iTunes RIP?

Mr E

Apple are pulling the plug on itunes, replacing it with 3 separate apps - Music, TV and Podcasts. To be announced officially at the upcoming worldwide developers conference.

https://loudwire.com/rest-peace-itunes/

Good riddance? It had become very bloated I think...

Spon Farmer

Mr E wrote: »

Apple are pulling the plug on itunes, replacing it with 3 separate apps - Music, TV and Podcasts. To be announced officially at the upcoming worldwide developers conference.

https://loudwire.com/rest-peace-itunes/

Good riddance? It had become very bloated I think...

What do you mean "bloated"?

Mr E

It's at least double the size it was a few years ago. They've made it a jack of all trades (podcasts, TV, store etc.) which is redundant if you just use it to transfer music and nothing else.

awec

Thank goodness for that.

iTunes is a heap of ****e.

Oafley Jones

Mr E wrote: »

Apple are pulling the plug on itunes, replacing it with 3 separate apps - Music, TV and Podcasts. To be announced officially at the upcoming worldwide developers conference.

https://loudwire.com/rest-peace-itunes/

Good riddance? It had become very bloated I think...

It’s been a bloated mess for well over a decade at this stage.

super_furry

God I hope so, its always been an irredeemably awful piece of software. Even Microsoft's Zune software was better.

duridian

I wonder this this impact upon users of older devices, such as for example iPod Classics, Nanos, etc. which a lot of people still like and use.
i.e., Will those still work with the new Music and other applications on Mac/PC for transferring music and so on?

Anteayer

The biggest issue is that it's an old jukebox that has had streaming rather crudely bolted on.

It's actually hard to even find where the streaming content is half the time and it's also completely different to the Apple Music iOS and Android apps.

They've got to compete with Spotify and it's generally much more usable as a streaming service.

iTunes it's a decent jukebox though. So I can see some people being very annoyed if Music doesn't have the ability to sort and catalogue large music collections that are locally stored. That's what iTunes excels at but it's not something that most subscribers to streaming tend to want. It's very poor at things like social media connected playlist sharing and all of that.

I guarantee you though this move will be controversial.

Cee-Jay-Cee

I use iTunes off-line all the time for transferring music onto my iPod Classic so I’m assuming that it will still work for the likes of me?

Franz Von Peppercorn II

This is what it used to look like.

https://images.app.goo.gl/QdcN8tUkmySnyhdJA

A simpler time.

brophs

It was a feat of ingenuity to make a piece of software that bad.

Rechuchote

This article warns about it - it erased all the writer's personal music that he'd collected over years, and replaced it with streaming links.

https://slate.com/technology/2016/05/will-apple-music-complete-itunes-destruction-of-my-will-to-collect-music.html?__twitter_impression=true

Franz Von Peppercorn II

Rechuchote wrote: »

This article warns about it - it erased all the writer's personal music that he'd collected over years, and replaced it with streaming links.

https://slate.com/technology/2016/05/will-apple-music-complete-itunes-destruction-of-my-will-to-collect-music.html?__twitter_impression=true

That’s the existing iTunes. Also the files can be downloaded again.

Circuital

Franz Von Peppercorn II wrote: »

That’s the existing iTunes. Also the files can be downloaded again.

Oh well then. :rolleyes:

Good riddance to it’s current incarnation.

Rechuchote

The article says it's not the existing iTunes but Apple Music.

If you upgrade your OS does that also change iTunes (crap and all as it is) to Apple Music?

Franz Von Peppercorn II

Circuital wrote: »

Oh well then. :rolleyes:

Good riddance to it’s current incarnation.

You realise that all it’s doing is uploading his music to the cloud? Click bait article.

@rechuchote

Apple Music exists on the iPhone but hasn’t been ported yet to the Mac.

5uspect

Franz Von Peppercorn II wrote: »

You realise that all it’s doing is uploading his music to the cloud? Click bait article.

@rechuchote

Apple Music exists on the iPhone but hasn’t been ported yet to the Mac.

Apple Music is a web interface within iTunes on Mac and PC.

Franz Von Peppercorn II

5uspect wrote: »

Apple Music is a web interface within iTunes on Mac and PC.

Not the App though.

On my music collection when I am paying for Apple Music the N tracks I own are available and when I am not the N tracks are available. Some online, some not.

When I pay for Apple Music they are available alongside a much bigger library.

Apple Music incorporates something that used to be called iTunes Match which matched your content where it could (often at higher quality) or uploaded any music that was unique to your collection.

That philosophy hasn’t changed, the article indicates that some of the matching went wrong and rare music was replaced by more common recordings and that was a feature. It’s definitely not a feature but it might be a bug.

Edit.

Seems like a bug.

https://www.imore.com/no-apple-music-not-deleting-tracks-your-hard-drive-unless-you-tell-it

CalamariFritti

Never liked iTunes. It tried to combine content purchasing and organising and synching and phone maintenance and many more things while trying mostly to be usable by my mother. And only succeeded in making all of these things way more complicated than they had to be. Most of the time you had to work around rather than with it. And unless you're into jailbreaking you were stuck with it nonetheless. Good riddance.

Sad Professor

Maybe it's because I've been using it since its SoundJam days but I have never had any major issues with iTunes's functionality. Its interface, hell yes, though I have been fairly happy even with that since iTunes 12.

I think much of the hate for iTunes comes from Windows users used to manually managing mp3 files being forced to use it and not taking the time to learn how it works. I also remember a lot of really terrible advice floating around online in the early iPod/iPhones days encouraging people to disable stuff that only made it more difficult to use and increased the likelihood of having problems.

I still agree that it's a bloated. It would be nice to see it return to being a more streamlined music player and library manager.

daheff

It’s overly complicated

regularly find uploaded albums have split into a few songs here a few there

This stuff shouldn’t be so difficult

Rechuchote

Apple has just got horrible in recent years.

5uspect

Franz Von Peppercorn II wrote: »

Not the App though.

The iOS Apple Music app, and the Apple Music (and iTunes Store) functionality within iTunes are mostly reliant on obsolete WebObjects.

It would be nice to see a new music app for all platforms that’s built using more robust tools. I suspect that Apple Music and other services are major drivers for Marzipan.

I’ve always had a soft spot for iTunes. It’s where I started trying to organise a music collection and where I discovered podcasts. Sure it could be clunky and it was never particularly great on Windows but it was fine on OS X.

Rechuchote

I liked it ok on earlier OSes but not on the latest iterations. It's a bully, like the rest of Apple's recent stuff.

beauf

brophs wrote: »

It was a feat of ingenuity to make a piece of software that bad.

Its up there with someone of the worst software I've ever used.

cursai

A music app for people who don't particularly care about their music collection.

jack presley

For someone who isn't that tech savvy and not up to speed with what counts as good or bad technology, what are the issues with iTunes, e.g. explain what 'bloated' means? I use it for copying my CDs so I can synch to my phone (Yea, I'm the person who still buys CDs) and it's fine for what I do. What features are lacking in iTunes that other programs have and what doesn't it do well generally?

5uspect

jack presley wrote: »

For someone who isn't that tech savvy and not up to speed with what counts as good or bad technology, what are the issues with iTunes, e.g. explain what 'bloated' means? I use it for copying my CDs so I can synch to my phone (Yea, I'm the person who still buys CDs) and it's fine for what I do. What features are lacking in iTunes that other programs have and what doesn't it do well generally?

As I mentioned earlier, iTunes doesn’t run particularly smoothly on Windows. It’s video playback in particular is shockingly bad. It’s also a mess on 4K displays.

On Mac things are a lot better in this regard.

The issues with bloat come from the belief that iTunes tries to do too many things. It started out, as the name suggests, a music application. You could buy and manage your music. Like you it was great for ripping CDs and I spent many an evening editing my music collection.

Then they added podcasts, movies and iDevice backup and management. Your iPhone would copy all its apps to your Mac/PC for some daft reason. They added Genius, Ping, iTunes Match. It began to use more and more system resources, managing your library became difficult; supposedly Bono complained to Steve Jobs about iTunes looking like a Spreadsheet and then we got a fancy but less usable redesign.

Historically good Mac apps are incredibly light weight with beautiful interfaces. The usually have a clear personality and brand (unlike parts of Windows for example, compare Disk Utility with whatever mouthful Windows throws up when you search for Disk Management, or Spotlight with the ****e Windows search. Even naming their file browser Finder as opposed to Explorer speaks to this idea).

iTunes is very much the antithesis of that philosophy, so the notion that Apple would spilt it up has been expected for years.

As it stands Apple have made iTunes almost redundant for management of iOS devices. Streaming is here to stay and I don’t have an active digital music collection anymore. I see Apple completely gutting it.

awec

I reckon iTunes costs them a lot of Apple Music subscriptions. People who want to listen to music on their PC are put off having to install iTunes to do so, and go with Spotify for the better experience.

Anteayer

I always feel iTunes is the Microsoft Office of music. Old, bloated, full of obscure features used by 3 people and with a diehard user base who will go absolutely crazy if anyone dares change anything.

jakdublin

Franz Von Peppercorn II wrote: »

Not the App though.

Apple Music incorporates something that used to be called iTunes Match which matched your content where it could (often at higher quality) or uploaded any music that was unique to your collection.

That philosophy hasn’t changed, the article indicates that some of the matching went wrong and rare music was replaced by more common recordings and that was a feature. It’s definitely not a feature but it might be a bug.

Edit.

Seems like a bug.

https://www.imore.com/no-apple-music-not-deleting-tracks-your-hard-drive-unless-you-tell-it

I've never forgiven Apple for mismatching lots of my rare music collection in iTunes Match when it came out first. Lost literally hundreds of tracks that took me a couple of years to find again. Had been a fanboy up to then but that made me decide to remove myself from the Apple ecosystem. I'm now Dropbox instead of iCloud, Google photos in stead of Photos and Tidal instead of Apple Music. Can't quite quit Apple altogether though. God, they make great computers and phones.

fin12

I have over 1600 songs on my iPod touch, will any of my songs be lost when these changes happening. I don’t like streaming music. All the music I have is once’s from cds I put on iTunes or in recent years would buy songs from the iTunes Store.

Blazer

jakdublin wrote: »

I've never forgiven Apple for mismatching lots of my rare music collection in iTunes Match when it came out first. Lost literally hundreds of tracks that took me a couple of years to find again. Had been a fanboy up to then but that made me decide to remove myself from the Apple ecosystem. I'm now Dropbox instead of iCloud, Google photos in stead of Photos and Tidal instead of Apple Music. Can't quite quit Apple altogether though. God, they make great computers and phones.

A lot of us got caught like that when match was released. It was hyped as the ultimate solution.
It was only when you actually went looking for stuff that you realised that its a pita to get it back and if you lost your original source god help you.
I moved to android a few weeks back and its a nightmare trying to download my original music..there's about a 100 songs that it refuses to download and it endlessly circles. I even installed apple music on my phone and still the same issue. I can stream those songs , I just can't download them regardless of the phone or operating system.
Also Android while pretty good sucks at browsing the web..I've never been spammed so much in my life in the last few weeks...google basically allow every ad to target you on chrome and don't allow ad blockers for it on android. And with their latest chrome agenda its time to move back when the new iphone comes out

Circuital

Blazer wrote: »

Also Android while pretty good sucks at browsing the web..I've never been spammed so much in my life in the last few weeks...google basically allow every ad to target you on chrome and don't allow ad blockers for it on android. And with their latest chrome agenda its time to move back when the new iphone comes out

Firefox on Android supports ad-blocking.

Why anyone would use Chrome on Android is beyond me! Even Samsung's browser is better.

And would you really move back purely because of a browser?

5uspect

Some clarification

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/06/answers-to-some-of-your-itunes-questions-old-libraries-windows-and-more/

Absolute garbage piece of software.
The Windows version was a bloated mess of install MSI files. Try uninstalling it gracefully

awec

Keeping it in Windows is such a nonsense move.

Ultimately it'll cost them having to maintain two separate things.

Sad Professor

I'm not entirely surprised by this. Anytime the prospect of iTunes being split up was raised in the past, the Windows program was always one of the reasons many suggested it wouldn't happen.

Separating the Mac and Windows versions would be a good thing IMO. Windows users deserve something designed for Windows rather than a port of a Mac app. And Mac users shouldn't have their experience held back.

Blazer

Circuital wrote: »

Firefox on Android supports ad-blocking.

Why anyone would use Chrome on Android is beyond me! Even Samsung's browser is better.

And would you really move back purely because of a browser?

yep..I would...firefox sucks because I'd have to use it on desktop so my bookmarks sync. Even with the ad blocker there's some a lot getting through compared to safari on ios.
Also apps are nowhere as polished as on ios.
Hell Bank of Ireland haven't updated their android app since August 2017 ffs.
Echofon which is awesome on ios absolutely sucks on android.

jakdublin

Blazer wrote: »

A lot of us got caught like that when match was released. It was hyped as the ultimate solution.
It was only when you actually went looking for stuff that you realised that its a pita to get it back and if you lost your original source god help you.
I moved to android a few weeks back and its a nightmare trying to download my original music..there's about a 100 songs that it refuses to download and it endlessly circles. I even installed apple music on my phone and still the same issue. I can stream those songs , I just can't download them regardless of the phone or operating system.
Also Android while pretty good sucks at browsing the web..I've never been spammed so much in my life in the last few weeks...google basically allow every ad to target you on chrome and don't allow ad blockers for it on android. And with their latest chrome agenda its time to move back when the new iphone comes out

Yeah, I'm not quite prepared to make the switch to Android, yet anyway. Used to update my iPhone regularly but financial circumstances have changed so I'm stuck with an iPhone 6 since they came out. When I do upgrade it'll be just to a 7 or 8, depending on price at the time.

For music I now use a combo of Plex for downloaded albums supplemented by Tidal, which you can now integrate into Plex. Best of both worlds.

Blazer

To be honest I'm basically using the same apps over on android so it really makes no difference.
The browser and polished apps are the main one really.
Also and this annoys the hell out of me. I have to unlock the mate 20 pro to hang up a call..how frakking dumb is that. Must be away around it

Spon Farmer

Mr E wrote: »

It's at least double the size it was a few years ago. They've made it a jack of all trades (podcasts, TV, store etc.) which is redundant if you just use it to transfer music and nothing else.

That doesn't make any sense.


What difference does it make how content is sold or offered on it? You just use it for what you want.

How can it be "redundant" if you only use it to sync music? That is is making use of it so therefore it is not redundant.

I use iTunes for movies and occasional podcasts. It makes no sense to moan that iTunes has audiobook and music or radio stations. Makes no difference me.

Spon Farmer

fin12 wrote: »

I have over 1600 songs on my iPod touch, will any of my songs be lost when these changes happening. I don’t like streaming music. All the music I have is once’s from cds I put on iTunes or in recent years would buy songs from the iTunes Store.

The majority of my music is from CDs too and I also have no interest in subscribing to the music service.

I think Apple has already explained how we will store and sync to devices but I haven't had a chance to look it up.

Nothing will be lost.

JP Liz V1

Spon Farmer wrote: »

The majority of my music is from CDs too and I also have no interest in subscribing to the music service.

I think Apple has already explained how we will store and sync to devices but I haven't had a chance to look it up.

Nothing will be lost.

I'm the same