I am fed up with useless/annoying/disruptive/sneaky “upgrades” to my Itunes music library. I have a useful, clean, simple way to upload music into the library, which continually gets disrupted by sneaky changes sent down the pipeline by the tech gnomes.
Sometimes I am greeted with multipage announcements/disclaimers in the Itunes store which interrupt whatever buying I attempt to do (not that I buy much from them anymore) and which no one has the time to read in detail unless they have no life. More often, the techies automatically “upgrade” the service and you have no idea anything has happened until you run head-on into problems.
Just recently all the non-Itunes albums I’ve been uploading started to take up twice the space on the Pod as usual. Instead of .04-05 GB per album, it’s double that. And all the songs I upload are now showing up in the library in alphabetical order instead of the order in which I load them, which happens to be in the order they appear on the album. I also used to be able to input all the song and album information and go right on to make AAC copies, but now as soon as I put in the info the album disappears from the page I was working on and I have to search to find it again.
Mrs. J. solved the double space-usage mystery - Itunes decided (apparently in advance of their own songs being made available at 256 bps) to switch my Preferences to 256 bps for everything goddamn thing I input, without telling me.* As to the other stuff, I may hever be able to return it to the way it was.
So - to you sneaky, ratty, who-gives-a-shit-about-keeping-the-customer-informed-of-what-changes-we-make clueless tech dimwits at Itunes: Is it too freaking much to ask that you inform people of major changes when you make them and give people workarounds if they don’t want the hassle of dealing with them?
And oh yes, bite me.
That is all.
*If I want the goddamn higher bit rate, I will use it on a selective basis. I know there are people who claim they hear an enormous difference between 256 and 128 and whoopee for them, but I do fine with the horribly degraded stuff I listen to now with my aging, rock-blasted, inner ear hair cell-deprived hearing.
Sounds like they hired some AOL rejects. I was on AOL for a few years. The reason I quit was because every time I turned around, AOL was doing some mandatory upgrade or other. Never mind that I had signed off because I wanted to use the phone for some other reason, AOL was SURE that I wouldn’t mind this mandatory upgrade, or the time it took. Yeah, I was on dialup. This was in the 90s. I think that techs sometimes lose sight of the fact that not everyone wants the most elegant solution…we just want to be able to use our technology in a way we’re comfortable with, and don’t fix it if it ain’t broke.
I can feel your pain about the disclaimers, but on the other hand, the world is full of rules lawyers who are just itching to find a loophole in something.
Well yes - but there are two simple things they could do to ease this process.
First, they could have a box appear which summarizes any changes made since the last time you bought something, instead of making you go through page after page of legalese to find whatever it is they have altered. For all I know there is some minutiae in the new agreement that authorizes trench coat-clad Inspektors to come to your house and go through your music for copyright violations, or mandates that you tithe 10% of your income to a secret Apple account. It makes you nervous.
Since these new buyer-seller agreements pop up when you’re trying to buy a song, it would also be neat if, when you’ve agreed to their terms, they actually let you complete the transaction instead of having to start the process all over again.
I haven’t downloaded the latest version of iTunes in months now (despite nagging from Apple) because every time I do, it includes a new version of QuickTime, which I loathe. I especially loathe that it insists on resetting my playback preferences so QuickTime is the default player for all sorts of media without asking me permission to make the change first.
Changing my settings without asking is, to me, a good description of virus-like behavior. I’m sure there’s something buried in that user agreement that allows Apple to do this, but as the OP said, who has time (or inclination) to burrow through all that legalese?
This part of why I loathe OS X so much. Sure itunes is a separate software package, but it uses the same control freak “my way or else” mindset that OS X is laced with. By “think different” they mean suck steve job’s cock and do things exactly how you think he thinks you should. If you have your own ideas about which media player to use then fuck you.
iTunes, somehow, now manages to disconnect my wireless connection while I’m downloading new podcasts. Worse yet, it cannot detect any wireless networks afterwards and I must reboot. No, I don’t know how this happens; I took over my husband’s old laptop, deleted his old iTunes, and downloaded the newest one. Sometimes I can get lucky enough and get a few downloaded before the connection drops. This is the only thing that kills my wireless connection - I can play World of Warcraft online and have multiple browser windows going in the background, and it works fine. Fire up iTunes and try to get a podcast, and bam, soon I’ll have to reboot the laptop. Between the two of us we’ve had iTunes running on at least 6 laptops (including this one!) with wireless and never seen this problem.
Hey, I can’t sync my Ipod with my new computer cause it says I’ve reached my 5 computer limit…since I’ve never owned 5 computers and never plugged my pod into anything else I’m wondering how that’s possible.
One more unsatisfied paying customer treated like a criminal.
The new version doesn’t seem to recognize artist tags in podcasts anymore. My “radio station” at work is Hype Machine, and without artist tags, it doesn’t get scrobbled.
I got a semihelpful but not exactly candid response from Itunes, suggesting I look up tutorials which presumably will help fix what they messed up. They acknowledge upping the bit rate to 256 bps so that we could take advantage of the impending (it’s been impending for quite awhile) upgrade of their Itunes store music. This of course totally ignores the reality of many if not most people stocking their Ipods with non-Itunes store music from CDs, vinyl and cassettes and not needing or wanting the supposed higher fidelity at the expense of reduced storage capacity.
How did you stop the automatic upgrades from Itunes?
I just installed the update today. The “iTunes Plus” quality thing confused me, too, but I checked and it didn’t downgrade my importing settings (I rip CDs at 320 kbps), so there’s that I suppose. I agree that it’s extremely annoying whenever an update changes any of your settings.
And yeah, I cannot believe they haven’t fixed the “signing the new buyer’s agreement takes you back to the iTunes store homepage forcing you to search for the thing you just tried to buy again” thing yet.
I have few complaints about the program overall, though. Just got a new iPod Classic and have been quite satisfied with the sync-y goodness.
I’m puzzled by this question. When an iTunes upgrade is available, I get a dialog box asking me if I want to upgrade to the newer version. It never happens automatically or without my consent. Is this a Mac vs. PC thing?
I found a couple links explaining how to disable the automatic upgrade feature (I don’t know about whether this varies between Mac and PC). You need to check the options box appearing on the device page, to “manually manage music”. This disables the automatic upgrade feature.
So hopefully I am shielded from all the wonderful new things Itunes wants to do (useless and annoying settings changes etc.). Maybe I will now get message boxes imploring me to allow upgrades. I will say no, cackling with glee.
On the PC there is also a checkbox called “Check for Updates Automatically” in the general tab of preferences. That way you will be turning off not only the automatic rejiggering of your device (manually manage music), but also turning off the automatic updates of itunes.
“Manually Manage Music” just means that iTunes won’t automatically add and delete songs from your iPod. I don’t think it will affect the software-update feature.