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Apple Plans End of iTunes

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Re: Apple Plans End of iTunes

#111

Post by [deleted] »

saurik wrote: post #77
scarface74 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No you don’t. With iTunes you could have smart playlists like “create a list of all of the songs I haven’t played in X days”. Normal people didn’t want to tag songs and use the filesystem. Do I really need to bring up the “No Wireless. Less Space than a Nomad. Lame.” Meme and how geeks didn’t get the iPod? https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-i...

> Do I really need to bring up the “No Wireless. Less Space than a Nomad. Lame.” Meme and how geeks didn’t get the iPod? People love to bring this up... but that product (pretty much) did fail, in no small part because it had less space than a Nomad. The iPod wasn't successful until a couple revisions later and after the introduction of iTunes (which led to an end-to-end rethink of how you loaded music on these devic…

[deleted]

Re: Apple Plans End of iTunes

#112

Post by scrooched_moose »

koyote wrote: post #107
jrochkind1 wrote: post #76

Hm, I wonder if I'll still be able to sync music and podcasts to my iPod. My 10-plus-year-old iPod is rock solid technology, hardware and software, just keeps on working. At this point it feels like some retro SF alternate vision of the future we could have had, with simple easy to use things that never broke.

Do you walk with your iPod in your pocket? The reason I am asking is because I am surprised yours has lasted so long. I had two and they broke within two years due to the mechanical hdd inside. (the headphones also broke, within a month each time; really put me off buying Apple products again)

The Nano/Shuffle/Touch lines (2005+) all used flash memory. I'm not aware of many issues with the Mini line either due to the much smaller hard drive.

Re: Apple Plans End of iTunes

#113

Post by ProfessorLayton »

Good riddance. iTunes went from one of my favorite music players, to an app I loathe to use every day at work just to listen to my Apple Music subscription.

Admittedly I don't find iOS' Music app that much better, so I'm pretty wary of iTunes' upcoming replacement.

Re: Apple Plans End of iTunes

#114

Post by tkxxx7 »

chrisseaton wrote: post #40
SomeOldThrow wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> an app which organises your music for you How do you figure? Itunes is completely unaware of most qualities of music, in fact nearly everything unattested in metadata.

I don't know how you manage your music, but when I use iTunes I just drop it on the icon and it gets filed away (organised) for me.

> and it gets filed away (organised) for me

This is optional, there's a "let iTunes manage my music for me" checkbox somewhere.

Re: Apple Plans End of iTunes

#115

Post by stevewillows »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #76

Hm, I wonder if I'll still be able to sync music and podcasts to my iPod. My 10-plus-year-old iPod is rock solid technology, hardware and software, just keeps on working. At this point it feels like some retro SF alternate vision of the future we could have had, with simple easy to use things that never broke.

It depends on the version, but you can really trick out iPods. I've got an iPod Video (5.5) with an iFlash Quad [1] (up to 4x micro SD cards) with a 2000mAh battery, running Rockbox [2]

I also replaced the rear panel since I didn't need the beefy 80gb version, and also the lock / headphone jack so they were both solid black.

Rockbox is excellent because it runs off of a basic folder structure, but also has a library option.

You can do the iFlash mod and still use iTunes / the original OS if you like, but Rockbox has proven to be superior in all ways.

If you're on a Mac, be sure to format the main card with a Windows box so its Fat32.

[1] https://www.iflash.xyz/store/iflash-quad/

[2] https://rockbox.org

Re: Apple Plans End of iTunes

#116

Post by mynameishere »

klodolph wrote: post #41
ErikAugust wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It goes under Albums, no?

The question is how you organize the albums, hierarchically. The easy case is when you have artist/album/track, like: Music > Buckethead > Enter The Chicken > Funbus But how do you file, say, classical music? Do I file this album under Wilhelm Furtwängler, the conductor? Do I file this under Bach and Beethoven, the conductors of various tracks? Do I file this under Wiener Philharmoniker? In iTunes it’s irrelevant, be…

Beethoven goes under Beethoven. No one groups stuff by orchestra.

And just because a media player respects your filesystem doesn't mean you can't search by the metadata in the Mp3s. This is extra-helpful when you realize not all Mp3s have metadata. In that case, such search routines will just pass it by.

Re: Apple Plans End of iTunes

#117

Post by sys_64738 »

iTunes was so finicky to get music onto iPods with. I prefer mounting the drive as a folder and copying manually. Android easily does this but it feels like a struggle with iTunes.

Hopefully any successor will be like Android.

Re: Apple Plans End of iTunes

#118

Post by scrooched_moose »

chrisseaton wrote: post #23
kvark wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Minority here, I never understood why music players shifted towards iTune-ish style of owning and re-categorizing everything in their own way... I mean, OS has a file system, why not just rely on it? Throw some searchable tags in, and you get the same abilities but without obscurity.

Because despite what everyone thinks again and again, music is not hierarchical, as a file system is. Does my album go under the composer, the conductor, the orchestra or the soloist?

I'm still annoyed how long it took to get "featuring" to be a common tag.

An album like 2.0 by Big Data would create 10 different distinct "artists" in most music players:

Big Data and White Sea

Big Data and Joywave

Big Data and Jamie Lidell

Big Data and Kimbra

Big Data and Rivers Cuomo

Big Data

Big Data and Jenn Wasner

Big Data and Dragonette

Big Data and Bear Hands

Big Data and Twin Shadow

Even Amazon Music had this problem up until 2018 or so, when my library collapsed from nearly 2000 "artists" to ~300 actual.

Re: Apple Plans End of iTunes

#119

Post by klodolph »

mynameishere wrote: post #116
klodolph wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question is how you organize the albums, hierarchically. The easy case is when you have artist/album/track, like: Music > Buckethead > Enter The Chicken > Funbus But how do you file, say, classical music? Do I file this album under Wilhelm Furtwängler, the conductor? Do I file this under Bach and Beethoven, the conductors of various tracks? Do I file this under Wiener Philharmoniker? In iTunes it’s irrelevant, be…

Beethoven goes under Beethoven. No one groups stuff by orchestra. And just because a media player respects your filesystem doesn't mean you can't search by the metadata in the Mp3s. This is extra-helpful when you realize not all Mp3s have metadata. In that case, such search routines will just pass it by.

But filing it under Beethoven means that the album is split apart. This doesn’t make sense to me.

Re: Apple Plans End of iTunes

#120

Post by macintux »

saurik wrote: post #77
scarface74 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No you don’t. With iTunes you could have smart playlists like “create a list of all of the songs I haven’t played in X days”. Normal people didn’t want to tag songs and use the filesystem. Do I really need to bring up the “No Wireless. Less Space than a Nomad. Lame.” Meme and how geeks didn’t get the iPod? https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-i...

> Do I really need to bring up the “No Wireless. Less Space than a Nomad. Lame.” Meme and how geeks didn’t get the iPod? People love to bring this up... but that product (pretty much) did fail, in no small part because it had less space than a Nomad. The iPod wasn't successful until a couple revisions later and after the introduction of iTunes (which led to an end-to-end rethink of how you loaded music on these devic…

As pointed out, iTunes predates the iPod.

The major things that changed after the iPod was released: adding online music sales, switching from FireWire to USB for all the people stuck with the slower Windows hardware interface, and iTunes for Windows.

None of those changed the core iPod design; I don’t think the first one failed in any meaningful way.

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