Apple's iTunes Is Alienating Its Most Music-Obsessed Users | Hacker News Reader

Apple's iTunes Is Alienating Its Most Music-Obsessed Users

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iTunes as an application is by far the worst UX present on a Mac or a PC, which is especially surprising considering how nice the vast majority of OS X apps are to use. You can go down the list of the recommendations Apple gives out to developers on how make what they consider great apps for OS X and iTunes breaks every single one almost as if it were intended as a use case for terrible UX.

The navigation and structure changes with every movement, there are occasionally two seperate back buttons present that can either do the same thing or completely different things, the "background activity" or as I like to call it, "What you need to know is happening to your iPhone" is constantly buried beneath the currently playing track, and is not readily accessible unless you click a 8pt square down arrow, on and on...

Not to mention, as an owner of multiple machines I prefer to use ownCloud to sync my various libraries. Windows and Linux this is absolutely not an issue. Because iTunes insists on owning the directory and file structure though, I can't just point it at the folder or it will literally ruin it, I have to instead keep two copies of my library on my Macbook, and occasionally use an rsync alias to move over new stuff. Thankfully I usually do all my purchasing (on Amazon MP3) on the Macbook anyway so it's of little consequence, but it's just one more irritating thing to add to the list.

I'm an Apple fan, I admit, but iTunes is a fucking train wreck.

Totally agree. I love Apple's products but iTunes is an abomination. One anecdote notes that U2's Bono complained to Jobs that it was no different than a spreadsheet... well, I'd be happy if it were halfway as useful as a good spreadsheet. Instead it has zero flexibility. There seems to be a trend in some software to prefer search functionality over other basic UI techniques for presenting information. When I have a big music library, I don't always know what I'm looking for explicitly. I want to browse my music based on my own strategy, but doing this in iTunes has never really been possible. And it's not better on the iPhone's own music app. For a company that led the world in music-listening technology, their software for it sure has always been downright awful.

It's weird too, if you're looking at Playlists it looks like Excel, the only way out is to view your entire collection, but then you can't find sh!t because it gives you NO information as opposed to ALL information.

Also, on the topic of playlists, removing a song from a playlist is labeled "Delete." Are you f!cking kidding Apple? This is UI Design 101!

It blows my mind how Apple has let this atrocious product represent such a core part of what the company has always stood for: music. How did they let this happen in the first place, and more importantly, why in tarnation has it never been improved?

Honestly I think it's good old fashioned Developer laziness, and/or marketing. They've whittled down all their Windows offerings to just iTunes for Windows, which handles devices, music, streaming, movies, etc. etc. and they don't want to have to develop and maintain multiple applications.

And why OS X is infected? They probably share a fair amount of code.

It's just feature creep. On iOS you have a Music app, a Podcasts app (which is garbage), a Store app and I believe Movies and whatnot are under videos. It makes a certain degree of sense, yet in OS X universe, all of these are brought down into a single app with just a clusterfuck of a UI.

I honestly feel a little bad for whoever has to design it, I can't imagine how difficult it would be to combine all that functionality and feature creep into a UI that felt even a LITTLE coherent, and honestly they do a pretty good job, it's the problem they're handed that should be addressed, i.e. break it up into a few apps.

> such a core part of what the company has always stood for: music

Ummm, until the iPod (2001) Apple didn't stand for music. Apple's been around since 1976, 39 years; it's been a music-related company for fourteen of those years.

Indeed, Apple Computer had to assure Apple Corps (the Beatles' record label) that it wouldn't enter the music business, which was the subject of lawsuits over the years (c.f. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Corps_v_Apple_Computer).

Years ago, before I discovered Unix and freedom, I was a huge Apple fan. I loved Macs (understandable, when one compares them to Windows and DOS machines). Apple stood for user-friendliness, for ease of use, even for happiness or pleasure. It never stood for music back then.

I should have said, what Apple 2.0 has stood for. Because music was very much the foundation for what led to the modern Apple Inc after Jobs return.

Because as long as it's the only supported way to manage your music on the world's most popular mobile devices, there won't be any appreciable market pressure on them to improve it.

iTunes: Use It Because You Have To™

It gets even more fun. When you're an iOS developer, all device provisioning and authorization happens via iTunes. So when iTunes is borked (which has totally never happened before) I can't build any projects to my devices until they fix it.

I can't count how many times I've had to blow away iTunes application support directory to fix something that got screwed on Apple's end. It's a nightmare.

Same reason Microsoft Outlook still is in heavy use; its a complicated set of festures that are hard to get right or to replicate.

iTunes is a tire fire. But purely in terms of content, Apple Music is probably the best streaming service, and their recommendation system is getting better. Apple also has the benefit of iTunes/Apple Music being closer to a first-class citizen on things like car bluetooth audio systems.

I would be thrilled to hear that Apple is totally revamping iTunes; I swear at it at least a couple times a week. But I'm probably not going to be able to stop using it any time soon.

I'm not sure I really understand the people who use alternate music player software on OS X; huge collections of downloaded music files accessed through file player software doesn't seem like where digital music is headed. I had a gigantic collection of purchased music on my computer, and it's more an annoyance now than anything else.

Hating iTunes so much you can't use it makes sense to me. But then, why not just use Spotify?

Anyways: predicting where this thread is inevitably heading, here's a list off the top of my head of shit that drives me nuts about iTunes:

* Purchased tracks randomly grey out and become non-playable.

* I'm a "Match" customer, and iTunes/iCloud/whatever doggedly insists on retaining the file-based metadata from my old MP3s, despite me not having had those MP3s in years.

* Ridiculous incoherent "Playlists / For You / New / Radio / Connect / iTunes Store" menu. "For You"?

* Playlists that contain both Apple Music tracks and purchased tracks flake out and vanish, which means that if you have a large collection of purchased music, playlists just don't work.

* Sometimes you can link to a playlist to share it and sometimes you can't.

* Purchased tracks randomly grey out and become non-playable.*

This 1000 times. I've been through three iPhones, and continue to be baffled why some of my music becomes unplayable. I solve by syncing (again and again...), navigating endless menus and changing random values in a vain attempt to find the problem and then hoping, and praying that next time I'm in my car, all my music will be available.

Me too. UX hell.

re: using an alternate music player

with my 200 GB/ 50k song library, iTunes is absolutely unusable, and I completely abandoned it last year. Apple has crammed so much into iTunes and just bloated the hell out of it, which is unsurprising for a design philosophy that layered all their media services on top of one another.

My replacement has been using Rdio and Swinsian. Rdio lets me stream most of what I have in my library as well as new releases. Swinsian is still necessary for obscure or underground music I've downloaded that aren't available on streaming services, as well as my personal vinyl rips, which make up maybe 1/5 of my library. so while music consumption is definitely moving away from downloaded files to streaming, there are still niche needs for a dedicated file player.

Unfortunately, with the recent news about Rdio, I have no idea what streaming service I'm gonna migrate to. Audio nerds recommend Tidal, my family uses Spotify, so I'll probably give those two and Apple Music a trial spin and evaluate.

So Swinsian is listed in the article as the only viable alternative, my problem is its a one-person shop which is a risky bet to migrate into. OTOH, I use Sublime Text...

And don't forget the innovative iTunes "cloud" icon. Translation: No, you can't listen to this track until it's been downloaded from the "cloud," but fortunately for you, the 3 or 4 identical duplicate tracks in your collection will play just fine.

iTunes is the only good argument I've seen for requiring software engineers to be licensed by the government.

Careful what you wish for.

Very true. I couldn't think of a better insult on short notice, so I went with the first one that came to mind.

> I'm not sure I really understand the people who use alternate music player software on OS X; huge collections of downloaded music files accessed through file player software doesn't seem like where digital music is headed. I had a gigantic collection of purchased music on my computer, and it's more an annoyance now than anything else.

I agree with you, but for those with the wherewithal, dumping all the files into a folder and pointing plex at it gives you a personal "cloud" with great capabilities, cross platform, on-the-web, mobile apps, etc.

Most people who have large collections of music have a lot of files that aren't available on any streaming service. Not sure if the sound quality of these services is on par with 320kbps MP3 files either.

Maybe there are some ways to convert Apple music to unprotected format and then we can enjoy them on any players as we want. I just learned about Notebunrer recently launches a Apple music converter, I prepare to try this and perhaps buy a license during black friday. I am waiting for a big deal.

Apple Music does allow you to stream music that's not available on their platform. iTunes will upload them when first added, and other devices can then stream from Apple.

It gained me as a user recently. I never used it until Apple Music and with the recent Apple TV it's pretty much awesome.

(Replaced Spotify)

Though one of Spotify strengths were its API. Apple needs an API so people people can get different front-ends and thus pretty much kill(?) Spotify for those who dislike iTunes.

Here's my dilemma with iTunes: I have about 50GB of music on my computer, an early 2007 iMac. If I want to upgrade my iPhone to iOS9, I need to update iTunes to the latest version. But the latest version doesn't run on Mac OSX 10.6... and my computer is too old to upgrade to 10.7 or higher. So if I want to have ios9 and sync music to my phone, I need to buy a new computer? Pretty upset about that.

If you are looking for an actual solution - I guess you could start Windows 10 in a VM(MS provides free images for testing purposes), install latest iTunes on it so you could upgrade your phone to iOS 9, then continue using your mac and its version of iTunes.

By the way - El Capitan supports mid-2007 iMacs: http://www.gottabemobile.com/2015/10/04/os-x-el-capitan-on-o...

For the love of god don't update an old computer that works perfectly fine on 10.6 on anything starting from Lion. All you'll get is bugs and confusing UXes.

Meh, I'm running my mid-2009 MacBook Pro on ElCapitan and everything works fine. I put an SSD in so it's actually quite usable,no complaints really.

"ElCapitan and everything works fine"

Finder went from broke in Yosemite to really broke in El Capitan. I'm getting sick of filing bugs (like Finder not saving place in folder when going up / down hierarchy).

El Capitan's Finder now crashes if you have a window showing a lot of files and execute a mv of some of those files in a Terminal. Its getting worse and worse. They need to pull a Snow Leopard again.

I feel you haven't even read my comment. OSX has been getting buggier and buggier after Snow Leopard, I never once said it was more resource hungry.

Thanks for the info. Unfortunately my iMac is "early 2007" so I missed the El Cap (and Mavericks/Yosemite) cutoff by a few months. As for the VPC, that is a fantastic idea. Might even just wipe the whole thing and install Windows as the primary OS (then copy back my music from an external drive backup). Surely a windows license is cheaper than a new machine (or is it? Been a while since I've bought windows or PC's).

I wonder what data Apple have on who will be affected by things like this, how many will upgrade their PC, how many will put off buying a phone, how many will leave Apple behind, and how those things balance out to impact their profits. I imagine they'd think a lot about it and made the decision that it's more profitable to not care about your use case, but would be interested to know how they approach it.

From a data point of one, when my grandma's old Mac Mini stopped being able to sync to or update her iPad, we ended up just caving and buying her a new Mac Mini. For the life of a computer, it really just wasn't worth the hassle.

Well, it shouldn't come as a surprise, that's Apple's policy towards their products.

I had the same reaction. I've owned older Macs and always found them- for one reason or another locked into the OS that it shipped with. My advice to family considering buying Apple hardware comes with a caveat about running older hardware/software and how Apple's approach to that, is to simply buy new hardware.

It doesn't look that way to me at all. The latest Mac OS X runs on computers as old as 2007. Apple hasn't dropped any hardware support for the last two OS revisions.

I agree that it's pretty dumb that you can't locally sync music on a new iPhone without newer hardware. It connects over USB, so make it available as a USB mass storage device and be done with it! But that's separate from supporting newer OSes on older hardware, which Apple is pretty decent at.

It would need to be a virtual filesystem presented as a USB mass storage device, though. I've thought about this for years, but don't know whether anyone's actually done it yet. Early iPods, etc. were definitely not powerful enough to handle this, but this should be cake for even modest smartphone hardware. Basically the VFS would present an interface to the music library, protect the library against mid-sync disconnects, etc. Likewise, the "host" computer wouldn't be able to screw up the device filesystem (or even know what the read FS type is), access non-music user data, or have low-level access to device storage.

It's not USB mass storage, but what you're describing sounds like MTP. It's the protocol used in a bunch of old (first-iPhone-era) media players, and I think the default for Android 5+ or so.

Used to write software to interact with it on the computer side with the Microsoft Windows Media Player SDKs. It did have the whole VFS and send the data over then commit thing.

Apple drops old hardware when they have a good reason to do so. They decided 64-bit x86 was the future so they relatively quickly dropped PowerPC and 32-bit x86. Since then, they haven't been dropping old Macs at all.

Their approach to hardware support on iOS has been similar: dropping devices with too little RAM or really wimpy CPUs/GPUs but otherwise extending it as far back as possible (some say too far back given the performance on these older devices).

iTunes Match is an option that is cheaper than buying a new mac.

I looked into this but iTunes Match appears to only work for official albums it "knows". I am really into live music and have a ton of concert recordings (legal -- bands that allow audience taping), and also a lot of recordings of my own music I've made with various bands.

Thanks for the suggestion though, I appreciate it.

Can't you do an Over The Air upgrade on the phone?

I'm not sure the phone would then sync with iTunes any more.

Is iTunes responsible for this trend I'm seeing more of where the Seek Forward/Backward (Fast-Forward/Rewind) symbol is being used in place of 'Next Track' and 'Previous Track?'

All other complaints aside, this, to me, is iTunes' worst offense. I don't know if there was some official standard ever, but it was at a very minimum an unofficial standard for DECADES. Now some asshole designer has decided to muddle and confuse everyone by redefining the symbol. This idea has infected PowerAmp on Android now, too.

I have not seen anyone discussing this before (but I haven't looked very hard). I refuse to buy into this new definition. Am I the only one bothered by this? I can't take a music application seriously if it can't get the symbols right.

I've never actually noticed this. I'm pretty sure if you hold the button it still does the scrubbing though.

You're right, it does seek if you press and hold. Thanks for that info.

I don't meant to shoot the messenger and this isn't directed at you, but this behavior makes no sense and is not intuitive to anyone who's ever listened to music on a CD (which is still A LOT of people).

I couldn't care less about scrubbing; I'd do that with the little progress bar because it's quicker and more precise than guessing how long to hold a button. I really just hate that one arrogant (or ignorant) person/group decided to change the meaning of a well-understood symbol as if they were the decider for everyone else.

A "designer" will no doubt point to a real world CD player/stereo and say "Holding down the next track button fast-forwards. We are just emulating that experience on a computer."

To which I would reply "My stereo does not have a fast-forward symbol on that button."

Oh I'm not defending it at all, I'm saying the missing | at the end of the button was never something I noticed. Possibly because I converted from Windows Media Player when I got a mac and the layout of media player is basically the same for playback controls (though they got the icon right). I agree, it's dumb.

I disagree. It's pretty intuitive for me, and I've listened to music on CDs. Personal opinion vs personal opinion.

The confusion/misdirecting part for me is that I would expect to hold down a 'Seek' button to seek through the track.

However, as a user, I was just trained to recognize the 'Seek' button as 'Next' or 'Previous' track.

So there are conflicting messages in their design. Why would I want to hold down the 'Next Track' button to seek ahead in the song? I would never think to do that.

While I kind of agree, it seems to be pretty common behavior for software audio players. VLC for example has the same UI and behavior.

The primary CD player (a Sony) I used for over a decade did the same thing as itunes in terms of press-and-hold.

I am writing an iTunes replacement ( the music and library management part ). Any feature requests from HN ?

Current alpha features:

* Playlist resume - if you interrupt a playlist 3278 entries in, you can resume at 3278

* Music diary - track what tunes played when & where ( occasional GPS polling optional )

* Powerful music list filters

* Keep track of recently played items and do not replay them for a while

* Works with Spotify thanks to Spotify API for premium users

* mobile app on iOS and Android

Suggestions beyond this ?

Music library spanning multiple disks.

This is my #1 desired killer feature, and no one has done it right (or even attempted it.)

I have 100s of gigs of music, but my MacBook Air can only store a portion of it. I want to connect the external drive and have the player see it all without changing the library pointer. I also want to be able to select which songs to mirror onto my laptop - a "checkout" feature.

I'll second that. Surprised it hasn't been solved by this point.

I use to use iTunes quite a bit, probably gave it a chance until 2010 or so even. But then it just became too little of a music player and too much of everything else that it was.

So I just use physical CDs, and more recently Spotify.

Pretty sure Winamp doesn't remove'missing' files from your library, unless you use the "remove all dead files" menu option.

Similarly you might be able to handle your external drive as a media device in order to 'checkout' files between them.

I'm a music stats geek. I'd suggest Last.fm intergration and I'd absolutely love some local database that keeps track of the play count meta data. iTunes keeps a running tally of the total number of plays, but it only keeps the most recent play count date. As a result iTunes looses an entire dimension of data. You can't use it to see your music consumption over time, and I consider that a huge omission. It's nuts that iTunes can't tell me what my top songs of the year were. The only app that I know of that keeps a local database of play counts is iScrobbler (discontinued but open source). Here's a shot of the type of thing it shows: http://cl.ly/image/0q2g0a3Q2e22

Please make it simple to just play an entire album. I'm an infrequent iTunes user because the piece of shit expects me to research who knows what to figure out how to play an entire album. It ain't obvious, and I could care less to figure it out because they'll change the interface on a whim.

Shuffle albums is also a cool feature to have.

I don't get this. You pick an album on the list and hit the big play button on the cover art.

A mechanism to bulk export and then import the metadata on existing files such as play count and rating. Extra points if it's not XML.

Yes. Metadata management as well. But JSON would be great for me. I like the sublime text method of preferences and packages.

a software that deal cleverly with podcasts, allowing at the same time to mix them with music in smart playlist but also keeping some specificity, (save playing position including across devices), bookmarks....

I haven't used itunes in awhile, but I can think of a major one. Music curation.

Allow me to remove duplicates, find names and album art, create and alter playlists and the like, and you might have me using your software.

Bingo, I agree with this

Probably wouldn't be a big in-demand feature, but the ability to create a playlist off any ID3 tag. I recently got interested in playing all my music from the 1970's and it was hard to locate.

Thanks, you've effectively voted for what I call 'filters'

Filter year > 1969 & year < 1980, expressed via a gui interface

Another idea I've had -- a "genre DJ". If you regard genres as graph points, this would give you control over transitions between those points.

So I can say "x% chance of playing Dixieland Jazz after playing a Swing song". This is so you don't get Megadeth right after listening to Louis Armstrong. But... after maybe 10-12 song + genre transitions, you might work your way there.

Some integration with Alfred and Quicksilver would be nice on the desktop - I never use the media player itself, but prefer to bring that up and type the song/album/artist.

daapd support (shared libraries), both as a client and as a server.

Lacking or in addition to that that compatibility with UPnP (currently broken on VLC).

Easier logic to create smart playlists. The iTunes smart playlist builder is very clunky for generating and/or relationships.

Full support for airplay from the app (not rerouting the whole OSX sound output to airplay like the Amazon Music App requires)

I also started a project on my own; mostly to accommodate my 80k music collection and partly to get better with Python: https://github.com/sphildreth/roadie

By iTunes replacement do you mean iTunes replacement or mp3 player?

Don't forget the following:

* Upgrade iOS on iPhone * Backup iPhone * Sync iPhotos from/to iPhone * Sync videos from/to iPhone

etc.

Just the music player for start

Does it work with Apple Music?

So what defines it as an iTunes replacement? Sounds like a different Music Player, maybe I'm missing something?

I made the switch to iTunes on OS X after finding out that some of the international artists I was looking for actually had a decent catalog on iTunes. Nowadays it's more of a balance act between the features I like and the annoyances it throws at me.

The most recent issue, which appears to be the result of one of the last updates, is that iTunes keeps on connecting to the store in the background for some reason, even when you're just on the normal Music view and not doing anything with the store. This wouldn't really be an issue, if it wouldn't complain every 1 to 2 hours with a popup message that it's unable to fulfill the store request.

However, iTunes on OS X is still only mildly annoying for me compared to the disaster that is the redesigned Music app on iOS. It took me a while just trying to figure out how to navigate it and then its features no longer match the iTunes on OS X behaviour, making it even more difficult trying to figure out how to use it. The search feature is the one I've been fighting the most with, as it no longer allows you to play the listed results like in the desktop version, so that you have to resort to custom playlists, if you are trying to play music that is not from the same artist or from the same album.

Just FYI, if you have the Genius or Recommendation features turned on for your library, iTunes will connect to the store to grab that information. If you don't want it to do that, just sign out of the store and turn those options off (but maybe not in that order). That should stop it from trying to connect in the background.

Thanks, I was hoping this might be it and just checked, but those settings are already disabled in my account. I would report it as a bug if I knew what caused it or had a way to reproduce it directly, but it's just a stock error message without any kind of additional information that occurs maybe once every 1-2hs.

Oh I hate the new Music app. I have a mount for my bike's handlebar that holds my iPhone and I use it in landscape so it doesn't wiggle quite so much, and that app in landscape on a phone is pure pain to use.

I use itunes daily. I really like it, they made it better recently with the miniplayer up next and such. I"m able to queue up music into a list easily anytime. Maybe its my usecase, but I find it pretty sweet.

That being said, itunes match, which I pay for and is supposed to sync all of my music between machines/ iphones somehow forgot a bunch of my songs. It might be part of iCloud now. I never could figure it out, but it just worked for the longest time. I turned on iCloud match and it seems to have brought most of them back. (Come to think of it maybe it was only cloud streaming songs I bought from itunes before...)

Itunes on the iphone turned into Apple Music nagware till you dig into settings and turn it off. searhing for a song would show you the Apple Music version. It was odd and jarring when your itunes match wasn't working right, but for some money you can play the song you thought you had...

Actually mac osx reminds me to "upgrade my keynote by upgrading my os" every time I open it. I've been using macs a long time and this new sell to me is getting grating.

If iTunes would remember my last view I would be happy. I tend to wanting my playlists on the side and the songs in list format on the right. Yet each time I open iTunes its in cover format or large icons or whatnot, never rhyme or reason.

Match. Match activated itself I don't know how many times. Removed all music from my phone so I was streaming everything. I honestly didn't notice at first except some of my music was missing (because it wasn't available on Match), and my music would inexplicably stop playing in certain areas. It screwed up all my tag edits/album art (on ~7K songs!) and because of some duplicate problem, which I have yet to resolve, my music doesn't sync properly onto my iPhone. (Among many, many other complaints about iTunes.)

My only question is, if I switch to something like Swinsian (which looks nice), how do I get the music and playlists onto my iPhone? (I've also been thinking about switching to Android since iOS 9 and its updates have turned my very expensive iPhone 6 into a slow, buggy POS.)

Them and everyone else. I suspect iTunes' major problem is that it encapsulates all (most?) of the code for communicating with iOS devices, hence XCode upgrades requiring it to be shut down and vice versa. Hence the amazing feature bloat. This plus its age probably make it a scary ball of mud.

Not sure that's enough to explain some of the UX choices - a few updates back I had to turn to google to find out they hadn't actually removed the mini player and then again to find out how to get back to the full window.

Maybe it makes sense to keep all the media management functions in one place, but then there's iPhoto/Photos, iBooks and the MAS, and then the Windows version.

It's like the app level equivalent of a god class.

Its casual users too. I suppose there's no point in me explaining why, since it's such a common thing.

This morning I clicked a downloaded MP3 file expecting it to simply play, but nooooh...

iTunes generally works great for me for maintaining my collection and playback, especially when combined with my home entertainment system. Where it falls apart is Apple Music, iTunes Match and iTunes Store.

- iTunes Match is too unreliable when it comes to actually matching songs. The syncing is unreliable. I have songs in my collection now that were manipulated by iTunes Match and now have incorrect artist/title entries for some reason. I routinely have an issue where a song will be purchased in iTunes Store but never shows up on other computers without me having to go through a whole process of checking for available downloads (never works), signing in, signing out, etc. which often doesn't work until a week later when the song magically shows up or just doesn't show up at all.

- iTunes Store is fine for buying music, if you know what you want to buy. Apple Match and iTunes are both terrible (in my opinion) for discovering new music that actually matches my own tastes.

Right now I am using both Spotify and iTunes. I use Spotify to discover new music which I then buy through the iTunes Store so that I can have it in my official iTunes-based collection. I know people who have started using Spotify as their main source of music but I have an existing collection of about 4000 songs made up of MP3's/purchased files which I wish to maintain as a single collection. Using Spotify doesn't allow me to do that. Adding songs from Apple Music to my music collection seems unpleasant because then it creates a mix of existing transportable MP3's that I can move around and Apple Music files that I have no control over.

It would be great to have a "single solution" that allowed me to discover new music, purchase it and maintain/listen to my collection but I've accepted that I will probably never find that solution.

I've been looking for a better alternative to iTunes for years, like Google Music. But nothing I've used has the same features like powerful smart playlists, ratings system, and the ability to change the start and stop times of songs. But iTunes is just a mess that's getting worse and worse. I might just have to suck it up and start over.

I find itunes to be just fine for dealing with a decade-old library with 20k+ songs that's been transferred between a half-dozen different computers, and it's certainly better than the terrible mp3 players I tried on linux in the last 18 months or so (banshee was the least horrible but it's random album shuffle was incredibly broken).

I'm quickly coming to the conclusion that I am one of a very small number of people on the planet that has literally no issues with iTunes' day to day functionality.

This despite abusing the hell out of it:

* My library is on an NFS volume,

* ..accessed with two different copies of iTunes on two different OSes

* ..with north of 20k songs

* ..and a library that's been backed up, restored, migrated, multiple times

*..all the way since ~2002 when I got the HP branded iPod and started using it to manage my music

The only conclusion I can come to, computers being deterministic machines, is that a lot of people have broken computers. Perhaps iTunes needs to be more error tolerant?

There's not a whole lot of ways to say "it works for me, and I don't know what you're on about" without being straight up dismissive but.. it Just Works, at least for me. Just another data point I suppose.

Agreed. I've been using iTunes daily since it first came out back in 2001, and I really don't see what all the hate is about.

Like you I've not treated it well – I've migrated the library across at least four computers, backed it up, restored it, and it's even been used by two computers simultaneously on a shared drive – and it's always worked fine.

The UX is also fine, even with Apple Music turned on. It does a lot of things, but it's still the best music player out there.

Every time I've tried to use something else, a missing or not well implemented bit of functionality has always brought me back to it.

Apple probably should have split the iPod/iOS/app management functionality into a separate utility, but iOS devices are now completely stand-alone, so they could drop all that stuff without issue.

And Apple Music is fantastic - it nailed my musical tastes way more accurately than Spotify, and I've used Spotify for years. The playlists it suggested were almost spookily good.

I tried Google Music on my phone for a while, and really didn't get on with it. Like all the Play services, it felt clunky and didn't have the polish it should. Using it felt like work.

The hate is from people that do not use it daily; the interface is far from intuitive for infrequent users, their help is a joke, and when all you want is to listen to music quickly and get back to what you actually are doing, iTunes completely fails.

You don't use iTunes Match or Apple Music, so you aren't really abusing it.

Yeah iTunes library on a network drive sucks balls in my opinion. SLOWWWWWW. And whenever my library gets horked and I try to re-match again it takes ages. It's just stupid.

I use both. I've got Beats 1 streaming in the background as we speak, and pretty much my entire library is cloud synched.

How does iTunes handle situations when your NFS volume drops off the network for you? I wind up having to restart all the time and re-match my songs back to get album covers back all the time, and it drives me up the wall. I have a slightly unstable wireless network and on a CIFS share I'm having lousy performance and it's only gotten worse over time, but it used to work much better for me in the past.

The last time this happened, it just started marking the songs missing (they got a little (!) symbol). I restarted iTunes, and it complained of the library not being found. Fixed the mount, fired it back up, and played the missing songs again.

You have to try playing those again if you want the songs to come up in shuffle, since it's the only way to clear the "missing" status.

I’m willing to bet that iTunes (as we know it) will get phased out in OS X 10.12.

Apple has a clear pattern now where they debut big ecosystem-wide changes in iOS first, and Mac about a year later. Apple Photos, the “Flat” aesthetic, Maps, etc.

A proper Apple Music app for iOS replaced the old iPod app last summer; Apple Music support was wedged into iTunes because Apple couldn’t afford to punt that feature all the way out to next year. But it seems in keeping with the pattern that an iOS-style Apple Music app for OS X, which would lack iOS syncing (works against the cloud strategy), iTunes University (deserves its own app), Podcasting (ditto, and one exists on iOS), etc.

iTunes isn't designed for the type of users this article discusses. The real issue the author should have focused on is there is no ecosystem as progressive or stable which is still focused on users who need/want to listen to their specific copy of a song rather than a generic hosted one.

I have a feeling this type of user will slowly fade out, and eventually looking at a HD filled with music (on a laptop less!) will provoke a reaction similar to the anachronistic feeling one has looking at a wall of CD's or DVD's.

A decade ago, I loved iTunes. I agree with other people here that it seemed to get a little less good over time, but it is still nice.

About 5 years ago I switched to Amazon Music because the songs were a little less expensive and I could also play my music on my Android phone.

Recently I started using Google's $10/month no advertisements on Youtube option. I then started using Google Play Music Premium and I find it good enough so I am making yet another switch in managing my music.

Fortunately, changing music hosting is not that time consuming.

Of course iTunes is bad, each version since 6-7 years adding layer and layer of half baked functionalities and a list of new bugs on previously working features. Unfortunately all the other music software are nowhere as good! That's really the sorry state of the music playing/managing software industry, if such thing exists.

Still a happy Zune 30GB user. One nice thing about using a discontinued device is that the manufacturer doesn't keep bloating up the software. (Also you can get refurbished replacement units cheap.) I guess at some point it won't run on the latest OS, but as of Windows 10, it still works fine.

It's 2015, and I can only load MP3s from a single Mac/PC into the music app on my iPhone. If I load MP3s from one of my other Macs/PCs, it wipes out the prior MP3s from my iPhone. Not user-friendly.

I tried iTunes back in 2004 or so and promptly killed the process and uninstalled when it started converting my MP3s to some Apple-only format. What's with that?

AAC [1] has never been an Apple format, though in 2004 it was less ubiquitous than it is now.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Audio_Coding

Okay, but my point was that iTunes should have just played and organized my MP3s instead of trying to re-encode them to a different format.

I am one of those alienated users, and I eagerly pressed the link to discover the alternatives. To no avail.

Are there viable alternative music players that can sync to iPhone?

It always has.

Using Ember.js as a front-end for their Music services as massive downer. Slow on a Macbook Pro 2014.

React or native would have been a better choice.

If it is that noticeably slow, I seriously doubt the framework for the front end is the sole issue.

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