Not usually a fan of articles which are made of of mostly tweets, but in this case I think it's apt. I upgraded to iOS 10 the other day and they of course changed how their music player looked, and I was just used to their old UI.
iTunes sucks for the same reason Adobe Reader sucks. It's an XML parser. That's the only thing it needs to do to play music files. But then it needed multiple album covers when the ID3 specification didn't allow it, so Apple got haxy. Then it needed to play videos so Apple wrote some more weird XML. Then it did podcasts that updated. Then there was a store. Then it was on Windows: and holy fuck is that a shitshow. Then there were rentals. Then there was the phone... and apps. Then there was a subscription music service. And all of it is underpinned by a poor, benighted little XML parser. iTunes sucks because it's what a bicycle would look like if you needed to land naval fighter jets on it while also baking ciabatta loafs off the strait of Hormuz.
My favorite Acrobat thing: pdf started out as a simplification of Postscript, because it turned out that documents don't often need to be turing complete and having them be makes life difficult for WYSIWYG editors. So pdf was lobotomized postscript. Then they did this, doing away with the whole reason pdf existed in the first place. It's not like Postscript couldn't have done the job perfectly well. They just took a very long road to an uglier version of the thing they started with.
Ha! Through constant frustration; it hardens those memories quickly.
I've given up on music almost entirely. There just is no good way to sort, parse, select, and play music any more. The only time I hear music now is on hold, or when my wife asks me if I want her to fire up Pandora while I'm cooking in the kitchen. I miss music.
Stopped using iTunes about two years ago in favor of Foobar2000. It's not the most elegant looking software, but it's lightweight and customizable and functions much, much better than iTunes for my needs.
The music player is just a shift in order to get people to move to Apple Music, which no one wants to do, so they're Google+ing it, so to speak. I have an iTunes library connected to a hard-drive in order to let me sync music to my iPhone. I only do this because I like being able to play my music without an internet connection. Otherwise I have my music uploaded to Google Play, or I listen to stuff on Spotify, which I get a student discount for the pro version of. Either way, WOW iOS 10's music app looks like absolute shit. It's no wonder they're dropping the headphone jack, no one will want to listen to music on the thing at this point:
I don't understand how they manage to ship such unintuitive software for so long. I don't have a Mac, because their software was always frustratingly simple to me; however, I do have an iPhone, because I wanted my mobile device to be super simple. Now the iPhone is simple, but the native apps UI are vague, and difficult to navigate. It took me a few minutes to figure out how to get my podcast episodes to play from oldest to newest. Now I forgot how I did it. I don't use iTunes anymore. I just couldn't bear it any longer. FYI rob05c got a 502 on this comment.
If you have an iPhone and a Windows computer, iTunes is how you sync contacts, calendars, etc. I have an Android and a Mac (several Macs). iTunes or an iPhone are the only way to hit an Apple TV with music. The Apple TV is completely dead to my Android phone, but I can navigate iTunes from my remote. The Android, of course, works a peach with Chromecast. There's so much hate for iTunes because it's essentially bridge software that is bloated beyond any reasonable capacity for life. In other words, nobody who hates on it so much has been able to find a workable solution without it.
raises hand That's me. I've given up on music in my life. It is just too fucking hard of a problem. I've actually debated just going back to LPs, because that's a soluble problem and well defined solution set with a library far larger than I have years of music listening left in my life. But... hipsters. So I just don't listen to music any more. sigh
LPs rule. Tapes rule. I own some eight-tracks (take that, hipsters) and they're really nice to throw on. Put on a side of an LP or Tape, go and take care of something like start to cook dinner, flip it to the B side when it's time to eat. It's a nice way of breaking up things and feeling a little less connected by using a physical form of media you've curated yourself as opposed to Pandora or Spotify...which do have their place at times.
I tunes was fine a decade ago. The only time I've opened it in the past few years is to update an I pod. I started using media monkey this year and it's...fine, I suppose. I don't have I tunes installed on either of my computer's which have my updated music library and I doubt that I'll ever install it again.
I've never used itunes. That said, I've never actually heard anyone speak of it in a positive and praising manner. I wouldn't be surprised if at this point, Apple's mentality for the software is "Fuck it. As long as it kind of works, we don't give a shit."
I've been a Mac user for like 16 years, since back when fonts could crash your computer. iTunes was good when it was a music jukebox. It was good when it was a jukebox that synced your iPod. Then they started grafting all this shit onto it. It now handles a store, videos, music, audiobooks, something called iTunes U, podcasts, different store functions for all those things and syncing and it's a nightmare. The simple thing would be to separate those things into different applications. But they did that on the iPhone and the Music app was unusable for like a year because I don't fucking know why. It was the worst Apple software I've ever used. They're probably gonna have to blow up my car or something to get me to switch because I hate Windows that much but the only fix is to totally rethink what they're doing and I think they've invested so much in the way things are, fixing it gives them panic attacks.