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Comment by lukevers | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

Which dialogs?

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

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.

"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.

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