[QUOTE=Subway Prophet]
I never called Apple the antichrist. And I hardly love Microsoft.
I just can’t stand Apple fanboyism. Enough people dislike Windows such that the people who do like MS products tend to have very good reasons for doing so.
[/QUOTE]
You’re right, you didn’t; I branched off into hyperbole.
Perhaps you might use a less disparaging term than “fanboy” simply because someone likes Apple computers, Apple products, or iTunes, and you disagree.
[QUOTE=BellRungBookShut-CandleSnuffed]
Anyone else think iTunes is the biggest piece of #@Q&(*$&?
[/QUOTE]
Nope.
[QUOTE=Turek]
You’re right, you didn’t; I branched off into hyperbole.
Perhaps you might use a less disparaging term than “fanboy” simply because someone likes Apple computers, Apple products, or iTunes, and you disagree.
[/QUOTE]
Fair enough. I’m sure there are plenty of people who have good, legitimate reasons to appreciate iTunes.
But fanboys exist. I know plenty of Apple devotees who have no rational reason to prefer one over the other.
The school network I admin purchased a dozen of them over my objections, even though they were twice as expensive as comparable Windows boxes, and even though our Microsoft agreement gives us free tech support, and even though they came with no centralized management tools, and even though our existing Windows workstations had all the software that they wanted to buy the Macs for.
It’s like their brains shut off when I showed them that we already had Adobe Photoshop and Premiere on the Windows boxes, because the reason I got when the Powerbooks arrived was that… they needed to be able to run the Adobe software.
:smack:
My brother is mighty proud of his Mac laptop, largely because of Expose and other eye candy. He does nothing with his Mac that can’t be done in any other OS.
Him: “Hey bro, can your laptop do this? poof Neat, huh?”
Me: “Yeah, ok, when I dual-boot into Ubuntu I can make it do that… and if that’s the only reason you dropped nearly 4 figures on a laptop, then you were ripped off.”
Don’t get me wrong. I have two (used) Macs at home. I like OS X. I like having a CLI, and I like the stability that a BSD kernel gets you. It’s a huge improvement over the mess that was OS 9. I’m glad they got rid of the 1-button mouse.
Apple makes good hardware, and in general, if you use their software exactly the way they want you to use it, they make good software. But it’s way overpriced, and IMHO not very well-tested. They certainly missed out a lot of common corner cases when testing iTunes for Windows.
[QUOTE=Really Not All That Bright]
Why can’t you copy directly to an iPod?
[/QUOTE]
Oh, you can; it just won’t play the files as songs, just store them as files. If you want it to actually play the songs, you must add them to the playlist via iTunes. Or at least this was how it worked back when I had an iPod.
[QUOTE=Subway Prophet]
My brother is mighty proud of his Mac laptop, largely because of Expose and other eye candy. He does nothing with his Mac that can’t be done in any other OS.
[/QUOTE]
Sorry to point this out, but this is moronic. A Mac is just a computer. One can pretty much do any sort of computations on any computer. Just like I can drive a BMW to work or a Le Car.
The reason the Mac is better is because it makes a user more productive. Just the immunity to all the current Windows malware must be worth a 20% productivity boost alone.
Of course, YMMW, I’m sure.
I’ve noticed iTunes slowing down my computers (PC at home, Mac at work), too. Neither are particularly old or slow. I did notice (on my PC - never checked my Mac) that the album artwork folder in the iTunes main folder was fucking huge - I think the program automatically downloads large image files for the covers even though nobody needs anything so big when all you see is a miniature icon on the display in the first place. I haven’t tried it, but maybe turning off the cover view or disabling the artwork entirely would cause less of a drag on system resources when running iTunes?
I don’t have a horse in this race. I think iTunes is a bloated piece of shit, but then I also think Windows Media Player is a bloated piece of shit. Call it a draw.
Therefore, I thought I’d chime in and offer some alternatives to the iTunes software because, although a lot of people have said that there are alternatives, not many of them have actually given examples.
Here’s a few:[ul][li]For the geeky, look no further than Foobar2000 with the iPod manager plugin. This is my personal preference. Foobar is an awesome, lightweight, highly configurable music player with powerful library management and tagging capabilities. Be warned, though, it takes a lot of tweaking to maximize its capabilities.[/li][li]If tweaking isn’t your thing, you could try Mediamonkey which is a very good all-in-one media player/library mgr/ipod sync prog. Heavy(ish) on the resources but nowhere near as bad as iTunes.[/li][li]If you don’t want another stand-alone music player/mgr program and just want to sync your ipod, try Yamipod, a good bare-bones ipod mgr.[/ul][/li]
[QUOTE=Jayn_Newell]
You say that like it’s gotten better. I installed it again a while ago (I know, I know, but when you have a .rm file you don’t have many options) and it took me a while to find the damn player beneath all the sponsorship crap and advertisements.
[/QUOTE]
Real Alternative is your friend. Also, for those who want to play Quicktime but don’t want to install iTunes, go for Quicktime Alternative. Both come packaged with the excellent Media Player Classic player, which beats the hell out of Windows Media Player.
[QUOTE=amarinth]
I haven’t put iTunes on my new machine - I probably will. I have a lot of music I bought there, years ago, that I still like and want to hear again. But I really hate dealing with iTunes.
[/QUOTE]
In that case, I recommend you fire up iTunes on your old machines, use it to burn CDs of your DRM’d songs, and then load those songs into the music library management tool of your choice on the new computer. It really is that simple to strip the DRM using iTunes.
[QUOTE=Subway Prophet]
iTunes belongs in the 90% of the field that is utter crap. A lot of people (maybe the majority, as you say) don’t have a problem with it because seeking out the 10% of non-crap is a bit of work..
[/QUOTE]
The mere fact that something is shiny doesn’t make it crap. And, obviously, everyone’s definition of crap is different. Personally, I like the way iTunes handles playlists, for example. I have dozens of them, both ordinary and “smart,” and the smart playlists have wonderfully complex boolean logic that determines which songs go in them. I use it to adjust levels and start/stop points (to take intros and applause out of live music, for example), and I have lots of metadata attached. It is, after all, a music library manager, and it does a marvelous job of managing my music library. I can find things very fast and organize them in no time flat.
It does exactly, precisely what I need it for, and has all the tech features I need. The fact that it’s shiny and includes useless stuff I don’t need doesn’t bother me a bit.
[QUOTE=matt_mcl]
Oh, you can; it just won’t play the files as songs, just store them as files. If you want it to actually play the songs, you must add them to the playlist via iTunes. Or at least this was how it worked back when I had an iPod.
[/QUOTE]
If you do the copy using Windows Explorer or Mac Finder, that’s true. There are 3rd party tools that let you copy music on without using iTunes, though.
[QUOTE=beowulff]
I would suspect that the Windows user space is big enough that it’s impossible to test every combination of Hardware and Software. Apple probably shoots for 99%, which leaves millions of possible problems. Look at Vista - Microsoft tested the crap out of it for years, and it was (is?) still a dog.
[/QUOTE]
Oh I think testing for 99% compatibility (presuming they held the players until the software worked) would send the profitability of the iPod, something intensely critical to their consumer operations, right down the dumper
And you can’t really compare the nightmare that is Vista as an OS, to a music program like iTunes. That’s just not accurate.
I think Apple got close enough and sent it on its way. IIRC, they only made and sold these things for the Apple crowd in the first place, but then after the success thought “holy crap, 90% of the working world outside of academia uses PC’s, we’d better make these things try and work with the PC.”
[QUOTE=buttonjockey308]
Oh I think testing for 99% compatibility (presuming they held the players until the software worked) would send the profitability of the iPod, something intensely critical to their consumer operations, right down the dumper
And you can’t really compare the nightmare that is Vista as an OS, to a music program like iTunes. That’s just not accurate.
I think Apple got close enough and sent it on its way. IIRC, they only made and sold these things for the Apple crowd in the first place, but then after the success thought “holy crap, 90% of the working world outside of academia uses PC’s, we’d better make these things try and work with the PC.”
[/QUOTE]
iTunes for Windows has been on the market since October of 2003. I would think that Apple has been pretty serious about fixing any major flaws in it since then. I know from personal experience that Apple’s developers are extremely conscientious about responding to bug reports - I have submitted quite a few, and they get tracked and followed up on religiously.
No, I think iTunes for Windows works well for the vast majority of users - but when you have many hundreds of millions of users (iTunes for Windows downloads exceed 500 Million), even a .1% problem rate translates into big numbers.
[QUOTE=Really Not All That Bright]
I think the issue here is that a program which is (functionally) basically a file manager is 80 meg.
[/QUOTE]
Shocking, isn’t it? But then I’m pretty sure I’ve had driver bundles that size, so go figure. If economical use of resources is that big an issue for you, I suggest you abandon the field of consumer-oriented computing as a dead loss.
[QUOTE=Subway Prophet]
Compared to a good media player, say, Winamp v2.x or v5.0, or the afore-mentioned FooBar, iTunes is a bloated chunk of turd.
[/QUOTE]
Indeed. But unfortunately, none of the good solutions are particularly popular.
[QUOTE=Jayn_Newell]
I installed it again a while ago
[/QUOTE]
<Points and laughs>Ha-ha.
As mentioned, RealAlternative is one option. Not bothering to look at the file is another. Either is prefereable to dealing with RealPlayer.
[QUOTE=InvisibleWombat]
If you do the copy using Windows Explorer or Mac Finder, that’s true. There are 3rd party tools that let you copy music on without using iTunes, though.
[/QUOTE]
Well, the mp3 player I have now allows you to simply copy the music onto the device as if it were a USB key, obviating the need for any special software at all. It’s quite convenient.
[QUOTE=Turek]
You could take this exact sentance, swap the words “Apple” and “Windows” and it would be just as correct. So that hardly makes Apple the antichrist.
[/QUOTE]
Or any better…
What I hate the most is that, even though I tell it over and over that I do not want it to check for updates ever ever again, every few days a new version (plus Quicktime) dialog pops up.
I detest nagware.
And I agree with the previous poster about the album art fickleness. I have tons of bootlegs and rare stuff that iTunes can’t find art for, or grabs the wrong art. The add/delete album art is apparently linked directly to a Magic 8-ball algorithm to determine success or failure if I try and update with my own artwork files.
[QUOTE=Hodge]
Real Alternative is your friend. Also, for those who want to play Quicktime but don’t want to install iTunes, go for Quicktime Alternative. Both come packaged with the excellent Media Player Classic player, which beats the hell out of Windows Media Player.
[/QUOTE]
Thank you! I knew there was another option but didn’t know what it was.
Slaphead, I didn’t know about Real Alternative at the time, and the file was for a school assignment (I still can’t believe they actually encoded the thing as a .rm file, I don’t know what they were thinking) so not looking at the file wasn’t an option. Actually, technically the file could be watched on the school computers, but I couldn’t find a way to plug in my headphones, so I had to watch it on my own machine.
And while I’m thinking about it,
You can get Quicktime without iTunes, but I don’t know if the reverse is true.
Sorry if I missed it upthread, but could someone direct me to the Winamp plugin that allows you to access your iPod?
Oh, and surfing was fun 
I haven’t used iTunes on a PC since I switched to a Mac 3 years ago, but I thought it worked fine then. But I suppose it sucks now for PC. Anyway, those of you looking to downgrade should look here:
Put me down as another iTunes hater, and I’m totally Mac-centric, having been a totally nerded out computer geek since 1986 but never owned a PC.
• I don’t want some app that moves my files around. I’ll store my damn files where I want to store my damn files thank you very much.
• I prefer to have files and playlists which I create as list of files that I want to play. When I MP3ify my songs from already-digital CD tracks, all those silly MP3 tags get attached based on some out-yonder database that has info that other folks have entered, and they don’t always spell band names, album names, etc the same way; and forget stuff like genre. When I digitize my old vinyl or cassette tapes, I type 'em in myself but again they may not match what other folks put. And MP3 files obtained in other ways may also vary. So forget organizing based on MP3 tag metafile content. Just let me deal with files as files thank you very much.
• Yeah it’s bloated. And it takes up too much screen real estate. Do not like the interface at all.
• I don’t like the whole You Using a Mac, Well Gee You Do Of Course Use iTunes (and iPhoto and Preview and Apple Mail and iCal and Safari and so on) bullshit. I would not like the Microsoft version of that either. Excuse me, but I am an independent computer user. I will pick my MP3 player of choice, my email app of choice, my PDF viewer of choice, etc, and that’s up to me, not the folks who make my operating system thank you very much.
• If I say I do not choose to Software-Update my copy of iTunes, then dammit don’t ask me again.
I’m not particularly fond of iTunes either, but I live with it because I, too, remember 1999-era RealPlayer.
iTunes does do one thing that drives me crazy: sometimes it stops downloading my podcasts because I haven’t listened to any in a while. Stop that! If I want you to stop downloading something, I will tell you! At least, you could announce that you want to stop downloading them instead of saying, “Oh yeah, I stopped downloading them a while ago and didn’t mention it,” when I go to, you know, actually listen to the podcasts?
[QUOTE=Sunspace]
iTunes does do one thing that drives me crazy: sometimes it stops downloading my podcasts because I haven’t listened to any in a while.
[/QUOTE]
Thank you! I could not figure out why my podcasts were not downloading automatically, but I hadn’t put a lot of time into figuring it out, because, well, I haven’t been listening to them very much. You just saved me the trouble. Again, thanks!