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.