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What the death of iTunes says about digital habits

theatlantic.com

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Re: What the death of iTunes says about digital habits

#81

Post by dang »

mnemonicsloth wrote: post #35
CharlesW wrote: post #8

My take on the author's take is that by point 10, he's realized what a muddled and silly thing this is. > So what really failed, maybe, wasn’t iTunes at all… At which point whatever substance he's abused to get that far really kicks in for his final point. > In 1940, the German critic Walter Benjamin wrote about an angel in a Paul Klee painting. […] It is now clear, 80 years later, that the angel is looking at his ph…

Walter Benjamin is the original inspiration for the postmodernists. His writing is nonsensically opaque. If his name appears in an article, it's a good sign that the article is about to go off the rails.

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: What the death of iTunes says about digital habits

#83

Post by kristofferR »

dredmorbius wrote: post #69
mcenedella wrote: post #49

“(A note for older readers: More time separates us today from the debut of the first iPod than separated the first iPod from the debut of the first Macintosh computer.)“ Wow.

Similarly, OS X is now older than Classic Mac OS (1984) was when OS X was released (2001).

Well, technically the last OS X release was in 2015, but I get your point.

Re: What the death of iTunes says about digital habits

#84

Post by j45 »

yuliyp wrote: post #58
j45 wrote: post #24

iTunes was a stop-gap when Apple didn't want to have an app store at any cost for the iPhone when it first came out.

iTunes existed well before the iPhone (since the first iPods, 6 years before).

Yup. Remember installing it when it came out. The use of iTunes for iPhone was because it already existed, and nothing did for iPhone

Re: What the death of iTunes says about digital habits

#85

Post by cpach »

disposedtrolley wrote: post #21

On a side note, that quote by Fitche is the perfect summary of refactoring spaghetti code: > you could not remove a single grain of sand from its place, without thereby, although perhaps imperceptibly to you, altering something throughout all parts of the immeasurable whole

Nitpick: Fichte

Re: What the death of iTunes says about digital habits

#86

Post by cpach »

scarface74 wrote: post #39
Macha wrote: post #25

While the iTunes client has been something I've directed much dislike to over the years, the iTunes store feels like the last place I can get mainstream music DRM free to just play on any of my devices and keep regardless of what licensing deals change. While Spotify is great for access to music, the client is very poor for library/playlist management, and some music I'd just like to have my own copy of. If the store…

You can get DRM free digital music from Amazon.

Do they offer lossless files? E.g. FLAC.

Re: What the death of iTunes says about digital habits

#87

Post by em-bee »

dredmorbius wrote: post #69
mcenedella wrote: post #49

“(A note for older readers: More time separates us today from the debut of the first iPod than separated the first iPod from the debut of the first Macintosh computer.)“ Wow.

Similarly, OS X is now older than Classic Mac OS (1984) was when OS X was released (2001).

it's much older than that if you count NeXTStep history. OS X didn't start from scratch

Re: What the death of iTunes says about digital habits

#88

Post by pmullins »

kalleboo wrote: post #77
wtmt wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's silly to say ~"iTunes died" it just changed names. I don’t agree at all. While iTunes was feature rich and relatively stable, the replacements are relatively feature poor and quite unstable. Apple should’ve taken another year to introduce the replacements.

It could have been much, much worse. They could have ported over the iOS Music app.

I'm pretty sure that's exactly what they did. My understanding is that they based the macOS version on the iOS version. Explains quite a bit.

Re: What the death of iTunes says about digital habits

#89

Post by tgv »

Macha wrote: post #25

While the iTunes client has been something I've directed much dislike to over the years, the iTunes store feels like the last place I can get mainstream music DRM free to just play on any of my devices and keep regardless of what licensing deals change. While Spotify is great for access to music, the client is very poor for library/playlist management, and some music I'd just like to have my own copy of. If the store…

For classical and jazz, there's e.g. prestomusic.com

Re: What the death of iTunes says about digital habits

#90

Post by pmullins »

tzs wrote: post #52
chmaynard wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple music is pretty much exactly the same as iTunes was without a bunch of non-music related features. Hmm, not really. I took a brief look at the UI during the Catalina beta and concluded that I wanted nothing to do with it. I have spent years learning how to use iTunes well. I'm not about to throw away that investment of time and energy on a new, untested app with a different UI. I'll stick with iTunes to manag…

For a long time the only interface in iTunes that I've really liked was the Column Browser interface. That's remained available throughout the various changes in iTunes and now in Music over the years, but disappeared in Catalina. Fortunately, that disappearance was only temporary. It returned in 10.15.2. Select "Songs" in the left sidebar, and a "Column Browser" submenu will be added to the View menu. Turn it on (⌘B…

FYI, The column browser interface is back in the Music app as of the 10.15.3 Beta.
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