Movies are being seperated from it
Yeah show me the sameness lol. I can hope, and I do. But, track record on reworks of other "renamed" or even just "enhanced" apps have de-featured the new version while gaining a new name or version number amid claims of improved functionality.
All the talk of removing "bloat" makes me nervous, I admit that. That's because it's not like Apple is going to brag up front on removal of a feature that you have to access with a right-click on some submenu anyway....
When Apple talked in the past about improvements going from iTunes 10 to iTunes 11... removal of "bloat" may have been in there, I can't remember, but anyway the outcome felt like what happened included taking out a kidney and a few lobes of the liver while the surgeons were in there fixing a few things that weren't actually broken.
The biggest improvement Apple could have done on recent iterations of iTunes was improve the documentation, so more of the recent generations of "switched-to-Macs!" users could understand the power of iTunes regarding metadata management. By now a lot of it has come down to word of mouth including passing on info about existence of Doug's scripts to enhance metadata management and in particular to restore some content presentation via features no longer available from the iTunes app, e.g. visual representation of shuffled playlists, and reshuffling options.