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iTunes will never work well

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Re: iTunes will never work well

#151

Post by lloeki »

knodi123 wrote: post #59
hanklazard wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Try VOX Player https://coppertino.com

Re: iTunes will never work well

#152

Post by josteink »

> Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting iTunes, too.

While a great quote, it's not entirely true.

Some of us said enough is enough and ditched the iOS/Itunes ecosystem for something better. Why suffer needlessly?

Re: iTunes will never work well

#153

Post by niccaluim »

sirn wrote: post #119
striking wrote: post #23

Earlier 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…

As someone who got to use a PowerBook G4 (running 10.5.8) from time to time (in fact, I'm typing this very comment on it), I fail to see how their current UI is any more undiscoverable than the UI from 7 years ago. The trash icon was there in the Dock in 10.5, and still there in 10.11. The search function in help was there in 10.5, and still there in 10.11. To remove things from the Dock, right click the icon and the…

I'd go back even further to find decent Mac UI, to the pre-X OS. Yes, it was a reliability garbage fire, but the Apple of that time really invested in usability. They published a 400-page book[1] for developers that explained the principles behind usability, showed how interface design fits into the development process, and gave specific guidelines for each type of interface element. The guidelines they publish today[2] are a lifeless husk by comparison.

[1] http://interface.free.fr/Archives/Apple_HIGuidelines.pdf [2] https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/Us...

Re: iTunes will never work well

#154

Post by forrestthewoods »

I have never seen any software turn adults into a pile of tears faster that iTunes. Trying to put music on your iPhone the night before a trip is the most god damn frustrating thing in modern software.

It literally can't be done. If all you want to do is copy a few songs to your iPhone you can't fucking do it. It tries to sync your phone. Then says "warning: this will delete everything". What the fucking fuck motherfucker. I just want to copy a dozen god damn mp3 files into a file system. It's not hard!

Syncing is a broken concept. There's no such thing as syncing. There's no such thing as being in sync. No PC, Mac, or iOS device of mine can ever be fully sunk. (sync'd?)

The totality of "my stuff" is a venn diagram. Things on my iPhone. Things on my iPad. Things on my Macbook. I have save data shared across devices. But also save data unique to each device. I own 100Gb of music. Most of it is on my Macbook. Some of it is on my iPhone. None of it is on my iPad. I even own music downloaded to none of these devices. Those purchases exist only in the cloud. Plus god knows how many apps I've bought and since deleted.

There is no such thing as syncing. No device can ever be fully sync'd. Fully up to date. The whole idea of syncing is fundamentally broken and wrong.

Fuck iTunes. No iPhone of mine will ever know iTunes ever exists. I now use Spotify. I download music to my phone for trips. My phone will never be connected to any Mac or PC.

If you must copy music don't use iTunes. Once upon a time I used Copytrans. It's free and gets the job done. http://www.copytrans.net/copytransmanager/

(This rant brought to through the sobbing tears of my partner. Thanks iTunes. You worthless piece of shit.)

Re: iTunes will never work well

#155

Post by sooheon »

systoll wrote: post #87
chiaro wrote: post #15

Wait, you can star-rating AND heart songs? Why? Why both?

Stars are old; hearts are new; stars are gone by default, but you can turn them back on in the settings. Why there's no conversion factor [EG: heart = 5 stars], i don't know

There's no reason to convert backwards if they want to phase out stars. Also, I'm guessing they hope to make the act of pressing heart an "experience" for the listener. Give everyone the joy of professing your love of a song to their algorithms. I know I got a dialog playing it up the first time I pressed the heart.

Re: iTunes will never work well

#156

Post by niccaluim »

Dain42 wrote: post #114
rtpg wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

want to eject a disk? drag it to the trash can...? I think Apple was good at keeping things consistent across apps, but the chosen metaphors were sometimes just as confusing (if worse) than the blessed windows one. Not that it matters, everything is learned behaviour anyways. Consistency is already a great achievement.

> want to eject a disk? drag it to the trash can...? That was just something that was there forever, basically since 1984. It was part of the Macintosh vernacular. You could also right-click to eject.

Contextual menus weren't added until Mac OS 8 or thereabouts. In all prior versions you either dragged to the Trash or used an item in the menubar.

Re: iTunes will never work well

#157

Post by forrestthewoods »

Twisell wrote: post #88

Well to be fair the title might be: iTunes will never work well ON WINDOWS. I was always wondering why I can read so much rants about a good product I've been using on a daily basis for years... Well it seams that the Windows version sucks, and what is described is really a world away from the native cocoa version on macOS.

There is no user experience difference. There hasn't been for at least 10 years. You can't put together a post that says "this is how it works on OS X" versus "how it works on Windows". Because it's the same.

Re: iTunes will never work well

#158

Post by brandon272 »

firasd wrote: post #3
hashkb wrote: post #2

This isn't constructive, just spiteful and angry. I can't tell what problem OP actually has with iTunes.

Hmm… I’m not spiteful, I just don’t have any hope for improvement. iTunes has been chronically bad, I could find thousands of other articles and testimonials about that. At this point the issue is clearly endemic to the product. Constructively: everything else aside, one glaring and easily-fixed problem is the dialog boxes. No program released after 1997 should be so behind in the state of the art that it throws up m…

I use iTunes every day and have never noticed this modal.

Re: iTunes will never work well

#159

Post by sooheon »

coleca wrote: post #37
sparkzilla wrote: post #22

I spent almost two days trying to resync my music after iTunes deleted it for no reason. It's the worst software on the planet.

After I subscribed to iTunes Match, it "helpfully" reworked all of my ~4300 song iTunes library so that most of the songs where I ripped a whole CD into iTunes were now spread across various "Greatest Hits" albums from the same (or sometimes different) artist, with random cover art. And after reading Jim Dalrymple's horror stories of upgrading to Apple Music, I am fearful both of ever discontinuing my iTunes Match su…

This is the one complaint I agree with. Honestly, all the so called UX problems in those tweets are eye-rollingly contrived, but there's no excuse for messing with the actual music that I own.

Re: iTunes will never work well

#160

Post by bestnameever »

flukus wrote: post #20
askafriend wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, even Google has terrible UI/UX these days. Just look at Google Maps or Gmail. Material design isn't that great for discoverability either.

They took away the zoom in/out floating buttons on the android maps app, managing to destroy discoverability and single handed operation.

double tap and drag.

http://www.carlsednaoui.com/post/46803524724/google-maps-one...

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