I’m not one to whine. Really. I’m totally not a whiner. However, I’m going to sound like one with this statement…
I fricken HATE iTunes.
There, I said it. I’m already starting to feel better.
Playing on Elisebeth Barrett Browning and her fantastic poem, “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.”, I’m going to count some ways that iTunes is filling me with inhuman, Hulk-like rage:
- Ridiculously frequent updates. Not the “Update Tuesday” sort of thing we get from Microsoft, but the “I’m going to interrupt you all the time, any time sort of upda…” – hold on, iTunes wants me to update it.
- Genius. You’re an idiot.
- Shuffle. You don’t.
- Home Sharing. If by “sharing”, you mean making it impossible to get music onto other devices without copying and moving it manually, you’re perfect.
- Relentless Focus on Making a Buck. Yeah, I know that Apple is the biggest capitalized company since the Iron Age and that they had a better Q4 in 2011 than the rest of humanity combined. But couldn’t you give it a rest for plain ol’ music, especially if you’re a user who still uses CDs? It seems like they’d monetize punctuation marks if they had the opportunity, for Pete’s sake!
- Duplicate Songs in Library. Take a few minutes and Google on ‘Remove duplicates from iTunes library’. (See it on Let Me Google That for You). People are about to grab torches and pitchforks on this one. WHY ISN’T THIS BUILT IN?!? WHY DOESN’T THE TOOL HANDLE THIS?!!!? Someone please make an app for this!
- Duplicate Songs on Disk. So my last disk backup took a lot longer than usual. Hmmm, I wonder why? So I looked at my backup info and saw this (image). Just in case you don’t see what I saw – 70.3 GB of hard disk sucked down for music. Keep in mind that I actually have only about 6 GB of music files. So, in the vernacular, W-T-F?!?
I’m now going to spend hours of precious time burning down iTunes and rebuilding my library. And I must’ve already done this two or three times in the past few years already. Look, Apple, I don’t fricken need this. I need troublefree music that doesn’t require an IT certificate to manage. Didn’t Apple used to be the company where everything was slap-your-mammy easy? Well, it ain’t so now. And it’s pissin’ me off.
I’m sure that there are other things about this product that makes your blood boil. Lay it on me! I want to hear your rant!
Enjoy!
-Kev
Almost a year ago exactly, I swapped my iPhone for Android. First thing I did was to uninstall iTunes. Felt GREAT to do so.
Bingo! You hit the nail on the head!
Also, when my wife got her iPhone, iTunes imported her Windows Media library, but copied into a NEW folder. AND changed the file format that first time in the new copy.
How about those silly nested folders that already sit in my “My Music” location?
I know how you feel. I have despised iTunes for years. I thought Apple users had easy to use software…except iTunes; it has got to be the worst software I have used and I have used thousands of software packages over 28 years. Apple is forcing you to use their software and don’t allow 3rd party integration. They also have their own codec in guise of better compression and sound quality, but real reason is to make it difficult for you to not have to use iTunes. Hence, iTunes got more popular because people couldn’t use the crappy software to default to .mp3 industry standard. Now try to import your existing music from your Ipod. Nope, you can’t do that, if you didn’t buy it on iTunes or it lost its knowledge of your device, they don’t let you import as it could be “pirated music”.
I just say No to iTunes and refuse to help anyone who has issues with it. Apple is out to make money at your expense and rip off artists by overcharging for their iTunes service. There are 3rd party apps that can sync your ipod/ipad, use them instead.
-Chuck
Did I ever tell you how much I loved my old Zune? Never duplicated anything. If you tried to load a song twice, it would politely ask you “Are you sure?” And, yeah, people made fun of me for not having an ipod but that was a small price to pay for efficiency and performance.
You shoudl try MediaMonkey, Songbird or my favorite Zune. Buy a couple Zune Music Passes and your entire hoard will be covered with unlimited music downloads.
Yep, I have to agree. I was seriously burn’t by ITunes own “special” way of doing things – and locking down music that belonged to me – and having an interface that’s just not intuitive – and slowing down my PC – and screwing up my PC. Do I buy music from ITunes? Do I hell!
For someone that’s not a whiner, that was some set of whining 😉
I tend to agree. I like iTunes in many ways, mostly because the sync was dirt simple. I plug in, and it syncs. However beyond that, it’s a mess. The duplicate files thing is really annoying, and I can only think that it’s another case of a large vendor just not putting resources into solving a simple problem.
The updates are crazy, and I usually ignore them for weeks, mostly because I worry they’ll break something. However I also rarely run iTunes anymore, mostly just updating my devices themselves through iCloud.
I think Genius is interesting. I have found some decent music from that, and shuffle works well for me since it tends to rate the stuff I listen to more higher, so it comes more frequently. I like that. However it would be nice to actually have a choice of the way the algorithm works. They could offer plug ins, or a few choices.
In terms of the store. I’m not sure why that’s bad? Personally I love it because I can easily find music there. I tend to use the Amazon and iTunes stores to get music, or used to (now on Spotify), and they were unobtrusive for me. If i didnt’ click “store” it never entered into iTunes for me. I also like that they’ve included podcasts and University lectures in there. I think that’s very cool.
Tim, Chuck, Robin – thanks for the +1s! Tim, I had the exact same experience which pushed me over the edge. Chuck – you rocked that rant!
Rachel & Peter – everyone I’ve known with a Zune has loved it. Peter, is the Zune Pass still supported? I don’t recall that the hardware is.
Steve – hey, at least I announced that the whining would begin. 🙂 I may have to look into iCloud. That sounds like a worthwhile approach. Genius isn’t actually bad, but Pandora is better. That’s why I dissed it. Rating must be the answer to Shuffle. I like to ignore my player once it’s playing an album, so it must base its shuffle on how many stars I’ve given a song. Too much work for me – but at least that approach makes sense. And I also REALLY like the iTunes University and podcasts. So I certainly can’t know that.
Great comments!
Ive never hidden my love for Zune. Its the only reason I use my PC. Other than that I’m on my Mac Air 100%. I have a Zune Pass for under $15 per month and I can download as much music as I want and keep 10 songs DRM free forever. The Zune HD is light, elegant, and versitile (I KNOW! I CAN’T BELIEVE I’M SAYING THAT ABOUT A MICROSOFT DEVICE) despite dearth of applications. I’ve an Ipad if I want to play games though. The Zune HD is the perfect music device.
Funny story, it turns out that Apple operates the iTunes Music Store at something very close to break even. Other than that, I’ve never had this many problems with iTunes. But, then again, I’m using it on a Mac. I hear completely opposite stories from OS X users about iTunes, so there could just be platform disparity.
I can say I really hated the Zune player on Windows. It needs 3D acceleration, or did at the time. Pretty cool, eh? Want to play music? Buy a computer that can play Skyrim!