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Apple Plans End of iTunes

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Re: Apple Plans End of iTunes

#91

Post by RickS »

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?

I work on cross platform design for a fortune 500. We keep our eye on this kind of thing.

In conversation, the consensus among my peers was that the separation between iOS and OSX is destined to be impermanent. Phones are becoming more complex, and more integral to our every routine. But more significantly, they're raising a new generation of digital natives that have different expectations about UI and its scale, density, information architecture, onboarding, collaboration, and storage, to name a few.

These mobile-first expectations are flavoring desktop software, and smoothing over the once rough edges of highly-compact power user software. Gmail's redesign, and most redesigns really, demonstrate this. Less information, displayed in a more opinionated way, with whitespace and garnish and a focus on golden-path big-brother-knows-best presentation over configuration and optimization for power users.

Desktop and mobile trends are slowly converging, and I think that when it comes, that convergence from apple risks being abrupt and unapologetic. They're like that – with flash, the headphone jack, and the touch bar. They wait a long time, but when they make a move, they really rip the bandaid.

I find this future to be sad and scary, for the most part. But I agree that the icon grid home screen abstraction feels more like a "because it's always been that way" thing than anything else. It's a holdover from the blackberry days. Given how far mobile apps have come in the mean time, the mobile phone's desktop/start menu is ready for some new abstractions.

Re: Apple Plans End of iTunes

#92

Post by octorian »

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'…

> We want content organized in a logical manner with tags, folders, lists and search that's completely removed from the physical location.

The problem is that there's a lot of room for interpretation as to what is the best way to actually translate media metadata into an organizational scheme. Furthermore, the most appropriate interpretation is DIFFERENT depending on the type and/or genre of the music.

Most metadata-oriented media players tend to pick one scheme, apply it across the board, and completely screw up somewhere along the way. For whatever kind of music the developers had in mind, it'll work okay. For anything else, it's borderline unusable as you constantly struggle to find/browse what you're looking for.

Re: Apple Plans End of iTunes

#93

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: Apple Plans End of iTunes

#94

Post by soulofmischief »

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.

Also chiming in for foobar2k.

Several custom modular interfaces are a tab-switch away. Takes a while to get everything the way you like it but you've got modules for autotagging, working integration with Winamp's Milkdrop2 (and any other Winamp plugins one might have), youtube search & playback, lyric fetching, advanced playlist organization, direct playback from VGM music files, pop-up search, artist bio fetching, etc.

It's very easy to get exactly where you want to be with a custom queue within seconds.

I would also recommend Amarok, not sure how it performs on Windows, but there's a KDE build[0]. It comes a lot more configured out of the box, plus it's still fairly customizable and its playlist creation features surpass even fb2k's.

[0] https://community.kde.org/Amarok/GettingStarted/Download/Win...

Re: Apple Plans End of iTunes

#95

Post by habosa »

I was an iTunes obsessive from 2003-2012. Then uploaded all my music to the cloud and moved on. Still miss the functionality though.

Two days ago I wanted to rent a movie for an airplane, so I opened up iTunes on my Mac. I'm not kidding, in order to rent this movie I had to type in my password 8 times and confirm so many dialogs I almost gave up. If your purchase flow is that bad, you just don't care anymore. So not surprised they're gonna end it.

Re: Apple Plans End of iTunes

#96

Post by skybrian »

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.

Apple just released a new iPod Touch, so it seems it will survive in some form:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/05/remember-the-ipod-ap...

Re: Apple Plans End of iTunes

#97

Post by scarface74 »

ken wrote: post #85
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...

Since 10.4, the Finder has had Smart Folders for this. (I believe Windows got a similar feature in Vista.) Apple even bragged that it worked "Just like iTunes" when they introduced it. This geek doesn't understand why we need two nearly-identical systems. Once you make the more-general form, refactor the prototype to use it! Normal people wouldn't need to "use the filesystem" any more than they do with iTunes now. Ju…

Where are these smart folders in native Windows? The closest I see is a “saved searched” and this is really more obtuse than creating a playlist.

Re: Apple Plans End of iTunes

#99

Post by dredmorbius »

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.

Frankly, console/command-line players, mostly mpv/mps and kin, hit that spot for me now.

You might try VLC for a GUI.

Re: Apple Plans End of iTunes

#100

Post by scarface74 »

asveikau wrote: post #90
scarface74 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The filesystem is strictly hierarchal. How do you have one song in multiple playlists without duplicating the songs? How do you propose to make that usable for the average person. History kind of proves that Apple took the right approach in the iPod era. The simple drag files to an attached device MP3 players failed to become successful.

Putting aside what has been mentioned elsewhere on the thread (m3u playlists, hardlinks) or similar technical solutions... You really think the iTunes filesystem layout is what made iPod successful? Not, say, the fact that it was solid hardware, good UI, etc., from a desirable brand? The comment was saying, my read of it anyway, is they didn't appreciate that it would slurp up and rename the files you give it.

You want normal people to use hard links?

But iTunes didn’t “slurp up and rename files” unless you enabled the option for it to manage your underlying file.

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