iPod Why the hate on iTunes?

[McScooby]

Agree with the replies talking about multiple clicks to do simple things, just gimme an option for it to scan my library & put each album into a playlist, it shouldn't be that hard. I used to have playlists for everything, then after an upgrade it was hosed, I've not got enough hours in the day to go thru the pain of doing it again, & yes, I've tried 3rd party stuff!

 

[determined09]

You're looking at this?:

View attachment 700725

Thank you.

 

[danny842003]

I was skeptical about Apple Music tried the trial and decided I would be keeping it within about an hour.
I grew up when napster was huge and for a long time torrented everything. The last few years I started purchasing music through iTunes being more mature I realised the errors of my ways I guess.
I have no idea why if you purchase music regularly you wouldnt go with Apple Music or similar.
With Apple Music I have no real issues with iTunes.
I do remember notice iTunes was much better when I switched to mac but that was around 2012 and I have never gone back.

 

[tshort]

iTunes made my wife's day even worse after it destroyed a playlist she had curated on her iPhone.

The iPhone is moving away form a unified app to manage all these types of media; I think the mac should follow. Analog Kid made some good points.

 

[Lostanddamned]

I genuinely like iTunes. I have just over 1TB of TV shows, 400GB of films, and 70GB of music. They’re all collated properly and sync to my iPhone or iPad with no friction.

I like looking at the screen of artwork, I like how Subler gathers the metadata and I have plenty of detail in front of me with no difficulty.

It’s a good app, but I think only if you’re using it for everything.

 

[Ffosse]

I never use iTunes - I have an orphaned iPod Shuffle with about 250 songs on it and that was the last time I used iTunes, December 2013 when I stopped using Windows and went to the Chromebook.

On my iPhone and Androids I use Google Play Music; I still have my entire library there plus all of Google's music and it works well with iOs.

 

[AFEPPL]

I prefer iTunes on windows and ended up moving over my whole library of around a 1000 movies to it. Runs 5 ATVs and has better uptime than the mac offered. All the files are on a NAS device.

But you have to say the layout is not nice and its pretty kludgy.
At least of late they have sorted the disappearing art issue that drove me nuts.

 

[tubular]

I've done the metadata rant too many times to go through it again. One sentence version: classical music is only very precariously usable in the iTunes world, and each new "innovation" forks it all up again.

My main complaint is that iOS and macOS don't have a "kill Apple Music and iTunes Store with fire" switch, such that every single trace of it goes away for good. I have to keep Apple ID logged out if I don't want my phone's iTunes list crammed with iTunes Store files that aren't local to my phone (because I didn't want them there), decorated with crap iTunes Store metadata that pours random crap entries into the Composer tag. I'm sure there's a lot of people for whom that's a very convenient use case. LET ME TURN IT OFF.

 

[glazball]

My main complaint is that iOS and macOS don't have a "kill Apple Music and iTunes Store with fire" switch, such that every single trace of it goes away for good. I have to keep Apple ID logged out if I don't want my phone's iTunes list crammed with iTunes Store files that aren't local to my phone (because I didn't want them there), decorated with crap iTunes Store metadata that pours random crap entries into the Composer tag. I'm sure there's a lot of people for whom that's a very convenient use case. LET ME TURN IT OFF.

Did you disable iTunes Store and Apple Music in Parental Controls in iTunes Preferences? It's almost like having the good ole' iTunes back before all the bloat.

I've been using iTunes since it launched (and Soundjam before that) so I'll likely never give it up. I do agree they should bring back Cover Flow for those of us who like seeing the cover artwork.

 

[tubular]

Doesn't help.

I've got some stuff I bought from iTunes store. It's not local on my phone and never will be. But if I sign in to anything with my Apple ID - i.e. to update an app - then there they are in the listing. That is, Apple has tied two very different functions to the same authentication act - software upgrade and "show my the list of stuff I bought from iTunes five years ago, in such a way that the crap iTunes metadata of tracks that aren't even on my phone demolish the carefully curated stuff in the files that are actually on my phone because iTunes Store metadata takes precedence despite the fact that it's globally recognized as crap crap crap data." And it's a very dumb design decision.

 

[mmomega]

I don't really have an issue with the program other than the layout decisions for Apple Music.

It is under Radio.
Which to me makes zero sense. Then make the name Apple Radio or remove the word Radio and replace with ...... Apple Music.
And now that they're doing TV Shows, which fall under Apple Music. So example finding something like their tv show planet of the apps you go to the music section not tvshows, then Raido? this is where Apple Music is hidden- no... Store? Well I can find it there. Click it, which takes me to Browse.
Ok Browse makes sense (sarcasm) so Browse is where Apple Music, music and TV Shows and Movie/Documentaries are?

Fine with eye candy and whatnot, I like pretty things. Just don't make it a chore to find a pretty large service you've been promoting so heavily and wanting people to pay for and use.

 

[nutmac]

iTunes was a great music player, until Apple decided to squeeze in video management, iOS devices, iTunes Store, App Store, Apple Music, etc. Each time, iTunes became more bloated, and more important, less stable. Jack of all trade and master of none.

I hope it will be broken into multiple apps:

1. iTunes: Purchased and ripped music, with iTunes Store for music.
2. Apple Music: Apple Music streaming service.
3. TV: Movies and TV shows, with iTunes Store for movies and TV shows.
4. Time Machine: Backs up iOS devices as well as macOS.

iOS device syncing should be done on the iOS device itself (via app resembling Apple Remote app).

 

[danny842003]

iTunes was a great music player, until Apple decided to squeeze in video management, iOS devices, iTunes Store, App Store, Apple Music, etc. Each time, iTunes became more bloated, and more important, less stable. Jack of all trade and master of none.

I hope it will be broken into multiple apps:

1. iTunes: Purchased and ripped music, with iTunes Store for music.
2. Apple Music: Apple Music streaming service.
3. TV: Movies and TV shows, with iTunes Store for movies and TV shows.
4. Time Machine: Backs up iOS devices as well as macOS.

iOS device syncing should be done on the iOS device itself (via app resembling Apple Remote app).

We know Music isn't going to be seperated. It makes no sense for Apple to have two seperate music apps.
The rest make sense though.

 

[PopBodhi]

The biggest reason I dislike iTunes is the small album artwork.

I grew up with vinyl albums. LPs… huge glossy pieces of cardboard that were often an art in themselves.

Now? A tiny little square that my ageing eyes are not very happy with.

Bring back Coverflow, at least.

Hear, hear!
[doublepost=1501390254][/doublepost]I've moved from being a devoted iTunes user (customer) to not using the program at all. Once it became clear to me that Apple didn't care about the people who wanted CD quality music files, I migrated to another player (JRiver Media) and started purchasing music from other vendors. When I can't find something lossless online, I buy the CD and/or the vinyl. It's really a shame. I have thousands of songs that could've been purchased through iTunes had they simply offered me a choice.

 

[Dimwhit]

To listen to music, it's fine. As a syncing platform, it's horrendous. Apple needs to bring back iSync and use that as an exclusive way to mount/sync devices. Since a lot of people don't manually copy over to devices anymore, there's no point having iTunes try to manage it, and it's causing a nightmare.

I would also split out Video management to a separate app and leave the Audio with iTunes, which it used to do great.

Not really sure why it still handles Apps, but if an app is needed for that, it can be broken out, too. But I think the Mac App store could just handle mobile apps, as well.

 

[jjmfe]

I see a lot of people saying that iTunes is a terrible application and needs seriously revamped. I don't really understand why people feel this way. Yes iTunes on Windows is terrible but on the Mac it works pretty well, the interface is easy to use, it sorts and keeps track of music well and has all the features you could need from a music management program. So what are your reasons for disliking it?

Why do I hate the new iTunes? Let me count the ways.
1) It's no longer an intuitive interface... finding and buying related or similar music no longer a right tool bar trial away as in early versions.
2) It wants to force me to go in to subscribing to it's monthly music service, instead of searching my library of 15-20,000 songs first.
3) Often it "loses" songs that I own and wants me to manually find them.... Going to the store to re-download the song is equally dissatisfying, because it "knows" I own the song, and hence, "do you want to find it manually on your computer. This is frequent and effects most of my library.
4) When I go offline to play my music or use TV for a period of time... it eventually won't access the content I own, even on the local hard drive, because it needs to go online to "see if this computer is authorized to play this content, it won't let me stream it on my local at home network without the web access... In other words, I am forever married to an internet provider to use the content that I bought. And Apple keeps me on a short leash with that... for example... if the ATM card that I have attached to my iTunes account for security sake, runs out of money during an item purchase... Apple locks down my entire library not just those purchase.
5) Music player and the iTunes app live in two different worlds, and you can't move smoothly between them both. Again, Apple wants to move to selling you subscriber services

I hate all things iTunes and music now... How do I hate thee Apple iTunes and Music... Let me count the ways....

 

[pika2000]

iTunes is an awesome program to manage a music library. The nature of its database and smart playlist are powerful features.

My main complaints of iTunes would be the syncing process with iOS devices. This has generated many complaints for years from never ending “waiting to copy new items” to random errors. Having said that, I’ve experienced better behavior once Apple removed the apps part from iTunes. Now the program behaves much better during syncing as it just backup the iDevice and syncs media.

 

[BornAgainMac]

I finally copied my movies and TV shows outside of iTunes to the Finder on external drives. And iTunes killed the App syncing so now iTunes is used just for Music. When I download TV shows or Movies, it is just a staging area before I copy them off to a normal folder and delete from iTunes.

Finally, I archived 90% of my music and kept my top 250 favorite songs in iTunes and make the iTunes library locally available on my SSD drive. I enjoy Apple Radio and my 250 favorite songs all the time now. It just works!

 

[Smellmet]

I've always liked iTunes for managing my music library, I think it does an excellent job of that, one or two corrupt library files down the years notwithstanding. It's when you try to manage other things like video that the app runs into problems IMO so I've just stopped using it for that.

 

[Apples555]

I've used iTunes to manage my syncable music since 2003. It's fine, but it really has started to rot lately. Some things just don't work anymore (like minimize to taskbar) and I never understood the decision to make album art small. What's the benefit?

I don't use Apple Music.

 

[ToM7]

I really miss to iTunes 11

 

[KingslayerG5]

I prefer file manager app and transfer speeds using a microSD card via SD adapter. Much faster.

Disliked iTunes since 2005. Never played nice with Windows. Can't recognize different video codecs. Need to convert them. When my computer crashed, I couldn't extract my music from my iPod.

I used Sharepod and it doesn't salvage all my photos in original size. If you used Windows XP, turning on iTunes would eat up all your RAM and it would freeze. If you want to delete photos in a photo album, you need to delete the photos in the folder and then sync to iTunes.

It's the main reason why I left iOS for awhile. I never liked using a program to handle my media files. It's a waste of time. Copy/paste drag/drop onto folders is the way to go.

 

[Apples555]

I've never understood why people have trouble with iTunes on Windows. I've used iTunes on Windows from XP to 10. The search on the new versions is a little slower on Windows, but that's the only thing I've noticed.

It's pretty much always running on my computer.

 

[KingslayerG5]

I left iOS for a few years mainly because of iTunes since it kept crashing my Windows laptop. I tried liking it. I also used Doubletwist, Media Go, Media Monkey, and Xiaomi Mi Suite. I admit that iTunes organizes it the best but nothing beats a file manager and drag & drop.

 

[sofila]

I'm asking for help about an issue occurring on iTunes 12.7.1 on Windows 10 (can't say if it is an OS related problem)
Hope to get it straight in explaining:
We all know that iTunes randomly adds album rating resulting in a fake rating (in dark grey stars) for those songs not manually rated in a given album. This behavior disturbs the proper management of smart playlists based on rating.


The issue: I have one library where I can get to edit album ratings (in "Album view" mode) and remove the blue stars (see next image)

On another library (same machine, same iTunes, same files location) I couldn't find a way to show those stars in Album view mode, (see next image)

So it is impossible to review and remove Album rating and my playlists are not properly working:
any tip please?