Sadly, I think if Microsoft ever designed an own-branded phone it probably wouldn’t make calls or receive text messages until you had typed in a 137-digit activation code that you could only obtain by phoning an activation centre in India to give them your details, whereupon they would SMS the code to you.
I hate to come across as an Apple apologist, because I know their products have flaws, but a lot of these complaints just don’t make sense.
It’s been a while since I installed iTunes & QuickTime on Windows, but I seem to remember having the option to either manually assign filetypes. And it’s pretty easy to change which application is assigned to which filetypes. Last time I installed WinAmp, it took over a bunch of filetypes I didn’t want it to own. Adobe Creative Suite did the same thing. For that matter, so did Firefox.
Have you ever purchased a phone that didn’t require activation? All of mine have. The day the 3G was released, the activation servers went down. Annoying? Yes. Perhaps poor planning for heavy load that day? Perhaps. Crazy stupid? No.
Huh? You can load songs at a variety of bitrates into iTunes. I’ve been using it since shortly after it came out, and I’ve never found a high-bitrate song it wouldn’t play.
When I used itunes (remember I said a while back) all of the songs I purchased from itunes came off at something like 96 or 128. Maybe that was a setting I didn’t know I could adjust but combine that with the DRM situation I was more than happy to find another way to rip my CDs and buy online music.
You don’t need to apologize. 1 zillion ipod users seem to support your preference.
I loathe iTunes. If you never buy anything through the iTunes store (and I never do), then this POS boat anchor has nothing good for you. Slow, bloated, badly-written, and an oft-times buggy UI to boot.
Case in point: did you know the little star ratings widget won’t render properly in Windows 2000 if your OpenGL drivers aren’t up to snuff? Why do they need OpenGL to render small pre-rendered star icons?! And try digging up this morsel in their technical support. This, alone, drove me nuts until I figured it out.
I also can’t stand the way it hides away when it’s not being used, ready to jump up and say “boo” as soon as you plug in your iPod (or any other USB device with music on it.) Sadly, when I say it jumps up to say “boo”, what I really mean is that it looks up at you over its newspaper, sets it down next to its easy chair with an annoyed sigh, slowly creaks to a standing position while picking up its cane, slowly hobbles over to you, and with a little hand flourish it screws up its face and pops out its eyes and goes “boo”, which leaves little flecks of iTunes spittle across your glasses. Of course, nothing else of note can happen while it’s doing this - it’s convinced the OS that this action so important that nothing else can happen until he’s done. Sadly, you and it both realize that you don’t want to load iTunes, you were really just trying to copy some non-music files onto the iPod, but the ceremony must be performed.
And why, exactly, is it important for me to see animated 3-d album covers whizzing across my screen while I’m listening to music? Seriously, how is this useful, or even entertaining? It’s something that Dilbert’s pointy-haired boss would insist on putting in, after the developers talked him down from insisting upon Visual ObjectiveCobol v2.0 (he likes the purple box the CD comes in, you see, and finds the Farsi documentation soothing.)
There are plenty of free and inexpensive media management apps out there to replace iTunes with. I use MediaMonkey, personally - my only gripe is that it doesn’t handle video but that’s not a deal-breaker for me. (I can upload video if I really need to, using Floola, without interfering with the rest of the iPod’s configuration.)
The vast majority of complaints about iTunes seem to come from either misunderstandings or not having the options set up right. Unfortunately, I haven’t found the “run really slowly on Windows” checkbox, and I’m not sure why it’s checked on some systems and not on others.
The OP was about iTunes (the program), not the iTunes store. You can use iTunes without ever buying a song or video from the store, you know. I doubt if more than 3 or 4% of my music library came from the iTunes store.
There’s a setting that turns all of this off (except maybe the flecks of iTunes spittle). You can prevent iTunes from starting up when you plug in an iPod, and take away its ownership of pretty much all of the filetypes.
(Nice description, though. Well done!)
Yeah. Even after I clicked that checkbox, it would still freeze my workstation when I plugged in a thumbdrive. I ended up having to use ProcessExplorer to find both (yes, two :rolleyes: ) background processes, killed them, and then used HijackThis to yank them out of the registry so they wouldn’t load on bootup. IOW, I had to treat iTunes as though it were malware.
When the background processes snuck back in after an update, I removed all Apple-installed software and never looked back. Thankfully, its shadow never darkened my new laptop.
Consider yourself lucky.
I had a 2nd gen iPod (before all them fancy color screens the kids are on about these days, why the ungrateful little…) the one with the battery issues. Not only that, but damned if iTunes didn’t upgrade my firmware and render that sleek new music player into a shiny, white hunk of plastic and metal, fit for holding papers on my desk in a windstorm.
iTunes is a digital mishigoss of biblical proportions.
I capitulated once again to the Man from Redmond, bought the Zune and have NEVER looked back. Damned fine piece of machinery it is, and with the new player update, it’s as simple as simple gets to deal with your music, and, oddly enough, the support rocks.
Most media programs (I’ve never had that problem with Firefox) will take over associations with most common filetypes if you go with the default settings. Don’t click ‘Okay’ mindlessly–it will always ask you if you want it to do this at some point (at least in my experience) and it’s the perfect time to decide what you do and don’t want it associated with, rather than trying to sort through menu options later on.
It isn’t activation in general, but having to activate it for phone calls via a music server that’s crazy stupid. A single point of failure that will prevent such disparate functions from working is awful, awful design.
It’s not that it’s a “music server” per se. Apple has this big ol’ server farm that handles all kinds of stuff (the store, serving music, serving video…), and they put it to work handling iPhone activations, too.
Don’t think of it as a music server handling phone activation. Think of it as the company’s entire Internet presence in one spot (which, of course, brings us back to your “single point of failure” issue).
Out of curiosity, do companies like Adobe and Microsoft handle their product registration on dedicated servers that do nothing else, or is it on the same server farm that handles their Web sites, product downloads, and so on?
Good question. I imagine it’s different for each company. Perhaps the bigger companies can afford more servers and hence are more likely to have systems dedicated to individual tasks? Obviously, that’s just a guess, hopefully somebody who knows for sure about specific companies maybe can tell us.
Well, since Apple has at least $15 billion in cash on hand, enough to buy GM, they could have afforded to buy a bit more connectivity and a few more servers, right? The question is… did they?
What, you think Apple saved up all that money by spending it? No no no no - they made all that money by starting a religion.
I had to install iTunes today. I finally got the music recognized. I can’t get incorrect album art to delete or be replaced. I gave up after 30 minutes. I hate the play list interface. I really hate having to load the piece of shit Quick Time on my system at all, and you can’t have the iTunes player without it. :mad:
You have to use the “Info” command and replace the art manually.
I used to have an iPod, and I fucking hated iTunes. For one thing, it wouldn’t even run properly on my computer; I ended up having to go to net cafés and run it there, should I ever, you know, wish to add songs to my device.
When the iPod finally died, I got an el-cheapo MP3 player which, wonder of wonders, actually allows you to put songs onto it by copying them onto its drive, with no special software (it acts as a USB key, more or less). It also allows you to listen to FM radio, record radio or voice, and even – drum roll – operates on standard, removable batteries. And it was cheaper.
Is there some reason people like the iPod?
I have used the manual add options. I have used the directions in help. It doesn’t function correctly. It says it changes it and wahla it’s back to either the blank or wrong artwork again depending which one I’m working on. Where’s the hair pulling smiley or head banging one when you need it? I always have this mental image of someone banging their head on their desk and getting a paper holder spike in the forehead.
Well then please excuse the fuck out of me for confusing Itunes with Itunes.
So to summarise, a piece of software used by millions and millions of people has succeeded in pissing of a great number of people, while another great number of people (possibly the majority, although no numbers exist to demonstrate this) thinks it’s just fine and wonder what the fury is about.
It’s good to know that some things never change. Theres another Pit thread on the go about Word 2007, but we don’t seem to have had any rants about internet browsers or operating systems for a while. Anyone have a good Firefox 3 or IE 7 rant they want to air?
vi vs. emacs, anyone?