Just got a new iPad2. Is there any way to run the thing without having to install iTunes?
no.
“I don’t use iTunes” is the new “I don’t have a TV.”
iTunes is buggy and has a lot of shortcomings, but it’s not going to format your hard drive and burn down the house. It works fine the vast majority of the time, and if you’re only using it to activate the iPad and do an occasional backup, you won’t even have to think about it being there.
You’ll need iTunes once, just to activate the iPad. You’ll probably be able to go a year or longer without having to do an update. Don’t sweat it.
“I don’t have Facebook” is the new “I don’t have a TV.”
I wonder whether Apple will make it possible to use the iPad without a computer? Maybe through a dedicated iTunes/backup device with a network connection?
You already can, can’t you? You only need iTunes to activate and update, which the Apple Store will do for you if you want.
Be nice if you could just connect an external hard drive or thumb drive to an iPad instead of having to go through iTunes. Or am I missing something as a new user?
You guys, “I don’t use iTunes” is in fact the new “I don’t have a TV”, and “I don’t have Facebook” is the new “I don’t have a mobile phone”.
Short answer: no. Nice write-up on the probable reasons why Apple won’t be making iPads completely stand-alone.
Related note: In my opinion reason iTunes has become such a bloated whore of a program is at least partially due to supporting Windows computers, as well as having to support an expanded feature set on mobile devices. Apple can’t assume that anyone will have various different video and audio codecs installed on their computers, and there are any number of incompatibilities between the different OS’s file-system support, so they made iTunes the hub between the computer and the mobile device.
There are some decent technical reasons, and arguments from a user-friendly interface design perspective for making iTunes all-inclusive too. The drawback is that since all these little bits and pieces were bolted onto an older framework, iTunes isn’t particularly well integrated. I think they should do a major rewrite and consolidate the codebase. I mean, it’s still got Carbon frameworks in it! That’s stuff that dates from pre OS X days.
This was rather an annoyance for my wife when she got her iPad. Her only computer is an old laptop that barely functions: We could almost hear it creaking when we installed iTunes on it. It took forever.
It might, however, delete every thing you put on the iPad. Did it to me twice in the first 4 times I ever connected my Touch to iTunes. 6 GB of music erased.
Just tonight it stopped refreshing new podcasts simply because I have not listed to one in a while. Listen, you POS program, I’ll decide when I want to stop subscribing. Until then your job it to keep downloading podcasts like I told you to do.
So it’s true, it may not burn your house down (I’d say 9:2 against) but it sure isn’t a fun program to use.
And you clicked an icon and told it to resume downloads and it did, and gave you the option to download everything that happened between the last download and today.
Heavens to murgatroid, that program tried to conserve your hard drive space by not downloading material that you didn’t appear to have any interest in any more. How evil of it!
To be fair, I hate that it thinks it “knows better” and stops downloading podcasts which I haven’t listened to in a while, too. And then when I want to listen to any podcast… they’re about 2 months out of date.
While we’re at it, can my iPhone automatically download new subscribed podcasts over WiFi please? And can I subscribe to new podcasts on the iPhone? [/rant]
Ok the answer is, yes you can (kinda), but you can’t update the OS without iTunes (will the apple store do it for you?), you won’t have a backup, and it’s really much easier to use iTunes.
Why can’t I burn music that I’ve bought? I can burn my MP3’s to CD or put them on my MP3 player using Windows. However, I bought a CD using iTunes and it’s in a format (m4a) that I’m guessing my MP3 player won’t play, and when I try to burn it to a CD it tells me that I can only do it if I burn it as an audio CD, and if I choose that it tells me that I don’t have burning software.
So apparently I can only listen to this music that I bought through iTunes on my PC.
Ruskinator, you need to convert your m4a to an mp3. Instructions are here. It’s pretty simple.
With regards to burning an audio CD, instructions are here. I don’t know why you’re having problems, it’s more or less select a playlist and hit burn. Are you not burning the CD using iTunes?
The relevant instructions are:
12.Drag the songs you want to include on the audio CD to the new playlist.
13.In the playlist, drag the songs so they are ordered according to how you want to hear them when they’re played back. The approximate total time of the songs in the list is displayed at the bottom of the window. (It does not include the Preference setting for the amount of silence between songs.) Most discs can hold a maximum of 74 minutes of music.
14.Click Burn CD.
Not always, if I don’t go in there all the time and update, there are some that won’t go back like “This American Life” and “Car Talk”. So now it’s a chore that doesn’t need to be there.
While I don’t expect Itunes to burn down my house, I do hate that any time my computer is turned on, Itunes is running. Go ahead, see what processes are running. Shut off all of the Itunes and Safari related ones. Now wait about an hour, and at least one of them will be running again. Even though I don’t have anything currently connected to my computer that requires Itunes.
If you don’t want your iPad2, just send it to me.
If you have asked for itunes to do anything on its own (like automatically download podcasts or be the default player for certain types of files or launch when an iPhone is conntected), then ituneshelper.exe is always going to be running in the background listening for queues. You can shut the processes down, but you are probably going to break some of the “helper” functionality that you expect. Here’s a list of them. I just checked my task manager and I only have ituneshelper.exe running, consuming zero CPU and 4 MB of RAM.
But just because ituneshelper.exe is running it does not mean that the iTunes application is running.