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Comment by roystonvassey | Hacker News Reader

iTunes has got to be the worst piece of software shipped by Apple. The bloat has gotten worse over the years, takes ages to load and I have no clue how anything works with its utterly non-intuitive UI. They should have just kept it as a simple music player and put the purchases/radio/everythingelse options on a different app.

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Am I the only one who finds iTunes just fine on macOS? Of course it could use being split into 2-3 apps (like they did with iBooks) but it's hardly as bad as the echo chamber makes it out to be. On Windows, sure.

I think they should at least split the video functionality into a "TV" app, as they have started to do on iOS.

It's far superior on MacOS, performance is way better and it's integrated into the OS.

Yea, just in a way there's no easy way to assign the play button to launch Spotify instead.

Bad on Windows? Steve Jobs had a different opinion - https://youtu.be/iwxnWuG_Ruw?t=1m4s

I have a couple of minor nitpicks with iTunes (on macOS) including:

- I find it a little difficult to organize and keep track of my podcasts, new episodes, etc. I'm sure I could improve this with updating podcast-related settings but I find the settings a bit confusing in terms of subscription, retention, etc. of episodes.

- I find the navigation between the store and my library to be a bit strange sometimes, although it seems like Apple has made some recent improvements as I'm finding that I am now able to better move between my library and the store while browsing for music and referencing back to my own library.

I do not have any performance gripes with iTunes. It rarely crashes on me. The audio quality is good. AirPlay is brilliant. It's easy to organize my library and playlists. I love the fact that I can buy music in the same app that organizes and plays the music so that I'm not manually importing things. I don't know of any alternative on Mac that even comes close to doing what iTunes does for me in such a well-integrated way.

I jumped on the Spotify train at one point but basically felt like I had to abandon my curated iTunes library because there is (was?) no way for me to import anything.

Apple could certainly split iTunes into two apps for TV and Music but I'm not sure that would alleviate any of the complaints that I see about it in regard to supposed bloat.

It's much better on macOS, but still the UI quirks are there.

You can drag and drop songs from your library into the queue, but can't when browsing Apple Music. When in the (obvious) WebViews, you have to press those ellipsis buttons as if you're using a touch screen.

It's better on macOS. But it's still awful. The benchmark here is actually iTunes itself, which was substantially better 5 years ago.

To continue, iTunes' biggest problem is simply that it tries/has to do too many things. I definitely think the best solution would be to break it up into separate apps, continuing the trend that Apple has already established:

• Photos.app: Syncs photos and personal videos with iOS/iCloud and manages the photo library that other apps can access.

• Books.app: Syncs books with iOS/iCloud, shows the iBookStore, and it should also manage a books and PDF library for other apps to access.

• Music.app: Should sync music and other audio files with iOS/iCloud, show the iTunes music store, and manage the music library for other apps (as iTunes now does).

• TV.app: Should sync TV shows, movies, and other video files with iOS, and show the iTunes video store.

• Sync.app: To handle syncing and backups of your iOS devices, accessing the photos/video/books libraries that are managed by the other apps. It could be called Backup.app, or even just be made part of the Time Machine Preferences panel.

• iTunes.app could become a thin launcher stub that just provides a menu for the Photos/Music/TV/Books/Sync apps.

I avoid iTunes as much as I can on my mac as well, it's horrible. In terms of performance I think the App Store they ship is even worse, it's a travesty of an application and I couldn't understand how Apple would ship something so unpolished and... non-native feeling. I might be wrong but it feels like it's web wrapped in a native shell and it's performing horribly compared to Electron apps.

EDIT: To be fair most of the slowness could be perhaps be attributed to slow network requests as well.

I never understand how Apple allows its stores to remain so slow (iTunes Music, Mac App Store, iOS App Store). I'm trying to give them money. If it takes 30 seconds to search and navigate to the product I'm vaguely interested in, with a multi-second pause for each request to complete, I'll give up and not spend the money.

What do you use instead?

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