Seriously, what should have taken 10 minutes just took 45 because the program is such a 12-teated sow of a memory hog that everything has a delay. Dragging and dropping to an iPod has a delay. Adding music to your library has a delay. Hell, scrolling down and playing songs have delays. If I didn’t have an iPod I’d never in a million years open this festering pile of let’s-devote-memory-to-collecting-data-about-our-users-so-we-can-sell-them-shit-instead-of-streamlining-an-actual-MUSIC-PLAYER program.
ok… breathe. I’m off on a trip, which is why I’m changing out all my music on my shuffle. I’m sure having Vista doesn’t help the situation, either. Microsoft and the iTunes division of Apple should team up to create Uber-shit, the program that has more features than god and jesus christ (heh, where’s magellan01 when you need him?) combined, but you’ll never be able to access any of them because you computer will lock up as soon as you boot the program. Which will be during startup. And you won’t be able to remove it.
I’m gonna go get a tatt that says “Winampz 4 Lyfez”
And before anyone says I need a new system, somehow I think that a 2 gig dual core should be able to run a music program without a 5 second lag time for the most basic of processes. And fuck Vista, too.
iTunes is ridiculously bulky (what’s it now, 80 megs to download?), but I haven’t noticed what you’re talking about, especially with the shuffle. Of course, I avoided Vista like the plague.
I can tell you one thing. Itunes 7.7 did two terrible and unreversable things to my ipod, once I foolishly upgraded from 7.6
#1 it made it so that it no longer works in disk mode with Firewire. I had to borrow my roommate’s USB cable just to use it anymore, and no matter what I can’t get my Firewire cable to do anything except charge.
#2 For some insane reason, whenever I opened 7.7, it would freeze for about 5 minutes before mounting my ipod. I was fortunately able to find a copy of 7.6 to reinstall which made things back to normal…of course fucking Apple doesn’t offer ANY older versions to download, so you’re always stuck with the latest buggy version unless you know about oldversion.com
I bought all my files, totally and completely legitimately. And I transferred them to a new computer.
And then I spent some very long, very very frustrating hours trying to a) make the frakking thing work faster, b) convince the frakking thing I had bought all my stuff on iTunes, really, no I swear.
By the end I wanted to put my monitor through the wall. iTunes is a piece of horse dung.
Like any other program, iTunes has its good and bad points, but I have never seen anything like you describe. I run it on a wide variety of Macs (including an original old Mac Mini with 512MB of RAM), and on two Windows machines (both older systems: one with WinXP and one with Win2000). The Mac systems run it far better, but I’ve had no delay issues on the Windows machines at all.
Perhaps Vista broke it? You know the Microsoft motto: “It ain’t ready to ship until the competitors’ products don’t work right on it.”
This is iPod myth #1. You do NOT have to use iTunes to use an iPod. We went through this at length in another thread within the last couple of weeks.
I’m in full agreement here. I upgraded my desktop about a year ago, but before that it was a 700-ish MHz Pentium III with 386 M of ram. There is no reason that a damn mp3 player should bring that computer to its knees. After all, Winamp worked fine. The install also managed to wreck random portions of Windows on two different computers, which, let’s be honest, is probably a feature of iTunes, not a bug*. At some point Winamp started supporting the iPod, which you can imagine made me quite happy. Then Apple, on at least two occasions, acted to break compatibility with third party programs, though these didn’t affect me. Eventually I just installed Rockbox on my iPod and I’ve been happily not dealing with Apple’s software since.
And while we’re at it let’s not forget Quicktime, another piece of software that I am quite happy to not be using.
*To be fair, it did fix a broken .Net installation at one point, which was pretty cool. Though I soon had to reinstall Windows due to the aforementioned random wrecking.
I don’t use iTunes for my Shuffle or my 80 GB iPod. I’m a happy woman. I use a Winamp plugin for the iPod and a Python script for the Shuffle. Yay for brilliant coders who code freeware!
I just loaded iTunes for the first time, and now - somehow - IE is messed up. It’s decided that Quicktime should run all audio & video on my system. Fuck iPods, iTunes, Apple, and especially Quicktime. Goddamn Macs are all pieces of shit. If it wasn’t for the goddamn Macs we would have this abomination of an OS called Windows, either. We’d have screaming machines running DOS 25.4 or something. Fuck.
Indeed. If you all hate iTunes that much, I suggest you invest 10 minutes on google looking for “Itunes alternative” or suchlike. There are dozens of pieces of software out there, although you might be a bit limited in support for the very latest models.
I like it. Almost any song I want right now for 99¢? That’s chump change, man. The first 45 I bought in *1971 cost me a dollar. Shit, that’s like 37 years ago…
[sup]*It was ‘Lookin’ out My Back Door’.[/sup]
Yeah, I still can’t use iTunes to listen to music and load Internet pages at the same time without the music skipping and hiccupping. I’ve tried every suggestion offered over the last year with still no success. Now I just hook my computer speakers directly into my iPod and bypass iTunes and my computer entirely. It’s not the solution I was looking for but at least I can listen to music while surfing without flying into a frustrated rage.
It’s funny to me how everybody lauds Apple for their design ability, but boy, did they do some howlingly bad ones too. Like that clusterfuck when the IPhone3G was released, and the users couldn’t make a phone call until the phone activated via the iTunes server. That’s crazy stupid.
If MicroSoft designed a phone that couldn’t make calls until it contacted the Napster music store, that would be the subject of much deserved ridicule.
I and my husband have used iTunes on my last three laptops (bought, running XP), our last three desktops (constructed ourselves, XP and Vista), and my husband’s last three laptops (bought, XP and Mac). None have ever had a problem with lag, interfering with the system, crashes, IE or Firefox, or upgrades to any or all of the above. I don’t know what the hell you guys are doing to your systems to cause those things.
I quit using Itunes when I realized that the low bit rate of the songs made for some crappy sounding music. It may have improved since then but I’m already converted over to other MP3 sellers, rip my CDs at CD quality bit rates and very happily use my 8 GB Sandisk that cost about 1/3 as much as the same sized iShit device.
I use iTunes to organize everything and load my iPods, but I almost never buy anything from the iTunes Music Store these days. After being so gung-ho about DRM free music a while back, Apple seems to have given up recently. Almost nothing I’ve wanted to buy lately has been “iTunes Plus” stuff.
So I now get everything from Amazon. Their entire catalog is DRM free and higher quality 256KB MP3s. Their downloader even tosses songs I buy into my iTunes library after it downloads ‘em. Piece o’ cake. If iTunes ever catches back up I’ll download from them again, but in the meantime, it’s all Amazon all the time for me.
I suffer through using iTunes once every other month when I change my songs on my Nano. Every time I end up swearing, banging on the table, and threatening to eat a Golden Delicious in front of the thing.
chopchop “You see?!?! You see what I can do to your brothers?! Now BEHAVE!”
You’d think of after a few years of working with iTunes I’d have come to love it by now. Instead, it has pushed me over the edge and convinced me that I hate Apple more than Microsoft.
I like iTunes. I like using the store; it’s far too easy to spend $20 on a whim. The games are fun, and it’s a great way to collect stand-up acts to listen to.
But Apple, in their infinite wisdom, has made it so that iTunes, since version 7, will not run on anything but XP SP2 or Vista. I have Win2K. I’m not even sure the computer would survive having XP on it. So I went looking for earlier versions and managed to get, like, version 5 to install on my computer. Great…except I fear to update the iPod software and I’m completely unable to use the store, which absolutely will not work without the latest version. So what’s the point?
Probably time to look into an alternative, presuming I can get Audible’s download manager to work without iTunes…
I use iTunes to organize my music and load it into my iPod. It’s very useful for that. But I use foobar to just listen to music. iTunes is a serious memory hog on my XP computer.
