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Comment by titzer | Hacker News Reader

I still can't believe they killed iTunes. I used to have my entire digital music library in iTunes. Most of that was music I had ripped myself from CD, but I had a handful of albums I bought of iTunes and even some TV shows. When they wholesale abandoned iTunes and deleted from Mac OS in favor of...whatever Apple Music is, I knew I'd never trust them again.

I searched for some decent mp3 players for a while, and even used AIMP for a while, but nowadays I think I'll just vibe code my own with my own interface and rely on the local file system and folder mounts to do the job. I really love this new era where I can just use AI to build a custom thing for myself and forget about all the predatory crap out there, especially from the OS vendors. I don't need streaming, I don't want it. I would have kept buying albums off iTunes, but since it sucks so much I'll just buy it on CD, thanks.

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You can turn off the cloud service in Apple Music and still use it with your local tracks and music downloaded from the iTunes Music Store (which still exists).

I did this for most of last year. I had all local music in Apple Music, disabled the cloud stuff, and synced it all to my iPhone by plugging it in with a cable, as if it was an old iPod. It all still worked.

Fool me once.

Yep, I've been importing CDs to Apple Music (which I buy from my local music store) and adding them to my Android phone for personal listening. It's a great way to spend money on music in a way that supports local businesses!

Turning off the cloud service just does the syncing thing right? What about turning off the Apple Music service so that the only thing visible is your local content? That's what pisses me off the most.

That's what I meant by cloud services. It hides the Apple Music part so it defaults to your local stuff.

Thought if I remember correctly, search was still showing it, which was a little annoying. But it depends on how much you search.

I'm currently using the service right now, so I can't really check if anything has changed since last year when I was doing it.

I've only ever used Apple Music with local content. On iOS the only indication to me that non-local content is even possible is the radio tab at the bottom of the screen.

On MacOS I think it opens to the online home page, but I use it so infrequently I'm not sure. I pretty much only use it to buy music from iTunes.

I've recently tried syncing local content to my phone, but to find that content on the phone is difficult. The phone really wants to show me Apple Music stuff. I have to Library->Downloaded->Songs. Going to Artists or Albums just shows me "Download Music to Listen Offline". I really just don't want to spend the time I previously spent on my iTunes library all over again. I was really just trying to quick&dirty add content. They've made this unnecessarily difficult and I despise them for it.

Just go to the Library tab in the phone app. That's where your own stuff is located.

I have over 8000 songs synced to my phone, 100% from local files on my computer.

I never activate the "library sync" BS that Apple tries to force on you, because historically it has replaced your copies with incorrect or "remastered" (AKA dynamically compressed to hell) versions from Apple servers.

I've even caught it switching "library sync" on without permission during an update.

Please re-read what I wrote. I know where the local stuff is. It doesn't fix the glitch that app is

That's not reflected by your comment, which I read and directly replied to:

"to find that content on the phone is difficult"

How? You tap Library, then Songs. There's all your music.

I don't know what you're doing differently then. When I open the Music App, it goes straight to my Library. The only items in there are songs I've synced to my phone. I've never seen anything else or known it to behave differently.

VLC on iPhone has served me more reliably than Apple Music.

Sadly it doesn't quite go away even when you've turned everything off: https://davids.town/dear-apple-please-fix-ios-music

You can, but basically every menu assumes Apple Music as a service, and its worse with each version.

You can technically still buy albums, but you can really tell its only there because it was forgotten about.

Buy albums from Bandcamp. You can download them in multiple different formats and the artist gets one of the best cuts

Yes, but I have a big pet peeve about the offline experience.

In iOS Music, tapping the artist name on a song launches the artist’s cloud Apple Music page —- even if you’ve hidden paid Apple Music.

Disabling cellular data for the Music app fixes this by showing an album view of the downloaded music from the artist. However, the cloud version is unavoidable on WiFi. It’s a small but annoying example of how Apple made the classic experience worse to push their subscription product.

The Music app reads the same library and has the same core music-oriented functions as iTunes. Is the interface what you're missing?

My main complaints are that it’s clearly store and subscription first, local music and playlists a distant second. Still works however.

I don't really understand what you mean - yes, it is designed for Apple Music, a tab for browsing for new music, etc.

But it still has library views for songs, albums, artists, and playlists. That's the whole thing. Additional tabs to support modern music streaming don't devalue those tabs.

On the phone it always defaults to searching the online store/music, instead of the local songs.

The Mac app version is less annoying in that way as it seems to vaguely remember what you were looking at.

There's great hand crafted library managers/players out there like https://www.strawberrymusicplayer.org etc.

Why vibe code anything? VLC would fit the bill. Even quicktime.

It's mostly that I want my own list management, key combinations, navigation, etc. Once the entire UI is my oyster, I realized I don't have to settle for how someone else decided to lay out the menus, etc. 25 years ago I would just learn all the key combos and be set, but 12 major iterations later, few to zero of those UI skills and muscle memory state has survived. So now, I can do my own and no one can take it away from me :)

I strongly recommend going this route (speaking from experience).

It is shockingly easy to build an opinionated UI for these things in a web browser. You need to implement m3u generation (or use a js web player), and some sort of hierarchical hyperlink based nav that matches your muscle memory. You should be able to use an existing service to grab cover art and metadata for newly ripped disks (unless those services disappeared over the years).

If you want to use a native GUI/TUI toolkit, I’d be shocked if an LLM had any trouble laying it out after a few rounds of refinement. (It definitely will not have any trouble doing this for web stuff.)

I've been vibe coding some music tools and after some researching let Claude get going with imgui (https://github.com/ocornut/imgui) to build a tool I use for local authoring. It's pretty pixel-dense and looks alright to me. It runs on MacOS and Linux, which is enough for my needs now. Claude has been pretty decent at getting audio stuff going on MacOS and can even tap into various accelerators in MacOS libraries. It's had no problems loading and playing mp3s and m4as, which is the majority of my collection. I'll probably prototype an music manager off of that. It'd be great if it works out for Android as well.

I constantly have trouble with VLC (long standing bugs, where it gets confused and fails to play audio after dvd menu clicks, etc).

I’ve had mixed luck getting llm’s to configure mpv (which involved writing lua or something for basic functionality!), but there are audio sync issues with it.

I miss the days when something like totem would just work and default to playing with deinterlacing and audio set correctly.

Configuring VLC is like solving a 200 variable boolean satisfiability problem or something. Also, the workarounds for core bugs come and go over time, so Reddit suggests toggling removed settings.

I absolutely love vlc

The iOS app is such a permanently buggy mess that I eventually had to bail after years of use with persistent issues that wouldn’t get fixed, and new bugs popping up. It can play hyper obscure formats, but the basic UI functions are very unstable

I think you must have very different needs if VLC is a substitute for iTunes/Music. For me, iTunes/Music is a music catalog app for managing my 9000+ MP3s with artists, album covers, playlisted based on various criteria, etc... where as VLC is an app for playing back single media files.

I manage my 9000+ MP3s with the filesystem. It has all the cover art, it's organized any way I want, and has playlists based on any criteria I want. Then I use any music player I want, and can drop the files onto any device I want.

What filesystem manages in multiple ways? Or are you using symlinks so you have one collection by artist, another by album, another by genre, another by year, etc...

I won’t say vlc is my favorite UI but it does all of this.

That's the difference? I still use the Music app and it still behaves exactly as it did before they renamed it. I do not subscrbe to Apple Music. I still have my entire digital music libray in iTunes/Music and it functions as it always did.

Check out Swinsian.

It is basically old iTunes with some UI improvements and modern features built around somebody who has their own library to manage. Been around for a long time.

It’s great software that I’m willing to pay for in today’s world for sure.

While I’m not sure Apple Music is the music app we deserved, iTunes had become this gigantic everything-but-the-kitchen-sink kind of monstrosity and I think it was the right call to split it up.

Worse, the fun, here’s your music collection as a wall of cover images didn’t sit well with consumers who just wanted, I don’t know, get fed music and not curate themselves and I guess that’s how we ended up with mediocre.

I had an OO perl replacement for iTunes back in the day (to learn OO perl, mostly). It had a web frontend, and also handled ripping and cd metadata with “insert disk, up arrow enter”. It failed to eject the disk iff there was a problem with the rip / transcode / metadata. I had 3-4 CDROMs in a desktop for parallelism.

Maybe I should have an LLM port to rust. It was under a thousand lines of code.

`bless` your heart

Yeah but then no rust comment...

Easy as [mpg]123

iTunes and iPhoto both. Given how good the tools are getting, and how much existing sample code is available, it seems likely someone will do a good job of reincarnating them in the near future. Apple broke the apps I used most on the Mac and then they added the bubblicious design crime UI, no thanks.

I found a WinAmp clone, written in Swift and AppKit, in the App Store yesterday. It was a month old, and from the description (ex. "No Electron, no bloat." and "No telemetry, no tracking, no accounts") it was almost certainly vibe coded. All the things it was saying were things I like, but written in a very AI way.

I think this is going to finally bring about the year of the open source desktop.

I’ll happily install that if I can see the source code, read it all in a sitting, and it is not terrible.

(Note that, in this model, if I want to futz with key bindings or other UI tweaks, I can just ask an LLM to change it. No configuration UI required! Just like evilwm.)

> I still can't believe they killed iTunes. I used to have my entire digital music library in iTunes. Most of that was music I had ripped myself from CD ...

iTunes Match still exists, one of the handful of subs I pay for.

If you keep your media accessible through Plex or Jellyfin, I recommend checking Chromatix[1] out - simple and no frills

[1] https://chromatix.app/

Yeah, the smart playlists were awesome ("play unrated tracks I haven't heard in over a year, from albums I gave at least 3 stars") for those of us who went deep into curation. I miss it.

I still use smart playlists in Apple Music. Your comment seems to imply they removed that functionality?

Even worse when you're on Windows. What's the point of the cloud if it only works halfway decently on Mac.

Makes me feel like an idiot for doing something as outlandish as paying artists for their music.

iTunes didn't go anywhere.

Just about everything I watch or listen to is served from the same iTunes Library I've had for over 20 years. It's more important to me now than it has ever been.

To respect my folder structure and still have nice covers and playlists... - and playing all the usual formats… I use JRiver Media Center (99$) and FlacBox (iOS and MacOS).

The specification would matter more than the source it produces. Specify it right and share it with the world. Code is basically a winamp skin on the OS level.

vibe code your own, implement some kind of yt-downloader? torrent downloader,etc, maybe some album art. hm might make one myself.

Yt-dlp doesn't do metadata though, at least the way I hold it. So I end up with "unknown - Unknown - file title" or the like when they're playing.

Stuff designed to rip mp3 streams got this right.

I'm probably holding it wrong.

Yeah, used to rip online radios with a winamp plugin. it placed the songs in folders per day and got each song name right.

Add --embed-thumbnail --add-metadata

And then load up MusicBrainz Picard to tag it after-the-fact; I've found some cases, usually on more obscure music, where Youtube metadata was close to right but wrong on some details. But it had enough details to allow Picard to find the correct album, and then the file(s) was/were tagged correctly.

iTunes is the single worst most rage inducing software I have ever experienced. It is the only software that has brought myself and numerous family members to literal tears. Its concept of “syncing libraries” in the early iPhone era was so unbelievably broken.

I wish I believed in software hell because then I would be happy knowing that’s where iTunes existed.

iTunes was responsible for my moving from iPhone to Android. My first phone was an iPhone 3G. But I could not simply transfer .mp3 files onto it from Linux; I had to run iTunes to transfer music onto the iPhone, and that meant loading up a VM running Windows just to run iTunes. (And pass the USB slot into the VM, and set up file sharing... it was all doable, and not that hard, but it wasn't simple).

So my next phone was an Android phone. And I could just plug it into a USB slot, and it showed up as an attached drive, the same way a thumbdrive did. Simple file transfer, at last.

That was nearly twenty years ago, and I have never bought an iPhone or iPad since.

The Music app IS iTunes. They just renamed it and continued from there. I have all of my ripped music in there just like before; in fact, that's the ONLY music I have in my library.

So don't worry! The same trash UI is available to you... except now even worse, thanks to "Liquid Glass" and brain-dead decisions like moving the playback controls from the empty area at the top of the screen into the content-browser area... where they reside on a "transparent" bubble that overlaps other graphics and text.

foobar is the best https://www.foobar2000.org/mac

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