:shrug: I’m not Apple, and I don’t have a great desire to rise up to defend their honor when it’s suggested that a piece of software doesn’t do everything people who don’t use it want it to do. I’m only slightly more willing to rise up and point out that it DOES do something that someone who reluctantly uses it complains that it doesn’t do.
That’s cool, but bear in mind that in your defense of iTunes you’ve made several factually incorrect claims as well, so that kinda undercuts your moral high ground on that point.
Fair enough - I copped to it when I realize I spoke too soon. Though I take slight offense that you think I’m trying to claim some sort of “moral high ground”.
I’m glad your experience has been good, honestly. You mention that you have 4GB of RAM, that probably helps a lot.
iTunes does not make very efficient use of resources - if you have enough overhead with your available memory and CPU cycles this may not cause you any grief. If you have less wiggle room, you’re going to have a bad time of it. Myself, I can admit that I tend to push my hardware as far as it can go with incremental upgrades, and usually end up wringing the last little bit of service out of it before I am motivated to actually replace a PC. However, I expect cutting-edge games or other demanding applications to provide the motivation for this.
At the time of my flirtation with the iPod, I was running a 266Mhz PII with 1GB of RAM, which was just fine for the latest versions of Photoshop and Premiere, and I was doing some largish projects in 3D Studio Max without pulling my hair out. No performance hit if I wanted to run WinAmp at the same time, which was pretty much constant.
iTunes, though? If if it was running my itself, it was as slow as molasses, and even web-browsing was too much to ask as far as multitasking was concerned. This is kind of disgraceful. I’m usually not going to complain to much if current software isn’t running perfectly on a computer that’s getting long in the tooth - but iTunes’ use of resources is completely bananas when considered in the context of what it actually does. Although I have an up-to-date rig now and have no doubt that iTunes would run better on it, I would still tend to shy away from it on the basis of its inefficiency.
Ouch. 
I don’t think Apple is better than PCs. I don’t own a Mac computer. The only Apple product I have is the iPod. I am used to working on a Windows computer. I still have no trouble getting iTunes to do what I want it to.
Who said there was no option to burn CDs in the menus? It’s right there (I just checked) File > Library > Burn Playlist to Disc (or you can click the burn button at the bottom of each playlist).
You can tell iTunes to leave your original folder structures alone. By default it will organise by its own method, but this can be turned off with two checkboxes in the preferences: “keep iTunes music folder organised” and “copy songs to my library when adding”. If you turn these off, iTunes will leave your folders alone, and enable you to spread your library across multiple drives, networks etc, and keep your file and folder names intact.
Alternatively, you can have those checkboxes on and it will do what many people complain about. Either way, the preferences are not that difficult to understand.
I cannot follow some of these posts that say it took their wife an hour to sync music to her iPod Touch. Drag music to iTunes, connect iPod Touch. Go to File > Sync iPod. That is it! Even if it’s unintuitive to click on the iPod when it appears in the panel on the left to get to the UI-based sync button (which is large), the Sync iPod command is in the top level File menu, not buried under any submenu/nested menu. If it took an hour and your wife did not see it, even after clicking on the menu (and not stumbling across the sync button, either by right clicking the iPod or left clicking it and seeing the new window with the large sync button) then I have to ask at what point she decided to give up and type “how to sync ipod with itunes” into Google? This isn’t a criticism, per se, but if it is taking an hour to work that out, she has missed something obvious or is expecting it to be much harder than it really is. The little booklet that comes in the iPod Touch box also has some iTunes tips.
I understand that many people do not like it, but a lot of the criticisms seem to be that iTunes doesn’t work like other music apps “out of the box” and they didn’t even look at the options to see if this was controllable behaviour.
Ah, you’re right. It is there, buried in a drill down behind the unhelpful ‘library’ item. (Putting music on a cd is not managing your library.)
My other complaint was that the burn button should be present at all times. It’s aggravating that iTunes will only let you burn things if its a playlist. You can’t just select tracks or albums. And if you have your library open, not a playlist, the burn button is hidden altogether, with no indication where to go.
And as I also said: the genius buttons are always there - no matter what you’re doing, no matter if you turned it off - because the real object of itunes is selling you stuff, not managing your music.
I’ve explained this to my mom repeatedly. What she sees when she opens iTunes is a big menu on the left hand side. It doesn’t have any indication that if she plugs in her ipod, it will show up there and she can commence syncing. The option in the File menu is greyed out. It’s not obvious that if you plug in your ipod, the left hand menu will suddenly become populated with currently invisible options.
This is not about how other music systems work. My mom has no other music system and thus no other expectations. She’s looking for something in the big visible menu that relates to her ipod - and there’s absolutely nothing that tells this is where she should be or what she should do.
Again, Apple manages to keep that Genius link in the left hand menu at all times, because selling stuff via the Genius bar is their priority.
None of my complaints, or the criticisms of Apple’s incessant foisting of its other software, including the non-optional MobileMe & Bonjour, and the omnipresent Quicktime & Safari, are based on wanting iTunes to work like something else. They’re based on direct areas where iTunes is lacking and badly behaved.
I’m not sure how long it’s been available, but you can use the Apple website to ask technical help to call you. It takes them only seconds usually and you never have to wait on hold or punch through voice mail menus.
One of these threads crops up every few months or so and I read them diligently to try to understand what people are complaining about. From the day I first got an Ipod, Itunes has always “just worked” for me. Perhaps the issue is that Ipod/Itunes is my first and only computer-based media player, so I have none of the background experience that would allow me to understand the complaints.
My bad; I shouldn’t be projecting motivations onto you.
Fair enough. For context, I’ve been managing my own audio files/music library since the early 90s, years before the first digital music player ever hit the market. (1996, according to wiki.) It was a happy day for me when the mp3 format was finally released to the world.
I have one huge issue with itunes - once you upgrade,you can NEVER downgrade to an older version with the same library. It marks your library database file with the new version number. This is a problem since #1 many new updates are buggy and sometimes unusable (yes, even APPLE releases shitware from time to time) and you are forced to wait for a patch update. #2 I have a Palm Pre,which itunes has hardware blocked from mounting in all versions over the last year. So that’s one more app I have to run from my secondary laptop if I want to add new music to my PDA.
I’m really trying hard to think of a single program that does what you complain iTunes doesn’t. Is there any program that indicates something isn’t plugged in? The most basic screen on a PC - My Computer - sure doesn’t. And that’s the main interface for other mp3 players, isn’t it? I really think this complaint is bending over backwards to find offense. Fine - you’re unable to explain to your mom that things need to be plugged in to work. Let’s blame it on Apple!
I do like your comments regarding Genius though. It’s a fun feature, but it does make it pretty apparent that iTunes’ purpose is there to make money.
Windows Media Player lets you prepare a synch list without the MP3 player plugged in. You obviously can’t synch the files until you do, but you can get it all prepared ahead of time. I don’t know if iTunes has that feature or not.
It does
I think he’s referring more to the design standard that Microsoft has long maintained where choices never disappear, they simply get greyed out when not available. Windows programmers are advised to always disable unavailable options instead of hiding them because it can confuse users when the interface changes.
My Computer? Do you mean Explorer? Explorer is the operating system, not an application, and as such there are no unavailable devices it would make sense to show. (Though the system tray on the taskbar – which is part of Explorer and thus part of My Computer – does indeed show “Network not available” if you unplug from the internet or you can’t find a wireless connection.) For a program designed to manage a specific device, it would make sense to show it as greyed out when not connected.
As a non-operating system application example, consider the low-footprint disk burning software I use. (Cheetah DVD Burner) When you open it, the destination area is available to drag files to even if there is no disk in the drive.
The pre is blocked because instead of writing a proper sync app or helper plugin for the palm pre, palm decided to take the easy route and just spoof apple’s USB vendor ID to trick iTunes into thinking there was an iPod attached. The USB-IF who manages the id codes ensures they are specific and unique to each vendor. You are way outside the legit boundaries by spoofing another manufacturer’s vendor code and they were rightly spanked like naughty children. Palm are free to write a conduit to sync with iTunes - it’s all documented and open. Ironically, the best third party software tat already does this is “the missing sync” by marksoft that grew out of the need for a way to sync early palm handhelds on the Mac when palm said “we are no longer going to support Mac, tough luck”. So when coming back to the Mac (that suddenly has market share they are interested in) their choices were either write a sync plugin (takes time and effort), licence and bundle The Missing Sync (embarrassing since it was originally written because you left Mac users out in the cold, also adds cost to the device) or go the kludge route and break the terms of your USB implementation contract and spoof the vendor id (cheap to do, just stupid).
Guess which one palm chose.
So, what you are saying is that I should install iTunes so that I can use Windows Explorer to make playlists. :dubious:
Using this method, but skipping iTunes, I could just drag and drop the files to a folder on my device. It also requires me to manually do what should be an automatic function. If I have 200 folders of songs I should not have to drag and drop all 200 from WE into iTunes to get my already functioning music collection to work.
No, she’s saying that if you’re going to bitch that “X can’t do Y”, you should, at the very minimum, attempt to do Y. :rolleyes:
But X, in this case, can’t do Y. That is the point. I already knew that I could copy and paste in Windows. That is not a feature or a function of iTunes.
Actually, what I like most about Itunes is that it is a manipulable database that gives me so many options for displaying my data. I wouldn’t like the idea of my music sort of floating free-form on my hard drive with only the folders I created and named as the key to finding things. I spend a lot of time entering the metadata just the way I want it so that it displays just so. Sometimes I literally just stare at my Itunes window appreciating the beauty of the organization.
Ditto.
I started out with that freeform style back in the Soundjam days but iTunes pretty much forced me to abandon it. But after giving it a try, I found that I rather liked it.