Why does iTunes often get called 'bad software'?

[fireshot91]

I've never known a Windows user who didn't loathe iTunes, so I can only conclude that it does Very Bad Things on a PC.

I'm getting a little tired of it myself. It no longer seems like a particularly well-thought-out solution for media playing.

There's always a first then right?



Seriously, I don't know why you guys say it's all slow on Windows.

I had a library of about 15GB of just music (I know, it's minuscule compared to some of yours) and on a 1.6Ghz Pentium Dual Core and 1GB RAM it ran fine. It opened with the same speed that it does on my Mac, and I saw no problem with it.

 

[almabanuelos]

iTunes behaves nice initially on my macbook pro - but after a week or so I can't even get it to open - just see a beachball for an extended period of time. I've repaired disk permissions, installed updates, etc but every time it always slows down and eventually freezes (even logging on to the iTunes store is impossible)

Very buggy

 

[J the Ninja]

I'm glad I'm not the only one who thinks iTunes needs to be broken up. It's already broken up on the iPod Touch: You have separate apps for Videos, Music, and the Store. Essentially three different frontends to the same database, just handling different facets off it. Why not do that on the desktop too?

And maybe throw in a 4th app as a consumer-oriented media encoder? Just give Compressor the "iLife Treatment". And heck, make it so you can feed iMovie and GarageBand projects into it, then send them to the iTunes library when you're done!

 

[str1f3]

iTunes has become so much of a pain in the butt. It is way too bloated and it's a chore for me just to listen to music. This is an app that needs to be rebuilt from the ground up (UI including) so it is fast for not only Mac users but Windows users as well. Maybe it needs to be broken up. I don't know and don't care. This is now the slowest app on my Mac and they should be doing whatever they can to make the fast app possible.

 

[Eidorian]

I've taken a shine to Play lately.

 

[chaos86]

iTunes has become so much of a pain in the butt. It is way too bloated and it's a chore for me just to listen to music.

Lol. If it's hard for you to get iTunes to play you some music, you're doing it wrong.

Seriously, how can it be a chore? iTunes takes a few seconds more than it used to to start up, but apart from that, music and playlists are still in the sidebar, and you still organize, search, play, skip, and scrub the same ways if you ignore all the new items in the sidebar.

 

[SkyBell]

I will agree that iTunes in Windows is worse...it's still usable, but just barely.

However, it desperately needs some fat trimmed on both platforms.

 

[Dustman]

Problem with Windows or not, if Apple is writing software that performs poorly on Windows then I can't blame Windows users for not wanting Apple software on their PCs. And frankly, QuickTime for Windows sounds like the reanimated zombie corpse of late-'90s RealPlayer for Mac, and who didn't hate that miserable, system-stealing piece of junk?

I remember that! Realplayer 8 I think it was. You'd open it and it would just stay frozen for about 30 seconds until it would begin to play your highly pixelated, crappy clip. The only way to close it was to restart the system with the little paper clip because clicking "quit" would cause the whole system to freeze. Those were the days...

OT: I don't think iTunes being crap on a PC is entirely Apple's fault, although I'm sure they do slow it down just a tad to frustrate those windows users a little over to their side. I think it more has to do with Windows itself being more bloated than OS X, and all those users that have expired Norton trials running in the background have no one to blame but themselves.

That all being said, I wish iTunes could the the 19 MB download size it used to be in the 5.0 days, rather than this 80 MB monstrosity.

 

[safetyobc]

I haven't had any problems with iTunes. I think it is great! But all I have is iPod's and iPhones. Never used another music play and have no intention on getting any (although the Zune HD looks cool!)

 

[BaldiMac]

That all being said, I wish iTunes could the the 19 MB download size it used to be in the 5.0 days, rather than this 80 MB monstrosity.

Are you still on dialup? 80 MB isn't really an inconveniently large download size otherwise. And it's already been mentioned that a good chunk of that space is because it is a universal binary. If you strip out the PowerPC or the Intel Code, you are probably looking at closer to 45 MB.

 

[After G]

From my quick glances at Task Manager in Windows, iTunes for playing songs uses 32 MB real memory (50 with the visualizer on). 2% CPU playing a song on my Turion 64 x2 2 GHz (about the same as a Core Duo 1.6) in Windows. iTunes the app itself takes 13 MB on disc. I'd hardly call that part bloated.

The real bloat in iTunes: Out of the ~88 MB iTunes install, 65 MB is languages...Cut some fat Apple, why do we choose a language if we install them all anyway?

32 MB utilized memory is around 6% of 512 MB, but memory is cheap! If iTunes ruins your day by taking up 6% of your memory, buy another 512 MB stick of RAM for $10 or so and iTunes instantly takes half the percentage of your memory it used to

Even my 8 year old Windows desktop has 1.25 GB of RAM. (it would be 1.5, but the 3 slots malfunction with more than 1.25).

 

[Cyberius]

The thing that just baffles me the most (and I understand this complaint pretty ridiculous) is the way iTunes organizes stuff. Artist/Album works great, and I love that part. What I'm talking about is the default root:

Users\My Music\iTunes\iTunes Music

Really? Really? Not only does iTunes make a subfolder for itself in My Music, iTunes defaults to putting the actual music in a folder inside that. As opposed to, say, just putting everything in My Music. Now, this can be changed, which is the first thing I do when I start iTunes up for the first time on a new box. It is still annoying.

What annoys me just a bit more is that both OSX and Windows have a perfectly usable My Video folder (or analogue), which iTunes happily ignores. No, iTunes, TV shows and movies are not music and should not be put into the folder for music.

 

[NoSmokingBandit]

So yeah, it seems "bloated" to those of us who loved the elegant and simple mp3 playing app which opened in half a second on old OS9 machines.

http://cogx.org/

The cure for what ails you.

 

[Eidorian]

http://cogx.org/

The cure for what ails you.

I'm surprised that Cog is still recommend when Play is out.

 

[Michael CM1]

The thing that just baffles me the most (and I understand this complaint pretty ridiculous) is the way iTunes organizes stuff. Artist/Album works great, and I love that part. What I'm talking about is the default root:

Users\My Music\iTunes\iTunes Music

Really? Really? Not only does iTunes make a subfolder for itself in My Music, iTunes defaults to putting the actual music in a folder inside that. As opposed to, say, just putting everything in My Music. Now, this can be changed, which is the first thing I do when I start iTunes up for the first time on a new box. It is still annoying.

What annoys me just a bit more is that both OSX and Windows have a perfectly usable My Video folder (or analogue), which iTunes happily ignores. No, iTunes, TV shows and movies are not music and should not be put into the folder for music.

This is one point I'll agree with about iTunes. There should be multiple save locations based on media type. I think "most" new Macs are portables, so unless I'm mistaken nobody has more than 500GB of internal storage. You buy every episode of Lost in HD and you've sucked up about half of that. I have all of my movies and TV shows stored on an external drive, and therefore I have to manually move the files after I accumulate a few of them from the ITS.

iTunes needs extra settings for where Music, Podcasts, Movies and TV Shows are stored. Maybe I should send this in to Apple because those guys finally allowed us to change the media type of multiple files at once after a few versions.

 

[NoSmokingBandit]

I'm surprised that Cog is still recommend when Play is out.

I find Play really awkward. Cog seems to work better with my library.

 

[KelchM]

The problem with iTunes is that so much has been tacked on over the years. I feel like Apple really needs to take the time to rewrite it from the ground up with all its current and future roles in mind.

 

[cjmillsnun]

Why? I'm not disagreeing, just wondering what kind of performance advantage we would see.

Carbon coding dates back to the original release of OS X. It was a kludge solution to allow minimal recoding to get OS9 apps to use all the features of OS X.

Cocoa is an Object Oriented framework based on the NeXTStep framework that allows the features to be implemented natively.

So Cocoa is matched to the OS in that everything is native, whereas Carbon is effectively a bolt-on

 

[ntrigue]

It's persons like myself that give it a bad name. Many Windows switchers are bothered by it's lack of transparency, where filenames are cryptic and hidden beneath countless subfolders.

But I mainly second the 'it's bloated' complaints. Having 65,452 songs severely slows both iTunes and AppleTV. I get spinning beachballs almost every click.

 

[Henry Li]

iTunes is just like a closed system. It only allows the connection of iPods and iPhones. And, the most worst thing is that every iPod can only sync with only one iTunes library. Every time when I need to transfer my songs from the iPod to another PC, it failed. Instead, when you sync your iPod with another iTunes library, iTunes will erase all your songs previously transfered.

The PC version of iTunes is even just like ****. My computer has already had 4 Gbs Ram and a intel quad-core cpu. But, iTunes still always hang on my computer. It seems that the apple programmers are not good at the PC programming.

So, I hate iTunes!

 

[BaldiMac]

Carbon coding dates back to the original release of OS X. It was a kludge solution to allow minimal recoding to get OS9 apps to use all the features of OS X.

Cocoa is an Object Oriented framework based on the NeXTStep framework that allows the features to be implemented natively.

So Cocoa is matched to the OS in that everything is native, whereas Carbon is effectively a bolt-on

I understand what Carbon and Cocoa are. I asked about the performance advantage of using Cocoa. As far as I can tell, the only significant advantage is 64-bit support.

 

[BaldiMac]

iTunes is just like a closed system.

Except that it is open to most file formats through Quicktime codecs and has APIs to integrate with third-party hardware and software.

It only allows the connection of iPods and iPhones.

And most other digital music players through sync services APIs.

And, the most worst thing is that every iPod can only sync with only one iTunes library. Every time when I need to transfer my songs from the iPod to another PC, it failed. Instead, when you sync your iPod with another iTunes library, iTunes will erase all your songs previously transfered.

They have made this clear since the first version of the iPod. It is an anti-piracy consideration. And FYI, any songs purchased from iTunes will sync back to any authorized computer.

The PC version of iTunes is even just like ****. My computer has already had 4 Gbs Ram and a intel quad-core cpu. But, iTunes still always hang on my computer. It seems that the apple programmers are not good at the PC programming.

Apple programmers are bad at PC programming because iTunes hangs on your computer? Seems like a larger sample size is needed. Maybe you have problems with your installation. iTunes does have slower performance on Windows, especially on large libraries. I don't experience any significant hangs with a 3 GB library on my work PC running Windows 7.

So, I hate iTunes!

Congratulations!

 

[BaldiMac]

It's persons like myself that give it a bad name. Many Windows switchers are bothered by it's lack of transparency, where filenames are cryptic and hidden beneath countless subfolders.

What does this mean? Lack of transparency? The filename is simply the track number and track title. How is that cryptic? The files are organized in folders by artist and then album. How is that countless? And you can go directly to the file from iTunes using the context menu.

And, of course, all of this is optional. Uncheck "Keep iTunes Music folder organized" and "Copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding to library" and you can organized them however you want.