iTunes built, and then broke, my meticulous music-listening system | Hacker News Reader

iTunes built, and then broke, my meticulous music-listening system

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71 pointsanjalik82 comments

For two years now I've used iCloud Music Library (iTunes Match) to handle exactly the sort of situation the article author describes. Bucking the trend here; I love it.

I've written a number of scripts (the main one is on npm) that run on a home Mac Mini server, converting FLAC to ALAC, and copying music which gets added to the library via the iTunes Add to Library folder.

Within minutes of hitting a synced drop folder music is converted, stored and uploaded. I then have access to that music on my phone and computer. I can access 100% of my personal 40k track library anywhere, and can listen lossless at home. I still have music in my library I ripped in the early 2000s.

I've definitely hated on iTunes plenty — the search is unforgivably slow and CPU intensive, and the app seems forever going backwards on usability.

Still, I have what seems like a miracle of the cloud. A reliable, personal streaming service, with none of the restrictions of Spotify or Apple Music. I'll deal with the inconvenience.

For the record: I've explored a similar system with Google Play, but Apple manages the best end-to-end ecosystem across devices in my opinion.

I'm also generally +1 on iTunes Match. However recently I've noticed my iPhone skipping songs frequently, no matter how hard I try I can't get those songs to play. I'm not sure if the fault is with my phone, itunes, match or something else, but it's not as seamless as I'd have liked.

It took me a while to notice as usually I'm not watching the screen of my phone when I"m shuffling around and such, but now that I know it happens i've been watching for it.

It happens to be occasionally too. I've ended up exporting and re-importing those tracks on the server and it tends to fix it.

Definitely an annoyance, but infrequent enough that I had forgotten about it until you mentioned.

This is pretty much to a t my thoughts on iTunes. iTunes Match is everything I want and need it to be for on-the-go but leaves me a with a bit to be desired elsewhere.

It's good enough for me, I've given up on syncing my music on iPhone (do still do local backups)...

I actually use Subsonic in jukebox mode, coupled with the amazing Dsub for Android for my home listening. It looks at the same directory as iTunes, and outputs via USB to an external DAC / amplifier.

What would you do if you didn't want to pay for it?

Syncing is broken on all phones, practically. MTP is a disaster.

These days I just use Syncthing on Android. What works best for me on my desktop is Rhythmbox and a bindfs mounted to the Syncthing directory, which contains a file named ".is_audio_player".

https://almost-a-technocrat.blogspot.com/2010/11/isaudioplay...

After that, multiple playlists, podcasts, transcoded or not: it can handle it all wirelessly.

I used to obsessively manage my music like this on external HDs, syncing apps, and `beets` [1] to clean up the tags/album covers. But I've recently given this up in favour of Google Music and I'm in love.

I haven't stopped raving about the service since I started using it two months ago.

Just having your entire collection (and it has 99% of the music I'm looking for, something like 35 million full albums... just a simple search and button click away from adding to my library) and for stuff it doesn't have you can upload 50k songs, even stuff your pirate off private torrent trackers or w/e.

Getting new phones each year, new tablets, new laptops, etc I always ended up with a half-baked collection of music. I never set up a NAS to solve this unfortunately but now I don't feel the need to.

It's helped me rediscover so much music I've forgotten over the years and lost from my collection during various moves.

Now I'm in the process of building playlists, rating songs, and rebuilding the playcounts. Not having to worry about ever losing them again is very reassuring!

I got a 90-day trial with my Nexus phone and it's only $9/month after that... but you can also use it for free with ads which includes the 50k songs.

[1] https://github.com/beetbox/beets

I'm on Spotify and Pandora despite having a huge music collection in iTunes. I dread having to launch it and have basically given up buying and managing my own music.

Just use Google Play music and upload your music to them. You get 50,000 songs. Plus if you just listen to your music its free.

And you can listen offline on your mobile.

Yes, you can. It pre-downloads two or four songs, I don't recall, from your current playlist and you can also choose to download playlists, albums and songs for offline usage.

My favorite money spent is on Google Play Music Family. I get my son, daughter and wife on it cost $15 and it includes ad free YouTube and the ability to play in background (Awesome for Podcast like content) and download videos (If I am going on a trip I down load a ton of stuff)

Also, the ad-supported version of Google Play streaming isn't bad, indeed, I consider it far, far better than commercial FM stations.

Did not know I could do this! Thanks!

I exported my playlists and used the data to create playlists using the Spotify API. Their API is really fast to search and I was able to "import" all but around 2% of my tracks in an evening.

Wanting an application to work is not an edge case. iTunes is an atrocity.

That old joke about emacs? iTunes is not a great operating system, and it still needs a decent MP3 player.

You mean a FLAC player :^)

Does iTunes even play FLAC files?

Apple developers have one serious problem: the "not invented here" syndrome. As everybody was using mp3, Apple wanted AAC. FLAC? Apple didn't invent it. So they just support their own rubbish instead [1].

[1] https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3002052?tstart=0)

Another good reason not to buy or use Apple devices.

>just support their own rubbish They support ALAC, a lossless format. Sure, converting is a slight hassle, but doesn't take long. The quality is the same as in FLAC.

The problems with iTunes extends beyond iTunes. I just want to drag and drop MP3s to my iPhone!!!

This! And no automatic syncing. I have no idea why deleted songs keep showing on my iphone and added songs keep disappearing from my iphone.

Is it possible to get mp3s onto an iPhone SE without using iTunes? Either Windows or Linux is fine.

Upvoting in the hope that someone has an answer.

As a linux user, my macbook died and no I basically cannot backup my music that I buy from iTunes.

I don't want to stream, I really enjoy owning my music.

and given that they've caused me to lose music before[0] I'd rather keep this.. so, how do we sync without itunes?

And how can I load the music I bought on CDs years ago onto my phone without iTunes?

[0]: https://blog.dijit.sh/importance-of-self-hosted-backups

You can use Tiny Player, which is a simple player for iOS:

http://www.catnapgames.com/tiny-player/

Thanks!

VLC allows downloading audio/video files from an UPNP/DLNA source. Only reason why I have not ditched the ipad mini yet.

Use CMUS is a small, fast and powerful console music player for Unix-like operating systems. https://cmus.github.io/

Anyone wanting to program and hack their music should use this gem. It is the best music player I have ever used.

Installation instructions http://macappstore.org/cmus/

Anybody have a good Mac alternative to iTunes? I found myself using VLC the other day on a plane because it is SO SLOW with big libraries.

Is this where I can complain about Apple Music completely screwing up all the album art on my own music?

Yes, this particular track I synced to the device also happens to be in some random music compliation CD from twenty years ago that's available on Apple Music. It doesn't mean I want to see that album art swapped into mine, dammit.

By some strange coincidence I got the dreaded corrupted iTunes library shortly after I read this article. Years of ratings, playlists, play counts, and whatnot are gone :-/.

Last time this happened I couldn't find a way to fix this. Does anyone have any experience with the matter and/or tips for fixing this?

On the subject of syncing, Apple's devices still† use USB 2.0 cables. In practice the software might be more of a bottleneck, but still.

†IIRC the iPad Pro actually supports USB 3.0 on its Lightning port, but the included USB cable is plain old USB 2.0.

Question. Would you subscribe to a service that fixed all this? I've created a streaming service for personal use and I'm considering commercializing it.

Or am I just an old fuddy duddy who likes to own my music and I should just give up and go to iMusic and GPlay to lease everything.

Use WALTR no need for iTunes, end of.

Unless I've missed something, WALTR doesn't solve the author's smart playlist / generate a "new playlist of the day" problem.

Any great replacements for Windows?

* foobar is the most feature-rich, but requires a lot of customization and the auto-move functionality is not on par with iTunes file organization tool

* MediaMonkey is nice but the interface is lacking in simplicity compared to iTunes

I personally use Clementine, which I think is excellent, especially how it lets you browse by album rather than just Artist like some other programs.

I've been using Clementine for the past few years, too. It's really a nice "simple" interface.

I tried to use Clementine every few months for a while but had SQLite crashes every time.

For me, foobar's killer feature is the tree view that can be sorted by any tag, even user-defined tags. I wish there was something like that for Linux. Unfortunately, any time I've tried to run foobar on WINE it has sucked. Maybe I should write my own, but I don't have that kind of spare time.

The Android version of foobar doesn't have the organizing abilities, either.

I really like MusicBee - seems to fill my winamp hole for the most part https://getmusicbee.com/

Take this as a lesson in not using or relying on proprietary systems like that.

The thing is, iTunes - the music organizer part - is still one of the best ways to organize your music collection, make automated playlists, make them to sync. Apple bought iTunes and then developed it back when they made iPods and needed people to manage copying the music to their players easily, and there were some great design decisions made back then that are still present now.

However, they also piled tons of crap on the core functionality. Which sucks. But I haven't seen an application that is as good as iTunes for music library.

Anyway I switched to Spotify too, but the UI is frankly pretty terrible, especially on desktop.

Wait, Spotify UI is terrible? How would you alter it? I ask because I find it to be really good, especially since I came from playing my music on Windows Media Player and occasionally VLC(!).

Not OP but take playlists in Spotify for a start. They push playlists like crazy and then have this silly little side bar for them that requires me to scroll if I have more than 10-15 playlists and is narrow so I can't see the full playlist names.

well it's a JS app firstly so it's kind of laggy and a bit of a memory hog.

There is a certain amount of truth to the old joke, "Where does Microsoft want you to go today?"

iTunes being shiat is a big reason why I don't listen to music as much. I am annoyed with constantly having to figure out what new crapped up way iTunes does X, annoyed with the integration of Apple Music into the iPhone Music app, and annoyed with all the maintenance. My music is a 250gb waste of hard disk space.

Riddle me this: why does the iPhone Music app require cellular data access when all I want to is play music local to my iPhone device? WTF is the app doing? I don't subscribe to the stupid music match function so what exactly is it doing?

iTunes is the single worst piece of software I'm still forced to use. I would pay $100 for a better piece of software but Apple has their walled "garden". And they have billions but can't hire PMs and engineers that can build a better piece of software. So fuck them.

Anyone foolish enough to build a music listening system on top of them unfortunately deserves whatever they get. I don't have much sympathy.

Why are you forced to use it? The only time I see it is when it comes up on my macbook when I plug my phone in, then I just close it - and I could probably stop it showing up then too.

You can only transfer music via USB onto an iPhone via iTunes.

That's a good reason not to own an iPhone. Android may have its (many) faults, but at least I can transfer music onto it from my Linux command line with "adb push". Or I can take out the SDcard and just pop it into my computer and transfer it like I copy any other files.

Is there another way to get music onto an i(device)?

I believe it is the only tool sanctioned to create local backups of iOS devices.

There is a real market opportunity for someone to do just this cleanly on Windows; Apple works hard to make things more secure (aka changes the software & hardware interface for backups) all the time though.

Top priority: getting media (pics+videos) off the device. Any suggestions would be appreciated!

What has walled garden to do with music apps?

Edit: seriously. Apple has not forbid to write music players/organizers, neither did they close access to the iTunes library files, so you can import easily if you want to do so.

iTunes is the only software that can properly sync with iDevice's - pretty sure that's what the parent is referring to.

> iTunes is the single worst piece of software I'm still forced to use.

Yes. This very issue (the complexity and difficulty of properly using iTunes) has been commented on by a noted and famous Twitter user, btw: https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&vertical=default&q=from%...

iTunes was a big part of the reason I switched to Android. Music players on Android suck, and music syncing on Android sucks. But they suck in predictable ways that you can work around. iTunes syncing is the mother of all heisenbugs.

> music syncing on Android sucks

I use rsync to sync to my phone. The nice thing about Android is that if you're sufficiently determined you can get any of the standard linux ecosystem tools to work.

Without rooting it?

Rsync works just fine on Android.

Unfortunately, the version I use seems to have been hidden from Google Play. It still shows up in my apps, even when I activate a new phone, but searching for it on Google Play goes nowhere. In any case, it works fine for me whether the phone is rooted or not.

http://android.kowalczuk.eu/rsync4android/

Music players on Android suck? All of them?

I'm just using the standard one that came with my S5 (running Android 6.0.1 I think), because I'm lazy and it works OK I guess and I haven't bothered to look for something better, but with the enormous number of apps in the Play Store, I assumed that when I got around to it, there'd surely be a nicer music player out there.

Music syncing isn't bad on Android, if you keep your music on an SDcard. Just pop out the card, stick it in your computer, and use rsync.

No SD slot on my S6, unfortunately.

I've tried a bunch of the music players in the Play Store. I thought the same thing as you at first. But every one of them lacks one feature on another. The feature I miss most is Genius from the iPhone player. One or two Android apps has something similar, but only at the cost of ads that play videos using mobile data that don't go away even if you pay for the app. It's a lot of crap like that. I finally just gave up trying and now I use Doubletwist. It's not great, but it sucks less than the rest.

VLC

How do you use VLC to sync a subset of star-ranked songs that haven't been played in X months to a device with a limited amount of storage?

Why are you eulogizing an existing product? Build something better or use something else.

It simply can not be done!

Apple is worth $ 750,000,000,000 and it spend last 16 years trying to build file synchronization tool.

Well not with that attitude it can't.

Have you even looked at other tools like Plex https://www.plex.tv/, Foobar2000 http://www.foobar2000.org/, Clementine https://www.clementine-player.org/, iSyncr http://www.jrtstudio.com/iSyncr-iTunes-for-Android, or DoubleTwist Sync?

Sarcasm? I used rsync for past 20 years...

I don't really get the complaint. The author acknowledges they are a tiny edge case and Apple has clearly been trying to get away from syncing and make the devices work without computers for years now. The music industry has changed and streaming is now what most people are doing with these devices. I think, in hindsight, investing a lot of time in any music delivery mechanism is wasteful. It changes much too often.

Well, you do get the complaint. You just think it is useless to make it. I think that too. And I think the author thinks that too and being useful was not the reason he made it.

It's not just music though. Stream if you will/want. I think it's a good model. But that doesn't work for pictures. I know - iCloud, but it's not even as reliable as iTunes. No way am I trusting it for the only backup of videos of my kids. This may be a HN edge case, but out there in the RW, folks are taking pictures at soccer practice that they want to keep forever. It's a real PITA if you can't sync reliably.

Have you used iCloud Photo Library? Syncs between your devices and you can have it store local copies on your Mac so you have cloud and local copies (and you can backup the local copies with your usual solution). Much safer than sync IMO because the photos are synced and backed up before you can get to a computer (useful if you're on vacation and without a computer for a couple of weeks).

I haven't found iCloud to be entirely reliable. The total lack of feedback in sync progress and errors when something goes wrong drive me crazy.

More importantly, Apple charges a lot for storage and it can't be shared so each account needs it's own storage - and enough of it to store all pictures/videos or it won't sync at all. Basically it comes down to I don't want to pay Apple four times for storage (2 phones and 2 iCloud accounts) just so that I can have my pictures fully backed up and synced.

They charge me $0.99/month per 50GB of extra storage. I just buy one fewer candy bars per month.

Are you talking iCloud generally or Photo Library? Sync progress for photos and videos is displayed at the bottom of your camera roll. As for storage they've reduced prices several times and it's very affordable now (I agree it started off terribly priced).

Music streaming at current prices thus far really hasn't proven to be that sustainable, and the available libraries are always in flux as negotiations fail. I think it's perfectly worthwhile to invest effort into lasting music delivery systems that are entirely under your control while still retaining the streaming capability that we're all so used to now.

>> I think it's perfectly worthwhile to invest effort into lasting music delivery systems that are entirely under your control

Agreed but I would argue that solution is a physical medium. You will always have the ability to play your content. With iTunes you're firstly at the mercy of iTunes developers. Personally I go with streaming (Apple Music) and I buy my favourite albums on vinyl so that if I stop paying my streaming subscription I still have music.

Physical media is definitely a solid option if you don't mind the space and effort considerations. I opt for a middle ground by using Emby as my current solution. It allows me to physically store all my media on local drives, back it up to some free unlimited Google Drive accounts via edu addresses (fully encrypted), then can do local playback within my network or stream it out to any remote devices.

It's largely open source, but there's always that worry I suppose that the devs ruin it at some point and I'll need to move to a new solution. Unfortunately there's a lot of work needed if I was to completely code my own solution, so hopefully I'll never need to.

I buy CDs, rip to FLAC with EAC, store on external hard drive, transcode to MP3 with Foobar2000, and upload to my Android phone--or anything else except Apple products, really--with an ordinary USB cable, with no additional software required. I recently got an M-Disc capable drive, so that I can stop messing around with rotating DVD-R backups. Those things supposedly last 1000 years with no bit-rot, and 25 GB media are about $0.08/GB now. That's still 8x as expensive as tapes, but probably more than 8x as convenient for me. I want to ensure that my descendants will always have the option to play music without paying anyone anything more than I already paid for the privilege, for as long as 12cm digital disc players exist.

I have never had a streaming subscription. I typically have the maximum number of songs that will fit on my device playing on random select. If I am not in the mood for a particular song, I have unlimited skips, so I use them. It ensures I at least have the opportunity to listen to everything I have ever bought/received while at my home computer, and a subset of whatever I like everywhere else.

Streaming services are still useful for discovery. I use them when adding new CDs to my gift wishlist. Whenever I don't want to be in complete control of everything that I listen to, I can always flip on OTA FM radio or a free music service. That's plenty good enough to be introduced to new music and possibly new (to me) artists. But then I get that CD and continue as usual. Never will I ever give up my option to be in complete control.

I think buying music on vinyl records would be ridiculously stupid for me, but fortunately for everyone, I am not in charge of what other people are allowed to like. The encoding format of pressed vinyl analog music tracks has been fixed for decades, after all, and anyone can build decoding devices unencumbered by patents now. I just prefer digital. Everyone can still hate iTunes for their own reasons.

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