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Who here HATES iTunes and thinks it's a bloated, buggy, overly complicated, slow POS?
- Thread starter wikoogle
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Depends on what you are looking for. For simply managing music, organizing/navigating by folders proved far superior to me.
For synchronizing Apples hardware, iTunes is best. Not surprisingly, though, as it's the only software that's allowed to do so.
It is definitely getting bloated, but it's far and away the best music player on the planet. It rarely crashes and is always fast for me! It's also not in the slightest bit complicated to use.
I don't like the way iTunes works on my Mac. It is slow. It is buggy. For instance. I connect my iPad and select "do not sync apps" and what does it do? It starts deleting every single app. What about "do not sync apps" does Apple not understand? I know Apple is wondering what about "do not sync apps" I do not understand. If they want me to understand it better, perhaps they should rename it "delete all apps".
Then there is the amount of time required to sync. I will never complain about Palm hotsync or Blackberry Desktop or Missing Sync again. My gawd, I could carry 8 gigabytes across a room in a teaspoon one bit at a time in the time it takes for a sync to run. What I plan to do about this is spend some time on the phone with Apple getting sync to work properly so my iPad and my iPod Touch are both backed up and are not overwriting one another's apps. But right now I am very underwhelmed with iTunes.
However, if I want to buy music, I would rather go to iTunes to look it up and listen to a sample before going over to amazon.com to buy it drm-free in mp3 format. The iTunes store is well designed and largely responsible for the success of iPods, the iPhone and the iPad. It's just the back end features of iTunes that get on my nerves. I'm not happy about the way it manages your music library and I'm not happy about the way it falls flat on its face when confronted with more than one device tied to the same iTunes account.
I don't use iTunes for windows so I can't comment, but I don't understand why some users are happy with iTunes on OS X. Perhaps they have only one device. Perhaps they care about music. I do not. There is less than 1 gig of music on my iPod touch and none at all on my iPad. I would like to sync my iPhoto library with my iPad but after iTunes started deleting apps behind my back, I decided I don't need to sync, rather I simply "transfer purchases" and back up my iPad.
Then there is the amount of time required to sync. I will never complain about Palm hotsync or Blackberry Desktop or Missing Sync again. My gawd, I could carry 8 gigabytes across a room in a teaspoon one bit at a time in the time it takes for a sync to run. What I plan to do about this is spend some time on the phone with Apple getting sync to work properly so my iPad and my iPod Touch are both backed up and are not overwriting one another's apps. But right now I am very underwhelmed with iTunes.
However, if I want to buy music, I would rather go to iTunes to look it up and listen to a sample before going over to amazon.com to buy it drm-free in mp3 format. The iTunes store is well designed and largely responsible for the success of iPods, the iPhone and the iPad. It's just the back end features of iTunes that get on my nerves. I'm not happy about the way it manages your music library and I'm not happy about the way it falls flat on its face when confronted with more than one device tied to the same iTunes account.
I don't use iTunes for windows so I can't comment, but I don't understand why some users are happy with iTunes on OS X. Perhaps they have only one device. Perhaps they care about music. I do not. There is less than 1 gig of music on my iPod touch and none at all on my iPad. I would like to sync my iPhoto library with my iPad but after iTunes started deleting apps behind my back, I decided I don't need to sync, rather I simply "transfer purchases" and back up my iPad.
I have used iTunes both on a PC and a Mac.
I recently purchased a MBP (my first mac), so have been getting more use to iTunes on it.
WINDOWS - iTunes is a memory and resource hog. It slows down even my Quad Core desktop to a crawl. It is laggy and slow. Syncing my iPod takes forever and if i didn't HAVE to use it, i wouldn't!
OSX - iTunes is a bit more responsive on OSX. It doesn't use up all my MBP resources and overall functions much better than it does on Windows.
I recently purchased a MBP (my first mac), so have been getting more use to iTunes on it.
WINDOWS - iTunes is a memory and resource hog. It slows down even my Quad Core desktop to a crawl. It is laggy and slow. Syncing my iPod takes forever and if i didn't HAVE to use it, i wouldn't!
OSX - iTunes is a bit more responsive on OSX. It doesn't use up all my MBP resources and overall functions much better than it does on Windows.
Well first off i care very much about my music, I have 13,000 legitimately purchased MP3s (mostly amazon or cds) and I use itunes for most of my music management. I also add most videos I buy to the itunes library. It is not that we are happy with it, I would love to see more alternatives, but therein lies the problem, none of the alternatives are better than itunes!
I am quite confident this is true because recently I said to myself, I hate the itunes music store and itunes isn't that great so why am I using it? Well I scoured the net for alternatives in OSX and the closest thing I got was Songbird. The only problem? It takes up twice the memory, it somehow skips occasionally on my 8 gb ram, 2.66 i7, 256gb SSD machine, which is absurd. It just seems like a piece of crap. So for those of us with large music collection that want some semblance of order, I do not see a reasonable alternative. Trust me, I wish that there was a Winamp like player for mac, but I have yet to find one.
I remember when the iPod was first able to use windows pc's and used Musicmatch, I think it was, to organize music. Try using THAT and then say iTunes is a piece of crap.
Just to reiterate, this limitation doesn't exist. You can drag and drop onto the iPod/iPhone without using the iTunes store
.
Just to reiterate, this limitation doesn't exist. You can drag and drop onto the iPod/iPhone without using the iTunes store
If you use "manually manage music" inside iTunes, yes, you're right in a sense. Perhaps my wording was unclear. My comment is directed toward those who wish to drag music from Windows Explorer folders directly onto the device as if it were a flash drive, which the iPhone (and I believe the touch, although I could be mistaken) cannot do-- not without a jailbreak anyway.
My wife had one of those "drag and drop" Sansas, and absolutely hated having to transfer new songs, because she would have to wait almost a full minute while it rebuilt its internal music database after every single song drop.
Most of the music I have is collected over the years. Some has been bought some "shared". Even some of the ones I have bought for some reason have mess ups in the tags. Example: I have had two lady gaga albums. For some reason one of them was labeled Lady GaGa and the other Lady Gaga. Every time I tried to change it in Itunes it just didn't like it. Ended up making it Lady Ga for both.
Maybe its just me but as for organizing the music, I can organize by folder faster than software can organize it for me. Just as simple as changing the title of folders. Song titles don't need to be changed most of the time. If you have any movies/tv shows you keep on your computer you keep them in folder format as well, at least I do.
I dislike iTunes a lot. It is very slow to do anything, it's super sluggish to respond to commands, and God forbid if I should ever try to ask it to do 2 things at once. When it's downloading, it basically becomes unusable.
With iTunes being so central to Apple's entire platform strategy for the past 5 years at least, I can't believe that it hasn't been overhauled yet. With each version it just got more complicated and slower.
With iTunes being so central to Apple's entire platform strategy for the past 5 years at least, I can't believe that it hasn't been overhauled yet. With each version it just got more complicated and slower.
iTunes was designed to be a simple music library manager before iPods even existed, and while many features have been added, its code base really hasn't changed. As long as iTunes still uses carbon for parts of its code, stays single-threaded, and maintains only one library file, it will continue to be just what your title says - a "bloated, buggy, overly complicated, slow POS".
They all appear and work the same, just like if you only have one device.
Devices back up automatically, but you can also right-click on one and click "Back up"
Click on "Music." Type what you want to find in the box at the top right with the little magnifying glass, or select the artist/genre/album you want to see.
Nope. You just have to find a song, and then drag it and drop it into iTunes.
This all seems ridiculously easy and straightforward to me. I agree that iTunes is bloated, slow and buggy, but complicated? How is it hard to use? Anybody with an ounce of common sense should be able to figure it out. The button that says "Create a playlist" creates a playlist. Drag and drop music onto that playlist to add music to it. Select the playlist and click the play button to play the music in that playlist. Select a device and click the Music tab, then check "Sync Music" to sync music. Select "entire music library" to sync your entire music library or "selected music" to select the music you want to sync.
I don't see how it could be much more obvious.
I think itunes bites it on my mac. I have imported my library several times on several pc's and on my mac. it is far faster on a pc. I just restored my mac and itunes could not find a bunch of stuff. so I am importing the whole library. not coping files just having it locate them. for a 300 gig library on the pc it took about a hour. for my reduced 192 gig library it has been going on my mini for 5 hours now. no clue when it will be finished. it is even faster on a really slow laptop running xp and only 1 gig of ram.
I haven't used iTunes on Windows because Windows sucks. On the Mac, I have zero issues with iTunes. Works great!
As a suggestion, perhaps this is your problem:
Mark
I use a macbook pro 2009 (best model sold in 15in config in 2009) and STILL iTunes poops on it. It is untrue that iTunes is a crap on PC, it is basically crap on any platform. Does that mean macs suck? No, iTunes sucks big time.
