I’ve talked to a lot of people and read a lot of threads here and on other boards about how people “hate,” “fear,” or “don’t understand” iTunes. This I have never understood. IMHO iTunes is one of the simplest, most user-friendly programs ever.
Is this a PC vs Mac thing, a general “I’m not good with computers” thing, or something else? I don’t get it. What is so difficult about it?
I have a PC, and I like it.
What I do hate is iTunes’ whole “You can only rent a song for five computers instead of buying it” thing, so I just don’t buy songs from them anymore. Or buy Apple products–I think Apple is totally evil. But iTunes? That I like.
It sucks. I’ve experienced dozens of limitations or bugs or just problems in general with it. It’s retardedly slow - I have a 4 ghz processor and I have to wait around for a media library to perform routine actions? It has some non-intuitive quirks - for example, when you open podcast listings that you’re subscribed to, it won’t update them. You can’t right click and select anything to upgrade either. You have to hold shift while clicking the triangle to perform this most basic of functions. This isn’t documented anywhere except finding other people randomly stumbling onto the same solutions via google.
That said, since I installed the latest version on win7 I haven’t had any significant problems with it. Not sure why.
That hasn’t been the case since the iTunes store dropped DRM at the beginning of 2009.
I think people confuse the iTunes music store with the iTunes program, and they auto-sync their music. I don’t buy songs from them and I manually manage the tracks on my iPod, and I’ve never had a problem with the program. It’s simple and intuitive.
¿Que? My podcasts update automatically. I just opened iTunes 30 seconds ago, and two of my subscribed podcasts immediately downloaded the latest updates, without me doing a thing.
You’re right - subscribed podcasts do update automatically. I was thinking of non-subscribed ones, where you could get a listing of the podcasts and download a few you wanted but not automatically grab new ones. You could never get an updated list after the day you first added one of the podcasts from that listing.
It looks like they’ve fixed it in newer versions since then with a “update podcast” button that wasn’t there before.
Oh, really? I’m surprised it took them that long to do it but it was a smart move. It’s still true of older songs I bought–I’ll only have them for one more computer and I can’t have them on my mp3 player which really pisses me off since I bought those songs. I didn’t intend to rent or lease them. Ugh. Stupid Apple.
There are ways to get around that, like burning the songs to an audio CD and then re-importing them. A hassle, but better than losing your tunes.
You can a) unregister any of the computers you no longer use or b) simply burn the songs to a CD and rerip them.
Maybe I’ll try b. I can’t do a since I don’t have those computers anymore. Or can I? Is there a way of unauthorizing them?
Yes you can de-authorize all computers and then re-authorize the ones you still have.
How do you do that?
Click the “Store” tab and it should be the option at the very bottom of the pull-down menu. It will ask you for your iTunes account password and then it will ask you if you are sure.
That only worked for me for about 2/3rds of the songs I’d bought before I stopped using iTunes altogether.
The other third won’t burn for some reason or another, and iTunes’s error messages are ridiculously uninformative (like most Apple error messages)
For me, bad experiences with the company and some products, including the iTunes store, have poisoned me to the rest of their products.
For me, it was both the tunes and the fact that Apple wasn’t at all receptive when they had a shoddy product (for me). My iPod broke all the time and there was no phone # to call until you took it to the “Genius Store” or something. I just associate Apple with all things bad, so other than iTunes to store the songs, I’m not using any of their products.
That seems like a strange complaint to me, since there’s such an easy workaround - why not just subscribe to the podcast? If you’re giving it a test drive and decide you’re not interested after all, you can cancel the subscription and delete the podcasts.
It’s not that it’s particularly difficult - it’s that it’s terrible. I had an iPod Nano (an old-style school slim rectangule one) and got rid of it while it was still shiny, just because of iTunes. I actually loved the device itself. What I did not love was that it yoked you to a bloated, problematic bit of software that provided no desired functionality, while actually preventing the device from being used in a commonsense way.
What do I need from an .mp3 player? I need to be able to put my music on it and have it presented to me in a logically-navigable way. This is easily done through the use of id3 tags (and maybe m3u fields) as sensibly provisioned for in the mp3 format itself. I don’t need a 300MB piece of software to help me with this.
I certainly don’t need that 300MB piece of software to randomize the filenames of my .mp3s and strip of the useful id3 information out of them. Chances are, when I get to work I’d like to move those .mp3s onto my workstation and listen to them on my PC. It’s possible that I may have more music there and would like to drop a couple of songs on it for the commute home, without installing a 300MB, notoriously problematic bit of software on my work computer. Every other mp3 player in the world keeps my music the way I’ve organized it in a way that remains useful to me outside of the device.
There are plenty of mp3 players on the market that use sensible open standardss. It’s a USB storage device, it’s a media player. It just works.
iTunes was a tremendous pain in the ass. I can honestly say that I preferred my iPod nano for actually listening to music - but iTunes was a dealbreaker. I would sooner staple my scrotum to my anus than purchase another device that required me to use iTunes.
I never found that iTunes stripped the ID info from my mp3s. I still know where all of my songs are and what they are. Weird–what I hated was the device, not the program.
Is this because I don’t listen to podcasts, but only songs? For me, I like it just because it’s so accessible and user friendly.
Yeah, I’ve never understood the complaints about iTunes. I have, by most standards, a huge music and movie collection on my computer and a four and a half year old computer, and iTunes does just fine. I wouldn’t call it snappy on this computer, but it’s not slow. It’s easy to use and it does what it’s supposed to. Plus, Genius is a great feature.
That said, my one major annoyance is that it won’t let me add xvid or mkv files to my library without transcoding them. If they’d add support for just a couple of file formats, it’d be close to perfect.