The interface in the current version is a mess. If you want to burn music to a CD, there’s no option for burning in any of their menus. If you just select some tracks, there’s no option for burning those either. If you make a playlist, a tiny little “burn” button pops up in the bottom right corner. There’s nothing to indicate before hand that it will be there if you make a play list. There’s not enough information being shown to users ahead of time.
Similarly, when you just open itunes, there’s nothing in the left hand menu that indicates that your ipod or other device will appear in the menu once it’s plugged in and recognized by iTunes (and yes, Dr. Amazing, the mp3 player should be listed there. iTunes doesn’t always notice if a player is plugged in.) There should be a listing there for devices even if nothing’s plugged in, for consistency’s sake.
The Genius Bar can bring even the strongest machine to its knees. THAT item is always shown in your left hand menu, even when you have the Genius Bar turned off. Also, at all times, you’ll have two little buttons present at the right hand bottom next to where the burn button mysteriously appears. Because iTunes doesn’t want extra buttons if iTunes doesn’t think you need them, but God forbid, Apple miss an opportunity to try and sell you something.
And that’s really what iTunes has become. It’s only secondarily a music-managing software. It’s primarily a direct link between your device and the iTunes store. Apple’s not shy about that fact either. It’s no surprise that some people would object to it.
Oh and Cover Flow is visually appealing but a complete waste of time if you have more than a dozen albums.
Hmm. Yeah, it seems like those of us who were in it at the very beginning and seen it slowly progress over the years have much less trouble navigating it than those who are jumping into the current version cold. The very first version was extremely basic, just your library and the store, and I could certainly see how all of the myriad bells and whistles in the current version can be confusing and intimidating to the previously uninitiated.
Not really a true solution, and it’s not a defense of iTunes - but set up a playlist that is only songs you want on your Touch, and just sync that (and any other playlists you want).
Hmmm…I must have been mistaken. Further research shows that iTunes doesn’t support non-Apple hardware.
[Numbers added for clarification.]
You were doing something wrong. I can multiselect just fine.
This I guess I just don’t understand, as I’ve never used anything but iTunes. iTunes creates a file in My Music, where it downloads songs and sets up it’s own directory system. iTunes Music/Artist/Album/Song. What are you doing that you want iTunes to do? And what are you doing within iTunes that isn’t organizing things the way you want? I mean - you’re given about 6 different filter categories to sort and organize - what else do you want?
I’d say there’s an 80% chance you had “sync music” checked. Don’t do that.
I don’t need or want a “library”, I have folders on my hdds for that. I don’t want it to “organize” anything for me. I don’t want it to play my music (that’s what winamp is for). On the rare occasions I need to connect with the apple store, I’ll do it on my iPhone.
All I use it for is a way to add/remove files from my iPhone and to back-up my iPhone once in a while. That’s it. And if I could do that as from Explorer, it’d be gone from my system in a half a sec.
I switched to iTunes on Windows because WinAmp was just so friggin’ awful. iTunes at least let me arrange and sort my music however I wanted , simply. Back then, it was a joy to use.
That said – the last few versions of iTunes have been bloated and slow, yes. Mostly I think this is because iTunes is now not just a music player, but also a manager for umpteen versions of iPod, iPad, iPhone and possibly iWeasel, plus an interface for music and app stores, and god knows what else.
Frankly, iTunes would be better off if split into multiple applications – music, apps, etc – with a common back-end to manage syncing with the various devices. But in the meantime, it still remains my player of choice because (a) I’ve already got everything loaded into it, and (b) bloated or not, it still Just Works.
I think the point for most people who complain about iTunes is that they don’t need or want iTunes to do anything. My music is sorted pretty much automatically as I put it onto the PC. Even if I didn’t sort it at all, virtually any .mp3 player is going to sort it via id3 tags exactly the way iTunes does on the fly anyway.
If I want to play music on my computer, Winamp provides an experience that sucks much less.
If I want to burn a CD, Deepburner works much better than iTunes does for that.
If I want to manage the files on my mp3 player, Windows Explorer provides a quick, convenient interface to do this. (Except on an iPod, for some obscure reason.)
iTunes is a huge, poorly-developed application that just seems to get in the way of using the device, when it’s not actively screwing up your computer. It does provide a convenient portal to the iTunes store, I guess - but this is not something I place any value in.
I won’t even look at another iPod, because I know that I can’t use the damned thing in a common-sense way.
I used to hate iTunes. It’s slow as hell, and it doesn’t organise things the way I want it to!
I used to have a no-brand mp3 player, and I would sort that according to folders, drag and drop, just like a flash storage device.
Now, though, I’m ambivalent about iTunes. If you don’t care about how it does things, well, it just works. I’m not fussy about folders and whatnot nowadays, I just let the thing sync whatever I’ve checked. And it works! I put a CD in, and I rip it. I’m vaguely aware of where it goes, but then I don’t have to care which folder it’s in any more. It works! I don’t have a system for naming the ripped files any more either. But I don’t care!
It’s really quite liberating.
Now, if iTunes, could just KEEP downloading those pocasts even though I haven’t listened to them in a while…
Fair enough. People who like to tinker and things will most definitely not like a program like iTunes - I can definitely understand that. I just always hear “it won’t sort songs the way I want!”, and just can’t wrap my head around it. I can sort 6 categories simultaneously in iTunes - what are those people doing wrong (or ridiculously complicated) where they can’t find what they’re looking for after applying 6 filters?!?
I think the disconnect is that they already know where all their music is, until iTunes gets ahold of it and now they have to use a search feature. It’d be like if I came over to your house and rearranged everything in it and gave you a spreadsheet of all your stuff that you could sort on a number of ways to find whatever you needed, like say your toothbrush which is now in your silverware drawer. You could find it easily enough with the spreadsheet, but why should you have to? Why can’t it just be where it’s always been and where you don’t have to “search” for it at all?
If you already have music ripped to your harddrive, you tell iTunes, “hey, it’s over there.” It doesn’t move anything, and now you have a program that lets you sort it, make playlists, etc. and keep the existing file structure in place. It’s no dffierent from other players in that respect (minus the bloatware, etc.)
If you don’t have any music ripped to your harddrive, it rips it into a folder structure that is, as far as I can tell, identical to what people who would never use iTunes would create.
And what if you had music ripped to your hard drive and want to rip more music to your hard drive? iTunes prompts you incessantly about moving your old music into the new folder structures…at least I did before I finally gave in and let it organize my old music.
Several people have said that if they drag a file to their iPod twice they’ll end up with two copies. That can’t be possible if it retains the same directory structure.
I had to install iTunes to set up my kid’s iPod she got from Grampa two years ago. After the mess it made of my computer I deleted it, and, as has been described by others, spent several hours rooting out all of the other Apple junkware that it surreptitiously installed along with iTunes.
I have used several music management utilities and iTunes was by far the worst. I suppose if you never saved an MP3 until you got an Apple player that the illogical and proprietary way that it manages files would not make much difference but when you have a mature digital music library and then you start iTunes everything you have ever done to organize your library is ignored and there is no way to preserve the categories you have created.
I have never organized my music by any of the tags that Apple uses. I have my music organized by folder by several idiosyncratic methods. There is no way to tell iTunes that you want the contents of a folder to become a play list. Is it possible that there would be any simpler tool to build into a music management product?
This is probably accentuated for me because I have music ripped from vinyl (or wax) and from cassette.
I now use Songbird to manage the iPod. It gives me no problems.
So I would say there is nothing scary or mysterious about the software. It just doesn’t do anything I want it to do and it does a great many things that I don’t want it to do. So I don’t use it.
Um, yes there is. I just did it. All I did was drag & drop the folder of music I wanted from Windows Explorer into a new playlist in iTunes. Took all of 5 seconds. Really could not have been simpler. Nothing was moved around or charged. When I click on “Get Info” for one of the tracks, it’s in the exact same folder location as always. How else did you expect to be able to do that that you couldn’t figure that out?
iTunes is slow to open, yes. I don’t use the music store and rarely the radio, so yes I agree it would be better if it was a smaller program that used less memory only to transfer songs to the iPod. But the above quoted statement is typical of what is really annoying. Yes iTunes has it’s drawbacks, but people seem to love making up stuff they think it doesn’t do, either through ignorance or I don’t know what, and then getting all bent out of shape about it, when the error is on their part.
IIRC you first have to pick “New Playlist” from the File menu for some reason; you can’t right-click on Playlists and pick New.
But that’s a nitpick. My problem is I create the playlist, drag it to my iPod, that works. But if I update the songs in that playlist and drag it to my iPod again, I get double songs on the iPod. Is there a better way? Why doesn’t iTunes/my iPod recognize that the songs are duplicates?
Everyone has their preferences. From what I’ve seen — especially on the Internet, there is a cross-section of people who are predisposed to voicing their preferences in absolutist rhetoric. It makes no difference if the matter is as inconsequential as non-compulsory free software that plays songs (or for that matter, dismissing people who bitch about such software ;)).
For the record, though not a perfect piece of software, I like iTunes just fine and find it neither slow nor bloated.
I don’t think those people are doing anything wrong, and I’m not sure that I could really speak to this question because it is pretty remote from my experience.
The thing is, I don’t need or want iTunes to sort my .mp3 collection – it’s been sorted since 1996. I have a toolset for the various things that iTunes is intended to do, and iTunes does not compare favourably with my preferred tools:
[ul]
[li]audio playing, tag & playlist management - WinAmp works better than iTunes, 10MB[/li][li]cd ripping – Audiograbber, works better than iTunes 1.5 MB[/li][li]cd burning - Deepburner, works better than iTunes, 3MB[/li][li]video playing - VLC, works better than iTunes, 16MB[/li][li]transfer to device: Windows Explorer, works better than iTunes 0MB[/li][/ul]
Any one of these tools fires up in an instant, they all do what I want them to do efficiently and without any unintended consequences. Collectively, they are one tenth the size of the iTunes application. Why would I choose to use a 300MB application that doesn’t perform as well as these, if I’m not absolutely forced to?
The only thing I needed iTunes for was to transfer files to my iPod. The mechanism by which this occurred led me to give my iPod away before very long. Say I have a couple of data CDs of .mp3s, and I want them on my mp3 player so I can listen to them on my way to work. This should be straightforward, no? Copy those sumbitches onto the device and you’re out the door. I don’t want to arse about adding it to a library and synchronizing my device with that, for no clear reason. What a pain!
I think people that discuss the speed of iTunes should mention how many songs they have. I have over 15,000, and I do find it very slow when adding songs or calculating the Genius stuff.
This. I don’t like it when simple operations are made more complicated because some company wants to control the way you do things. iTunes has, on 2 separate occasions, deleted every single audio file set to sync with my iPod/iPhone. No word of warning or apology after the event, iTunes just shows my music library as empty and when I check the music folder it is empty. This has led to me needing to keep a duplicate of all my audio in case it does it again.
Also, iTunes has an annoying habit of randomly re-syncing a bunch of tracks to my iPhone and doing it reaaallly slowly. Tracks that have been on the phone for months suddenly decide they need to be put back on and it takes around 10 minutes per track.
As a mobile IT technician I have had to fix iTunes related issues more often than issues with any other software except for email clients. It just doesn’t seem to work very well at all.
Another of my bugbears with iTunes is that it ignores my instruction to download all new episodes of podcasts and just gets the latest one instead. It also seems to keep forgetting to delete podcasts I have listened to until I have refreshed and synced the phone about 5 times.
