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iTunes will never work well

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Re: iTunes will never work well

#341

Post by dTal »

cmiller1 wrote: post #312
dTal wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had an SSH password once with a # character in it. I tried to log in from a friend's Macbook and was forced to ask him how to type this. Apparently it was Option-3. Completely unmarked. Astonishing. But hey, at least you can type §.

Huh? I have a Macbook Pro and a Microsoft keyboard on an old Win XP box right next to each other right now and they both, clearly labeled, have # above the "3" for shift-3

I believe this is because I live in the UK. Apple seems to have invented some kind of bizarre hybrid layout between the UK and US ones. Shift-3 is the £ symbol here.

Re: iTunes will never work well

#342

Post by dublinben »

newscracker wrote: post #310

Apple needs to allow importing songs into the Music app on iOS from any source, not just iTunes and its own store. This has been a long standing pain point. Not everybody wants Apple Music and not everybody wants to buy music from Apple. But there are people with existing music collections who want to add them to iOS devices easily without having to use iTunes. This procedure works for iBooks, where you can add books…

If you want to manage and control your own music library, you're not Apple's intended customer. If you are inside the Apple ecosystem, they expect you to play entirely within their ecosystem. I suggest you try using an Android phone, where you can easily drag & drop any files you want, and can manage them with any program you choose.

Re: iTunes will never work well

#343

Post by asveikau »

massysett wrote: post #320
asveikau wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that so? Some years ago I remember some rando's blog post that seemed to completely invent this narrative from thin air, and it got repeated a lot by Apple fans who have never built Windows applications and probably grossly overestimate its cost. This seems like a pretty lame excuse for one of the world's most powerful companies to not do something it would otherwise want to do.

I don't guess it's a cost issue. iTunes is the Apple trojan horse into the Windows platform. They know that they can get anything onto a Windows desktop by crammng it into this one application. My guess is that strategically they don't want to give this up.

So you don't think apple can break up the app into various components and provide a single installer and call the whole bundle "iTunes".

And failing that, you don't think users are capable of installing multiple things or coping with a re-brand.

But if they did this only on the Mac all these things would work. Windows is the key.

Sorry, I do not think this is the reason. More likely they just don't want to put resources into a ground up overhaul of iTunes.

Re: iTunes will never work well

#345

Post by Nelson69 »

lukevers wrote: post #5

People 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…

I, too, kind of like it. Conceptually to me, it's a media player and store and that doesn't seem like it's doing "too much." Splitting out iBooks made sense. Splitting out device sync makes a ton of sense and I think you could have a headless homesharing system as well. But as a media player, it's not bad, I don't need skins and visualizations and such.

Where I think it is weak though is it's meta data format, it's some structured unified file that is opaque. As your media library grows things slow down. I'm somewhat confident that it can be corrupted but I have limited visibility in to how it's corrupted and less in to how to fix it. Thing is, people have gigantic media collections, I'd think something like sqlite could fix it. Along with that, as it has morphed over the years, there is this divide as to where the data lives. Like your podcast subscriptions can be duplicated in the cloud (makes sense so you can pull them on your phone) It's not super clear where the data really lives or where the canonical source of truth should be for it.

Re: iTunes will never work well

#346

Post by NelsonMinar »

SCdF wrote: post #226

OK, so I use OSX, and I want to play mp3s that I have locally, and see them in a library format that I can search. Even maybe have album art, though I'm not fussed. Ignoring itunes, how do I do it? What is a good fast low memory music playing app with library management? If I was on Windows I'd be using Foobar2k. On OSX it seems to be either itunes, a command line app, or various bloated messes that aren't honestly b…

There isn't a good one, because iTunes sucked all the oxygen out of the room. I gave up. I use VLC to play single files (no library), and I have a separate Sonos system with its own speakers and amp for my library.

Re: iTunes will never work well

#347

Post by yoz-y »

twhb wrote: post #122
jheriko wrote: post #11

i 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…

Speaking of, Apple is to blame for the absolute worst case of discoverability I've ever encountered: getting the iOS App Store app to list all apps labeled "Essentials". Dug around, couldn't find it. Googled it, found a few forum threads where everybody concluded it couldn't be done. Went into an Apple store, gave an employee a few minutes to figure it out, and he gave up. And yet, it's possible. Rather than just tel…

Well, I remember having to search for "OK Google" in Google Maps to save the current view for offline viewing...

Re: iTunes will never work well

#348

Post by Grishnakh »

newscracker wrote: post #310

Apple needs to allow importing songs into the Music app on iOS from any source, not just iTunes and its own store. This has been a long standing pain point. Not everybody wants Apple Music and not everybody wants to buy music from Apple. But there are people with existing music collections who want to add them to iOS devices easily without having to use iTunes. This procedure works for iBooks, where you can add books…

>Apple needs to allow importing songs into the Music app on iOS from any source, not just iTunes and its own store.

Why? I think Microsoft "needs" to go back to the Win7 UI, or better yet just open-source their OS and shut down their company, but that's not going to happen because they don't agree with me.

>Not everybody wants Apple Music and not everybody wants to buy music from Apple.

So what? If you don't like having to buy all your music from Apple, then don't buy an iPhone. There's plenty of other non-Apple devices out there. People who don't want Apple Music and don't want to buy from Apple are not target customers for Apple. They don't need you; they have plenty of suckers happy to pay them $$$$ for a phone and then more $$$ to buy all their music from iTunes.

>agreements with the record labels and/or wanting a monopoly on music

Android phones don't have this problem, and they have music stores too, plus you can just load your own music in MP3 or Ogg format easily. On many phones, you don't even have to use USB to transfer it, because you can just copy it from your PC to an SDcard which you can then insert in the phone.

Of course it's the monopoly angle: they want a monopoly on how Apple users get music, and they have one. If you don't like that, then don't buy an Apple.

Re: iTunes will never work well

#349

Post by Declanomous »

gregn wrote: post #337

Saying "iTunes will never work well" is like saying the sky is blue. Why would anyone need a kitchen sink to copy an audio file to their device? Oh, wait, unless there is manufacturer locks, and controls put in place to steer consumers' capital flow. Oh yeah, that's why. From that perspective I would say iTunes is a smashing success. And this negative social virus has spread like gang-busters spawning countless imita…

This trend is why I started using Linux full time again. I'm not a die-hard believer in the Unix Philosophy, but systems designed with it in mind generally avoid the worst bloat.

I feel like a similar mindset is ruining gaming as well. The best games from the past had a design that I'd compare to movies. The story and fun was self-contained and complete. If another installment was created, it was also self-contained and complete. With rise advent of microtransactions, games seem more like sitcoms or slot machines. The experience of a single episode (or pull of the lever) is a full experience, but it's intentionally designed to feel always feel slightly incomplete.

I mean, the design of games now is pretty user-unfriendly. Anything that could compete with a publisher's ability to charge more for gameplay has been crippled. Simple example -- almost every game used to include god-mode cheat codes that you could use to your hearts content. Now a lot of games charge money for extra weapons and other things that used to be considered cheats, even in the single player modes.

Another example is the team creation tools in EA sports franchises. You used to be able to copy and paste players from one team to another. My brother and I would create teams where every player on the team was our favorite player in Madden and FIFA and pit them against each other. That feature has been absolutely gutted in FIFA, most likely because it interfered with their Ultimate Team mode. However, they gutted it for offline play as well.

I don't fault the developers and publishers trying to makee money. I do think it's really lame that modern games have intentionally locked or removed simple and historically common features in the pursuit of profit. It makes every gaming experience feel like I'm being forced to buy everything from the company store, and it sucks.

Re: iTunes will never work well

#350

Post by aseipp »

baldfat wrote: post #328
neohaven wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you do DRM on analog?

what analog output is there? It is now removed.

Your ears don't listen to digital signals or encrypted sound waves (they can't decrypt it). So, how do you go from digital signal on a Lightning cable to actual sound waves for the human ear? They convert the signal, obviously, somewhere along the line. The DAC is in the headphones now, instead (presumably, similar to every other bluetooth headset since forever, I suppose.)

The analog output can never be removed from the chain, so to speak. This is the "analog gap", and also why it's not really sensible or possible to "encrypt" physical audio signals in a manner to prevent people from copying them, when the copying-person is also the intended recipient of the end-result.

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