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Apple Plans End of iTunes

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Re: Apple Plans End of iTunes

#71

Post by downtide »

khazhou wrote: post #18
nategri wrote: post #5

I remember when iTunes came out for Windows ca. 2003. I had friends with Macs so I leapt at the chance to try it for myself---it just seemed lightyears ahead of whatever I was using to interface with my music library at the time (Winamp, probably). And what a long, slow, weird, decline it's been since then.

I was a long-time winamp user and I've still never found that sweet spot in any new player, of being able to easily queue up albums and always be listening to exactly what I want, in the order I want.

And it has only gotten worse and worse. I still resort to Foobar2k on Linux under Wine, because it seems to be one of the only apps that has it all.

Re: Apple Plans End of iTunes

#72

Post by WorldMaker »

khazhou wrote: post #18
nategri wrote: post #5

I remember when iTunes came out for Windows ca. 2003. I had friends with Macs so I leapt at the chance to try it for myself---it just seemed lightyears ahead of whatever I was using to interface with my music library at the time (Winamp, probably). And what a long, slow, weird, decline it's been since then.

I was a long-time winamp user and I've still never found that sweet spot in any new player, of being able to easily queue up albums and always be listening to exactly what I want, in the order I want.

Foobar 2000 is probably the closest to an honest successor of WinAMP's queue support. It's visually boring, but gets the job done well and is configurable and extendable to other needs. Has all sorts of power user options for shuffle modes, play queue management, and play list management.

(For instance, the ability in a shuffle to right click a song for it to play next in the queue, and then have it return to the shuffle. Or to shuffle entire albums, playing the albums in track order but shuffling which album is next.)

Re: Apple Plans End of iTunes

#73

Post by mr_toad »

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.

I tend to agree. It’s also bit weird having separate apps in iOS for podcasts and music, but having the same app in MacOS.

Re: Apple Plans End of iTunes

#74

Post by rusk »

rifung wrote: post #53
rusk wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that you need developers to build an ecosystem and Apple is currently alienating them in droves. developers developera developers as a wise man once said

How does that argument follow? Apple needs developers but they don't need those developers writing code using an iPad do they? After all, iPhones have an endless amount of apps but nobody (or close enough to nobody) is developing apps using their iPhone.

The stuff they do themselves is terrible; they need third parties and they need a thriving market place to develop talent and competency.

Re: Apple Plans End of iTunes

#75

Post by manigandham »

kvark wrote: post #8
nategri wrote: post #5

I remember when iTunes came out for Windows ca. 2003. I had friends with Macs so I leapt at the chance to try it for myself---it just seemed lightyears ahead of whatever I was using to interface with my music library at the time (Winamp, probably). And what a long, slow, weird, decline it's been since then.

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're good at while the software lets you consume it the way you want.

Re: Apple Plans End of iTunes

#76

Post by jrochkind1 »

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.

Re: Apple Plans End of iTunes

#77

Post by saurik »

scarface74 wrote: post #28
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.

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 devices). No matter how hard Apple-acolytes want it to be true, if I come out with a bad product, and then later come out with a good product, it doesn't make the bad product retroactively awesome.

Re: Apple Plans End of iTunes

#78

Post by Silhouette »

What does this men for getting data onto and off iDevices from non-Apple equipment like Windows PCs? Apple has always stubbornly refused to support standardised formats and transfer protocols for a lot of widely useful data types, and if you didn't want to trust your data to iCloud then the PC iTunes application was one of the few other officially supported ways to move things onto or off your mobile devices. It would be great if their push to make their devices stronger candidates to replace general purpose PCs included improvements here, because iTunes on Windows is pretty bad, but it would be a concern if this actually heralds a move further in the other direction.

Re: Apple Plans End of iTunes

#79

Post by jaredklewis »

brians wrote: post #46
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?

Hard links are going to blow your mind. https://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/Hard-Link... Seriously, I had my MP3s organized this way pre-iTunes. I get why that can’t scale to the general public, but I still think a tool could approximate it.

For one thing, even if this was a good idea, you would still need a tool to covert the meta information from the ID3 tags that come with your music from amazon, iTunes Store, or wherever into a myriad of hard links.

Further, it's hard to imagine how the hard link system could ever be as flexible as even an average music library program, where you can trivially find songs released between 1990 and 1995, with at least one play count, and then have them sorted by beats per minute.

Music libraries act as relational databases, which are a far more powerful data modeling tool than the file system.

Re: Apple Plans End of iTunes

#80

Post by OJFord »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #30
wuunderbar wrote: post #27

I really hope the next iOS makes some sort of "leapfrog" UX change where we move away from icons on a grid for the home screen, especially for iPad. I know this may alienate and confuse some iOS users, but I trust Apple can figure out some way for this to be intuitive for their users.

Why?

On Android I have a 7 icon dock (3 are folders of each The alphabetical list is my main criterion, I don't think anything beats it. The dock is just a handy shortcut to a few common things, but even the coach tracking app I use every working morning and most of those afternoons isn't in there (that's much more frequently than I use some that are) and it's fine.

Grid of all app icons was designed at a time when 'apps' were newNd nobody had many.

I don't have many, I only recently got 'smartphone' again, but still more than I care to spread over a grid.

(The only annoyance is some daftly named apps, like 'Credit Card' instead of ' Credit' or something.)

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