What is so scary and mysterious about iTunes?

[Gary_Robson]

@ftg

I’m a serious computer geek. Decades of experience. Former CS professor.

Me, too.

What amuses me most about threads like this is the absolutism. People say, “this program is better than that one,” or “this program sucks” as if their evaluation is purely objective.

When I started putting music on computers, I played with quite a few different programs, including WinAmp, Apple’s old predecessor to iTunes on Windows (I can’t remember what it was called), and iTunes itself. I picked iTunes as the one that worked best for me, and I’ve been generally happy ever since.

Bloated? Yeah, it’s got a lot of stuff in it, but it’s no worse than most of the Microsoft products I’ve used. Better than most. And I’ve never had a problem with performance. I can fire up iTunes (on a 4GB Mac) and get actual work done before Photoshop even finishes loading.

Organization? I use iTunes for organization. To me, that’s what it’s for! I’ve spent many hours working on the metadata in my library. The smart playlists work beautifully. Home sharing fixed my complaints about synching the libraries between my two computers, and moving things back and forth between my systems and my wife’s Windows computer, too.

Buggy? I’ve had trouble with it on Windows. I haven’t seen that many bugs on the Mac version, though. There are some features I would have done differently, but that’s true on my other software, too.

Non-intuitive? You might have a point there, considering that “intuitive” really means “matches my previous experience and expectations.” A program that’s intuitive to Mac users may be opaque to Windows users and vice-versa. Features that are obvious to me as a software engineer may be impossible to understand for someone else who has never used Boolean expressions or manipulated tags and metadata to organize data.

Doesn’t do “X”? When I load a new program and start playing with it, one of the first things I do is go through the options and see how I can tweak it to be exactly what I want. Most of the time, it seems that when someone complains that a complex program doesn’t do what they want, it really does do it – they just have the feature turned off or can’t find it.

My point is that “it sucks” is not a valid evaluation of iTunes. “It sucks for me on my particular computer for my particular uses” is.

@Markxxx

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 have no idea what you’re talking about here. Everything I do with iTunes is drag and drop. Works great.

[WarmNPrickly]

I will say this. I really don’t like the new way iTunes displays music. I liked it when it was just nested lists with the album covers showing in the bottom left. When looking for a particular song, I could just go to the genre, find the band, then get the album and the song would be there. Now when it displays genres, I get micro categories with album covers and no list of artists. If I o to artists, I have hundreds of artists to look through, and once again, it’s displaying album covers instead of a nested list.

[Acsenray]

Are you sure you just haven’t changed the display options?

[Munch]

@WarmNPrickly

I will say this. I really don’t like the new way iTunes displays music. I liked it when it was just nested lists with the album covers showing in the bottom left. When looking for a particular song, I could just go to the genre, find the band, then get the album and the song would be there. Now when it displays genres, I get micro categories with album covers and no list of artists. If I o to artists, I have hundreds of artists to look through, and once again, it’s displaying album covers instead of a nested list.

1. View -> Column Browser – make sure “Show Column Browser” has been selected
2. View -> Column Browser -> Check off every category you want to be able to sort by

[WarmNPrickly]

I’ll check that out. Since I really never use iTunes as a music browser anymore, I’ve never looked very hard to fix it. I did kind of assume there was a way to fix it, that’s why I posted.

[Munch]

You used to be able to switch the column browser on and off with a button right on the front of the UI. Once they “hid” it in the View tab, the hue and outcry that “you can’t sort music” reached its peak.

[Biffy_the_Elephant_Shrew]

@Munch

You used to be able to switch the column browser on and off with a button right on the front of the UI.

I don’t know about the PC version, but using the latest Mac version I still see four view option buttons at the top of the frame.

[Munch]

@Biffy_the_Elephant_Shrew

I don’t know about the PC version, but using the latest Mac version I still see four view option buttons at the top of the frame.

If you’re referring to the 4 radio-like buttons that switch between song list, album list, grid or cover flow, none of those are the column browser.

Edit: You should also go and make sure that it’s set to appear at the Top, rather than on the Left. The Top gives you 4 variables with which to sort with, the left only one.

[Biffy_the_Elephant_Shrew]

@Munch

If you’re referring to the 4 radio-like buttons that switch between song list, album list, grid or cover flow, none of those are the column browser.

Sorry, I misunderstood the complaint.

[Ograbme]

Why does itunes gotta truncate everyt…

[Munch]

@Ograbme

Why does itunes gotta truncate everyt…

Huh? You can adjust the column widths by just dragging them.

[digs]

@PlainJain

I’m glad you asked this as I have long wondered the same thing. It always floors me when I hear people blasting it. For me, it couldn’t be better/easier.

Yeah, I’ve used it for years, and have gigs of music/audiobooks/podcasts scattered between computers and hard drives. And I like it. I’d probably like a bare-bones drag-‘n’-drop better, but iTunes hasn’t done me any real harm. And by giving me free “Discovery Downloads” and free audiobooks and recommendations for free podcasts, has done me some good.

I think that’s why I’m not understanding some posters attitudes here. My focus is on LISTENING to the music, not in managing it. Or getting software to do just what I want.

Wow–just realized that as I mature I’m less of a hacker. Ouch. Oh, well.

If I needed software so it acted just like I want it to, I’d be spending hours and hours on the computer, not out walking (and singing along with The Jackson Five, or learning from Radiolab). And I’d hate Apple (their slogan these days is “Where do you want to go today? Oops, too bad-- Most People want to go HERE instead.”).

But if I can keep my focus on the end result, I’ll be less frustrated with software… and hardware…

…and people (I’m going to go apply this to Real Life, and stop trying to hack my wife…).

[digs]

That “hacking my wife” was intended metaphorically.

[Gary_Robson]

@digs

My focus is on LISTENING to the music, not in managing it.

I don’t see a big disconnect between those two. I like to listen to my music, too. I find it particularly cool that I can decide on the spur of the moment that I feel like listening to medieval folk rock with female vocalists, or death metal without cookie monster vocals, or any song that features Eric Clapton, or instrumental classic rock. Assuming I’ve put in the time to add appropriate metadata, which is a piece of cake in iTunes, I can do any of these in a few seconds.

[cordylus]

@Eyebrows_0f_Doom

Why would iTunes be copying anything unless you told it to do so? I don’t know why people always complain that iTunes “moves around” or “changes” their mp3 files. No, every single one of my files are exactly where I put them. All iTunes does is create a library and playlists that link to those songs. Nothing is moved, copied or changed.
You also get a lot of these exchanges:
Person A: “I don’t like iTunes because it does* x*! This sucks! What a stupid program!”
Person B: “It won’t do X if you tell it not too. Just click this setting here.”
Person A: “Oh, well, um… iTunes still sucks!”

Replace “It won’t do X if you tell it not too. Just click this setting here.”

with

“It won’t do X unless I tell it to. Just click this setting here.” And I might give it another try.

I gave up on it when I moved my mp3 collection from one directory to another and it re-indexed all my files. I had everything listed twice. Easy I thought, I’ll just tell it to remove all the dead entries. No dice. Granted this was a little over 5 years ago.

If all you want is something to manage a collection of audio files I can find you 20 options under 20 mb on sourceforge that are better than iTunes. Hell I can write a bash script to sync all my files with a removable device without the need to let Steve Jobs touch me where my bathing suit covers.

Oh and a special message for Bonjour:

"To the last, I grapple with thee; From Hell’s heart, I stab at thee; For hate’s sake, I spit my last breath at thee”

[Snowboarder_Bo]

My only problem with iTunes (sorry if this has been discussed already; I didn’t read the whole thread) is that it constantly “loses” my songs.

I go to listen to something, or put it in my iPhone, and iTunes tells me it cannot locate the file. So I highlight the title, click “Get Info”, see where it thinks the song is, and EVERY SINGLE TIME when I go to that folder, the file is sitting there, with the same name that iTunes says it can’t find.

It’s got to be one of the worst, sloppiest databases in history.

[amanset]

@cordylus

Replace “It won’t do X if you tell it not too. Just click this setting here.”

with

“It won’t do X unless I tell it to. Just click this setting here.” And I might give it another try.

I gave up on it when I moved my mp3 collection from one directory to another and it re-indexed all my files. I had everything listed twice. Easy I thought, I’ll just tell it to remove all the dead entries. No dice. Granted this was a little over 5 years ago.

If all you want is something to manage a collection of audio files I can find you 20 options under 20 mb on sourceforge that are better than iTunes. Hell I can write a bash script to sync all my files with a removable device without the need to let Steve Jobs touch me where my bathing suit covers.

Oh and a special message for Bonjour:

"To the last, I grapple with thee; From Hell’s heart, I stab at thee; For hate’s sake, I spit my last breath at thee”

Sounds like someone decided to just move the files using explorer or finder rather than using the built in support for moving the library. And then were amazed that iTunes wasn’t sure where things were anymore.

As others have pointed out, this thread is littered with people claiming iTunes doesn’t do some thing when in fact it does, they just haven’t got off their arse to find out about it. Moaning is much easier. Te classic example is ‘iTunes insists on organising my files for me, copying them into it’s own directory structure when I have spent years organising it myself in directories’. This is not only not true but hasn’t been true for years and years. The options are clear as day, there in the preferences.

See also: no menu item to burn, no way to get rid of genius links etc etc.

iTunes does have problems. One is sluggishness on windows. It does run like a cow. I also, again on windows, don’t like that there is no UI that fits in with standard designs. But so many of the complaints in this thread are simply not true.

[amanset]

@Snowboarder_Bo

My only problem with iTunes (sorry if this has been discussed already; I didn’t read the whole thread) is that it constantly “loses” my songs.

I go to listen to something, or put it in my iPhone, and iTunes tells me it cannot locate the file. So I highlight the title, click “Get Info”, see where it thinks the song is, and EVERY SINGLE TIME when I go to that folder, the file is sitting there, with the same name that iTunes says it can’t find.

It’s got to be one of the worst, sloppiest databases in history.

This has only ever happened to me when the music was stored on an external device. My guess is that when it loads up it has issues finding the device and then permanently flags it as missing.

[Wakinyan]

My problem with iTunes has always been that songs disappear; there’s an exclamation mark by the title, and when I click the song iTunes says it cannot be found. Sometimes when I opened iTunes, twenty or so songs had this exclamation mark, other times just a few. The songs are actually lost from Windows Explorer. I’ve been googling a lot on this, even think I started a thread about it here, and it obviously I’m not alone suffering from this but I never found the reason or solution. This spring every song on all my Nick Cave albums had this exclamaition mark, as spontaneously as ever. I don’t use iTunes anymore, but haven’t really found out what to use after the summer when I’m back to commuting.

[Alessan]

I think my problem with iTunes is that it isn’t what I want. It’s a program for organizing my music, and I don’t need a program for organizing my music; what I want is a program for interfacing with my iPhone.

That’s all I need: a simple interface. Something to tell me what’s on my device and what isn’t, and to help me transfer files to and from my computer. Anything more than that is superfluous.