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Comment by taligent | Hacker News Reader

Sorry but what does OSX have to do with your iPod not playing MP3s ?

And I don't really understand why you think your anecdote is relevant considering you switched 3 years ago to Windows Vista. Which lets be honest was universally recognised as not being Window's finest release.

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I don't understand the hate for windows vista. I used it happily for years; XP didn't work on my motherboard. It was basically windows 2000 with a stupid skin on top, but so was XP.

It was popular to hate Windows Vista. There is no other reason.

I can tell you from personal experience that there are many concrete reasons to dislike Vista. My family runs a small business out of the house and I was the go-to tech guy for all the laptops in the office. This can't be anything but anecdotal, but all the time that I spent trying to figure out how to configure things, how to explain kludgy "innovative" interface quirks, and in general dealing with a beast of an unresponsive OS? I do not believe for a second that that time was a result of some bandwagon hatred.

The annoying interface that gets between you and diagnosing internet problems (beyond the 'giant X on the line between you and "internet"' diagnosis) was frustrating. Ok, I get it, I'm not on the internet. Where do I go to get more information so I can start diagnosing it?

For the sake of 'usability', Windows Vista hid a lot of functionality behind 'ease of use' features that served only to provide the user with less information, making tech support more difficult for no real benefit. Users still have no idea what's going on, but receive no error messages that indicate why.

Vista also added helpful features like the whole 'Let Windows find a solution!' concept, which is great in theory but, in my limited, anecdotal experience, has never once actually provided any sort of solution. The closest I've seen was yesterday, when Windows 'found a solution', tried to implement it, and failed.

They spent a lot of time and engineering making a 'usable' OS on the surface, but all it was was a pretty sheen over top of an OS that didn't, at its core, work significantly better in a lot of areas.

Windows XP was an OS I disliked strongly, but tolerated grudgingly. Windows Vista was an OS I actively discouraged people from getting. Windows 7 is the first version of Windows I've ever recommended people upgrade to, but Windows 8 looks like another step in the wrong direction.

Vista was such a clunky OS, a transition between XP, which was snappy but required lots of configuration, to something that worked well from the start (Windows 7). That's why I am not touching the next Windows OS, it's another transition and to me an OS should be virtually invisible, not a nuisance.

Quite simply, bloat. It took up massively more drive space than XP and was slower at many things.

This is why people were disappointed with Vista.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9ifQvQCO7Y

Imagine if Apple released the iOS device, but the UI responsiveness was like Android pre-jellybean.

Sure, Vista works (and had for many many people), but XP set a responsiveness standard that Vista did not meet - and to be honest there were real, major issues pre SP1 (file copy crawling while music playing was the most egregious).

Meanwhile, Apple was slowing getting better and better with OSX, and right around that time, the Linux-powered netbooks first hit the stage and were quite good for the time and price.

Thanks to DWM (the compositor) in Vista, if you had decent enough graphics card, it was way faster than XP. Most of the UI issues were either that the GFX card was crap or the classic theme was enabled.

Vista was from a technical point of view, like going from MacOS9 to OSX...

They introduced a new kernel transaction manager, entirely new audio subsystem, new scheduler, new network stack, SxS, UAC, new display driver model, entirely new graphics stack, new power management stack, new crypto API, a whole load of new fonts and a proper stable 64-bit environment.

Because it and iTunes do not handle id3 tags correctly and consistently.

I switched to windows 7.

OSX has nothing to do with ID3 tags. And there have been 400m+ iPods sold with no major ID3 issue.

Just saying that just because it affects you personally does not make it a widespread issue.

OSX as the "package" of OS, iTunes, apps etc does.

You are wrong. This is not a personal issue - it's very widespread and makes a huge number of people suffer constantly:

1. How broken is it: http://www.id3.org/iTunes

2. Other people with problems: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=ipod+wont+play+songs

iTunes is the only mac application I ever tried to use (~5 years ago). That program is a joke. How you can make a program with so little features so complicated to use, I can't fathom.

I may be biased cause I've been using iTunes since I can remember, but it doesn't seem complicated to me.

I've tried a lot of stuff, but nothing can manage well libraries over 10GB. There may be alternatives now, I haven't really looked for one in years (as I said, works for me and I like it).

On Windows, Foobar2000 handles my 77+ GB collection with no problems. It's very lightweight and has many add-on/UI tweaking options.

Aw, Foobar2000! I remember using early releases back when I mostly used Winamp. I'll keep it in mind for my VMs or in case I switch back to Windows.

Thanks!

I've got 14Gb in Zune and its lightning fast on a 5 year old ThinkPad.

It boggles my mind that iTunes is as bad as it is. As the main interface between users' desktops and Apples' iOS devices (their cash cows), it should be extremely refined, polished, and usable. Yet it remains bloated, unintuitive, and slow (and I'm on a Mac. I've heard it's much worse on Windows).

They keep trying to push the Album Cover view, yet flipping through hundreds of album covers is an idiotic way to navigate a large music collection. Ping seemed like a half-baked idea destined to fail, and its iTunes integration was so poor. At least they're cutting their losses and yanking that.

I'm not aware of a better alternative though. What program to play, organize, and upload music to your devices do you recommend?

Slightly related anecdote: A number of years back (at least five or six) I noticed that if you made a smart playlist with a time range constraint the "max" time would increase by one second each time you edited/saved the playlist. I sent in a little bug report (through an iTunes feedback form on their website).

Right now I can't check whether the bug still is present in the Mac version, but I can see it still exists in the Windows version.

To be fair, ID3v2 is a ridiculously complex and over-engineered "standard". It reeks of second-system syndrome, despite not being created by the same person who created the original ID3 format. What was needed was a basic key-value store. What was delivered was a custom container format with an over-complex frame system, a bunch of redundant frame types, an unsync scheme, etc.

iTunes is hardly the only software with issues related to ID3v2 reading/writing.

A company the company the size of Apple doesn't have an excuse to get it wrong. It was poor testing and low quality development.

Have you tried Zune, it does magic to ID3 tags!

I learned the hard way.

http://www.id3.org/iTunes: "It can write 2.2, 2.3 and 2.4. The support in general is good."

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