iTunes will never work well | Hacker News Reader

iTunes will never work well

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305 pointsfirasd363 comments

i don't understand how apple have a reputation for good ui... all of their stuff is terrible.

the main problem: zero discoverablity - i need to google how to do things, then get some snotty fanboy answer about how easy and obvious it is, but there is literally no way to infer the functionality from the design.

they do love to steal context too... and interrupt your flow...

... i could go on and on, but having zero-discoverability is highly unforgivable, its an entire, rock-solid argument on its own.

Their reputation stemmed from the days where everything was discoverable. Want to delete a file? There's a trash can glued to your dock. Need to perform a function but don't know the name? Look it up in the Help menu's search box.

Now, though, they've done the Windows 8 thing of overloading gestures and hiding behaviors. Want to see your notifications? Two-finger swipe to the left, starting from the edge of the touchpad. If the piece of text hasn't been there since OS X first came out, is it clickable or not? Because I damn well can't tell, nothing new looks like a button anymore.

I could also talk about how the gaussian blur effect is just about the most wasteful effect you can apply to anything, and is a far cry from pioneering the first fast rounded rectangle drawing algorithm, or anything in that vein, but I don't need to.

Because Apple's UI is just no longer good. I'd rather every button look like a shimmering stupid bubble than an unusable postmodern art piece.

Sent from my MacBook Pro

As someone who got to use a PowerBook G4 (running 10.5.8) from time to time (in fact, I'm typing this very comment on it), I fail to see how their current UI is any more undiscoverable than the UI from 7 years ago.

The trash icon was there in the Dock in 10.5, and still there in 10.11. The search function in help was there in 10.5, and still there in 10.11. To remove things from the Dock, right click the icon and the "Remove from dock" is still there in both versions. Any menu items that will open a dialog still indicates with three dots ("...") in both versions. Shortcut for opening dictionary is still not very discoverable in both versions (Cmd-Ctrl-D). I still don't know how to trigger Space/Expose without either using gesture (in 10.11) or look up the shortcut key (in 10.5).

I always see people saying Apple UI got worse in discoverability for the past few years and make it sounds like earlier releases were perfect, but I don't believe that is true. The bad part of the UI interaction was always there (e.g. drag icon from the dock to somewhere to remove it). The main difference I see is that 10.11 has a LOT more features than the 10.5, but the core interaction remain the same in regard to discoverability. In 10.11, we're exposed more to gestures, because it's quick, but there is always alternative way to trigger something without gesture.

I'd go back even further to find decent Mac UI, to the pre-X OS. Yes, it was a reliability garbage fire, but the Apple of that time really invested in usability. They published a 400-page book[1] for developers that explained the principles behind usability, showed how interface design fits into the development process, and gave specific guidelines for each type of interface element. The guidelines they publish today[2] are a lifeless husk by comparison.

[1] http://interface.free.fr/Archives/Apple_HIGuidelines.pdf [2] https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/Us...

[1] is a great resource and a lot of it is still relevant. Thank you for linking to it.

I read (and purchased) the HIG as a graphic design student in university. It inspired me to jump into the UI design w/ 2 feet.

> As someone who got to use a PowerBook G4 (running 10.5.8) from time to time (in fact, I'm typing this very comment on it), I fail to see how their current UI is any more undiscoverable than the UI from 7 years ago.

Problem: You plug in an external monitor and for some reason it doesn't immediately display an images. What do you do?

In pre-el-Capitan, you open up the display settings pane and press the button marked "Detect Displays".

In El Capitan, you open up the display settings pane and note that the button is not there. Are you screwed? It appears so. So you run a google search and discover that if you hold down the option key, the button that had been there for maybe 16 years magically appears in an area of what previously appeared to be blank in the dialog.

I believe that's called the Indiana Jones UI pattern.[0]

So yes, the discoverability has gotten worse over the years. This is something that was visible and made invisible.

[0] http://youtu.be/xFntFdEGgws

I'm not sure it was every that great in OS X. My distant memories of system 7 do not include a frustration with this...

want to eject a disk? drag it to the trash can...?

I think Apple was good at keeping things consistent across apps, but the chosen metaphors were sometimes just as confusing (if worse) than the blessed windows one.

Not that it matters, everything is learned behaviour anyways. Consistency is already a great achievement.

> want to eject a disk? drag it to the trash can...?

This is the appendix of the Mac UI.

Gather round, kids, and listen to Grandpa tell you a story of the days when Macs had only one floppy disk drive. When you wanted to copy a file from one disk to another, you had to (physically) eject the first disk to insert the second one, but the first disk volume was still logically mounted so you could use it as a source or destination. So the volume's icon remained on the desktop, only dimmed so you knew the disk wasn't physically present.

So you physically eject a disk by selecting it and pressing Command-E (remember, only one mouse button), but how do you get rid of the ghost icon afterwards? Same way you get rid of anything -- you drag it to the trash.

From there it's an obvious shortcut to combining the two operations by dragging a "live" icon to the trash to both eject it and remove its icon in one step. (Well, obvious in 1985, anyway.)

Now that we can right-click the icon to eject the volume and have forgotten the origins of the drag-to-trash gesture, it may seem nonsensical, but those of us who were there at the beginning were grateful for the shortcut. (Also, get off my lawn.)

> want to eject a disk? drag it to the trash can...?

That was just something that was there forever, basically since 1984. It was part of the Macintosh vernacular. You could also right-click to eject.

That's kind of my point. It's all learned vernacular, so having inately understandable behaviour isn't as important as being consistent.

Though someone's saying that dragging the ion turns it into the eject symbol, which I hadn't noticed until now but is more reasonable.

Right-click? On a mouse with one button?

But it's been considered a terrible design choice since 1984. It's not one of those things that we decided against long after it was put in place, Unix philosophy types were complaining about the inconsistency of that choice the day it came out.

Contextual menus weren't added until Mac OS 8 or thereabouts. In all prior versions you either dragged to the Trash or used an item in the menubar.

if there was a two-button mouse....

the trash can turns into the eject symbol if you start to drag an ejectable volume

1. Not very discoverable if your dock is set to auto-hide.

2. On a large screen, this action (the trash can transformation) can happen very far away from the place you're looking at, which means that you will miss it. This is a general gripe of mine with Mac OS: It will regularly place popup dialogs on seemingly random screens. I have three active screens, and when I'm looking at the left screen, the right screen is so far outside my FOV that I will literally not notice dialogs popping up there.

> Want to see your notifications? Two-finger swipe to the left, starting from the edge of the touchpad.

Or, y'know, you could just click the notifications icon in the menubar (the one that looks like a list of notifications)?

Er.. so what does a list of notifications look like, especially iconised, and how/why should I intuitively know that?

I don't know, iOS was doing a lot of these things before Windows 8 was even in the earliest of pre-release states.

Sure the flat UI thing could be argued to have inspired some of Apple's later work... but I think the lack of discoverability started at Apple and was inherited by Microsoft, not the other way around.

You are definitely right that it has gotten worse in OS X overtime though...

Imagine what real 3D gesture recognition will be like.[1]

[1] https://atap.google.com/soli/

Tiring.

> Their reputation stemmed from the days where everything was discoverable. Want to delete a file? There's a trash can glued to your dock. Need to perform a function but don't know the name? Look it up in the Help menu's search box.

The trash is still glued to the dock. The Help menu still has a search box.

yes, that's an example of when everything was discoverable. Now, not everything is discoverable. Only some things.

I don't think anyone who uses osx would be unaware that the trash can is in the dock.

> Now, not everything is discoverable. Only some things.

Both of Striking's examples are wrong though. The notification menu has an icon in the top-right corner of the screen (next to the spotlight one), click it to get the widgets/notifications; and OSX buttons still looks like buttons, they have changed look slightly (from aqua) and that's about it. Links have always been in OSX, usually for contextual linking.

They seem to know some iOS and assume OSX is the exact same, which it isn't.

Wanted to eject a disk back then? Drag it onto the trash can. Not the most clever ui decision in the days when formatting floppy disks was a common task.

Sounds like a "fail safe" operation.

Eject is a lot safer than format.

Yes, but there was still good reason to hate it - what about users who learned the pattern the other way?

It sounds silly, but ejecting disks was about as common as deleting local content. Overlapping "delete" functionality with anything else still threatens to cause unintended deletes, even if this was better than the reverse.

(It's still fuzzy with Volumes in OS X, where you can click an 'eject' button that effectively deletes downloaded content if you haven't copied it out. Check out how many Volumes low-confidence users have running some time.)

I thought what he meant was you could erase a disk when you wanted to eject it (oops!)

I take some issue with this because you're describing one method to resolve a task when there are many.

You can also see notifications by just clicking on the omnipresent icon in the Finder Bar, or act on the notifications themselves by clicking them as they appear.

Like, I agree that the versatility of the trackpads is a blessing and a curse - beyond a few common ones, most gestures are unintuitive and it's probably why not too many applications take use of them on non-mobile devices. But the issue isn't with Apple having hidden behaviors here, it's that one method is less visible than others which are very accessible. The issue with the Windows 8 charms was that all means of accessing them were obfuscated. You had to move to a certain corner or swipe from a certain way on trackpads that often had poor sensitivity (or conversely, were overly sensitive) and the behavior was erratic and unpredictable.

It's fine to dislike aesthetics, but that doesn't make it unusable. In the case of the text buttons, I can't think of an instance off the top of my head where the text wasn't clearly marked as button with either a drop down arrow or ... or some other item.

> ... or some other item

some of these are not obvious, the little arrows pointing right are a bit confusing for instance - i only discovered they did anything when i clicked one in error.

a) If you want to see notifications click the button in the top, right corner where it's always been.

b) Apple has not changed the behaviour of buttons on OSX. They still look like they always have.

c) Computing resources are not finite like oil. It's there to be used.

d) Which gestures are available has always been in the Trackpad system preference which has videos to show you how to use them.

On c): recharge cycles are limited, as are Amper-hours. Idk though how much it takes, I just don't like blurs, it is like you're semi-blind or your screen is damaged, sort of. But flat interface would be too ugly without all that color blots. It is like a makeup to actually bad ui. Shame on Apple they lost it at iOS 7.

I'm not sure I accept D) as a full defense of a confusing system.

I get that some things can't be made intuitive, and have to be learned. But "there's a video somewhere if you know to look" is a crappy justification for the current setup. As is, non-regional gestures compete with regional versions of the same motion and the enabled-by-default gestures aren't terribly well chosen.

I've watched a lot of non-power-users work their touchpad, accidentally fire off either the wrong gesture or an unintended gesture, and then sort of click aimlessly until they get back to something recognizable. That's a sign that OS X is failing users, no matter how elegant things look to Apple.

Notifications have a dedicated button at the far right of the menu bar, a prime Fitt's Law location. The help and the trash are still where they've been for years.

> all of their stuff is terrible.

As a PC-only user since the days of DOS up till Windows 8, and having used Windows 10 after jumping ship to Macs a few hours ago, macOS has demonstrably more discoverability than Windows.

One example: Just click on the Help menu, in any app, and type something like "show" or "find" or any other operation, and it will show you all the menu items which have that word in their name.

That feature is a part of the Cocoa subsystem and comes for free with every app, and very handy when you know an app has a certain feature but you're not sure which menu it's buried in (like standard operations and filters in different image editing apps.)

Also, all the shortcuts and standard menus are the same in every macOS app, and can be discovered/modified from System Preferences -> Keyboard, again for any app.

Take "Preferences", which in Windows is sometimes under Edit, Tools, or the app name menu (which imitates macOS.)

I could go on and on, but "zero discoverability" is an undeserved hyperbole.

It could be argued that is not "discoverability". IMO, that's a feature to handle bad discoverability and unintuitive UI.

Discoverability is when you can see what/how to do something by just looking or clicking around a bit.

i would say that i think recent windows 8/10 are considerably worse than OS X - they approach iOS levels of undiscoverability.

maybe i am overstating it a bit - maybe unforgivable sounds really bad, but what i find it hard to believe that most people couldn't trivially improve on the more confusing or poorly implemented UI elements.

Oops, years, not hours. I should proofread.

Also, to be specific, the standard menus and searching etc. come with AppKit, which is part of Cocoa.

> "zero discoverability" is an undeserved hyperbole.

Actually, it's a deserved hyperbole.

It's not like Apple haven't realized their mistakes... They wrote a book in the late 80s about UI and it's still one of the best works. But they've abandoned many of their most-important guidelines, and almost always for the worse.

They threw out the discoverability baby with the skeuomorphic bathwater.

Which book are you referring to?

See [1] in a comment somewhere else in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12529428

Agree. I really love Apple, but I always find myself Googling for "Can I do that in iTunes?" (the answer is usually No) or "How to do this?". And I can't say that I want something weird. Some workflows look so simple and obvious to me (and I think most people have the same workflows), but they are literally impossible with iTunes and other Apple stuff.

For example, I have a 2TB AirPort Time Capsule, but it looks impossible to backup my iPod or MacBook directly to it (which is nonsense, why do I need 2TB then?). So I have to create backups with iTunes, then go to `~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup/` and copy everything manually to the capsule.

Searching for a song in iTunes is always confusing. Why don't they have global search field that searches in both Library and connected device?

Photos app is another nightmare (and photos management overall)! Again, I just want to connect my iPhone or my camera and transfer photos to AirPort Time Capsule. Impossible.

Or in macOS, you can't just make some apps fullscreen: they always have that 5px gap between app window and dock bar (http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/141800/gap-at-the-b...).

Or the fact they don't have proper window management and themes. One have to use third-party apps full of hacks to have, say, dark window theme or some parody of tiling WM.

a) Photos stores its library in your Pictures directory. You can back it up entirely to any drive. Or if you want individual photos just use the Export/Save menu option.

b) Almost every app bar a few older ones can be made full screen. Unless I am confused there will be no black bar at the bottom. I definitely can't see it.

c) You can do basic side/side tiling if your apps are full screen. Most people aren't clamoring for advanced window management and there are dozens of tools available that aren't hacks by any measure.

Please. Don't try to defend Photos.app, it's an abysmal piece of junk. It breaks UI metaphors. Saving its library to your pictures directory? Sure. But it's a royal pain if I don't want to store those pictures on a Mac. Which wouldn't be such an issue if Apple let you upgrade the storage. But no, you can't do that. So buy iCloud and shut the hell up, right?

I find myself wondering daily, how the hell have Apple dropped the ball so badly, and how on earth have they not been steamrolled by Microsoft.

>Which wouldn't be such an issue if Apple let you upgrade the storage. But no, you can't do that. So buy iCloud and shut the hell up, right?

>I find myself wondering daily, how the hell have Apple dropped the ball so badly, and how on earth have they not been steamrolled by Microsoft.

Because there's legions of gullible suckers who'll line up to buy the latest iDevice and then believe everything Apple tells them, whether it's "you're holding it wrong" or "you don't need to copy music files to your phone, just buy them again on iTunes" or "you don't need a headphone jack, just buy a new pair of Bluetooth headphones from Beats for $$$".

Have you found Time Machine?

How does it help? Can I use Time Machine to backup my iPod to AirPort Time Capsule?

You can use Time Machine to automatically back up your MacBook to the Time Capsule, and as .../MobileSync/Backup/ will obviously be a part of that backup, your iPod backups will come along for the ride as well.

> "Can I do that in iTunes?" (the answer is usually No)

Betteridge's Law of iTunes Features

Speaking of, Apple is to blame for the absolute worst case of discoverability I've ever encountered: getting the iOS App Store app to list all apps labeled "Essentials".

Dug around, couldn't find it. Googled it, found a few forum threads where everybody concluded it couldn't be done. Went into an Apple store, gave an employee a few minutes to figure it out, and he gave up.

And yet, it's possible.

Rather than just tell you, I'm going to leave this as a challenge. See how long it takes you to figure this out.

Wow. That was about five minutes of hunting, and I actually seriously considered the possibility that your comment was a troll. That was impressively unexpected.

Could you share the solution? I couldn't figure it out. Searching for "essentials" was the closest I got.

Took me no more than 10 seconds. After noticing that the essential terms is translated into a query for apps TAGGED as essentials by Apple (Facebook, Google Mail etc), I just put the term in quotes("essentials" vs essentials in the search bar).

It's a convention followed for literal matches in tons of environments (including Google Search IIRC).

They'll never beat iTunes ("How in the ?#$# do shuffle and repeat actually work?!"), though.

Those devs are master-level trolls.

Searching for "essentials" seems to do the trick.

Same here. What am I missing?

Perhaps the App Store has been upgraded in the last 10 hours, but I too simply typed "essentials" into the search bar and it worked fine (on both iOS and Mac, as well as iTunes). Didn't even need to put it in quotes.

Perhaps actually doing the text search is the barrier you mean? Were you looking for an item labeled "Essentials" in the Quick Links section? I agree that would be preferable, but it's not like doing a search is the Riddle of the Sphinx.

For my part, my surprise comes from the fact that I have to use the free-text search UI to list matches for a tag, and whether it matches free text or a tag is completely opaque. It is hostile UI when I can filter on "Games" in the category list, and search for "Angry Birds" by free text, and yet tags live in a nebulous nowhere-space. If I wanted to find apps titled "<Language> Essentials", I'd be pretty annoyed to find them disappear behind an unexpected magic keyword-to-tag search.

In this case, there is no good place to put tag search because tags aren't first-class citizens.

Why on this blue-green earth would you want to ask a vendor for what they consider "essential". How is this useful to you? Why would you expect the vendor to provide this for you (except to further their own sales agenda)? This is a straw man that I implore you to burn.

Apple do a lot of editorial on the App Store.

Well, I remember having to search for "OK Google" in Google Maps to save the current view for offline viewing...

To be fair, even Google has terrible UI/UX these days. Just look at Google Maps or Gmail. Material design isn't that great for discoverability either.

What's wrong with Google Maps? I've just been watching a non-technical friend use it and the only thing that wasn't intuitive was adding an extra stop to her trip (and even then, she discovered it without needing to search for help).

On mobile, I would honestly say that Google Maps is the single most difficult app to navigate.

Add a route between A and B, then slightly scroll on the map. The context information disappears and once you get the bloody thing up again, how do you go back to results? It is infuriating.

They added the feature that used to bug me the most: when I search, my saved locations now get preferential treatment.

And, yet, the maps themselves are worse: they changed the algorithm for which labels are displayed, making it impossible to cause some street names to appear.

My two main gripes with Google Maps (on Android):

1. In the most recent version, there is some action (I don't know which at the moment) which makes all UI elements disappear, and I don't know how to bring them back except by restarting the app.

2. My most common use-case is to search for some amenity within a certain area. So I pan and zoom to the area that I want to search, type in my query... and it zooms out to the city level to show me absurdly distant results. I can zoom back in afterwards and do "Search in this area", but it's still annoying every time.

So tell me how am I supposed to find a route between x and y from my phone without being on x or y first?

It is doable, but how is it supposed to be done?

(For context: IIRC there used to be a shortcut to navigation for that feature. And yes I think ux designers mindlessly copying each others or Apple are at least partially to blame.(

Lack of quality control - the last two-ish months, the search feature on maps has been completely broken for me.

They rolled out a feature to limit search results to locations within your current zoom. Great! Problem is, they reloaded the entire page (not just the results partial) on every change.

The constant flickering made it very difficult to orient yourself around the map. Was infuriating to use and I'm very glad that they've now fixed it.

Using Chrome on a 24" monitor, I get a 2" subwindow for Street View positioning (yellow guy). And it auto hides quickly. Maddening.

They took away the zoom in/out floating buttons on the android maps app, managing to destroy discoverability and single handed operation.

At least on my OnePlus phone, you can double-tap the screen and drag up or down to zoom in or out, like a scroll wheel. It's better than buttons, in my humble opinion.

But pinch to zoom is used for everything.

double tap and drag.

http://www.carlsednaoui.com/post/46803524724/google-maps-one...

I've been wondering lately if it stems from the purchasing experience. I'm looking at getting a new PC lately and there are just so many options from supplier to hardware details. How many cores do I want? Which processor architecture? What nanometer size? How much RAM? How big a hard disk? What graphics card (a dozen questions on it's own)?

Even if you restrict yourself to one supplier, they have dozens of variants and arcane naming schemes that makes working out what's current something that takes hours of research. Compare this to apple which only has a couple of SKU's at a time in each category and it makes purchasing a lot simpler.

My thinking is that apple == easy is something that just sticks in your mind from the outset.

Heh, Apple don't really make it easy anymore either. You have to choose upfront how much RAM and HDD you need, because unlike on almost every other decent manufacturer's higher end machines, you can't change them later.

But I agree. It's even worse with phones - have you seen the number of phones Samsung have? I have a nack for remembering model numbers and specs and even I find it absurdly difficult.

"i don't understand how apple have a reputation for good ui... all of their stuff is terrible."

All you need to know about Apple UI is this:

Sometimes you click the green (maximize) button and the window gets smaller.

Yeah, that's because it's not a maximise button. It's the button that adjusts the window size to the content size.

At least, that's what it used to be. They changed the default behavior to 'fullscreen' because all the people coming from Windows thought that's what the button should do...

Good to know I'm not the only one who can't figure out UIs these days. Mobile apps have all these icons that give me absolutely no idea what action will be performed. I miss the days of being able to hover and get an English description. (I guess this is where I say "get offa my lawn!")

On many Android apps, you can tap-and-hold the menu buttons and a popup will describe the action, like a tooltip on WIMP UIs.

apples UI reputation is from the mac days when it's major selling point over windows boxes was that the UI was nicer, shinier and easier. the ipods looked nice, and the iphones looked nice.

but the UX for some apple things is trash. I've had years of IT working with crap interfaces and itunes is still one of the most confusing and willfully annoying programs i've used.

> i don't understand how apple have a reputation for good ui...

They don't. Apple is the only tech company that markets their products like fashion accessories.

That's not a bad thing: in 2016 we're living squarely in the age of 'wearable computers'.

The "good UI" stuff is just rationalization, however.

Steve Jobs balanced aesthetics and usability. Jony Ive is 100% aesthetics. That's the trap they are in now.

I had an SSH password once with a # character in it. I tried to log in from a friend's Macbook and was forced to ask him how to type this. Apparently it was Option-3. Completely unmarked. Astonishing. But hey, at least you can type §.

Huh? I have a Macbook Pro and a Microsoft keyboard on an old Win XP box right next to each other right now and they both, clearly labeled, have # above the "3" for shift-3

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_and_American_keyboards...

"The # symbol is replaced by the £ symbol (as on PC keyboards); the # is available by pressing ⌥ Option+3

More recent Apple British keyboards move the backquote/~ key to the left of the Z key and replace it with a section sign (§) and a plus-minus sign (±) respectively.

The Enter key spans two rows and is shaped similarly to the Enter key of many ISO PC keyboards."

I believe this is because I live in the UK. Apple seems to have invented some kind of bizarre hybrid layout between the UK and US ones. Shift-3 is the £ symbol here.

Until a few years ago, the difference to windows was like night & day.

Whenever I had to use a Windows PC during the Windows XP - Windows 7 days, I'd wonder how Windows users ever got anything done.

Windows would almost constantly interrupt any sort of flow with notifications about updated virus definitions, really really urgent updates that need a reboot right now, the highly relevant information that I got a new DHCP IP etc. etc.

It's gotten better now I believe, and OS X usability has indeed suffered a bit while expanding in features.

No, it's gotten much worse with Windows 10: now it'll force you to spend 45 minutes downloading and installing updates (while you can't do anything else) and then rebooting, at whatever time it feels like it, even if you're right in the middle of a critically important meeting. I don't remember XP-7 doing stuff like that.

I'm surprised they haven't been hit with a class action lawsuit for the iTunes UX yet, since it seems designed to needlessly fill up space on your computer / phone in order to get you to upgrade to larger models.

E.g. with the podcasts sync feature, you can only decide how many episodes you want stored for every podcast at a global level, not per podcast. So e.g. you can either store the most recent ten episodes of each podcast, or every episode of each podcast. So even though for most podcasts ten is probably enough, you end up needing to store every episode of every podcast on your phone even if there is only one podcast where you want every episode.

Similarly, once you purchase an app the only option is to download all the new updates, even if you don't use the app anymore. There is no option to archive the app, so it's either let iTunes keep installing the updates each week or else delete it the app you paid for from your computer. Again, this just needlessly churns through backup disks so that Apple can sell people more external hard drives.

These are just a couple examples, but it seems like pretty much every features of iTunes is designed to force you to buy more stuff from Apple that you don't actually need.

> it seems like pretty much every features of iTunes is designed to force you to buy more stuff from Apple that you don't actually need.

I actually highly doubt this. Apple has done a lot of work (starting in iOS 4 IIRC) to actually remove the need for iTunes.

From my personal experience, and that of working at the Genius Bar, most people don't use iTunes at all. With regular backups and sync happening over iCloud, with Apple Music/iTunes-over-the-cloud/Spotify, the use case for iTunes - ESPECIALLY for managing an iOS device - is incredibly small.

In fact, more and more iTunes features are added to lessen the space it takes up - the default behaviour of iTunes (as a music listening app) is for it to stream songs and download as much as possible on-demand. My 45GB iTunes library only takes up 15GB on my Mac.

I say this as someone who uses iTunes daily to listen to music, but never actually touches iOS devices through it.

Then why have it at all? The point is that if it's there taking up space, it should work well. It doesn't. Fix it or kill it.

iTunes is not necessary at this point. I have never agreed to the terms of service in iTunes desktop and thus have never used it. I don't know if there are any terms to agree to on the phone because it also never gets used there. iTunes for me lives in a folder called "other" that I never open. (Spotify is my music player)

The podcast thing is not true. You can create "stations" with different retention settings, and put the podcasts inside.

Archiving is redundant. You can have manual update and update the app as needed, you can have auto update and update all installed apps, or you can just remove the app from your device and install it again later when you need it. If you don't use an app, just remove it. You can redownload it later. Why keep things you admit you don't use?

It must be really hard to maintain and add features to such a huge old application. Platforms have changed underneath it, the devices and services it connects to have come and gone, Objective C has changed a lot as well. And then there's the Windows version...

Still, iTunes is crap. I hated it so much that I wrote my own music player for iOS, just to avoid using iTunes for putting music on my phone [1].

My guess is that sooner or later, iTunes will be dismantled and the features will be split into multiple smaller apps. There will be a music app that JUST plays music from the Apple Music account, a podcast app that JUST plays podcasts, a sync app that JUST helps you manage stuff on your phone etc. Some features will be removed (Internet radio, ripping & burning CDs). And of those that remain, only a few will need to keep a Windows counterpart. That way, things will be easier to maintain.

[1] Tiny Player: https://itunes.apple.com/app/id1140849233

(My Opinion): This is a business decision. The user is a captive audience (no alternatives available), so Apple has a disincentive to optimize anything other than profit generators.

And it's not just Apple. In Google Play, try housekeeping your app collection, or re-install a specific app on a new device. It's technically possible, but the more apps you have installed in the past, the harder it gets.

(My Opinion) All of Apple's 40,000 foot view is walled garden. iTunes, DRM Wireless Headphones etc..

What DRM wireless headphones?

No more analog-only headphones on the new iPhone. DRM capable digital to analog adapters coming in 3...2...1...

I think Apple would have split up iTunes long ago if it were only a Mac application, but they don't want to distribute a bunch of smaller Windows apps.

Sure. Hopefuly "a bunch" could be reduced to just two: Apple Music client and iPhone sync app. The rest would be removed without a replacement (on Windows). The headphone jack removal shows that Apple is willing to make people angry about some things for a long term benefit and iTunes is imho a good candidate for the next "act of courage", heh.

Could they drop the iPhone sync app completely? These days the iPhone should be able to do all the syncing it needs directly against the internet.

I really don't think they would. iTunes has been awful for pretty much the entirety of it's existence. It's not Windows stopping it being magically wonderful.

Is that so? Some years ago I remember some rando's blog post that seemed to completely invent this narrative from thin air, and it got repeated a lot by Apple fans who have never built Windows applications and probably grossly overestimate its cost. This seems like a pretty lame excuse for one of the world's most powerful companies to not do something it would otherwise want to do.

I don't guess it's a cost issue. iTunes is the Apple trojan horse into the Windows platform. They know that they can get anything onto a Windows desktop by crammng it into this one application. My guess is that strategically they don't want to give this up.

> My guess is that sooner or later, iTunes will be dismantled and the features will be split into multiple smaller apps

I've been hoping for this for ages, but looking at the new Music app on iOS I guess I should be careful what I wish for. At least iTunes isn't that bad.

I've been listening to music by artists, playing albums in whatever random order iTunes/music deigned to give them in. It's not perfect as I'd like them to be in release order, but never mind.

Updated to ios 10, that feature no longer exists. I can "shuffle" an artists songs, or listen to them in alphabetical order. That seems to be it. Thanks so much.

People have been saying that for years (the dismantling of iTunes is near) yet Apple keep on shoving more shit into it.

@tomasandrle How do I add music?

When I toggle "ENABLE UPLOADS", "no network available" error pops out

You need to be on WiFi. Open a desktop browser and point it to the URL that the app gives you in the Upload tab or get the Tiny Loader Mac app (http://www.catnapgames.com/tiny-loader/) to just drag & drop files and folders - it finds your phone automatically using Bonjour.

If you still have problems please msg me directly or tweet @catnapgames, thanks.

Just realized that... thanks

also if you could get the app to move all music from iTunes on the iPhone to TinyPlayer it would be great.

Can I create play lists?

People always bash iTunes, but I actually use it quite often and I like it. Maybe it's just me though?

The only thing that bugs me, is on iOS, when I load the music app (that's basically iTunes for iOS, right?) it shows a blank page until it can connect to the their servers to grab some data. It doesn't have a problem if I'm on wifi or a fast connection, but I'm often in places where my service is shit, and I get a white screen and can't pick what music I want to listen to. My workaround is to pull the menu up from the bottom of the screen and just hit "play" and then it usually works.

But iTunes itself, I do like.

The lack of async and modal dialogs drive me nuts with iTunes. My main gripe is syncing my ipod or phone interrupts music playback--they should be completely separate things. Ideally separate applications.

> My main gripe is syncing my ipod or phone interrupts music playback

It doesn't though. I just tried. Start playback, plug phone (keeps playing), sync (itunes still playing), disconnect, itunes has never stopped playing.

Thanks for the correction.

I've honestly stopped using iTunes for the most part after 10+ years of problems like that. It's weird, but I'll listen to music on my phone while using my computer. I also sync phones/ipods a lot less often since so much has moved to the cloud. It may not interrupt playback, but I swear I still see modal dialogs when syncing.

I still think they should be completely separate applications.

Up to a few years ago, iTunes was full of these things. They've refined it over time, and most of those actions are now non-blocking from a UI perspective.

Which dialogs?

I don't seem to have the same issue with playback and syncing.

"People always bash iTunes, but I actually use it quite often and I like it. Maybe it's just me though?"

I'm really picky about OSX annoyances and confusing fake-ease-of-use from Apple, but I do use iTunes fairly regularly just to listen to music and podcasts and I have never had any issues.

Here's why:

I only use iTunes to just play tracks. I don't use it for anything else.

All of my file org and maintenance and backups and transfer - all of that is done from the command line with cp/mv/rsync/etc.

For me, iTunes is just a play button and nothing else. I use command-o to open files and then click play and that's it.

That's why I still use OSX even though I hate it. No matter what the OS refuses to let me do (or figure out to do) I can always just force the issue with the command line - and that wasn't an option always in Windows ...

That is also why this weird "you're root but not actually root" in the newest versions of OSX has me worried.

Yeah, I've had a similar experience: i only ever use iTunes for one thing, and that's as an Apple Music client. If you limit yourself to that, it's actually quite nice, much better than Spotify.

However, if I were trying to organize my mp3 library in it, I would lose my mind, I think .

Heh. I have the same complaint about Spotify. I can't even play my own music on the device until it's finished failing to connect to Spotify's servers.

Better if you set it to offline in playback. But then there's the damn gapless playback, even if you don't want it. Quit premium over this.

I, too, kind of like it. Conceptually to me, it's a media player and store and that doesn't seem like it's doing "too much." Splitting out iBooks made sense. Splitting out device sync makes a ton of sense and I think you could have a headless homesharing system as well. But as a media player, it's not bad, I don't need skins and visualizations and such.

Where I think it is weak though is it's meta data format, it's some structured unified file that is opaque. As your media library grows things slow down. I'm somewhat confident that it can be corrupted but I have limited visibility in to how it's corrupted and less in to how to fix it. Thing is, people have gigantic media collections, I'd think something like sqlite could fix it. Along with that, as it has morphed over the years, there is this divide as to where the data lives. Like your podcast subscriptions can be duplicated in the cloud (makes sense so you can pull them on your phone) It's not super clear where the data really lives or where the canonical source of truth should be for it.

That must-connect-to-server-before-I-show-you-your-LOCAL!-files has really pushed me over the edge. Infuriating! I've been trying out some replacment music apps, but haven't really found any great alternatives at this point. I guess the whole thing will sort itself out when I switch to android in the next few months.

Someone around here put it best a few wks ago in an iPhone7 discussion: Steve Jobs is dead.

> I guess the whole thing will sort itself out when I switch to android in the next few months.

The stock android music app was, last time I punished myself by using it, terrible. This cloud integration stuff is so damn pushy. I wish there was something out there with only the features of winamp, but enough UI polish that it doesn't look like some college kid's hobby project.

I don't use Android currently, but when I did, PowerAmp was a great music player. Simple interface. Would automatically find sound files wherever you put them. Played most formats including flac. Worked very well with my BT headphones. Never had a problem with it.

For a long time it was also the poster boy for how async programming is terrible. Press next twice in a row and the song that played was whichever song loaded last, sometimes after playing a bit of the one that loaded first. That's if it didn't crash of course.

Try VOX Player https://coppertino.com

Cesium is a really great iOS music player app. It's basically the iOS 6 UI with the bug fixes you always wanted, and none of the gunk from iOS 7 and above.

Apple needs to allow importing songs into the Music app on iOS from any source, not just iTunes and its own store. This has been a long standing pain point. Not everybody wants Apple Music and not everybody wants to buy music from Apple. But there are people with existing music collections who want to add them to iOS devices easily without having to use iTunes.

This procedure works for iBooks, where you can add books from any source online through the share sheet. But it's not allowed for Music in 2016^, nearly 10 years since Steve Jobs wrote his Thoughts on DRM.

^: presumably due to licensing issues and/or agreements with the record labels and/or wanting a monopoly on music

If you want to manage and control your own music library, you're not Apple's intended customer. If you are inside the Apple ecosystem, they expect you to play entirely within their ecosystem. I suggest you try using an Android phone, where you can easily drag & drop any files you want, and can manage them with any program you choose.

Isn't that what iTunes Match did (does?) for a fee?

No, iTunes Match simply allows you to sync your music via iCloud. If you have a song on your computer in iTunes, Match will find the song in their catalogue and let you download that to your iPhone, or it will upload the music file from your computer and let you download that to your iPhone. It was basically a way to cut the cord, so to speak, and not have to actually sync your phone to your computer.

You still need iTunes for it all to work in the end.

>Apple needs to allow importing songs into the Music app on iOS from any source, not just iTunes and its own store.

Why? I think Microsoft "needs" to go back to the Win7 UI, or better yet just open-source their OS and shut down their company, but that's not going to happen because they don't agree with me.

>Not everybody wants Apple Music and not everybody wants to buy music from Apple.

So what? If you don't like having to buy all your music from Apple, then don't buy an iPhone. There's plenty of other non-Apple devices out there. People who don't want Apple Music and don't want to buy from Apple are not target customers for Apple. They don't need you; they have plenty of suckers happy to pay them $$$$ for a phone and then more $$$ to buy all their music from iTunes.

>agreements with the record labels and/or wanting a monopoly on music

Android phones don't have this problem, and they have music stores too, plus you can just load your own music in MP3 or Ogg format easily. On many phones, you don't even have to use USB to transfer it, because you can just copy it from your PC to an SDcard which you can then insert in the phone.

Of course it's the monopoly angle: they want a monopoly on how Apple users get music, and they have one. If you don't like that, then don't buy an Apple.

As far as I have used iTunes the only problem I see with it is trying to do EVERYTHING in a single package. It tries to be

- music player

- content manager (music & video)

- sync manager

- update manager

- Apple Music client

and these are the five things I can name on top of my head, without opening up the app. This is fine, but they are not honoring their boundaries. When I am listening to my music, don't mess me with the sync business. If there is a new version, put a helpful icon but only steal my focus if I click to sync tab.

It's like going to a supermarket to buy a piece of candy. Sure there are meats and potatoes on the next shelves but I need my candy. Yes I can hear you overhyped sales person about the discounts but. I. Need. My. Candy.

Also I cannot see the logic behind the Apple Music's integration with iTunes. I have tried to use AM with iTunes on windows and it is not a fun experience I can tell you. Spotify, even though people are grumbling about its ux, provides a smoother experience. Search, double click play, right click to save or add to a customized playlist. Or mess with that knob to download.

The disconnect between macOS and iOS is stark in this particular area. All of iTunes functions on the desktop are split into 4 or 5 apps on iOS (Music, Videos, App Store, etc.) and then on desktop you have the behemoth iTunes instead.

And yes, there's also: Backup Manager for iOS devices, and, somewhat unique to me as an iOS developer, iTunes also holds the keys for me to be able to build to my devices which is all kinds of fun let me tell you.

I hope at some point they revisit iTunes and re-do it completely but that seems like something Steve Jobs would have to push through. As much as I get annoyed with the deification of that man (frankly he as just a really good salesman, nothing more) I think a majority of long time Apple users would agree that their software has taken a hit in quality since his passing, the debacles with iOS 9 and 10 updates bricking various portions of the iPhone comes to mind.

The problem is, they can never satify everybody. I bet you that if they ever split iTunes up in separate apps like you suggested there will also be a lot of people who dislike that approach and rant along the lines of "Why did they split it up? It was so convenient to have everything in one place. Now I have to open a multitude of apps" No matter how much sense that may make, there will be people like that. The question is, how many compared to people who want things to be plit up. Apple would be best served to conduct some polls or maybe even a nice beta programm where you can use separate apps and then give feedback if it works as intended.

Agreed. Satisfaction is not an objective commodity. But Apple Music really, definitively, needs its own app considering the problems it creates in people's iTunes libraries.

I agree, but doubt it will happen.

Step by step, Apple are pushing their customers towards subscription services. They did it with photos first, then music. From macOS Sierra onwards they'll be doing it with the "Documents" and "Desktop" directory.

iTunes has always acted as an advance party for Apple's next business experiments. It gets UI changes ahead of the OS. It gets "features" like this subscription funnelling ahead of the OS.

I have never seen any software turn adults into a pile of tears faster that iTunes. Trying to put music on your iPhone the night before a trip is the most god damn frustrating thing in modern software.

It literally can't be done. If all you want to do is copy a few songs to your iPhone you can't fucking do it. It tries to sync your phone. Then says "warning: this will delete everything". What the fucking fuck motherfucker. I just want to copy a dozen god damn mp3 files into a file system. It's not hard!

Syncing is a broken concept. There's no such thing as syncing. There's no such thing as being in sync. No PC, Mac, or iOS device of mine can ever be fully sunk. (sync'd?)

The totality of "my stuff" is a venn diagram. Things on my iPhone. Things on my iPad. Things on my Macbook. I have save data shared across devices. But also save data unique to each device. I own 100Gb of music. Most of it is on my Macbook. Some of it is on my iPhone. None of it is on my iPad. I even own music downloaded to none of these devices. Those purchases exist only in the cloud. Plus god knows how many apps I've bought and since deleted.

There is no such thing as syncing. No device can ever be fully sync'd. Fully up to date. The whole idea of syncing is fundamentally broken and wrong.

Fuck iTunes. No iPhone of mine will ever know iTunes ever exists. I now use Spotify. I download music to my phone for trips. My phone will never be connected to any Mac or PC.

If you must copy music don't use iTunes. Once upon a time I used Copytrans. It's free and gets the job done. http://www.copytrans.net/copytransmanager/

(This rant brought to through the sobbing tears of my partner. Thanks iTunes. You worthless piece of shit.)

Copytrans now costs $20.

There is no good tool for "just put some fucking music on my iPhone" that doesn't cost money that I've ever been able to find.

The single worst thing about itunes, in my opinion, is the way it handles duplicate songs. It has a "detect duplicates" feature, but all that does is show a list of groups of songs that it thinks are duplicates, and it has false positives! But the one thing it can't do, is detect when you've added multiple copies of the exact same file in the same directory.

My music collection needs to by synced across computers, and if it refused to add the exact same file twice, then the operation would be trivial. Add mp3s to your music directory, drag and drop all files to itunes, and let it detect new songs. Since it's not, I have to do a long series of "okay, the timestamp on this file is newer than the newest added-on date in itunes.... I think.... except this directory was untarred, so it retains old timestamps, and blah blah blah..."

fdupes is your friend in cases like these — it finds duplicate files fast. As usual, the CLI tools are much better at solving problems than a terrible GUI like iTunes.

You don't even need a separate tool for that:

  find -type f -name \*.mp3 -exec md5sum {} + \
    | uniq -dDw 32

The problem isn't duplicate files, it's that iTunes has an internal list of songs, and it allows the same file to appear in the list twice. I can manage a directory of files, I just can't manage iTunes' indexing of them.

I understand why you would have assumed this was a file issue, though, because the real problem is the most idiotically stupid thing ever.

Not all music files are MP3s.

When people mean duplicates, they normally mean duplicate songs, not duplicate files (audio + metadata + headers).

Wouldn't the play count metadata embedded in the file lead to different md5sums?

If you're using a Mac then you should go buy yourself a copy of Swinsian now:

http://swinsian.com/

It's a lean, fast native player that supports tons of formats, has great library management features, and omits all the bloat and confusion of iTunes.

It doesn't really matter to me, as I'm not a Macintosh user anymore, but does it have the smart playlist feature like iTunes?

That's the biggest thing I miss in most music players, including my current one, Google Play Music (with my all-access).

Not sure if you're aware but Simon Weber has a Chrome extension for smart playlists in Google Music.

https://github.com/simon-weber/Autoplaylists-for-Google-Musi...

Yup, it does.

iTunes is the worst piece of software I've come across in a long time. I banned it from my computer until I upgraded to my iPhone 7. Now, the only computer with enough disk space to accommodate my backups of 256GB is my personal desktop, so I was forced to install iTunes. It's infuriating and in the 4 years that I haven't used iTunes, it hasn't gotten any better.

I would love to blacklist whoever is responsible for iTunes from ever finding work again, because it's obvious they give an ounce of care about UI design or keeping their customers happy. They really don't deserve to be working in software. If they had any honor they would be thoroughly embarrassed for producing such a horrible piece of software.

iTunes is actually SoundJamMP under the hood. That app was (if memory serves) released 16 years ago and subsequently bought by Apple. AFAIK the core of iTunes is still unchanged from then and all Apple have done is simply bloat the UI and bolt on additional functionality (eg AAC playback, videos and iCloud etc) without ever re-examining the underlying engine.

SoundJam was great for me in 2001 playing mp3s and as most of the tone of this thread seems to confirm, everything else since then has simply given users extra grief to cope with when wishing to play a simple music file in a simple manner.

I've stuck at OSX 10.6.8 and iTunes 10.6.1 (which is still 239MB of bloat) rather than upgrade. That's where I'm staying as Apple only ever seem to make stuff worse these days.

It's obviously not a delightful piece of software, but attacking the team that works on it is mean spirited.

You know nothing about the constraints they work under.

https://xkcd.com/277/

The last good iTunes I've used was on OS X 10.4 on a Mac Mini G4.

There were little iGimmicks around so it would play music, sync with the iPod, that's it.

From there it went downhill.

Somewhere around 4.9 or 5.x is when I think it was best. They'd added library functionality for movies, TV, and audiobooks, which meant it was a one-stop shop for my media library on my Mac at the time. It was also still fairly lightweight, because it didn't have loads of stuff tacked on to it yet.

Really, the biggest thing I miss from iTunes, as a Google Play user, are the Smart Playlists. I loved being able to pull in every song I had from a set of artists and then shuffle through that. The "radio" features from Google just doesn't do it for me. I rarely want to listen to a bunch of music that's not in my library but which is similar to something I do have there. I'd much rather self-curate what I'm listening to. But I don't think the demand is there for that as much, now. I still wish they'd at least remove the 1000 song cap on playlists, so I could manually do this.

I'm having a hard time understanding these tweets.

Playing a song and adding songs to 'up next' are two different things. That dialog box has saved me multiple times. What's wrong with it? It only occurs when you are telling iTunes to do conflicting things that it cannot resolve by itself. It's a better outcome than clearing a playlist someone may have spent a lot of time working on.

Software update and login dialogs? Yes those are a thing many apps include. What makes these unique or interesting?

The podcasts menu seems super straight forward to me. Am I missing something here? It says exactly what it does.

Contacting the iPhone update server dialog? Once upon a time Apple's servers would go down under a heavy load of people activating new iOS devices. Presumably the dialog is there to inform you there is a problem contacting the iPhone update servers. Either way I think it's long since been changed.

Okay. So I’m no UX expert, just a developer and I’ve also worked in product management. I think at some point, if you work in this field, you have to develop instincts around the design and experience of things. A modal (i.e. app-locking) dialog that says “contacting the iphone software update server”, which is current behavior and not changed as far as I can tell, is so far out of the realm of acceptable in my view, that if we differ on that point, we can’t even begin a discussion about the more subtle issues… (Consider that Chrome updates itself all the time; now imagine if you launched Chrome, typed in gmail.com, and it suddenly locked up all your tabs because it was ‘contacting the Chrome software update server’.)

After all, design trades in subtleties, otherwise if the discussion is just about explaining the purpose for a widget, everything in an interface can be explained, even this well-known ‘bad UI’ example: http://i.imgur.com/UJXoqwR.png

The Microsoft AutoUpdate client on OSX is a beautiful mess for this.

doing anything else

> Microsoft AutoUpdate starts bouncing in the dock

> Modal "There are no updates for your Microsoft software at this time." dialog appears.

Seeing as half of the updates it receives are FOR THE UPDATE CLIENT, it's incredible this behaviour hasn't been fixed in the last eight years.

I remember that file renamer program! Think it was actually rather well reviewed at the time.

Didn't realize it was in some sort of bad UI hall of fame :)

> Contacting the iPhone update server dialog?

This is a modal dialog which prevents you from changing the song or pausing it. That is bad.

I've switched to using Plex now, I find iTunes and the Music app way to complicated to use and constantly throwing up dialog boxes when all I want to do is listen to some music.

I've never truly understood how the people who gave us Safari and OS X gave us iTunes - they couldn't be more different.

iTunes was an Apple acquisition. It has always been... different.

But bafflingly so. It would take less than year to write a better music player/app manager/etc from the ground up.

Given Apple's almost infinite resources, I don't understand why this hasn't happened.

I can only assume there are good commercial reasons for leaving iTunes the software equivalent of week-old underpants.

> I've never truly understood how the people who gave us Safari and OS X gave us iTunes - they couldn't be more different.

They're almost certainly from completely separate teams, I've always heard that Apple operates like a bunch of disconnected groups that rarely ever interact with each other, perhaps that has changed recently.

But regardless of the details the end result is very often as you describe, and it's odd to see happen over and over. There are certainly managers and executives working over each of those groups that should be guiding them in the right direction so that things feel like a "part of the whole".

> They're almost certainly from completely separate teams, I've always heard that Apple operates like a bunch of disconnected groups that rarely ever interact with each other, perhaps that has changed recently.

Every company of non-trivial size operates like that.

A company is usually a tree-like structure, where the branches are connected by the root node. Too bad that this particular company's root node was garbage-collected in 2011 while there were still live references to it.

But iTunes was already shit when the root node node was still around.

Saying "iTunes will never work well" is like saying the sky is blue. Why would anyone need a kitchen sink to copy an audio file to their device? Oh, wait, unless there is manufacturer locks, and controls put in place to steer consumers' capital flow. Oh yeah, that's why. From that perspective I would say iTunes is a smashing success. And this negative social virus has spread like gang-busters spawning countless imitators.

This trend is why I started using Linux full time again. I'm not a die-hard believer in the Unix Philosophy, but systems designed with it in mind generally avoid the worst bloat.

I feel like a similar mindset is ruining gaming as well. The best games from the past had a design that I'd compare to movies. The story and fun was self-contained and complete. If another installment was created, it was also self-contained and complete. With rise advent of microtransactions, games seem more like sitcoms or slot machines. The experience of a single episode (or pull of the lever) is a full experience, but it's intentionally designed to feel always feel slightly incomplete.

I mean, the design of games now is pretty user-unfriendly. Anything that could compete with a publisher's ability to charge more for gameplay has been crippled. Simple example -- almost every game used to include god-mode cheat codes that you could use to your hearts content. Now a lot of games charge money for extra weapons and other things that used to be considered cheats, even in the single player modes.

Another example is the team creation tools in EA sports franchises. You used to be able to copy and paste players from one team to another. My brother and I would create teams where every player on the team was our favorite player in Madden and FIFA and pit them against each other. That feature has been absolutely gutted in FIFA, most likely because it interfered with their Ultimate Team mode. However, they gutted it for offline play as well.

I don't fault the developers and publishers trying to makee money. I do think it's really lame that modern games have intentionally locked or removed simple and historically common features in the pursuit of profit. It makes every gaming experience feel like I'm being forced to buy everything from the company store, and it sucks.

I can easily copy files to my Android phone with the simple "adb" command-line utility. Or, I can copy them onto an SDcard any way I please, and insert the card into my phone.

iTunes is definitely a smashing success, thanks to gullible suckers who happily buy anything that Apple shovels at them.

OK, so I use OSX, and I want to play mp3s that I have locally, and see them in a library format that I can search. Even maybe have album art, though I'm not fussed.

Ignoring itunes, how do I do it? What is a good fast low memory music playing app with library management? If I was on Windows I'd be using Foobar2k. On OSX it seems to be either itunes, a command line app, or various bloated messes that aren't honestly better than itunes.

Quod Libet is cross platform and runs on my Ubuntu box, Windows Surface and MacBook Pro. It is fast, has a simple interface that actually works and has been extremely stable. It also manages playlists that work in my car's USB port. I do like having my music in the cloud, and finally settled on Dropbox. I am still looking for a decent Android Dropbox music player for this setup, but for iOS, I use Eddy cloud music player/streamer. It even bookmarks my place in audio books. Sad part about Eddy is that it takes so long processing my entire music library on Dropbox and starts the whole process over when reinstalled. Also, haven't figured out how to get it to work with playlists saved to Dropbox, but I have asked for the feature.

It was Apple's changes to the music app on my iPhone that finally annoyed me enough to seek an alternative setup which baffles me, because the only reason I was convinced to ever purchase my first Apple product was an iPod and they have completely screwed it up.

I did use Google Music, but Google's insistence that the desktop doesn't exist made it useless on Windows & Mac. I tried every Google Music app I could find for either platform. They are unstable, often slow, and usually break every time there is an API change.

In a similar vein, is there a general recommendation for locally web hosting your music yourself. Is it one of the plexy type setups?

More OT, but what about personal photos / videos? I find the whole Apple photos experience depressing. Two examples of why

- my wife and I really share a photo collection, but it's neigh on impossible for us to automatically sync all our images to one another

- this weekend I made a stop motion clip with my kids by taking photos on my phone. We tried to move the images to my computer so we could put them together / edit them but were stuck waiting for the devices to sync on some sort of black magic driven schedule.

Is there any general solution out there for families who want to share their content (local music collection and photos / videos taken) seamlessly?

There isn't a good one, because iTunes sucked all the oxygen out of the room. I gave up. I use VLC to play single files (no library), and I have a separate Sonos system with its own speakers and amp for my library.

Have you tried Clementine? https://www.clementine-player.org

Vox is not perfect but works fine as a player: http://coppertino.com/vox/mac

On OSX I quit and just use preview. I'm not even kidding.

For just playing mp3s, I like https://cmus.github.io/

Open cubic player might have OSX support (OSX has OSS right?)

Is it a mess? Yes, but it's not really bloated.

I spent almost two days trying to resync my music after iTunes deleted it for no reason. It's the worst software on the planet.

After I subscribed to iTunes Match, it "helpfully" reworked all of my ~4300 song iTunes library so that most of the songs where I ripped a whole CD into iTunes were now spread across various "Greatest Hits" albums from the same (or sometimes different) artist, with random cover art. And after reading Jim Dalrymple's horror stories of upgrading to Apple Music, I am fearful both of ever discontinuing my iTunes Match subscription or upgrading to Apple Music.

My solution thus far has been to stop even trying to listen to music on iTunes and switch to podcasts instead (on Overcast, not Apple's horrible Podcasts app). #ThanksiTunes

This is the one complaint I agree with. Honestly, all the so called UX problems in those tweets are eye-rollingly contrived, but there's no excuse for messing with the actual music that I own.

iTunes Match never messed up my library, though Apple Music certainly did.

I feel your pain. Same thing happened to me twice(!) and then it tried to delete all my Google contacts.

iTunes is now second from the top on my list of software-I-will-never-use-again[0], so that means no shiny Apple devices for me. Which is a shame, because otherwise I quite like Apple stuff.

[0] Of course, Lotus Notes is top of the list

iTunes is actually the main reason I am considering switching to Android.

Almost every cloud music app I have used has issues with the concept of a "queue" or playing a snippet of something while I am in the middle of a playlist. Spotify, Mog <defunct>, rdio, and itunes seems to never do what I want when it comes to "just checking out a song while other songs are playing".

Lets say you have enqueued up a bunch of songs on Spotify or perhaps have a really good shuffled playlist god forbid you accidentally click on a song instead of queue it.

Because of this annoyance at times I just give up and put on Pandora. Their song selection sucks but otherwise I think Pandora is fairly stress free UX wise.

I really liked queueing in the original Amarok. iTunes kind of halfway gets it right with the concept of Up Next. However it seems now that in iTunes 12 it is no longer possible to queue an album at the end if there is nothing in the queue at all. I'd prefer if the action of playing an album did "put it in queue & play"

I don't know about the UI or anything but it's 2016 and iTunes still makes me re-download any firmware from start in case of any network issue. So if you are downloading a 2.5 gigs file and that screws up even once in that whole download at any place, iTunes says fuck you. This becomes a problem when they screw up iOS 10 update and brick your iPhone and the only way to fix it is restoring from iTunes and then iTunes keeps giving you the middle finger.

Not only that, when I had to re-download the firmware due to the failed iOS10 update, even pausing the download caused it to restart..

And interesting if it's downloading some purchased content from the iTunes Store, this doesn't happen. Also, those downloads don't throw a modal dialog when it's trying to "contact the server". It just seems like downloading firmware doesn't reuse existing code for downloading content.

It's so true. We used to have very simple and efficient music players such as winamp. The problem was that they were playing free mp3 that you stored on your hard drive. With regards to that, iTunes is not a music player, it's a media manager. It's all designed around buying stuff, not playing it. It makes me think of the bad dvds with non-skippable trailers we used to have 10 years ago.

I'm still kinda curious why iTunes has blocked the UI thread so often for such a long time, perhaps a limitation of the overall architecture of the app combined with having webviews everywhere calling out to native code?

This is the most annoying in Itunes I tried Apple Music but couldn't stand to wait between each click to album artist and so on. That why I switched to Spotify which is much faster and easy to use.

There never was and never will be a better music player than Winamp! #WinampSkins

I was happily paying $10/month to Spotify but canceled my subscription because the desktop player was so bad and incomplete. After a while I realized that attempting parity with other players was not on their to-do list.

I'm not even a power user, there are many advanced and obscure features of Winamp/foobar I never used. But those products have the nuances of day to day management of playlists and usability figured out and Spotify in comparison doesn't care. It seems they'd be happier to have you use web/mobile and not even support a desktop player.

Foobar2000 my friend

> Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting iTunes, too.

While a great quote, it's not entirely true.

Some of us said enough is enough and ditched the iOS/Itunes ecosystem for something better. Why suffer needlessly?

And even better, with iOS 10 we can now delete the Music and iTunes apps from our phones.

Unfortunately that's not what happens. You can removed it from the Home screen [1], the app keeps using space on your phone.

[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204221

Ah, that's interesting. Well, as long as it's not on my screen I'm happy enough. :)

Hide. Not delete, hide.

One interesting thing about iTunes is that it is one of the few applications I can think of which manages to irritate both power/sophisticated users (ie. everyone here) and also regular users. I'm not sure anyone actually likes it.

So this dude made a couple of tweets, then he wrote a medium article about his tweets.

I actually found this method quite readable and a pleasant surprise!

Wait, you can star-rating AND heart songs? Why? Why both?

The hearts affect Apple Music algorithms. The stars are legacy (I don't even think the new iOS Music app has a way to see/change them, or I just can't find it in that tire-fire of a UI)

Stars are old; hearts are new; stars are gone by default, but you can turn them back on in the settings.

Why there's no conversion factor [EG: heart = 5 stars], i don't know

There's no reason to convert backwards if they want to phase out stars. Also, I'm guessing they hope to make the act of pressing heart an "experience" for the listener. Give everyone the joy of professing your love of a song to their algorithms. I know I got a dialog playing it up the first time I pressed the heart.

Probably to accommodate people who just want the like system, and people who want a more complex system.

I think the heart is new while the star-ratings have always been there.

Hah! I also literally had to Google how to play a song on repeat, but for me in the new iOS 10 Music app.

IIRC the location / icon for the song/album repeat toggle hasn't changed in iTunes since 11.0 in 2012 though. The menu entry for it hasn't changed in more than a decade. Music on iOS 10 was a big revamp so that's understandable but iTunes? It simply hasn't changed much or at all in 4 years. No clue how anyone could be confused about it.

I found that on accident the other day. It wasn't very discoverable, but on the whole, I'm really enjoying the UI revamp.

For OSX VLC is a surprisingly good player for music and it supports FLAC.

However I'm quite interested in building a dedicated OSS music player node/electron for OSX (and windows eventually).

Would you mind developing a QuickLook plugin for the latest OS X/macOS releases that could play FLAC? :) I've been breaking my head over it and don't seem to have any solutions.

Wouldn't mind at all. Of course, that's not really in my wheelhouse...

I'm not an iTunes user, but the irony of posting about UI issues on a site that breaks my browser's Back button hit me pretty hard. Ouch. Please don't do that, sites.

I like iTunes, but I hate how Apple try to get me to subscribe to Apple Music both on iOS and OSX.

When iTunes started, it was fine because there was only music to deal with. But with the addition of other media types in iOS devices, it's become very messy. If you have books and photos on your iOS device, there is no simple way to get these to their respective apps on the Mac (iBooks and Photos/erstwhile iPhoto). Using iTunes will do almost nothing if you aren't buying all your stuff from Apple, except backup all data (including these) into a "hidden" location. You'd have to use each of these apps every time you want to just get the latest from the iOS device to it.

Apple should introduce a simple sync application that will take all photos to Photos, all books to iBooks, all apps to iTunes or some new App app (the removal of app transfer from iOS devices into iTunes is a big issue in different ways), all music to iTunes, etc., along with all the respective user-created metadata (like collections for books, favorites for photos, etc.). Most importantly, this should work for things obtained from non-Apple sources.

(Sometimes I wish Apple would have interviews with users like me to understand how difficult things are and use that to improve its products)

I strongly prefer a Unix approach to tools: each tool does one thing, Vasili. One thing only, please. That eases understanding of what is going on. Users are better educated and troubleshooting bugs/flaws is vastly easier. I consider a corporate decision as to what my computer will do irrespective of my wishes to be a flaw.

Well to be fair the title might be: iTunes will never work well ON WINDOWS.

I was always wondering why I can read so much rants about a good product I've been using on a daily basis for years... Well it seams that the Windows version sucks, and what is described is really a world away from the native cocoa version on macOS.

There is no user experience difference. There hasn't been for at least 10 years. You can't put together a post that says "this is how it works on OS X" versus "how it works on Windows". Because it's the same.

Believe me, it's not much better on Mac from a UX perspective.

This is why I still use Winamp, and now more and more, Plex.

Although I'm a proud owner of a Winamp license, I've been using AIMP over the past year or so. It's blatantly, if not purposefully, a Winamp clone but has a few excellent innovations of its own and is frequently updated. I strongly recommend it for any Winamp fans.

Thank you! I just checked it out, and as a long-time Winamp user (I mean... since there was first a Winamp) I see exactly what you mean and I love it.

Do you still have to use iTunes to transfer music to iPhones? Can't you just copy files over and use some other playback app on the iPhone? The author sounds makes it sound like they are "forced" to use iTunes.

(disclaimer: the newest Apple product I own was manufactured in 1983)

There is no "copying files over" with iDevices. For a long time there was "gtkpod" / "libgpod" which reverse-engineered iPod protocol and database format to load songs on an iPod. But on later iPods it involved an extracted Apple signing key, and Apple issued (successful) DMCA takedowns on websites which provided these keys.

Most pages on the gtkpod website currently appear to be defunct, probably because it's been impractical to make it work with iPhones.

This is one of those simple things I was happiest about when I finally moved from iOS to Android. Look, it's an operating system which actually allows you to move any files you want back and forth like with any other external storage! What an amazing innovation! How did they do it?! It was like having handcuffs removed.

There are many other reasons, but this is probably my biggest issue with iOS (well, this and all the hours of my life iTunes wasted while I wrestled with it to attempt something simple, such as its constant, needlessly slow & complex updates). It's intentionally broken to inconvenience us in the hopes of making more money unethically. I shudder in revulsion.

Playlist sync is the #1 thing why I use iTunes on Windows for years now with Android phone. It's easy, seamless and works. Manually copying multiple GBs and keeping playlists on both devices seems asinine.

Sadly I haven't found a Linux replacement which syncs music like this, probably no one is interested in making that works since everything is cloud nowadays.

> Do you still have to use iTunes to transfer music to iPhones?

Don't use an iPhone myself, but if I did, I would try if KDE Connect on iOS supports file syncing over Wifi like it does on Android.

KDE Connect is Android-only, and even if there is an iOS version sometime I don't think it would ever be able to support file syncing like on Android due to Apple restrictions on filesystem access.

As far as I know, yes. If there's another way, they don't make it obvious.

I found the new iTunes for Mac to be quite clean (12.5)

I was surprised (and pleased) to see Apple add "rename" to the file menu in Finder for El Capitan. Coming from Windows, I found the "click on a file to rename it" very unintuitive. Evidently a lot of other people did, too.

Now if they'd make it so Finder always opens a window if you select Finder and a window isn't open ...

Finder includes your desktop, so technically you already do have a window open.

One of the features I hate in iTunes is adding music to the library. When adding songs it should create a shortcut from the music folder that is being added from rather than creating a copy of the songs in its folder. When creating a copy into the iTunes folder the storage space on the macbook is lowered.

I've actually just moved my entire iTunes library into my ownCloud directory and let it sync to my other systems. Windows is fine with it, just point your chosen media app at the folder and it should just ignore all of iTunes' files and grab the music.

Every once in awhile I get a sync error but it never seems to affect anything and sorts itself out, going on about 8 months now with no real problems.

That is why this is a setting that you can change:

In iTunes Preference, under "Advanced", simply uncheck "Copy files to iTunes Media folder when adding to library" and you'll have the exact behavior you want.

Off topic trip to Memory Lane:

http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/OSX/itunes2_erased_drives.html

I am glad people in the reality distortion field of Apple trying to defend this and throw an ad hominem regarding the author, are getting downvoted into oblivion. Maybe they will realize some day.

Using VLC with command line to listen to my playlists works great for me

Unfortunately iTunes is still better than the competition. I also know that isn't saying much.

RIP Rdio, Lala, and countless others. Hell even Beats was better!

"Spotify" just switch now and never look back

Spotify has just as bad if not worse UX as iTunes/Apple Music. Spotify kept taking away useful features from their desktop app and promised to return them, but never did, even years later. Plus, I don't need to run another instance of Chrome and Adobe Flash which constantly consumes 5% of my CPU and a few hundred MB of RAM just to listen to some music. While still not perfect, I'm pretty happy with the newest release of iTunes and the iOS music app.

I think users like you are part of the reason iTunes is like it is. Never, ever, take away a feature. Never ever refactor the UI to simplify things.

Completely disagree. Spotify has nailed the desktop/mobile music app UX like nobody ever has, and it is an absolute joy to use. Yes it's missing a few features, but nothing that's actually truly essential to just listening to music.

Absolutely agree. It just doesn't work well for music I own that isn't on Spotify.

Yep, cloud sync is the only reason I still use Apple Music.

The failure of iTunes is intrinsically linked to the unsuitability of WebObjects as a modern application framework.

iTunes isn’t bad because Apple is inept, far from it, but to make it fine at this point would require a rewrite and I assume at Apple there is a tradeoff between “Is this crappy to use” and “Well, does it at least work?”, with the latter being a stronger motivator (or in this case, demotivator) of change than the former.

AFAIK the vast majority of itunes is a regular cocoa application, what does webobject have to do with anything?

WebObjects is a server side technology. iTunes doesn't directly use it.

iTunes was beautiful up to 10.7. Then they removed the column browser, disabled the Library view, and broke USB sync. I still haven't upgraded, and I'm desperate for another company to step in.

Agreed. You can enable the column browser and the library view if you want though. Check the View menu.

iTunes is terrible on OS X too. Apple needs to throw it all out and write modular replacement apps for various functionality from the ground up.

I have never understood why there is so much hate for iTunes. I think it's fine. It does everything I need it to and probably more. Why put so much energy into debasing something?

I think most users would agree with you. Hating on iTunes is popular with tech people, but I don't know if your average person cares.

The biggest complaint I have with iTunes is that it tries to do too many things, and it would be better to break the app up. It somehow got itself into the smartphone and tablet backup business.

Years ago, I wrote that iTunes should be split up into smaller apps: http://interchangeproject.org/2012/04/16/itunes-should-be-sp...

I don't know if I really care that much anymore, as iTunes works fine for my uses, but I'm also no longer a heavy iTunes user. I use my iPhone to play music at home and on the go. I watch movies either on my Apple TV or iPad.

I mainly use iTunes to see what's new in the store. That could be a reflection of using iTunes, however.

iTunes is beyond hopeless at this point. It needs a full rewrite, possibly split into multiple apps.

Ditto. It has a UX problem.

Okay. I get annoyed by things in iTunes and think the whole application really is overdue for replacement -- I'd like to see things split up somewhat more like iOS, with a "Music" app, a "Video" app and (since this is the desktop) a device management app. But I confess that a lot of the lamentations about the UI design (not necessarily the UX design, which I'll circle back to in a moment) strike me as, well, highly overblown. I'm sorry the author couldn't figure out how to make songs repeat, for instance, but while the repeat icon has moved in newer versions of iTunes, it's literally the same icon as in the screenshot of iTunes 4 from a decade ago. (That's the earliest screenshot I could find.) And perhaps the Windows version of iTunes is uniquely horrible compared to the OS X, er, macOS version, but I can type the name of a song into search and have it instantly located; if I double-click a track name (or the big play arrow that shows up when I hover by it!) it just starts playing, but it certainly won't select a rating or a heart unless I click a star or a heart; so on and so forth.

I'd really argue the biggest problem with iTunes' UX stems from the way it's still, after all this time, inexplicably modal. I've never had a problem syncing an iOS device while it's playing music, as one commenter mentioned, but there are dialog boxes it brings up that are not only UI-blocking but process-blocking, which makes iTunes kind of a mess as a headless media server. (It still plays media, but won't be able to add any until the dialog box is dismissed.)

But I still cut iTunes a fair amount of slack. I've been using it for nearly as long as it's been available, I've subscribed to iTunes Match, I've subscribed to Apple Music, and I've ripped my own music library full of lossless tracks. Not only has Apple not, repeat, not, either deleted those or fiendishly replaced the files with AAC simulacra, it turns out to handle mixing my ripped tracks, purchased tracks, and "borrowed" tracks (i.e., ones that are only available in my library through the Apple Music subscription) pretty seamlessly. The introduction of Apple Music was a huge mess, admittedly, both in terms of UX and some teeth-grindingly poor song-matching algorithms (a distinct regression from iTunes Match on its own) -- but the server-side flubs seem to be straightened out now, and the current UI for Apple Music is pretty solid.

But, yes, I'm sure iTunes will be rewritten. I'm also positive that when it is, there will be a veritable explosion of thinkpieces that will almost all be variants of, "Who asked for all these horrible changes? iTunes was just fine! Apple is always fixing things that weren't broken! This would never have happened if Steve Jobs were still alive!"

I've grown very fond of a CLI media player named cmus. It's lightning fast and does everything I need with a simple interface http://matthieukeller.com/media/2015.01/2015.01.cmus.png

I also keep aliases in my .bash_profile for streams like this:

  alias bbc='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://bbcwssc.ic.llnwd.net/stream/bbcwssc_mp1_ws-eieuk 2> /dev/null'

That's awesome. Do you have any others??

Sure. There are a lot of streams available on shoutcast.com, just click the download icon and copy the URL, some stations list their stream URL on the site, just google the call letters + "m3u" or "pls" etc, then there is this site which is the best directory I've found so far radioroku.com. If you use iOS there's also a great app for playing these streams called fstream.

Here is my list:

  alias wor='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://wor-am.akacast.akamaistream.net/7/495/179680/v1/auth.akacast.akamaistream.net/wor-am 2> /dev/null'
  alias wgy='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://wgy-am.akacast.akamaistream.net/7/697/21577/v1/auth.akacast.akamaistream.net/wgy-am 2> /dev/null'
  alias npr='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://www.npr.org/streams/mp3/nprlive24.pls 2> /dev/null'
  alias rain='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://yp.shoutcast.com/sbin/tunein-station.pls?id=2340 2> /dev/null'
  alias rain2='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://yp.shoutcast.com/sbin/tunein-station.pls?id=368490 2> /dev/null'
  alias rain3='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQ9OWMsJBTk 2> /dev/null'
  alias art='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://yp.shoutcast.com/sbin/tunein-station.pls?id=366888 2> /dev/null'
  alias chopin='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://yp.shoutcast.com/sbin/tunein-station.pls?id=590375 2> /dev/null'
  alias phil='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://yp.shoutcast.com/sbin/tunein-station.pls?id=248466 2> /dev/null'
  alias french='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://www.listenlive.eu/franceinfo.m3u 2> /dev/null'
  alias fip='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://www.listenlive.eu/fip128.m3u 2> /dev/null'
  alias bbc='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://bbcwssc.ic.llnwd.net/stream/bbcwssc_mp1_ws-eieuk 2> /dev/null'
  alias 1010='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://8733.live.streamtheworld.com:80/WINSAMAAC_SC 2> /dev/null'
  alias ewtn='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://http.yourmuze.com/ewtn-2/mp3-128-s.mp3 2> /dev/null'
  alias wabc='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://8723.live.streamtheworld.com:80/WABCAMAAC_SC 2> /dev/null'
  alias wktu='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://wktu-fm.akacast.akamaistream.net/7/110/19973/v1/auth.akacast.akamaistream.net/wktu-fm 2> /dev/null'
  alias chant='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://calmradio.com/playlists-free/gregorian.pls 2> /dev/null'
  alias chanteurs='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://sv1.vestaradio.com:4090/ 2> /dev/null'

Thanks for a great list of streams!

I did a similar thing (using `mplayer` though) for me, wrapping it in a script that takes shortcuts for stream names:

https://gist.github.com/EarlGray/d64514459892650881353a465c4...

iTunes was a significant factor in me moving to Android.

iTunes circa 2008 was amazing. Like so many things, once they unified the bIOs and desktop OS code bases and technologies everything went to shit.

This isn't constructive, just spiteful and angry. I can't tell what problem OP actually has with iTunes.

Hmm… I’m not spiteful, I just don’t have any hope for improvement. iTunes has been chronically bad, I could find thousands of other articles and testimonials about that. At this point the issue is clearly endemic to the product.

Constructively: everything else aside, one glaring and easily-fixed problem is the dialog boxes. No program released after 1997 should be so behind in the state of the art that it throws up modal dialogs that lock up the whole app to say pointless things like “We’re checking for updates”.

I use iTunes every day and have never noticed this modal.

The same problems everyone else has, from the sound of it.

Interesting that every single UI example in this article is from an old version of Windows.

Fuck Windows. You want iTunes to work well? You want to see Apple's real UI? Then use their real platform.

Oh Well, if Apple cannot do a half-decent App on windows maybe they shouldn't develop software targeting windows users until they can?

Microsoft, for example, are developing their Office suite of applications for OSX and they are not off the hook for any UI/UX issues for Mac Users. They must make the Apps work for that platform's users as they expect.

If they are marketing their platform and its services & Apps for other platforms, then at least they should give respect to those customer's choices.

Are you saying on OS X I wouldn't have gotten the inscrutable dialog saying, "You are about to start playback. Do you want to clear the 2 songs previously added to Up Next?"

(I guess, all these years later, I kinda get it? But they should just have moved the song you selected to the top of the Up Next queue.)

That dialog happens when you've added some songs to Up Next, then double-click on a new playlist/album. Double clicking on a playlist/album means play this song and all the ones that come after it in the album. So you've given itunes conflicting instructions. Without that dialog, there's no way of resolving the conflict without pissing someone off.

> But they should just have moved the song you selected to the top of the Up Next queue.

You can do this by right clicking a song, and clicking Play Next. There is no dialog for that. But imagine how frustrating it would be if they adopt your proposed behavior for someone double clicking on an album. What if I just want to clear everything and just play this album? I want to hear it now, not wait until this song ends.

Honestly, I don't know, about that particular detail. I haven't seen that, though. Which version of iTunes was this?

Anyway, the question itself isn't that offensive, right? They want to know whether you intend to play your selected song and THEN the things in queue, or clear out the queue instead. I admit that a modal dialog is...sub-optimal here, but I'm not sure how else to do this.

It's a catastrophe on Mac OS as well.

If iTunes is so awkward why would I want to switch to a whole OS + computer made by the same company?

It is a fair question. However, iTunes is arguably Apple's worst product. So it's not really a representative sample for judging their entire output on.

Exactly, it's one of the reasons I'm switching away.

Perhaps because of said company's well-deserved reputation for overall OS and UI quality?

Everyone admits iTunes is not the greatest thing ever to spring from the mind of Steve. But let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater.

> Perhaps because of said company's well-deserved reputation for overall OS and UI quality?

Why would I go off reputation and not my own experience with apple software?

Because a reputation is the result of the experience of many different people who communicate with each other. Your experience with Apple software is a very small sample.

Your position is a bit like saying: "Although everyone else thinks the earth is round, it looks flat to me!". Of course, you're free to disagree with the consensus opinion, but you'd probably need a better argument than personal experience.

If the consensus differs from your personal experience, it's worth taking a second look.

Or they could make it easier for me to manage my music without iTunes? I wouldn't even need it then.

You missed the point. iTunes is a old product holding together well.

* No doubt if iTunes was designed today it would be completely different. But as a legacy product it has to satisfy legacy users that are familiar with the UI, and legacy products (this iTunes still supports 10 year old iPods and older?!!)

* Say iTunes failed today. No doubt the writer would say it deserved it, and the product was a failure from the beginning. But I want to emphasise that iTunes has existed for several years now and has given many hours of pleasure for many millions of users. it works well and is a success.

You are naive if you think iTunes one day will work well. It won't get better. What is going to happen with it? It is obvious. You don't have to go past Microsoft with Internet Explorer. They kept that product going for years and it was a great success. However eventually the tech aged and they replaced it with a new product, Microsoft Edge. The same will happen with iTunes.

> You missed the point.

No he didn't.

> iTunes is a old product holding together well.

No it's not, it's a terrible product and always has been.

> You are naive if you think iTunes one day will work well.

He doesn't think that. In fact, the title of the article states the exact opposite.

> What is going to happen with it? It is obvious.

Yes, which is the whole point of the article.

> as a legacy product it has to satisfy legacy users that are familiar with the UI

I cannot think of an application with a less consistent UI than iTunes. Every major version seems to present a total rethink and re-engineering of the entire UI layer.

If consistency is a goal for iTunes then it has failed dramatically.

>But as a legacy product it has to satisfy legacy users that are familiar with the UI, and legacy products (this iTunes still supports 10 year old iPods and older?!!)

The UI changes so much with each release that I have no clue how to navigate any more, and don't care to learn because I'll have to relearn it all again in 12-24 months. There is no consistency, and legacy to uphold, except perhaps a legacy codebase.

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