Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Apple Plans End of iTunes

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 198 posts

Re: Apple Plans End of iTunes

#131

Post by arafa »

stevewillows wrote: post #115
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…

Seems interesting, especially since I used to use Rockbox. But my iPod Classic/6G is in the Rockbox unstable category and has apparently been that way for 2 years. Bummer, I still use mine all the time. :(

Re: Apple Plans End of iTunes

#133

Post by wwweston »

manigandham wrote: post #75
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.

Since HN likes technical analogies: why do you use a RDBMS instead of flat files? People don't care about how the files are stored, and they shouldn't need to. We've seen this in everything from music catalogs to file sharing to productivity software. We want content organized logically with metadata, tags, folders, lists and search that's completely removed from the physical location. Let the computers do what they'…

> People don't care about how the files are stored, and they shouldn't need to.

The second clause of this sentence is a pretty good software design value. The first part is overgeneralizing at best.

Some people care very much about where in a folder/directory system their files are stores. I'm not just talking about HN audiences, I'm talking about actual people I've observed from personal acquaintances to real live user testing. Files are not some weird obscure technical point they're a dominant metaphor that's been used in computing workflows longer than more than half of HN has likely been adults. Lots of people know and care how they work.

This is especially true for music files, where people have been ripping, transcoding, slicing/processing into derivative works, backing up, and yes sometimes sharing files for longer than iTunes has existed.

They're not perfect for every application and user. An application-specific database with a different use profile might be good to have between the filesystem and a user. Users shouldn't have to care.

But if we really mean "the software lets you consume it the way you want" then you don't really want it completely removed from filesystem location. You want to keep facilities that allow users to find underlying files and keep them easy enough to find. You want to accommodate use profiles where users may bring in files from outside your curated market, or even choose to intentionally organize files in a way that your application doesn't by default.

Re: Apple Plans End of iTunes

#134

Post by dwaite »

jjdjr0odo7 wrote: post #103
chrisseaton wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Why can’t it read what’s what and generate a map without all the mv’ing? The answer is probably in the realm of “That’s how we wrote desktop apps back then.” Files are not real things. Just identifiers for an organization of bits that sound like a Neil Young sing when played through the correct decoder.

It seems many people also under the misunderstanding that iTunes has to control the location of your music - that was just the default

Re: Apple Plans End of iTunes

#135

Post by ProfessorLayton »

will_pseudonym wrote: post #124
ProfessorLayton wrote: post #113

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.

I'm genuinely curious: why not use an alternative to Apple Music?

Great question:

- I'm all-in the Apple ecosystem (iPhone, Watch, ATV4K, Airport Express). So are my family members.

- I'm on a family plan so $15/4 is a price that can't be beat. I do not live with the family members I share the plan with. This is relevant because:

- I actually had a friend share their Spotify Family plan with me and Spotify insisted I prove I lived in the same address! Apple doesn't ask for anything beyond linking Apple IDs to a family.

- The actual service/catalog provided by AM is fantastic, but overall I'm very unsatisfied with the UX of Apple's music apps.

Re: Apple Plans End of iTunes

#136

Post by Razengan »

The arguments here between "file hierarchy" versus the "library/drawer/shoebox" styles of organization highlight a fundamental failing of traditional filesystems:

The need to store certain content under multiple horizontal categories (or folders.)

For example I will add the same song to multiple playlists, for different moods and activities, or a photo may have multiple elements that I might search for (e.g. "nature", "warm", "urban" etc.)

Symlinks/Aliases are too cumbersome. Tags help alleviate this a little, but they're still a tacked-on layer instead of a core FS feature in modern OSes (even macOS has inconsistent UI support for tags and becomes unwieldy if you have hundreds of tags.)

Re: Apple Plans End of iTunes

#137

Post by chipotle_coyote »

derp_dee_derp wrote: post #101
biql wrote: post #57

> The company is launching a trio of new apps for the Mac – Music, TV, and Podcasts – to replace iTunes. Nice. It's always better to have multiple programs each dedicated to a specific task than one that tries to be everything.

not nice. Apple is very open about their long term plan to convert to a media and services company. Their business plan is to 1) get you to change over to these 3 new apps now when they are free, 2) convert each to a paid monthly subscription plan once enough people use them. so soon you'll be paying for 3 things instead of being able to use iTunes like it is now.

Apple is not splitting up the apps on macOS as part of a nefarious plan to make you pay more money. They're doing it because the apps have been split on iOS for years already:

- The new Music app will have the ability to play local music, so it won't need a subscription. (Conversely, you can get an Apple Music subscription with iTunes right now.)

- The TV app will likely function just like the iOS one: if you have videos in your library that are playable by it, it'll play them, no subscription. If you subscribe to a TV "channel," it'll show up there. (This presumably includes the forthcoming Apple TV+ service, but there are no details about its pricing model yet.)

- Again, the Podcasts app will likely function just like the iOS one, which means it's not something that Apple is making money from. You subscribe to podcast feeds in it the same way you do in any other podcast player.

To be clear, I'm not saying Apple doesn't actively have nefarious plans to make you pay more money -- I'm just saying this isn't one of them.

Re: Apple Plans End of iTunes

#138

Post by chipotle_coyote »

yomly wrote: post #109
chipotle_coyote wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I go back and forth on this. On the one hand: if Apple really wants the iPad to be a laptop replacement, there needs to be a way to do everything that a laptop can do. It doesn't have to be the same way; it might be a new way that requires a learning curve. (A lot of the "iPads suck because I can't do my work" articles I've seen really mean "iPads suck because I can't do my work the way I expect to be able to do it."…

On a plane, I have a terminal on my laptop. Mosh? Less likely...

Are you willing to pay $8 or so for wifi access on the plane? Boom, you have mosh access.

I mean, yes, I get what you're saying, but I think it's at least plausible that the long-term solution for "doing developer things on the iPad" is going to involve network access and The Cloud™ for heavy lifting. (Granted, I think long-term, the distinction between local and remote everything is going to progressively blur over the coming years.)

[Edited to note: I think "Xcode for iOS" or an equivalent is almost certainly on the road map. I'm not sure whether full-blown web development of the "I am running a local web server on my iPad to test things" variety" is, although thinking about it, I can imagine ways a "LAMP App for iOS" might be implementable even today.]

Re: Apple Plans End of iTunes

#139

Post by chipotle_coyote »

mrep wrote: post #130
eridius wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I call them "developers".

And how do you think they will develop IOS/Mac apps with an Ipad which is what this thread is talking about?

Long-term, there are likely to be iOS development tools that allow this. They may not be this year, or the next, but given that iOS already has Git clients, code editors, and even sandboxed programming environments like Pythonista and Scriptable, it's hardly ridiculous to think that an iOS equivalent to XCode is already under development.

Re: Apple Plans End of iTunes

#140

Post by SomeOldThrow »

mostlysimilar wrote: post #62
SomeOldThrow wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple is not in the business of designing tools, they are in the business of making money. We’re gonna end up using ipads regardless of our needs.

People need tools to build the apps that run on their devices, apps without which they would make significantly less money.

People will build tools fine on Xcode for Ios or whatever, and you will have a unix app or something that gives you access to tools. Not want you want? I doubt apple gives a shit.
Post reply on HN