Apple starts cutting the bloat from iTunes by removing iOS App Store
theverge.com
theverge.com
I own a 2016 MacBook Pro and a custom built Windows gaming machine with an i7-7700, GTX 1080ti, 32 GB DDR4 RAM, and a 1TB SSD and on both systems iTunes lags terribly. I sometimes can't even drag the window around without slideshow rendering. Updating takes 2-3 minutes and sometimes requires a restart (for a media app!). It's time to rewrite - maybe this is the start of that?
I have a loaded 2017 13" MacBook Pro (i7, 16GB RAM) and iTunes is fine.
A few months before that my machine was the least-powerful 2015 MacBook Air (11", i5) and iTunes was fine on that too.
I'm the same as you however -- I've never had issues with iTunes performance. I don't love the design, I'm glad they're simplifying it, but it always performed better than Spotify for me (which is the main reason I switched actually; I found the Spotify app to be terrible).
Your profile implies that you write software for a living, and you're going with "resolved: works on my machine"? Especially with something that has the breadth of iTunes, along with the vast number of users, I'm most certainly willing to believe that there are cases of iTunes not running well on powerful machinery.
We're on a casual forum, all evidence here is anecdotal, and I don't work for Apple, so yeah.
> resolved: works on my machine
Haven't we all thought this at least once in our careers?
The only thing that pisses me off about it is the ellipsis next to the track names on the song list.
There is something very liberating about using VLC on iOS, and managing my own music archive, manually. Sure, it feels like 1996 all over again - but at least I know exactly where I stand, and what I'm bringing with me, with VLC.
For instance if you open a million large windows so they don't fit in your graphics card memory the system will fail to composite them smoothly.
My main issue with AM at least is that when I add music to my library, I wind up getting a bugged library. As in, there is music I added to my library 3 months ago that for whatever reason is always at the top of my most recently added music. I haven't touched it since adding, but it winds up being on top of my actual most recently added music. That's definitely a bug.
In addition to local media, there's even Soundcloud integration if you get your tracks from there, which beats using their web app.
Syncing music. Contacts. Calendars. Safari Bookmarks. Notes. Apps. Ringtones. Videos. Photos.
The killer feature of the Apple ecosystem was the way the Digital Hub worked together. It's all gone by now. They demand always-on Internet to connect to the cloud.
I'm trying to rewrite my own ecosystem one app at a time (I've done Notes and Maps, halfway through contacts & calendars, and still need to start music & photos). It's going to take years of on-and-off work, but I don't trust Apple to keep providing that, so I must make my own. Some shell scripts linking other apps just won't cut it for me - I want a scriptable, syncing ecosystem that Just Works.
None of these features have gone anywhere.
Columns are still available as an option in the Songs library view. (Check the View menu if you're not seeing it.) They aren't available in the newer sorted library views like Artists or Genres because those views already have some form of filtering "baked in".
I don't believe playlist folders ever changed. They're certainly available in current versions.
The mini-player has changed a bit, but you can certainly fast-forward by pressing and holding on the forward button, or by dragging the playback indicator.
Sync… I'm not quite sure what you're referring to here?
https://www.macworld.com/article/2057971/os-x/sync-contacts-...
Syncing Notes and Safari Bookmarks were removed in Mac OS 10.8.
https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/79978/how-can-i-sy...
Syncing apps was removed in iTunes 12.
The mini-player doesn't show the track name.
http://dossy.org/2012/11/itunes-11-is-a-total-failure/
"Some soft of filtering baked in" doesn't cut it for my large library. I want to be able to navigate quickly through a deep hierarchy (Genre/Christian -> Artist/IHOP -> Album/Jon Thurlow). I'm dealing with tens of thousands of songs. iTunes 10.6.3 could do it. Since then it's been dumbed-down beyond recognition.
As it should be. None of that functionality made sense to have in iTunes. It was essentially a relic of the iPod era.
> The mini-player doesn't show the track name.
It's a little dependent on window size, but there are definitely still mini-player modes that will show the track/album/artist names when the mouse is outside the window. (When the mouse enters the window, they're replaced with the player controls.)
> "Some soft of filtering baked in" doesn't cut it for my large library.
So use the Songs view with the column browser. (Cmd+B will show/hide it on macOS.) It hasn't changed. The new library views are entirely optional.
Case in point: Look at your iTunes screen right now in Artists view. See lots and lots of missing artist pics (pink microphones)?
It used to be that you could manually set an artist pic, but they simply removed that and offered no workable solution. Its like a year 1 programmer approach.
Its sorta amazing to me that the same company that produces Logic Pro, Garage Band, Final Cut...has such a lackluster music player. Its schizophrenic. Sadly as Apple has ballooned in size, I only see these problems getting worse.
It's interesting, you're talking about a syncing system (syncing requires connectivity) and have an issue with requiring access to one of the most convenient sources of connectivity, which is the internet.
We're in a transition time right now. Access to the internet is not always available. It is not always fast. But this time will pass. It makes sense, to me, to design for this future.
> I'm trying to rewrite my own ecosystem one app at a time [...] I must make my own.
I sympathize with this (and good luck!). But I could spend a lot of effort organizing my digital life, but (for me) it feels like I would be a slave to this effort, and what does it get me, really? I spent a long time organizing my digital movie collection; now most films I want to watch are on streaming services. I spent a long time organizing music; now Apple Music and Spotify are much more convenient.
There was an essay from a while back floating around online about the ever-increasing burden of organizing our digital lives. I wish I could find it now, but it really summarized a lot of what I feel about this.
Sometimes, internet is also expensive and metered. It might be where things are going, sure, and I'm all for that. But I think forcing this stuff with no other option is either elitist or disconnected from reality.
I travel the world quite a bit and it's quite difficult to be offline, in any populated area of non-trivial size. Whether it's South-East Asia or Europe or South America, I'm never far from some kind of WiFi access point.
Where the heck do you live ???
If you have metered/expensive internet, modern smartphones are going to present all kinds of problems, syncing aside (e.g. app download sizes for one).
On a hike to a waterfall, my friend Lenard asked if someone can play music on a Bluetooth speaker. There was no phone signal so he couldn't get Apple Music. More seriously, he couldn't even get a map to find his way home. This wasn't a problem for me.
There are many popular posts on HN complaining about Facebook these days. I don't have a problem, because I only check FB when I'm online. It can interrupt my work in the office, but not dates. I can enjoy mealtimes without disruption. I have offline Wikipedia (10GB of text on a 64GB phone) if I need to check any facts. Internet access is only needed for real-time communication, and the telephone can do that.
If you need help getting setup, give me an email at me@drsr.me.
In seriousness though, I'm optimistic for fast worldwide internet. There are new solutions for low-population density areas on the horizon. If you look at current stats, about 47% of the world are online now, up from 16% a decade ago. In the developing world it's 40% up from 8%. I actually think in some ways it's an easier problem to solve than, for example, access to clean water. I wouldn't be surprised if this reaches 90% in a decade.
I imagine bigger problems will be variance in speed and latency, and artificial restrictions on supply/metering, and product design not accounting for this. Which we're already seeing in e.g. app sizes, webpage sizes.
What remains to be seen is how this plays out on Windows.
My bet would be that iTunes/Win32 will be replaced with web apps, requiring Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) for DRM.
iTunes for Windows currently relies on QTML ("QuickTime Media Layer"), which is the porting layer that the QuickTime team created to bring QuickTime (and QuickTime Player, etc.) to Windows. I'm sure that Apple would love to kill QTML as soon as they can.
I'm also reasonably sure that Apple isn't interested in Universal Windows Platform (UWP) development. That leaves web technologies as a likely solution, which (based on iCloud's web apps) Apple's pretty good at, and seems to be betting on in earnest.
That does not allow managing your iDevices... while I believe there is some html5 way to access Bluetooth, I rather hope they won't ever implement USB...
Luckily, they aren’t that insane:
"Attacks against USB devices
The WebUSB API does not even try to provide a way for a web page to connect to arbitrary USB devices. There are plenty of published attacks against USB devices that makes it unsafe to allow this.
For this reason, a USB device can define a set of origins that are allowed to connect to it. This is similar to the CORS mechanism in HTTP. In other words, WebUSB devices are associated with a web origin and can only be accessed from a page from the same origin."
Given that a computer isn't really necessary to operate an iOS device these days, could Apple just cancel the Windows version of iTunes without a replacement?
https://support.apple.com/downloads/itunes
It's kind of a relief given the App Store orientated nature of the Apple ecosystem.
Edit: must be something related to the query string, as this URL does not have the same issue.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/monument-valley-2/id11872657...