It was for some podcasts I only was interested in a few episodes from, and I didn’t want it autodownloading them. I realize it’s a minor complaint, but it’s the only stupid design feature I could remember offhand.
But here’s another. If you don’t want to or can’t copy your entire music library to your mobile device, you can use the “copy only checked songs” option and then check/uncheck whatever songs/podcasts/videos you want on your ipod. Simple enough.
Except… if you then want to use it as a music player on your PC, you can now only play those same checked songs, even though you have access to your entire library in front of you. You can click a non-checked song manually, but whenever it goes to the next song it always picks a checked one. So you cannot both manage your portable music library with checks and also use iTunes for your whole library at your computer.
There’s no design reason for doing it this way, it’s just dumb.
Of course it doesn’t. The only time I’ve ever seen anything remotely like that is in importing songs *from *the iPod back into iTunes–which isn’t intended to work that way, and can’t be done without a hack. And even then all you lose is the file names–the files in the iPod are renamed with random four-character titles. The tags are still intact and the correct song title still appears when the song is imported back into iTunes.
I just copy the songs I want individually since I have a limited number of songs. I don’t bother with the checks unless it’s a song I just never want to hear.
I’m a serious computer geek. Decades of experience. Former CS professor.
It’s an unbelievable piece of crappy bloated software. I have no idea how regular people accept this sort of nonsense.
I tried it for awhile for my iPods. Holy freaking ick. Over and over again basic things couldn’t be done well or at all and it automatically did Very Bad Things.
Deleted it. Then I had to really delete it as the uninstall software doesn’t actually uninstall it all.
I use a plug-in to Winamp to manage things. A tiny little easy to use plug-in.
If you plug the device into a PC and treat it as a USB storage device, the id3 info is not there in the files. The filenames are randomized, and when you play them directly with a software mp3 player, there is no id3 info - instead, there is a table somewhere on the device which matches the randomized filename to the appropriate information in the table. Really.
I suppose it’s possible that this has changed at some point in the last four years, but it was true of the slim ipod nanos, and I do recall a co-worker having the same complaint with an iPod Touch.
If it didn’t do this, why would you need a hack to import music from an iPod back into iTunes? They’d be just a collection of normal .mp3s stored on a solid-state drive, and you’d be able to do anything you’d expect to be able to do with a collection of mp3s stored on a solid-state drive. But you can’t, because iTunes has (by design) converted them into a less-than-ideal form, making you dependent on iTunes for their use, toward no discernible end besides making you dependent on iTunes for their use.
If I plug my little Sansa into my desktop, the music on it can be streamed to the media player hooked up to my stereo, and navigated easily either by the existing directory structure on it, or by sorting/filtering based on info in the id3 tags. If my wife plugs her little Creative in there, same thing. This is sensible behaviour, IMO.
I do like my .mp3s to be stored on my devices in their original forms. There is absolutely no reason that it should be necessary to alter the files by a single byte, because the mp3 format is quite elegant and provides everything needed to properly categorize your audio files.
I’ve had a couple of Minor Irritating Things crop up with Itunes software, such as significant changes occurring on updates without warning (I’ve disabled automatic updates for that reason), and seemingly random alterations in the way songs are imported (such that you have to perform a couple additional steps to add an album with the songs in the right order). Even then the delay is not that big of a deal.
I have a Mac and I generally dislike it. My main complaint is I have my music library scattered over three computers, but iTunes only allows you to be snyched with one computer. So I have to manually transfer over the songs to that computer to sync it with the iPhone. That annoys me to no end.
Also–and this may not just be iTunes, I don’t know, but there appears to be no way to clean up my music library efficiently. That is, I have a bunch of songs on in my library that are off-line, either because they are on offline network drives or have been moved/deleted. There doesn’t appear to be a way for the program to poll the playlist and let you know whether it is currently online or not, or which links are dead.
My only peeve with iTunes is a very minor one. Every time I update it, it wants to install Safari.
Unlike Quicktime, Safari is not in any way necessary for iTunes to work. I don’t want it. If I did want it, I’d nowhere to get it. Stop pushing it on me.
I know. All I have to do is uncheck one little box. I said it was a minor peeve. But in general I dislike having to opt out of installing anything on my computer. Software installation should always be opt-in.
It’s much better than it used to be. The user interface is better but there are still vast amounts of wasted gray space. At one time (a short time I think) it took over and rearranged your MP3 files automatically. Not nice. It still tries to sneak in Safari.
And it still takes me 30 minutes or more to update my iTouch like I want it. Mind you I’m manually managing my music, not syncing. But if I just want to copy an updated directory of music to my iTouch I first have to delete the music off my iTouch, then copy it to my iTouch, otherwise I wind up with duplicate songs. The updating is not totally iTunes fault, it’s just the way that Apple designed the iPods. >:(
I am a network administrator. When I first started my current job, our database software required that end users have local administrative privileges, so they had the ability to install whatever they liked on their workstations. As you can imagine, this made my job a little more difficult.
By far, the two applications which caused me the most frequent problems were iTunes and Google Desktop.
iTunes automatically installs Apple’s enunciation service, Bonjour. Bonjour frequently caused significant problems – problems which caused my users to consistently complain “The internet doesn’t work!” (By which they meant to say that they had no access to network resources at all, but my users somehow always notice a lack of internet access first.) Solution: uninstall iTunes (and then manually clean up after it, because the uninstall process leaves a bunch of additional un-asked for crap running, including Bonjouur) and sternly advise the user that installation of iTunes on PC’s on the corporate network again might result in their being beaten and sodomized with a cedar stick.
I am disheartened about iPhones gaining ground as smartphones, because this has led to some of my users requesting that iTunes be installed, and offering a reasonable enough justification for it. (Synchronizing their contacts/calendar.) In one instance, this broke their installation of Office so profoundly that I ended up swapping their PC out altogether and reinstalling Windows on it. I’m guessing a malformed registry setting somewhere. More typically, disabling the iTunes add-in and telling the user to bugger off because we’re not supporting iTunes has done the trick.
Personally, my own technical problems with iTunes were limited to my computer slowing down intolerably, and were easily solved by insisting that none of the associated services or processes started on their own. They would have also have been easily solved by running the software on a PC with a lot more overhead to eat up. I don’t avoid iTunes for these reasons, I avoid it because it is a terrible piece of software when it’s working exactly as it is designed to. It’s a shame – iPods of various flavours are all very well-designed little devices, and a real joy to use, if you are only looking at them as a playback device. Not quite nice enough to justify the enormous pain-in-the-ass of being yoked to iTunes, though.
The only software that you should be required to have installed in order to get your music onto (or off of) your .mp3 player is a USB Mass Storage Device driver. Hell, I don’t even want to be stuck with proprietary software to encode video for my device – just give me a set of acceptable specifications.
The OP’s suggestion that a disdain for iTunes might be indicative of someone being “not good with computers” is a little misguided. iTunes is “not good with computers.” It’s completely unnecessary, and yet absolutely mandatory, if you want to use an iPod device. If I can’t manage my media the way I want to, then the device isn’t really very valuable to me. I want to be able to use it wherever, for whatever, with no complications – therefore, iTunes is anathema to me.
I thought of another thing that iTunes does, it manages to lose it’s link to some of my songs. My songs are in my own directory and naming structure, I added them all to iTunes. But sometimes iTunes shows me a “?” next to the song and it has somehow lost the link to the song. And it’s a pain to fix too, iTunes won’t just show you the missing ones without a special trick that I forget at the moment. Something about adding a special tag to an unused field in ALL songs, and the ones that don’t have the tag are the ones that iTunes has “lost.” :rolleyes:
The reason people hate iTunes is because it’s not drag and drop. That is what most people want. I don’t think it’s that hard overall, but it’s not “drag and drop.”
I can understand why it’s not like that, but other mp3 players use drag and drop.
It’s slow as crap. It may be my computer. It’s an old one and just might not have enough RAM to push iTunes’ latest version, but it always takes awhile to sync with my iPhone. By that I mean recognizing my iPhone in general. I do know enough to manually manage my music instead of auto-synching everything.
I always have trouble downloading when I buy songs. I don’t get the complete song, just some weird incomplete kind of file. I much prefer using Rhapsody because I can hear the complete song before I buy it, and not just a 30-second sample. And downloads are swift and easy.
The songs are sold in AAC format. Which means I have to convert them into an MP3 so I can transfer them to my other player, a Creative Zen. It’s not a big inconvenience, because at least iTunes converts them rather nicely, but Rhapsody and Amazon already sell their music as 256 kps MP3’s.
I don’t have all that much hate for iTunes, but I’m not all that in love with it. I do have to use proprietary software with my Zen, but it will accomplish the same things as iTunes in about 3/4 of the time. I might investigate that WinAmp plugin.
Oh, and I want to add: I code software for a living. At home, I have a macbook, a windows laptop and 2 linux machines. What I don’t like is software that messes with me.
And in addition to this: any complaints that people “confuse” itunes with the istore is purely due to the fact that the istore is bound up in itunes. That’s not the user’s fault - it’s Apple’s.