Apple Plans End of iTunes
bloomberg.com
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My 10-plus-year-old iPod is rock solid technology, hardware and software, just keeps on working. At this point it feels like some retro SF alternate vision of the future we could have had, with simple easy to use things that never broke.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/05/remember-the-ipod-ap...
The reason I am asking is because I am surprised yours has lasted so long. I had two and they broke within two years due to the mechanical hdd inside. (the headphones also broke, within a month each time; really put me off buying Apple products again)
I also replaced the rear panel since I didn't need the beefy 80gb version, and also the lock / headphone jack so they were both solid black.
Rockbox is excellent because it runs off of a basic folder structure, but also has a library option.
You can do the iFlash mod and still use iTunes / the original OS if you like, but Rockbox has proven to be superior in all ways.
If you're on a Mac, be sure to format the main card with a Windows box so its Fat32.
I've been trying to break free from iTunes with a modded 5.5 gen, but Rockbox caused endless errors where non-corrupted songs would skip constantly(1). Wiped back to the default Apple firmware, and voila, no skipping. I tried an iPod plugin for Musicbee, and it appeared to work (files were syncing in Musicbee) but the songs and playlists didn't appear on the iPod. So back to iTunes sadly. I'd love to kick it to the curb.
When you add songs, do it from the original firmware. With the iFlash and all that, transferring files while loaded into Rockbox will cause the issue you mentioned... a lesson I learned after transferring about 80gb of FLACs.
When you boot the iPod, lock it right away and it'll boot to the normal firmware. The transfer speeds are better than using disk mode.
I'm using the original firmware with a while now, it's less error prone and the UI on rockbox isn't exatly polished.
Rockbox is one of those things that is perfect once you live with it for a while. I've been using it since the iPod Video came out (and on a few devices.) The main thing with Rockbox and the modded iPods (iFlash etc) is limiting the EQ bands and other DSP settings. The Sandisk Clip+ is an unexpectedly killer device for Rockbox -- but like anything, the UI takes some getting used to.
Considering they're working around clickwheels with a center button, d-pads with menu button, some with power buttons, others without... its a bit of a marvel that everything is accessible on the devices that are able to be used -- but like I said, I've been using it for ages and can get around some of the odd navigational quirks.
One of the biggest benefits of Rockbox over the iPod firmware is 'timestretch' / playback speeds for files (podcasts, audiobooks.) Its still my favorite audiobook player.
It's a shame what's become of iTunes though...just an awful app.
And what a long, slow, weird, decline it's been since then.
Personally, I'm in the camp who kept a manually-organized directory tree for music for years, and would still prefer that mode of working, but even among my technical friends I think I'm in the minority there. Presumably Apple was right that this is what most people prefer.
That was what bothered me about iTunes...I was never sure WHERE things lived. Even if I pointed it at a folder, was that my music, or just an input source for where my music actually ended up living?
If you have "Organize my music" checked then iTunes copies the files to its library. If you have it unchecked, then the files stay where you left them.
¹Music available in iCloud Music Library but not explicitly downloaded locally doesn't offer this of course.
Music > Buckethead > Enter The Chicken > Funbus
But how do you file, say, classical music? Do I file this album under Wilhelm Furtwängler, the conductor? Do I file this under Bach and Beethoven, the conductors of various tracks? Do I file this under Wiener Philharmoniker?
In iTunes it’s irrelevant, because I can find the album by looking for Composer=Bach, Composer=Beethoven, artist=Wilhelm Furtwaengler, or artist=Wiener Philharmoniker. With a filesystem I would… use symlinks or something?
And just because a media player respects your filesystem doesn't mean you can't search by the metadata in the Mp3s. This is extra-helpful when you realize not all Mp3s have metadata. In that case, such search routines will just pass it by.
Seriously, I had my MP3s organized this way pre-iTunes. I get why that can’t scale to the general public, but I still think a tool could approximate it.
I know what hard links are.
> I get why that can’t scale to the general public
So why suggest it as a solution?
> pre-iTunes
So even you gave up on it?
Further, it's hard to imagine how the hard link system could ever be as flexible as even an average music library program, where you can trivially find songs released between 1990 and 1995, with at least one play count, and then have them sorted by beats per minute.
Music libraries act as relational databases, which are a far more powerful data modeling tool than the file system.
This is one of my peeves with the 40's channel on Sirius. There could be the wonderful voice of a woman singing a song, but the display will only read "Benny Goodman Orchestra."
(That's basically what iTunes does now, except the exact behavior is hidden behind a mysterious "Keep iTunes Media folder organized" checkbox, and the index is stored in big opaque XML files rather than Spotlight.)
My email has hierarchical folders, too, but I don't know anyone who worries about the folder structure of their email. All messages are indexed, and search is quick, so there's not much point.
The answer is probably in the realm of “That’s how we wrote desktop apps back then.”
Files are not real things. Just identifiers for an organization of bits that sound like a Neil Young sing when played through the correct decoder.
You can organise your collection how you like. There is no right answer (although its obviously by genre).
If you're indecisive then just dump everything into one huge flat file, or just add links.
An album like 2.0 by Big Data would create 10 different distinct "artists" in most music players:
Big Data and White Sea
Big Data and Joywave
Big Data and Jamie Lidell
Big Data and Kimbra
Big Data and Rivers Cuomo
Big Data
Big Data and Jenn Wasner
Big Data and Dragonette
Big Data and Bear Hands
Big Data and Twin Shadow
Even Amazon Music had this problem up until 2018 or so, when my library collapsed from nearly 2000 "artists" to ~300 actual.
With iTunes you could have smart playlists like “create a list of all of the songs I haven’t played in X days”.
Normal people didn’t want to tag songs and use the filesystem.
Do I really need to bring up the “No Wireless. Less Space than a Nomad. Lame.” Meme and how geeks didn’t get the iPod?
https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-i...
A la M3u files.
You really think the iTunes filesystem layout is what made iPod successful?
Not, say, the fact that it was solid hardware, good UI, etc., from a desirable brand?
The comment was saying, my read of it anyway, is they didn't appreciate that it would slurp up and rename the files you give it.
But iTunes didn’t “slurp up and rename files” unless you enabled the option for it to manage your underlying file.
You miss the point with this question. A media player managing playlists certainly can. Or it can manage m3u files. Or it can put them in an sqlite db. Or ...
You posed as an intractable problem unless we adopt iTunes thinking.
Literally iTunes does this, by default, without changing its configuration.
You can manage the files yourself and point it at that, but the default, eg. if you choose to open a file from any old place, is to copy into its own naming and organization scheme.
That is not the default when you install iTunes it asks you whether you want it to “manage your music”. This is not a new behavior - note the date on the above post.
People love to bring this up... but that product (pretty much) did fail, in no small part because it had less space than a Nomad. The iPod wasn't successful until a couple revisions later and after the introduction of iTunes (which led to an end-to-end rethink of how you loaded music on these devices). No matter how hard Apple-acolytes want it to be true, if I come out with a bad product, and then later come out with a good product, it doesn't make the bad product retroactively awesome.
There was a winner
What part changed during the iPod era.
https://macdailynews.com/2007/02/06/apple_ceo_steve_jobs_pos...
The major things that changed after the iPod was released: adding online music sales, switching from FireWire to USB for all the people stuck with the slower Windows hardware interface, and iTunes for Windows.
None of those changed the core iPod design; I don’t think the first one failed in any meaningful way.
https://macdailynews.com/2007/02/06/apple_ceo_steve_jobs_pos...
Through the end of 2006, customers purchased a total of 90 million iPods and 2 billion songs from the iTunes store. On average, that’s 22 songs purchased from the iTunes store for each iPod ever sold.
Today’s most popular iPod holds 1000 songs, and research tells us that the average iPod is nearly full. This means that only 22 out of 1000 songs, or under 3% of the music on the average iPod, is purchased from the iTunes store and protected with a DRM.
This geek doesn't understand why we need two nearly-identical systems. Once you make the more-general form, refactor the prototype to use it!
Normal people wouldn't need to "use the filesystem" any more than they do with iTunes now. Just make iTunes use these features internally so we don't have two incompatible sets of tools, and two separate sets of bugs.
They are already used by Windows to provide the major Documents, Music, Pictures, Videos, etc. locations.
https://windowsreport.com/enable-libraries-windows-10-file-e...
And another how to article.
https://windowsreport.com/enable-libraries-windows-10-file-e...
This is why geeks end up designing Homermobile type solutions and wonder why the common person is confused.
"?playedLast < 30d" is not a hard query filter
People don't care about how the files are stored, and they shouldn't need to. We've seen this in everything from music catalogs to file sharing to productivity software. We want content organized logically with metadata, tags, folders, lists and search that's completely removed from the physical location. Let the computers do what they're good at while the software lets you consume it the way you want.
The problem is that there's a lot of room for interpretation as to what is the best way to actually translate media metadata into an organizational scheme. Furthermore, the most appropriate interpretation is DIFFERENT depending on the type and/or genre of the music.
Most metadata-oriented media players tend to pick one scheme, apply it across the board, and completely screw up somewhere along the way. For whatever kind of music the developers had in mind, it'll work okay. For anything else, it's borderline unusable as you constantly struggle to find/browse what you're looking for.
The second clause of this sentence is a pretty good software design value. The first part is overgeneralizing at best.
Some people care very much about where in a folder/directory system their files are stores. I'm not just talking about HN audiences, I'm talking about actual people I've observed from personal acquaintances to real live user testing. Files are not some weird obscure technical point they're a dominant metaphor that's been used in computing workflows longer than more than half of HN has likely been adults. Lots of people know and care how they work.
This is especially true for music files, where people have been ripping, transcoding, slicing/processing into derivative works, backing up, and yes sometimes sharing files for longer than iTunes has existed.
They're not perfect for every application and user. An application-specific database with a different use profile might be good to have between the filesystem and a user. Users shouldn't have to care.
But if we really mean "the software lets you consume it the way you want" then you don't really want it completely removed from filesystem location. You want to keep facilities that allow users to find underlying files and keep them easy enough to find. You want to accommodate use profiles where users may bring in files from outside your curated market, or even choose to intentionally organize files in a way that your application doesn't by default.
Most people are not concerned about files, they want music. Tracks, playlists, artists, albums, etc. That's how they think and interact, and this abstraction provides that rich interface. That's why it's so seamless to switch from iTunes to Spotify where everything is streaming, because the basic primitives are not files.
If you do want to handle the raw files then there's nothing stopping you, but it's definitely a tiny minority.
I mean, yes. Files as we're speaking of them are in fact this very thing themselves. But:
> Most people are not concerned about files
Do you know how you know that? Is it based off of observation, or is it a story you like to tell yourself?
Like I said, I'm not pulling this out of my nose, I'm basing this off of real life observations including non-technical users. It isn't everyone who wants files in every case, but it is waaay more than a tiny minority. It's a little complicated given that you've got at least two curves you're dealing with (user experience and very roughly speaking intelligence), but if you imagine a bell curve and draw a line about a half standard deviation down from the median, roughly everyone north of that will likely care about files or file-related behavior at some point.
> they want music.
Ask yourself this: do you see "Copy Song Link" with Spotify tracks? What exactly do you think Activities are doing all over iOS?
These are ways of directing/handling files.
> If you do want to handle the raw files then there's nothing stopping you
Except sometimes in applications written/designed by people who think "they want music" means "Most people are not concerned about files."
I'm not sure what you mean.
iTunes brought library management and meta data editing to the masses, which is a good thing. While Roon is my main player/management software I still use iTunes to sync to iOS devices. Of course I won’t let iTunes move any files - there’s an option that tells iTunes not to move anything. So you could actually have it both ways: Use your preferred file structure and benefit from proper library management software.
I use Spotify on my phone but I’m someone who listens to pretty much all the same music that I always have, so Spotify is more replicating my mp3 collection due to a lack of being able to have Winamp on iOS. I’d love to have Winamp on mobile though, it’s still the easiest fastest and cleanest music player I’ve ever used.
(For instance, the ability in a shuffle to right click a song for it to play next in the queue, and then have it return to the shuffle. Or to shuffle entire albums, playing the albums in track order but shuffling which album is next.)
Several custom modular interfaces are a tab-switch away. Takes a while to get everything the way you like it but you've got modules for autotagging, working integration with Winamp's Milkdrop2 (and any other Winamp plugins one might have), youtube search & playback, lyric fetching, advanced playlist organization, direct playback from VGM music files, pop-up search, artist bio fetching, etc.
It's very easy to get exactly where you want to be with a custom queue within seconds.
I would also recommend Amarok, not sure how it performs on Windows, but there's a KDE build[0]. It comes a lot more configured out of the box, plus it's still fairly customizable and its playlist creation features surpass even fb2k's.
[0] https://community.kde.org/Amarok/GettingStarted/Download/Win...
You might try VLC for a GUI.
It felt to me like too much style over some unstable software.
Two days ago I wanted to rent a movie for an airplane, so I opened up iTunes on my Mac. I'm not kidding, in order to rent this movie I had to type in my password 8 times and confirm so many dialogs I almost gave up. If your purchase flow is that bad, you just don't care anymore. So not surprised they're gonna end it.
How do you figure? Itunes is completely unaware of most qualities of music, in fact nearly everything unattested in metadata.
This is optional, there's a "let iTunes manage my music for me" checkbox somewhere.
Save yourself some disk space my friend.
Admittedly I don't find iOS' Music app that much better, so I'm pretty wary of iTunes' upcoming replacement.
- I'm all-in the Apple ecosystem (iPhone, Watch, ATV4K, Airport Express). So are my family members.
- I'm on a family plan so $15/4 is a price that can't be beat. I do not live with the family members I share the plan with. This is relevant because:
- I actually had a friend share their Spotify Family plan with me and Spotify insisted I prove I lived in the same address! Apple doesn't ask for anything beyond linking Apple IDs to a family.
- The actual service/catalog provided by AM is fantastic, but overall I'm very unsatisfied with the UX of Apple's music apps.
Nice. It's always better to have multiple programs each dedicated to a specific task than one that tries to be everything.
Apple is very open about their long term plan to convert to a media and services company. Their business plan is to 1) get you to change over to these 3 new apps now when they are free, 2) convert each to a paid monthly subscription plan once enough people use them.
so soon you'll be paying for 3 things instead of being able to use iTunes like it is now.
- The new Music app will have the ability to play local music, so it won't need a subscription. (Conversely, you can get an Apple Music subscription with iTunes right now.)
- The TV app will likely function just like the iOS one: if you have videos in your library that are playable by it, it'll play them, no subscription. If you subscribe to a TV "channel," it'll show up there. (This presumably includes the forthcoming Apple TV+ service, but there are no details about its pricing model yet.)
- Again, the Podcasts app will likely function just like the iOS one, which means it's not something that Apple is making money from. You subscribe to podcast feeds in it the same way you do in any other podcast player.
To be clear, I'm not saying Apple doesn't actively have nefarious plans to make you pay more money -- I'm just saying this isn't one of them.
Does this also mean they are killing QuickTime?
iTunes is a library for music, tv shows, movies, podcasts, audiobooks, heck even home movies.
This saves bandwidth when managing multiple devices, makes setting up a new device a whole lot faster (than waiting for apps to download), offers control on the app versions and also helps in cases when some developer removes an app from the store because they want customers to buy another app or a differently named one.
That’s why I use an iOS 6 iPhone 5 with iTunes 11 on OS X Mavericks.
Presumably this will get moved into Music.
The need to store certain content under multiple horizontal categories (or folders.)
For example I will add the same song to multiple playlists, for different moods and activities, or a photo may have multiple elements that I might search for (e.g. "nature", "warm", "urban" etc.)
Symlinks/Aliases are too cumbersome. Tags help alleviate this a little, but they're still a tacked-on layer instead of a core FS feature in modern OSes (even macOS has inconsistent UI support for tags and becomes unwieldy if you have hundreds of tags.)
Playlist-like organization is useful for a lot of other types of content besides music, so why not bring those features back into the filesystem layer?
Good move as the thing went from doing x to doing a-z and being so bloated. I am happy to see it streamlined into a few apps again :)
I know this may alienate and confuse some iOS users, but I trust Apple can figure out some way for this to be intuitive for their users.
For iPhone, I'm certain there is a better way to discover and open apps than what was devised a decade ago. The current pull-down search is useful, but as a naive idea: some sort of search & auto-complete on the home screen would be great.
EDIT: Bonus - Trying to organize your apps is a nightmare. How do you organize a bunch of icons split across multiple screens?
https://9to5mac.com/2017/05/05/average-app-user-per-day/
I don't know exactly what that means but I figured it is a good starting point for a discussion.
The alphabetical list is my main criterion, I don't think anything beats it. The dock is just a handy shortcut to a few common things, but even the coach tracking app I use every working morning and most of those afternoons isn't in there (that's much more frequently than I use some that are) and it's fine.
Grid of all app icons was designed at a time when 'apps' were newNd nobody had many.
I don't have many, I only recently got 'smartphone' again, but still more than I care to spread over a grid.
(The only annoyance is some daftly named apps, like 'Credit Card' instead of '<Provider> Credit' or something.)
In conversation, the consensus among my peers was that the separation between iOS and OSX is destined to be impermanent. Phones are becoming more complex, and more integral to our every routine. But more significantly, they're raising a new generation of digital natives that have different expectations about UI and its scale, density, information architecture, onboarding, collaboration, and storage, to name a few.
These mobile-first expectations are flavoring desktop software, and smoothing over the once rough edges of highly-compact power user software. Gmail's redesign, and most redesigns really, demonstrate this. Less information, displayed in a more opinionated way, with whitespace and garnish and a focus on golden-path big-brother-knows-best presentation over configuration and optimization for power users.
Desktop and mobile trends are slowly converging, and I think that when it comes, that convergence from apple risks being abrupt and unapologetic. They're like that – with flash, the headphone jack, and the touch bar. They wait a long time, but when they make a move, they really rip the bandaid.
I find this future to be sad and scary, for the most part. But I agree that the icon grid home screen abstraction feels more like a "because it's always been that way" thing than anything else. It's a holdover from the blackberry days. Given how far mobile apps have come in the mean time, the mobile phone's desktop/start menu is ready for some new abstractions.
Can you talk more about this? Conversational as in "voice/nonphysical primary input"? or "user offers abstract intent and computer sorts it out" instead of "user negotiates with computer via GUI", both, more?
What's Amazon done here that positions them well?
iTunes is the single worst piece of software I have ever used. It’s the only software I’ve seen bring someone to literal tears. And it’s done that to more than a couple of family members.
May it rot in hell forever.
I mean sure it's bad, but I find it hard to take this statement literally for any HN reader.
*Note that is not a comment about HN UX, just that anyone who uses software and technology extensively has to have used some pretty terrible software products in their lifetime.
Some software is broken. It doesn’t work. But iTunes is so bloated and janky I don’t think I could design something that bad if I tried. The concept of “syncing” is completely wrong in a multi-device context Venn diagram.
Plus iTunes has literally brought friends and family to tears. Actual tears. No other software has done that.
For a moment, I thought it sounded like a good plan.
As other HN users have noted in the past, until Apple gives me access to a terminal where I can run the command line tools required for my work, I have absolutely zero interest in replacing my laptop with an iPad.
After all, iPhones have an endless amount of apps but nobody (or close enough to nobody) is developing apps using their iPhone.
In any case, you can develop fully featured projects for iPad on the web too, you don't even need a Mac for that, let alone an iPad.
Oh goody
You seem to be responding to a higher-level comment saying "developers are not the target audience" with "but it's not suitable for developers", which... yeah?
If the rumors are true and Apple is planning to abandon x86_64 for their machines to switch to the ARM cores for everything, I'm going to have to pry the mac pros running 10.6.8 from the cold dead hands of our users to get them over to Windows with modern hardware.
It's really only the memory capacity that the Mac Pro's have an undisputed advantage on (4-6GB vs up to 128GB). Memory bandwidth is way faster (33GB/s vs 19GB/s) on A12X owing to LPDDR4 vs DDR3.
The latest iPad Pros are beneficiaries of a decade of intense R&D from the most profitable product in the world (iPhone). Form-factor aside, the chips themselves are stupid fast.
On the one hand: if Apple really wants the iPad to be a laptop replacement, there needs to be a way to do everything that a laptop can do. It doesn't have to be the same way; it might be a new way that requires a learning curve. (A lot of the "iPads suck because I can't do my work" articles I've seen really mean "iPads suck because I can't do my work the way I expect to be able to do it.") But if I literally can't do my work on an iPad, it's not a laptop replacement.
On the other hand: while I can't open a terminal on the iPad, I can open Blink and open an effectively persistent mosh terminal on my Linode. I have a Git client that can make a repository a document provider, letting text editors work with it directly. It's possible that there may be some things that the iPad can never do locally that I can still technically do "on the iPad," and that this may be enough.
I mean, yes, I get what you're saying, but I think it's at least plausible that the long-term solution for "doing developer things on the iPad" is going to involve network access and The Cloud™ for heavy lifting. (Granted, I think long-term, the distinction between local and remote everything is going to progressively blur over the coming years.)
[Edited to note: I think "Xcode for iOS" or an equivalent is almost certainly on the road map. I'm not sure whether full-blown web development of the "I am running a local web server on my iPad to test things" variety" is, although thinking about it, I can imagine ways a "LAMP App for iOS" might be implementable even today.]
You can certainly attach a bluetooth keyboard to an iPad (I did so yesterday) and then they are pretty good for writting emails, but they are annoying to carry and a thin laptop is much better.
Just sayin'
Hopefully any successor will be like Android.
"At this point, whatever the causes of the product problems with iTunes and related iOS apps — feature scope, management, team structure, etc. —we can be pretty sure that the only ‘solution’ will appear when this software achieves end-of-life, the same way that the mystery of how to set recording time on VCRs was finally solved by their obsolescence."
I'm sure people liked it in 2004 (although I never was blown away by it.) Also the fact that it was the #1 store can reflect music distribution agreements (and the success of iPod/iPhone) more than its prowess as a product.