People are always complaining about iTunes. I don’t understand this. iTunes, while not absolutely perfect, seems to do what it is supposed to do just fine. It organizes my music, lets me maintain playlists, lets me search through my music in various different ways, lets me easily keep my music library synchronized with my iPod - basically everything I’d want. It is a simple, effective, and easy-to-use consumer-level application.
What’s with all the hate?
There are a lot of albums that iTunes very frustratingly does not have, and it drives me insane. For instance, it doesn’t have Some Fantastic Place by Squeeze. This is far from an obscure album and it’s bullshit that I have to order the fucking album now instead of just downloading it. It doesn’t have all of the soundtracks for the seasons of The Sopranos, another very, very frustrating thing since I’ve been re-watching the show and would love to have the music from it, but again, am forced to order the actual CDs. And it also doesn’t have the soundtrack to Me, Myself and Irene, which is notable for the highly desirable cover by Hootie and the Blowfish of Can’t Find The Time to Tell You by Orpheus. There’s a lot of music that iTunes should have, that it doesn’t.
I find it kind of annoying to use.
I downloaded the iTunes software two or three years ago, but it wouldn’t work at all. Damn thing crashed every time I tried to run it.
So I called up Apple’s support line and they said that they couldn’t give me any support unless I was a paying customer. I explained that I was trying to be a paying customer, but their buggy software wouldn’t let me! They weren’t having any of it, and tried to charge me $29, I think it was, for any support at all.
I told them to go fuck themselves and never looked back.
I like the program, generally. But they don’t have a lot of artists, as has been mentioned. Some of these are the artists’ fault, it should be pointed out. Some…I don’t really know why.
I don’t like their “World” classification. That is such bullshit and it’s basically “all the English music” vs “the rest of youse guys”. Why can’t it be broken down further? By language would be awesome; it’s very difficult to search for Hindi music, for example.
Mmmm, what else? I don’t really have too much other problems, though I have bitched before about how resource-heavy it is. On my computer, which isn’t that old, it hesitates between each song, so forget trying to type something and listen to music. I usually switch over to Windows Media Player.
Oh, and I hate the constant updates which never seem to do anything. Can’t you just update once every six months and put everything in there at once?
iTunes is great for most libraries. But once you go over around 50,000 songs it becomes well nigh unusable. I long for a pro version that can handle massive libraries.
It won’t let me use a great deal of the music that was already on my computer and that Windows Media Player handles perfectly well. Since iTunes won’t let me use it, I can’t use it on my iPod.
There are alternatives. Winamp supports ipods now, as do other programs whose name escapes me right now.
Personally I dislike the iTunes program and use it only for loading and unloading my ipod, and think its ridiculous to have to download Quicktime. One day when I get much, much less lazy I’ll probably switch over to using winamp exclusively.
Could this music be in some proprietary Windows Media format, by any chance?
I think it’s the look and feel and and general “un-Windows” design of iTunes. It’s not like a standard Windows app, at all. It wants to do things it’s way, it doesn’t care how your music is arranged, it all gets assimilated into the iTunes database.
I read here that the newest version of iTunes is suppose to actually allow you to designate files as being audiobook, and thus, 1)list them under the “audiobook” menu on the iPod, 2) keep them out of Shuffle, and 3) remember your spot. I tried it and it indeed has menu options for all of these things, but NONE OF THEM ACTUALLY WORK. I checked all the boxes and on my iPod it does NOTHING.
So, “features that don’t actually do what they say they do” kind of annoys me.
If you think iTunes is bad, trying using it with an iTunesU site. You’ll discover what a messed up cob job the software really is. Trying to set up iTunesU is like trying to put together a three dimensional jigsaw puzzle in the dark, where the shapes of the pieces keep changing and Apple stands in the corner sneering about how stupid you are since they could do it one-handed.
Once you get it working, it’s like having to travel across town to pick up the car keys before starting your car in the morning. And having Apple bragging about how great the system is.
As for iTunes itself, it’s OK as a player, but the store is lacking and the album covers for the CD you’re playing all too often are missing or have no relation to the music you’re playing (for example, “Songs and More Songs by Tom Lehrer” shows this.
A couple years ago when I got my daughter a shuffle, I installed it, thinking, “Hey, it’s an Apple product–it must be awesome.” But it’s been nothing but a constant series of disappointments and frustrations.
I absolutely hate the thing. Last year I got an Ipod, and my daughter just updgraded to a Nano. Things have gotten a bit more… messy. I’ve been looking into switching to Winamp.
As mentioned, it seems like every blessed time I launch it, there’s an update available. What is so freaking unstable or broken with this app that every two weeks there’s an update released?
Other problems I’ve had (and I’m using Win XP, not Mac)-- hard/confusing to figure out how to load certain things onto your device (say I want to add a few songs and delete some video)–navigating to my device, then figuring out which tab to hit, whether to check the sync or not sync and then whatever the options are below that (I’m at work now, with no itunes). Clicking the wrong buttons will erase the device. I was hoping for some simple type of drag and drop file structure like you see in Windows, but no.
Adding files to my library is usually a pain. I can rarely select more than a few files–if I do, it does nothing. Sometimes the files need to be converted for the ipod, but nothing tells me that aside from not seeing them on my ipod when I’ve added those files and synced the ipod.
I can’t see any easy way to download files from the ipod. My daughter went away for the summer and came back with a new set of music. I’d like to be able to get those files on my computer/library, but I see no options for it (granted, I haven’t looked hard for this, and for all I know it could be happening automatically when a sync takes place–I haven’t checked to see if those files are now on my comp).
The way my songs are organized is crazy. Bands with the same name appear twice in my Artist list. Even when I’ve gone in the name field and ensured they’re the same–no extra characters, spaces, etc anywhere. I have to manually group them. Really? *It’s the exact same effing name, you pos app. *
Some of my movies seemed to have randomly been assigned to TV shows. Easy to change, but a pain.
The daughter’s Nano, upon coming home from Summer camp, would not show up on itunes. My ipod and the shuffle do just fine, but not the Nano. After much research online and much tinkering and updating of the USB driver, I was finally able to fix it, but man, what a pain. I’d blame the computer, but before she left for the summer, we hooked it up and loaded it just fine.
I could go on if I thought more about it–really, just about every time I launch the thing I wind up wanting to pull my hair out.
As I mentioned in another thread, there is a group of people that have made an alternative OS for iPods, called RockBox. It completely changes the way the iPod operates, and the best thing about it is you can drag and drop music to anywhere you want on the iPod and RockBox will find it when you do a database update. You can also choose different fonts and “now Playing” displays, some of which look really spectacular on color iPods (mine’s a B&W 40GB.)
Disclaimer: This software is a bit complicated to install if everything doesn’t download properly, and could conceivably render your iPod unbootable, worst case scenario. Only for use on older iPods, doesn’t work on the late-model Nanos and Classics.
My big hangup with iTunes and iPods in general, is that everything… and I mean EVERYTHING has to be done through iTunes. You have to buy your music in iTunes, you have to create your playlists in iTunes, you have to move your music onto your player in iTunes. Its ridiculous! Without iTunes, your iPod essentially won’t work.
I don’t want to have to depend on any proprietary software to use my music player. I prefer more direct control over how I use my music. I prefer to move the music myself by copying it directly from my system to the hard drive of my player. I prefer to pick and choose from where I will buy my music. Most importantly, I don’t want to have to depend on a piece of software that won’t let you use your music player unless you activate the player from within it first. I should be able to use my player independently of my computer.
That’s why I don’t use iTunes or iPods.
I don’t use an iPod, but I still use iTunes just to play music on my computer. I would never buy off iTunes–people still use it? I just buy on amazon.com. That way I can put tunes on my non iPod mp3 player. What’s the point of buying off iTunes? They have such a monopoly on their music.
I like their party shuffle mode a lot in particular. I’d never get another iPod, though. Those things kept breaking on me.
Count me in the I love iTunes and most things Mac camp. I especially love the new upgrade with the Genius feature… I love seeing what playlists it will come up with.
But like I said I’m an all-the-way Mac girl. I know a lot of people who are primarily PC users who find it frustrating to use and spew nothing but hatred towards it. But it works fine for me.
because it’s apple and they are teh suxxors…
personally, I use it and found it to be much better then winamp, musicmatch and wmp.
Much of what’s been said here isn’t even true or is just so ridiculous it’s sad. Generally it seems that folks latch on to some reason to not like it and don’t bother to find out that it’s something that can be easily changed.
You have to buy your music in iTunes…not even close, you can use your existing CDs or any other format supported by the iPod including MP3, the most popular format on the planet. Yes, it doesn’t support the proprietary wmv format just like windows doesn’t support apple lossless, go figure.
you have to move your music onto your player in iTunes. Its ridiculous…that a company would provide an interface to allow you to manage it’s device when you could be hunting all over your computer for media to drag in?
every two weeks there’s an update released…cite? itunes is on ver. 8 last time I checked windows media player was on ver 10 or 11.
they don’t have a lot of artists…really? and the smaller online stores have more? itms is the largest online music store and I believe at this point they have surpassed almost all the brick and mortar stores…so where are you finding more in one place?
It wants to do things it’s way, it doesn’t care how your music is arranged…there’s an option to not allow itunes to manage your library. As a convenience, they provide a way that will allow the software to manage your file system. Sounds like the best of both worlds to me.
Yeah, this confused me. I don’t even like iPods, but the majority of my songs are downloads, songs I owned on hard copy from my CDs, or songs that my friends burned for me. I bought a bunch of iTunes songs back before I realized I’d only have them in one format and could never play them on an MP3 player, but I don’t know why people are saying you have to buy them on iTunes. I stopped doing that ages ago.
I downloaded iTunes once. ONCE. On three separate computers now – two of mine, one of my parents’ – it has flat out refused to work. The only way to describe the behavior is ‘crash and burn upon launch’. One of the computers didn’t even manage to get the interface fully loaded before the errors popped up. One of my roommates has managed to get it to magically work, but it’s extremely resource-heavy. She keeps it exclusively for the music-buying function; everything she buys, she immediately burns to CD and rips to high-quality MP3 so she can play it through Winamp.
I have managed to get QuickTime installed without iTunes tagging along, but it took some doing. I am also infamous within the family for once managing to remove Internet Explorer entirely from an installation of Windows 95. (It broke the AOL browser, but I would have to argue if you said that was a bad thing. Netscape worked fine.)
I’ve also developed a distaste for MP3 players that require fancy software to load and unload after going through a very iTunes-like experience with Sony’s SonicStage software for their ATRAC Walkman models. My current player is a Sansa, which is easy to deal with – either use Winamp for playlists, or drag and drop if I’m in a hurry. I swap music in and out frequently, as only rather recently has anyone come out with an MP3 player that could hold the whole collection, and it’s an iPod, so I won’t be buying it.
Basically, it’s a case of mutual loathing. It hates my computer, and I hate the way it behaves like a bag of pointy elbows around all my other software. We agree to disagree, and I spend a few more seconds extracting links from XML files to get to the podcasts I really want.
