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Comment by borism | Hacker News Reader

because iTunes is the most hideous part of Apple experience.

luckily it's only needed for music...

...oh wait

Vigorously agree. I have no idea why I have such a hard time using iTunes, but I do consistently, even doing really simple and obvious things. It horrifies me.

To be fair, it's a pretty complex program that does very sophisticated things behind the scenes. I used to hate it, and I still mostly do. But I notice that the only people that really hate it are powerusers. There are hundreds of millions of people out there that find it delightful and enabling. It probably says something good about your UX if you're only bothering powerusers.

I think there's a pretty compelling argument that iTunes has become a monolithic abomination trying to do a thousand things. Split it up into more programs that each do something simple and well.

I'm not sure splitting it up is the solution. But I 100% agree, it's become a bloated piece of crap. I've thought this for a long time now. Anyone have any alternatives, that aren't something like MythTV? I just want a lightweight multimedia app for my Mac (VLC doesn't have a great "library" feature, so that's a nogo for me... but something like VLC). VLC is my favorite app ever.

VLC doesn't have a great "library" feature, so that's a nogo for me

I really wish VLC had this kind of thing. I know there's an add-ons type architecture, but I've never seen anything for it to handle libraries, sadly. Does anyone know of anything like this, or anyone working on this? I'd be quite happy to donate funds to encourage its development.

As a side note, for folks looking for a lightweight Windows alternative, foobar2000 has been wonderful for me. Low memory usage, extremely customizable UI but sensible defaults, extensible, and automatically adds files with no hassle or slowdown.

I've been using Plex for Mac, and it's quite good. Not sure if it counts as 'lightweight', but it's fantastic. I load TV shows or movies into it (non-iTunes though).

I have it set up on my Mac Mini (connected via HDMI), and I can remote control it with the Apple Remote, but there's also an iPhone/iPad app that can both remote control (up, down, select, back), remote browse (tap on a movie or TV episode to watch it on the TV), and stream (tap on a movie to watch it on your iPhone/iPad).

It also has the nice feature of being able to automatically find any other Plex instances on the local network and automatically stream from them as if the media were local. That way, you can connect Plex to your media centre in the basement, but watch the data anywhere in the house (e.g. on a smaller TV in the bedroom or an iMac in the office).

It's really a great ecosystem, and if their partnership with LG[1] pans out, it might get that much better.

1. http://www.engadget.com/2010/09/03/plex-announces-paternship...

Yes. I long for the days of Winamp 2. But it's a losing battle...

Not to mention that it is coded in Carbon which I'm sure doesn't help performance. If apple isn't working on a new version then they are very shortsighted.

> But I notice that the only people that really hate it are powerusers.

This is an excellent point. If I write network clients in elisp just for yuks, I'm probably not Apple's target user for iTunes. Emacs' UI has broken my brain (and hurt my fingers.)

Powerusers don't want a UI. They think they want a scripting language. Most of them really want a butler, though.

Just make everything directories and let the power users do what they want. Just don't do that in the mainstream app. Keep stuff like that in the power user's special app.

I agree, and am hoping they will sooner, rather than later, rewrite it from scratch.

I did just move to an SSD over Christmas though, and must say it is significantly better now - especially noticeable is I no longer seem to be getting beach balls during iPhone syncing.

iTunes is just fine on OS X. And yes, the second style is iTunes specific, I guess to keep consistency between normal and "mini" mode.

iTunes is by far the worst Apple product in terms of software engineering

Big reverse opinion from me. I'm big into cataloging and organization of my files. iTunes rescued me from a complex nest of mp3 folders and got me into a unified metadata interface that allows me to slice and dice my collection anyway I choose.

For example, the following smart playlists: - Top 100 highly rated songs that haven't been played in a month - Five random Simpsons episodes (hooray bus entertainment) - Unrated songs - Highly rated songs from the 90s - etc.

My wife and I use frontrow (just a skin over iTunes really) to manage our media library: dozens of movies, hundreds of tv shows, thousands and thousands of songs. Couldn't be happier with it.

Care to back thar up with some explanation. Having switched to iTunes long ago and use it daily without ever having problem I fail to see your point.

Lack of support for third party codecs (FLAC specifically).

Lack of auto conversion support when transferring to devices.

"Genius" Playlists never work for anything obscure

Ping is terrible

Lack of tagging support (no autotag feature)

I use mediamonkey (i'm on PC), once you switch you can never go back. I can organize my collection exactly how I want it from in the software, i can browse my harddrives to preview music before I add to my library. It supports pretty much every codec under the sun AND will convert it to compatible versions for whatever device i'm syncing to.

There is also a plugin for discogs tagging support (one of the best online discographies in the world), a plug in for "autodj" (based off last.fm).

I realize that not everyone in the world is as anal about organizing music as I am, but for the job, itunes can't compete.

I do believe that by installing Perian you get support for more formats in iTunes as well as Quicktime.

iDevice backups take forever and the iTunes Store is frustratingly slow to browse.

More to the point: neither of those belong as part of iTunes.

(Well, maybe the music store. But device management and syncing makes no sense.)

I like how you can't tell it to monitor other folders for new music.

Shuffle STILL plays just a few dozen songs over and over.

Maybe. Never had any problems with it, be it Windows (long time ago) or Mac (since 2004).

Do you use the Store and iDevice syncing parts of it at all? The Store always has me running around in circles unless I know exactly what I'm after and can search for it directly. The back button and breadcrumbs often behave contrary to expectation, and for some reason there only is a global search. The store also seems excruciatingly slow; I assume the servers are all located in North America and the content isn't optimised for transcontinental latencies.

iDevice syncing is full of unhandled corner cases which lead to crashes, inconsistent state, nonsense error messages, or lost data. It's also really easy to accidentally delete stuff off your device if you don't have the same data locally. I probably get the short end of the stick for being a developer: iTunes and XCode have a kind of love-hate relationship. That's far from the only source of problems though, I've seen all kinds of weirdness outside the context of iOS development.

Even outside of this, there are some embarrassing hiccups, e.g.:

- The UI becomes extremely unresponsive while importing media - it seems the import runs in the UI thread, or otherwise causes the UI thread to block.

- If you're editing metadata for a file while it's playing, there's a brief pause while saving.

There's no excuse for either of those, and seem the sort of thing a decent programmer with knowledge of the codebase could fix in a day or so. (I'm aware that ID3v2 is typically stored at the start of the file and requires the whole file to be rewritten; notifying the streaming playback thread of the byte offset shift and new file descriptor is however not rocket science)

File more bugs: http://bugreporter.apple.com/

Registered Apple developers only. Though there's at least one iOS bug that's getting close to being $99 worth of annoying to me (they broke an edge case of "sort album artist" behavior in cover flow a while back -- though I suspect it was on purpose, for efficiency reasons).

"Registered Apple developer" means you need an Apple ID, which is free. You might need to login to the developer site with it first.

That has to be rare. For the brief period when I had an iPhone and was using it as my primary mp3 player, I had to use iTunes on Windows. This was from August to November of this year, and iTunes was almost completely unusable to play, manage, sync, or even view my music collection.

I use iTunes on Windows and Mac to manage a 300GB music collection. Never lost data, speed fine after first import and sync (to iPod an iPhone) works fine. I have auto sync off though, obviously.

On OS X it's pretty easy to fix, just run

  defaults write com.apple.iTunes full-window -1

in the terminal.

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