Moan about iTunes

PGL

This has probably been posted before but I want to have a rant about iTunes!

Why is it so damn "user-unfriendly"? I have always used Creative Zen MP3 players and have found them so easy to use in terms of simply dragging and dropping music from my computer to the mp3 player.

However I bought an iPod Classic for my missus at Christmas. Before uploading the music onto the iPod, I have recently gone about ripping all CDs onto my laptop, and have arranged all music in terms of artists and albums, to have a pretty organised and comprehensive music library.

The trouble then started when I downloaded iTunes. It took about 2 days to convert all of the music in WMA format. But the worst thing is that there is widespread duplication of songs, together with songs going missing from album folders. What a pain in the you-know-what......

Am I missing out on something with iTunes? Seeing as the iPod is the world leader in mp3 players I would have thought that iTunes should be on the ball also?

Can Windows Media Player (head and shoulders above iTunes imo) or some other format be used instead of iTunes for uploading music onto iPods?

Rant over. I now need some help!

cheers

spoongibbon

PGL wrote: »

This has probably been posted before but I want to have a rant about iTunes!

Why is it so damn "user-unfriendly"? I have always used Creative Zen MP3 players and have found them so easy to use in terms of simply dragging and dropping music from my computer to the mp3 player.

However I bought an iPod Classic for my missus at Christmas. Before uploading the music onto the iPod, I have recently gone about ripping all CDs onto my laptop, and have arranged all music in terms of artists and albums, to have a pretty organised and comprehensive music library.

The trouble then started when I downloaded iTunes. It took about 2 days to convert all of the music in WMA format. But the worst thing is that there is widespread duplication of songs, together with songs going missing from album folders. What a pain in the you-know-what......

Am I missing out on something with iTunes? Seeing as the iPod is the world leader in mp3 players I would have thought that iTunes should be on the ball also?

Can Windows Media Player (head and shoulders above iTunes imo) or some other format be used instead of iTunes for uploading music onto iPods?

Rant over. I now need some help!

cheers

Actually, iTunes is known for it's ease of use - complaints usually focus on it's bloatedness and tendency to become sluggish over time. The issue here seems to be a question of familiarity, you expect iTunes to behave in the same way that Windows Media Player does, but it's different software. As far as the conversion of all your music goes, you have to remember you're copying it onto a different device and each device will (mostly) have different requirements. The iPod isn't known for it's ability to play a billion different formats but it does support .mp3, the most common music format, so any question of why it doesn't play .wma should be accompanied by the question of why all your music is in the .wma format in the first place. As for your duplicates and files going missing, I'm not sure what's going on there without a bit more detail, what are you using to convert the files? You can easily remove duplicates in iTunes by going to File>Show Duplicates, though.
To answer your final question, there are plug-ins and software available if you want to use Windows Media Player with your iPod...this crowd came up in a search: http://www.mediafour.com/products/xplay/
But give iTunes a try! You might even have a look at a few tutorials to get a feel for it?
http://www.apple.com/support/itunes/windows/tutorial/index.html

Rob_l

I like itunes i have no issue at all with it but if you do then check out this link



http://www.simplehelp.net/2007/07/08/10-alternatives-to-itunes-for-managing-your-ipod/

Biro

iTunes is the bain of Apples company. Talk about lock-down! There's very little positive can be said about it, it's just what you have to put up with for Apple ownership.

PGL

Thanks for the replies lads. In terms of the duplicate files, I have clicked "File" and then "Show Duplicates". The problem now is that it appears every song has 3 copies, and I have heaps of songs, so is there a quick way to delete the duplicates?

cheers

di2772

I hate iTunes. Its the worst software ever written. So slow too. And as for having to download 70MB for an update.

miralize

And having to restart your computer after it. Argh so f*cking annoying

mad muffin

I have no problem with iTunes really. Yeah its restrictive but it works fine for me.

This is a common complaint for windows users, you never hear anyone using a Mac complain about iTunes.

This is only natural as iTunes is native to Apple and Apple designed the OS for MACs .

pleasant Co.

mad muffin wrote: »

This is a common complaint for windows users, you never hear anyone using a Mac complain about iTunes.

Mac user here, I don't like itunes, it's functional but i'd like to have more control over my music and other forms of media, in some aspects it excels but in others it's plain out poor...what can I do, mediamonkey doesn't work on mac, nor does jriver media centre or foobar2000...as a mac user my choice of quality media players really is limited.

To be perfectly honest, when I read that itunes works just fine for Mr/mrs X, I think, well, so would a handful of other players, there's no reason not to use itunes of course, unless it doesn't fit your needs. Meh, suddenly lost all interest in my wee rant. Basically, itunes ain't the bees knees of media players, but it's functional (just like a lot of other media players).

chrislad

I like iTunes. It's perfect for me in terms of music and audiobooks, as well as the app store. What I dislike about it is the lack of support for any video outside of the Quicktime codecs. It's irritating having to convert files to play in iTunes/AppleTV.

tman

The gripes mentioned are far removed from my issues with iTunes...
I started using it again recently because Winamp is crap for gapless track and album art support, and has been doing some pretty screwy stuff with the songs on my ipod (says its playing one song when its playing something totally random)

Horribly bloated and sluggish
Takes ****ing HOURS to add a decent sized amount of music to the library (unless you skip the artwork and gapless playback checks)
Doesn't remove dead items from the library (found a .js file that does this for you though, so I guess that's one less problem)
Installs ****ty quicktime without asking you!
If you use it to convert a WMA album with various artists, it creates a seperate folder for each artist instead of 1 folder for the album

Besides those points though, it is a fantastically easy interface to use... How can anybody find it harder to use than the zen is beyond me... Its the exact same drag and drop principal

banquo

LOGIN PROBLEMS.

Widespread and very, very annoying. It's like a lottery, who gets a non-working login.

On a happier note, the sky outside my window is quite beautiful

Oafley Jones

mad muffin wrote: »

I have no problem with iTunes really. Yeah its restrictive but it works fine for me.

This is a common complaint for windows users, you never hear anyone using a Mac complain about iTunes.

This is only natural as iTunes is native to Apple and Apple designed the OS for MACs .

If anything I believe Mac users are tougher on iTunes than most Windows users and rightfully so. Go to any mac forum and you'll see lots of discussions criticizing iTunes. The lack of a viable alternatives (such as songbird on PC) is a major problem. iTunes started out as a decent system but in recent years it has achieved a level of bloat and sluggishness that would embarrass even Microsoft. iTunes really needs a complete overhaul at this stage.

mad muffin

Oafley Jones wrote: »

If anything I believe Mac users are tougher on iTunes than most Windows users and rightfully so. Go to any mac forum and you'll see lots of discussions criticizing iTunes. The lack of a viable alternatives (such as songbird on PC) is a major problem. iTunes started out as a decent system but in recent years it has achieved a level of bloat and sluggishness that would embarrass even Microsoft. iTunes really needs a complete overhaul at this stage.

Nope what ever forum I go one and there is this discussion Mac user go I have no problems with it in OSX, its because you are using it on windows...is what they say. :pac:

Oafley Jones

mad muffin wrote: »

Nope what ever forum I go one and there is this discussion Mac user go I have no problems with it in OSX, its because you are using it on windows...is what they say. :pac:

I've only switched back to Windows in the last year, before that I've used iTunes all the way back to 4.0 on Mac, so I've much more experience of it as a Mac user. Performance is poorer on Windows but that's still Apple's failure to optimize the code and not the platform. My biggest gripe with iTunes is how poorly it is all organized; the same failure applies to the Store as well, the initial design template can't cope with the amount of features that have been released over the years. Even MS have passed them out in terms of usability. And that's an embarrassment. For example, Compare iTunes' Genius with Zune's Mixview - genius is a relic compared to it.

PGL

can anyone tell me how to get album artwork sorted on iTunes? it appears to me that the only way to guarantee album artwork is to download music from iTunes - surely this is not the case? album artwork generally pops up on Windows Media Player for all of my music....

some help would be most appreciated!

cheers

Red Alert

I like iTunes and no other player so far has the ability to keep the folders organized. I don't like doing my own organization so I'm more than happy to let iTunes do it for me.

What I'd love to see though is a way to sync libraries between separate machines and to allow for multi-user libraries but with individual playlists.

Jip

I still fail to see why people have issues with iTunes, I've never had any problems with it. You see regular threads around here by people complaining "It can't do this, it can't do that etc etc " when in fact it can, it's just a case of RTFH.

spoongibbon

PGL wrote: »

can anyone tell me how to get album artwork sorted on iTunes? it appears to me that the only way to guarantee album artwork is to download music from iTunes - surely this is not the case? album artwork generally pops up on Windows Media Player for all of my music....

some help would be most appreciated!

cheers

You can go to Advanced>Get Album Artwork... or failing that, you can add artwork manually by selecting a track, or selection of tracks by shift-clicking, and going to File>Get Info>Artwork.

cpu-dude

spoongibbon wrote: »

You can go to Advanced>Get Album Artwork... or failing that, you can add artwork manually by selecting a track, or selection of tracks by shift-clicking, and going to File>Get Info>Artwork.

You must make sure you are also signed in and also that every album (but not so much on artist) has the correct title name because if it's missing or incorrect, there won't be any artwork to pull down.

It's worth your while taking a day to sort all your art work because an iPod Touch full of the correct art work in cover flow looks gorgeous!

mad muffin

cpu-dude wrote: »

You must make sure you are also signed in and also that every album (but not so much on artist) has the correct title name because if it's missing or incorrect, there won't be any artwork to pull down.

It's worth your while taking a day to sort all your art work because an iPod Touch full of the correct art work in cover flow looks gorgeous!

Agree :pac: no other phones album look is as sexy as that pic.

Oafley Jones

Coincidently, I just saw this on Wired.com this morning.

iSuck: Apple's Five Worst Products, Ever

Guess what made number five...

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/08/isuck-apples-five-worst-products-ever/

nulabert

I used windows media player and then changed to iTunes. iTunes is the dogs boll1xs compared to media player. ITunes is like any software - spend a bit of time at it and you'll know how to used it. People who don't spend time at it to
figure it out or ask other iTunes users how to fix things usually just moan about how crap and user unfriendly it is - hence the thread!!

Appleguy

Its the worst programme on my mac. But still a million times better than windows media player.

banquo

All true. It is a savage media player, but still pretty bloated.

And the itunes store is so goddamned slow.

Oafley Jones

Appleguy wrote: »

Its the worst programme on my mac. But still a million times better than windows media player.

True, not exactly setting the bar too high when people start comparisons with WMP.

PGL

nulabert wrote: »

I used windows media player and then changed to iTunes. iTunes is the dogs boll1xs compared to media player. ITunes is like any software - spend a bit of time at it and you'll know how to used it. People who don't spend time at it to
figure it out or ask other iTunes users how to fix things usually just moan about how crap and user unfriendly it is - hence the thread!!

i have to agree with nulabert, and i'm the one guilty of starting this thread!

iTunes is far from the finished article, but now that I have had time to get used to it, it is certainly better than Windows Media Player and probably all other similar platforms.

thanks for all the responses!

cheers