Thank you. That does change the way I feel about Apple’s Photos. But I’ll still keep my pics organized manually, and open them in Preview to, well, preview them. That does have some handy color correction/contrast/sharpness tools (which some Mac users don’t realize), but I keep using Photoshop* due to its Industrial-Strength Pixel Pushin’™.
*Want to talk “Doing things manually”? I’m using Adobe CS6… NOT paying Adobe every month to let me borrow “their” Creative Cloud apps.
macOS Catalina is where iTunes splits into 3 apps, and there’s now some real information.
So, much as I hate to dampen the horror and outrage, it turns out that your media devices are not obsolete, you are not forced to use iCloud, and my “insane” assumption that no functionality has been lost may be correct. Of course, in order for all this to work seamlessly you will need a quick outpatient operation to install the new iControl device that sits under your skin just behind your right ear. It looked pretty small in the presentation, I think it will be barely noticeable.
Thank you very much, Beowulff and zbuzz
So, sort of like it is already on your iPhone, with one app for Music, one app for TV/movies, one app for podcasts.
Just drag the ones you want to the desktop. Viola!—a copy.
Uh… You may have missed several details.
You can get an iPod battery replaced; it’s a fairly inexpensive fix and there’s batteries available on ebay and etc. I’ve replaced the battery in my ancient iPhone and even more ancient iPod over the last couple of years. You can find a local provider or you can even do it yourself or get a technically inclined friend to replace it for you. The tools to pry out the old battery and install the new one are provided along with the battery itself. I’ve been told you will also need a hair dryer to melt the glue used to affix the batteries in place.
Apple is generally no help at all with legacy devices but there are alternatives. I am blessed that I have a friend who is super great at all this stuff; he took care of everything for me and my old stuff still lives. When you shop for batteries be sure you’re getting the correct one for your device, there’s a gazillion different ones out there. Hope this helps.
Jenny
your humble TubaDiva
Administrator
Whatever they do probably won’t be worse than iTunes. I’ve been through 2 iPods and had to live with that mess. I was very happy to move all my music to a 64GB SDcard in my phone.
I loved iTunes when it first came out, so much that it was the primary reason I bought Apple stock when it was like $5. (Sold it at $30. Argh!) However, it’s become unnecessarily confusing. So I’m glad that they’re splitting the features into separate apps.
I hope the new music app will let me purchase music from my phone again. Now whenever I search for something on my phone, it wants me to buy Apple Music for $9.99/month. When I decline to do that, it ends the search. You can still purchase music the old fashioned way, but they’ve made it very difficult.
I get that streaming music might be appealing to youngsters, but I have no interest in paying $120/year to listen to music that I’ve paid thousands of dollars to purchase, one song or album at a time.
It sounds like you’re doing your searches in the Music app (which will end with asking you to join Apple Music), not the iTunes Store app itself. You can still purchase individual songs when searching the iTunes Store app.
It does…thank you! I tend to get a little intimidated by electronics when I can’t see the screws or clips that hold it together.
I’m neither a “youngster” nor an oldster (I’m in my forties), but for me it’s simple math. I listen to not only thousands (probably tens of thousands) of older tracks, but hundreds of new ones each year. $120 is far less than I’d pay to buy all of them.
Or replaces it with a more modern watered-down application that looks suspiciously like a mobile app and has traded many of the features we like for new and improved social media enhancements.
I was stung by this with Aperture/Photos. Before Photos, there were two photos applications: iPhoto and Aperture. Aperture was a pro app, a direct competitor to Lightroom; it was a much better app than Lightroom IMHO. Indeed, Lightroom was modeled after Aperture.
I was a diehard Aperture user, relying on it to manage photo shoots of hundreds of shots, raw editing, using plugins such as SilverFX for B&W, doing color management, and so on. It was a perfect app for pro and semi-pro users.
Then Apple said it was discontinuing Aperture, “but we have an amazing new Photos app to replace it!!!111!”
All of the finesse and pro features of Aperture are gone. Now you can go in and “like” a photo, but can’t even do something as simple as give them star ratings to assist in culling. I ended up moving to Lightroom.
Ugh.
[/rant]
iTunes is a bloated mess that had far too many things packed into it.
How do you explain to your mom why she needs to use an app called “iTunes” to manage an iPhone or iPad even if she don’t have any music? Thankfully that dependency has faded in recent years, but the app is still bloated.
I’m glad they are splitting it apart. I just hope they don’t do the Aperture/Photos trick with folks.
I’m nearly sure they will.
I’m considering disconnecting my iTunes computer from the internet, lest Apple force an unasked for and unwanted update on me. Or another album I don’t want, thank you very much not Mr Bono.
Will existing installations quit working? Could users still use it to back up their iPhones locally?
A couple of years back, I sprung for the fee for iTunes Match - because I had a fair bit of music purchased from Apple that had DRM on it, and this would strip the DRM.
Some of my music never converted, for some reason. Nothing I listen to all that often, but I wonder if I’ll be able to get to them if iTunes goes away.
My beef with iTunes is that they keep reorganizing it and making it harder to use. Like I’d attach my iPod (an aging Touch) and try to change the settings for which podcasts etc. I wanted to sync, and simply clicking on the device icon did nothing (there was some other, non-obvious way to do it). And their look-and-feel took a definite turn for the worse.
That said, it was frankly nice to have everything in one app. Now, I presume I’d have to do all 3 tasks separately or something.
Interestingly, they have an Apple Music app for Android (I don’t have an iPhone). Supposedly it sucks.
Oh, and I want a decent podcasting app for Android. The ones I’ve found have such colossally non-intuitive interfaces that I can’t find anything.
So will Amazon be the only place where you can buy single tracks any more?
BUT: if you don’t choose to continue doing that, why should you lose access to the ones you’ve already bought (which is something I keep worrying about).
This bears out my longstanding preference for having physical media versus “buying” something stored on the cloud. The vendor can take it away or change the terms. I doubt I’ve spent as much as 100 dollars on single-song purchases in the 14 years I’ve been using an iPod. I’d rather buy the CD and rip it into iTunes (and then toss the CD in a large trunkful of them in the cellar; unlike one former coworker I do NOT give it away). Similarly with ebooks… let’s just say I have them backed up in a way that Amazon and B&N can’t take away from me.
BUT: if you don’t choose to continue doing that, why should you lose access to the ones you’ve already bought (which is something I keep worrying about).
This bears out my longstanding preference for having physical media versus “buying” something stored on the cloud. The vendor can take it away or change the terms. I doubt I’ve spent as much as 100 dollars on single-song purchases in the 14 years I’ve been using an iPod. I’d rather buy the CD and rip it into iTunes (and then toss the CD in a large trunkful of them in the cellar; unlike one former coworker I do NOT give it away). Similarly with ebooks… let’s just say I have them backed up in a way that Amazon and B&N can’t take away from me.
The “subscribe for 10 bucks a month” is a pattern that a LOT of software vendors are taking. Quicken is no longer a “buy once, use forever” thing. 1Password strongly pushes you to subscribe to a plan that will charge you 5 bucks a month (or whatever) FOREVER. Supposedly they offer better services for that, like upgrades, and storing your info on their cloud (um, Agilebits, no thank you). In the case of 1Password there’s still a way to make a one-time license purchase (you have to figure out how to get it to sync to your other devices on your own; they don’t make it easy). I had to do a fair bit of digging to find out how though. In a year or so of owning that license, I’ll have spent less than the monthly fee.
Then there was a utility from AVG that scans your PC for things like duplicate files, farkled registry entries etc. I’d happily buy it for 50-75 - but that’s NOT an option; I’d have to pay something like 50 a year forever, even if I never upgraded anything.
It’s all part of “software as a service”. They claim “it’s much cheaper to get started, you don’t have the big upfront expense” but really, it’s a way of guaranteeing a revenue stream forever. I’m stick with it with Quicken, as there’s no good competition there. I’m NOT gonna shell that out for that PC utility.
Things like Apple Music subscriptions, Amazon’s music subscription, Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited are in the same vein. If you listen to a LOT of different types of music, nearly constantly, and are always on the lookout for lots of new stuff, they might make sense… but I’d bet that for most people, it’s a poor economic bet. I’m quite sure I wouldn’t spend 120 dollars a year on music that goes away after the year - I’ve certainly spent more on that purchasing CDs but then I own them forever. Amazon’s book subscription is a bad idea all around: all the books you could possibly want to read, for one small fee, as long as you don’t care to read anything popular or interesting (the selection sucks).
If they just split the app, I’ll be happy, as I’ve never used anything about it other than music, so from my perspective, it has all this other stuff.
I think I’ll hide all my music when i upgrade, though. I never invested in DRM’d music, assuming that at some point if lose it and be pissed. So I have stuff I’ve ripped from CDs, created myself, or purchased from Amazon. I assume that if i hide it offline, I’ll be able to reload it if the upgrade doesn’t go smoothly.
Don’t you have a backup?
You should.
Oh, there’s no “might”. Just last week, I made a “Best of 2017” playlist, starting with around a thousand tracks and narrowing it down to the 50 I liked best. Without Apple Music for ten bucks a month (actually $15 as we use the Family subscription), I would have had to, what, spend $1,000 on buying tracks only to discard 95% of them? No thanks.