"Spotify" just switch now and never look back
Absolutely agree. It just doesn't work well for music I own that isn't on Spotify.
Yep, cloud sync is the only reason I still use Apple Music.
iTunes will never work well
51–60 of 379 posts
Re: iTunes will never work well
#52People always bash iTunes, but I actually use it quite often and I like it. Maybe it's just me though? The only thing that bugs me, is on iOS, when I load the music app (that's basically iTunes for iOS, right?) it shows a blank page until it can connect to the their servers to grab some data. It doesn't have a problem if I'm on wifi or a fast connection, but I'm often in places where my service is shit, and I get a w…
Heh. I have the same complaint about Spotify. I can't even play my own music on the device until it's finished failing to connect to Spotify's servers.
Re: iTunes will never work well
#53I'm having a hard time understanding these tweets. Playing a song and adding songs to 'up next' are two different things. That dialog box has saved me multiple times. What's wrong with it? It only occurs when you are telling iTunes to do conflicting things that it cannot resolve by itself. It's a better outcome than clearing a playlist someone may have spent a lot of time working on. Software update and login dialogs…
Okay. So I’m no UX expert, just a developer and I’ve also worked in product management. I think at some point, if you work in this field, you have to develop instincts around the design and experience of things. A modal (i.e. app-locking) dialog that says “contacting the iphone software update server”, which is current behavior and not changed as far as I can tell, is so far out of the realm of acceptable in my view, that if we differ on that point, we can’t even begin a discussion about the more subtle issues… (Consider that Chrome updates itself all the time; now imagine if you launched Chrome, typed in gmail.com, and it suddenly locked up all your tabs because it was ‘contacting the Chrome software update server’.)
After all, design trades in subtleties, otherwise if the discussion is just about explaining the purpose for a widget, everything in an interface can be explained, even this well-known ‘bad UI’ example: http://i.imgur.com/UJXoqwR.png
Re: iTunes will never work well
#54i don't understand how apple have a reputation for good ui... all of their stuff is terrible. the main problem: zero discoverablity - i need to google how to do things, then get some snotty fanboy answer about how easy and obvious it is, but there is literally no way to infer the functionality from the design. they do love to steal context too... and interrupt your flow... ... i could go on and on, but having zero-di…
Their reputation stemmed from the days where everything was discoverable. Want to delete a file? There's a trash can glued to your dock. Need to perform a function but don't know the name? Look it up in the Help menu's search box. Now, though, they've done the Windows 8 thing of overloading gestures and hiding behaviors. Want to see your notifications? Two-finger swipe to the left, starting from the edge of the touch…
> Their reputation stemmed from the days where everything was discoverable. Want to delete a file? There's a trash can glued to your dock. Need to perform a function but don't know the name? Look it up in the Help menu's search box.
The trash is still glued to the dock. The Help menu still has a search box.
Re: iTunes will never work well
#55Interesting that every single UI example in this article is from an old version of Windows. Fuck Windows. You want iTunes to work well? You want to see Apple's real UI? Then use their real platform.
If iTunes is so awkward why would I want to switch to a whole OS + computer made by the same company?
Exactly, it's one of the reasons I'm switching away.
Re: iTunes will never work well
#56I've grown very fond of a CLI media player named cmus. It's lightning fast and does everything I need with a simple interface http://matthieukeller.com/media/2015.01/2015.01.cmus.png I also keep aliases in my .bash_profile for streams like this: alias bbc='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://bbcwssc.ic.llnwd.net/stream/bbcwssc_mp1_ws-eieuk 2> /dev/null'
That's awesome. Do you have any others??
Sure. There are a lot of streams available on shoutcast.com, just click the download icon and copy the URL, some stations list their stream URL on the site, just google the call letters + "m3u" or "pls" etc, then there is this site which is the best directory I've found so far radioroku.com. If you use iOS there's also a great app for playing these streams called fstream.
Here is my list:
alias wor='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://wor-am.akacast.akamaistream.net/7/495/179680/v1/auth.akacast.akamaistream.net/wor-am 2> /dev/null'
alias wgy='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://wgy-am.akacast.akamaistream.net/7/697/21577/v1/auth.akacast.akamaistream.net/wgy-am 2> /dev/null'
alias npr='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://www.npr.org/streams/mp3/nprlive24.pls 2> /dev/null'
alias rain='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://yp.shoutcast.com/sbin/tunein-station.pls?id=2340 2> /dev/null'
alias rain2='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://yp.shoutcast.com/sbin/tunein-station.pls?id=368490 2> /dev/null'
alias rain3='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQ9OWMsJBTk 2> /dev/null'
alias art='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://yp.shoutcast.com/sbin/tunein-station.pls?id=366888 2> /dev/null'
alias chopin='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://yp.shoutcast.com/sbin/tunein-station.pls?id=590375 2> /dev/null'
alias phil='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://yp.shoutcast.com/sbin/tunein-station.pls?id=248466 2> /dev/null'
alias french='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://www.listenlive.eu/franceinfo.m3u 2> /dev/null'
alias fip='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://www.listenlive.eu/fip128.m3u 2> /dev/null'
alias bbc='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://bbcwssc.ic.llnwd.net/stream/bbcwssc_mp1_ws-eieuk 2> /dev/null'
alias 1010='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://8733.live.streamtheworld.com:80/WINSAMAAC_SC 2> /dev/null'
alias ewtn='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://http.yourmuze.com/ewtn-2/mp3-128-s.mp3 2> /dev/null'
alias wabc='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://8723.live.streamtheworld.com:80/WABCAMAAC_SC 2> /dev/null'
alias wktu='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://wktu-fm.akacast.akamaistream.net/7/110/19973/v1/auth.akacast.akamaistream.net/wktu-fm 2> /dev/null'
alias chant='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://calmradio.com/playlists-free/gregorian.pls 2> /dev/null'
alias chanteurs='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://sv1.vestaradio.com:4090/ 2> /dev/null'Re: iTunes will never work well
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
Their reputation stemmed from the days where everything was discoverable. Want to delete a file? There's a trash can glued to your dock. Need to perform a function but don't know the name? Look it up in the Help menu's search box. Now, though, they've done the Windows 8 thing of overloading gestures and hiding behaviors. Want to see your notifications? Two-finger swipe to the left, starting from the edge of the touch…
> Their reputation stemmed from the days where everything was discoverable. Want to delete a file? There's a trash can glued to your dock. Need to perform a function but don't know the name? Look it up in the Help menu's search box. The trash is still glued to the dock. The Help menu still has a search box.
yes, that's an example of when everything was discoverable. Now, not everything is discoverable. Only some things.
I don't think anyone who uses osx would be unaware that the trash can is in the dock.
Re: iTunes will never work well
#58The single worst thing about itunes, in my opinion, is the way it handles duplicate songs. It has a "detect duplicates" feature, but all that does is show a list of groups of songs that it thinks are duplicates, and it has false positives! But the one thing it can't do, is detect when you've added multiple copies of the exact same file in the same directory.
My music collection needs to by synced across computers, and if it refused to add the exact same file twice, then the operation would be trivial. Add mp3s to your music directory, drag and drop all files to itunes, and let it detect new songs. Since it's not, I have to do a long series of "okay, the timestamp on this file is newer than the newest added-on date in itunes.... I think.... except this directory was untarred, so it retains old timestamps, and blah blah blah..."
Re: iTunes will never work well
#59People always bash iTunes, but I actually use it quite often and I like it. Maybe it's just me though? The only thing that bugs me, is on iOS, when I load the music app (that's basically iTunes for iOS, right?) it shows a blank page until it can connect to the their servers to grab some data. It doesn't have a problem if I'm on wifi or a fast connection, but I'm often in places where my service is shit, and I get a w…
That must-connect-to-server-before-I-show-you-your-LOCAL!-files has really pushed me over the edge. Infuriating! I've been trying out some replacment music apps, but haven't really found any great alternatives at this point. I guess the whole thing will sort itself out when I switch to android in the next few months. Someone around here put it best a few wks ago in an iPhone7 discussion: Steve Jobs is dead.
> I guess the whole thing will sort itself out when I switch to android in the next few months.
The stock android music app was, last time I punished myself by using it, terrible. This cloud integration stuff is so damn pushy. I wish there was something out there with only the features of winamp, but enough UI polish that it doesn't look like some college kid's hobby project.
Re: iTunes will never work well
#60i don't understand how apple have a reputation for good ui... all of their stuff is terrible. the main problem: zero discoverablity - i need to google how to do things, then get some snotty fanboy answer about how easy and obvious it is, but there is literally no way to infer the functionality from the design. they do love to steal context too... and interrupt your flow... ... i could go on and on, but having zero-di…
Agree. I really love Apple, but I always find myself Googling for "Can I do that in iTunes?" (the answer is usually No) or "How to do this?". And I can't say that I want something weird. Some workflows look so simple and obvious to me (and I think most people have the same workflows), but they are literally impossible with iTunes and other Apple stuff. For example, I have a 2TB AirPort Time Capsule, but it looks impo…
Have you found Time Machine?