“There is no easy way to say this. iTunes is a dinosaur. It’s broken and has been broken for a number of years,” Jeffrey Mincey writes for Bohemian Boomer. “Based upon Apple’s history with archaic technology, iTunes will not be fixed.”
“iTunes is a music player, a movie player, an internet radio station player, a media shopping mall for music videos, TV shows, movies, and probably a few more items that I haven’t found or figured out how to use. iTunes is a hugely bloated, convoluted mess that nearly everyone who pays attention to such things says is in need of a major fix,” Mincey writes. “Apple may patch up bugs from time to time, and slather on a new feature here and there to keep the lights on, but don’t expect iTunes to be fixed. It won’t.”
“What I expect Apple to do is to remain Apple,” Mincey writes. “One day we’ll be watching a new keynote address and iTunes will be replaced. Out with the old, in with the new.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Yes, please, and the sooner, the better!
SEE ALSO:
To fix iTunes, Apple should revisit iSync, an app that actually worked – August 18, 2015
The tragedy of iTunes: Nothing ‘just works’ – July 28, 2015
Dear Apple, please go thermonuclear on iTunes – July 28, 2015
Marco Arment: iTunes is a toxic hellstew – July 27, 2015
Jim Dalrymple: I got (most of) my music back; Apple working to fix Apple Music issues shortly – July 26, 2015
Jim Dalrymple: Apple Music is a nightmare, and I’m done with it – July 23, 2015
Apple’s iTunes: Whatever happened to ‘It Just Works? – July 17, 2015
The iTunes Report: Still a mess – July 14, 2015
Apple releases iTunes 12.2.1, fixes iTunes Match issues – July 13, 2015
Apple Music, both on iOS and OS X, is an embarrassing and confusing mess – July 10, 2015
iTunes 12.2 is mangling network-shared libraries – July 6, 2015
Serious iTunes Match issues for some users ahead of Apple Music launch – June 26, 2015
Open letter to Tim Cook: Apple needs to do better – January 5, 2015
Why can’t Apple break up iTunes into a collection of discrete streamlined apps for us Mac users (a la iOS), and leave it as a bloated catch-all mess for Windows sufferers?
They won’t know they are suffering since their regular context is a bloated mess.
Exactly!
Apple needs to outsource their software maintenance and development to the only company in industry that has a solid and proven track record, and the name is none other than Microsoft!!!!
Microsoft is the only world-class software company in the high-tech industry!!!!
Apple is a garage league software/hardware wannabee shop!
🙂 🙂 🙂
Because its run by guy who puts social agendas, political correctness, high profile visibility events and selfish leftist views ahead of running a company. Before he fixes iTunes he will discriminate against white male employees, make speeches telling why gay and lesbian behavior is perfectly normal, warn us that we are all going to die from global warming, and on and on and on. This guy is the antithesis of Steve Jobs.
Companies need to be socially and environmentally responsible. They also need to be responsible to their customers and stockholders. I think Cook is having problems doing this balancing act and the customers are currently getting the short end of the stick.
Wow. Hate much?
(By the way, gay and lesbian behavior IS perfectly normal…for gays and lesbians. Why do other peoples’ sex lives bother you?)
And pedophilia and beastiality are normal to those groups too.
Do I have a problem with their sex lives? Hell yeah!!
All pedophiles should be hung in the public square and the others locked up in a zoo with their animal buddies.
Consenting adults is the difference. Your horribly offensive comparison makes me wonder if you’re one of those guys who doesn’t know what consent is.
Tell us, Krioni! What constitutes ‘consent?’ Can an under 16-year-old boy ‘consent’ to sex with a man twice his age as long as he ‘believes’ he’s homosexual? Seventeen the limit? Fifteen – just what age constitutes consent! In your homosexual mind? Explain to us also what ‘social responsibility’ is required of corporations? Your SoCal construct, here, mine?
And just why do you insist on the use of ‘gay’ instead of ‘homosexuality?’ Does that science-based term disturb you, point out that by at least a 98 to 2 % margin that homosexuality is not the ‘norm’ (another of those science descriptive disturbing terms)?
Wondering minds want to know (even if I don’t really care, except when someone wants to guilt the normal thinking of other people)….
Not sure if you really don’t know what consent is, or just have reading comprehension problems. I was criticizing Manco for comparison being gay to pedophilia or bestiality, not defending those illegal (for good reason!) actions. I was saying that adults having a consent-based relationship is very different than what he was expressing horror about, because consent is a real thing (that we don’t think children or non-human animals can do, so there is no consent possible).
Being super-tall is not the “norm” – what do you propose we dot with super-tall people?
When did I insist on using the term “gay” in this conversation? And, since that is an adjective, while homosexuality is a noun, good grammar can help you know which one to use. Ah, there’s the hint about reading comprehension.
In short, I think the degree to which you are filled with hatred about other people’s lives is muddling your ability to read and express yourself clearly.
The age of legal consent differs by country and state, so no one can definitively answer that question.
This has what to do with gay people, exactly?
“Why Apple can’t and won’t fix iTunes”
Simple because iTunes is garbage and Apple can’t fix software even if their life depended on it (which it does)!
Apple has proven it just can’t manage or create any useful software!
Apple probably still develops and maintain software straight out of Jobs garage.
The day I purchase any another of Apple device will be when it comes with Windows OS pre-installed!!!!
🙂 🙂 🙂
Apple can do anything they want. Except services. They just fuck that up constantly. How’s the new streaming TV service going for you? It’s been years and still nothing.Hey Tim, fire Eddy Cue. It’s your job Tim, do it. There are no excuses when you have all the resources that Apple has. More money than the US mint and a reputation, constantly beating their own chests, of just doing things right. Well they don’t do things just right. And things don’t just work. And they are to put it mildly, arrogant. Can you imagine what everyone here would say if Samsung, Google or especially Microsoft had failed this long at something? There were be a shit storm of ridicule and laughter. Well, let’s hear it. And no excuses or exceptions.
Right, let’s fire Eddy for not accomplishing what nobody else on earth has accomplished either!
Let someone else try. Hire someone from Google, they seem to get things done.
Yeterday! Please.
There is no reason for Apple to fix iTunes, from the standpoint, it is old baggage. How much old code is stuck in it? Apple has done well in starting from scratch before. We may not like it at first, but it certainly is the correct corse of action. A bit of bitter taste for a sweet future.
Scrapping products and starting over does seem to be the new trend with Apple. Whatever they replace it with will have fewer features but will be more responsive. It makes sense although I’m sure some of us will miss whatever features are removed.
Pleazzzzzzzze, can I just sort a damn playlist, and can I just “download all” within that playlist on iOS? Pretty fckin pleazzzzzze?
It’s not nearly as simple as it sounds. You have your music library- but that’s linked to your phone (or iPod). You have video and TV shows and Movies- but these too can be linked to your phone.
The only thing they truly break out are the apps. But why would you want to manage your music and TV shows and movies and pod casts (and, and, and) in one app and your apps in another for your phone?
It’s not as simple as you think…
If they just got rid of all and any syncing functions, and made it all, at all times, manual, that’d be something. Most of the time, the frustration comes from messages about synced/unsynced/library problems not really letting one know what the hell is going on.
I get really pissed with complaints about iTunes and AppleMusic. The whole thing works brilliantly, so I can only think that the moaners and groaner a just don’t understand it.
What have you been smoking and whe… oh, the Koolaid IV drip, I get it.
Can someone please show me examples of what a better solution looks like? I read all the complaints about iTunes, but what more can people point to other than “fix it” or “start over” to demonstrate what an improved end solution actually would be. I really don’t have an issue with iTunes and actually like that all of the stuff that’s in it is right in one place. My only beef with it is that it sometimes acts goofy switching between stores or in syncing at times. Fix the glitches….but throw it out and start from scratch commentary lacks substance in most of the comments I read.
I love “better” every time I see it…but I also get sick of reading amorphous gripes about how “bad” iTunes when the comments lack substance. Oh, and the “fire Eddy” comments aren’t much better. Please, someone, make specific cases and show examples of things working better…and then you might get me (or people like me) as converts. Otherwise it just seems like silly ranting.
Here’s one recent problem I’ve had, simply by installing 12.2 and doing nothing else: Over 1500 songs were changed to 128 kbps from 256. I subscribe to iTunes Match so normally I’d just select a hundred or so at a time, delete (now remove download) them, right click on the selection and click “Download” and they’d all come back as 256. Unfortunately “download” is gone from the right click menu. Each song has to be downloaded individually, the downloads are painfully slow and a lot of metadata is lost including play counts, lyrics and ratings.
I’ve made peace with the fact that the programmers scramble the interface every so often to confuse the users enough so they shut up about the bugs that have persisted for years, but having an install screw up my library while removing the tools to fix it is over-the-top incompetence. Apple Music should have been introduced as a beta standalone program prior to any integration with iTunes.
I could go on if you want more.
Ok, I get that you’ve experienced a bug that is annoying. I can point to some as well (and did in my post). That’s not what I was really speaking to though. Neither your problem or the couple issues I’ve gotten annoyed with really rise to the “iTunes is a spaghetti mess that needs to be destroyed and redone from scratch because it’s the most horrible, backwards thing known to man” that so many posters like to claim.
Bugs are annoying, especially ones that persist uncorrected (and I’m sure there are several). It’s people’s unfounded sounding assumption that Apple has to start anew and that will magically make the complainers happy. I just don’t get the arguments these people are making. Wish they could point to a service that works and does what they want iTunes to do…but which is better.
The sad thing is that iTunes was better in the past. And by better I mean less buggy and more intuitive. Just in v11 we had a sidebar that had far more functionality than the come-and-go sidebar we have today and acted as a launcher for iTunes’ various functions. I could see the iOS apps and it had a number next to it showing how many apps needed to be updated. If the number was high I could click on Applications and update them on the computer which was much faster than transferring purchases from my device. It was easy to jump from my library to the store and back.
If I downloaded an audiobook on my device i could right click on the device and select transfer purchases. Now these functions are all buried under various menus and submenus.
I’d like to sort audiobooks by author before syncing, keep audio and video files on separate volumes. I have hundreds of videos I’ve ripped from DVDs that I have to copy to iTunes before I can sync them to a device and any metadata I add in iTunes gets lost if It isn’t kept in iTunes, yet I want to keep my music library on the computer since it takes up very little space in comparison to my video library.
I’d love for my iPhone and iTunes to agree on how much free space I have on my iPhone and for WiFi syncing to work more than 10% of the time. I’d love to have my music videos to be treated like videos in iTunes the way they’re treated on the phone.
Mostly I’d like to be able to defend iTunes to my Windows friends the way I used to. It’s the ambassadorial program to the Windows world and I could explain why Bonjour and quicktime were loading during the install. Now when they ask what happened to features that were inexplicably moved to hidden places or why they can’t do certain things anymore, I have a hard time answering them since Apple could never give me a good answer.
Apple is (or was) good at rewriting things like OS X when they made the switch to Intel and Snow Leopard when it got over encumbered with old code. So far they’ve ignored iTunes for far too long and that’s one program they need to run perfectly on both the Mac and Windows because that’s the interface to their bread-and-butter iOS devices.
Apple *can’t* keep ignoring iTunes, it’s too important to their business, yet they have been ignoring it and that’s bad for us and bad for them and they don’t seem to understand that.
I too like iTunes just the way it is. The moaners and groaners have their heads so far up their assholes that they’re never going to be able to see clearly.
iTunes is a convoluted mess, and even as an Apple guy of 25+ years, *I* have a hard time figuring it out. Why can’t people just drag and drop content from their PCs to their iPhones? Why does it have to sync everything? Why does it ask to erase the iPhone in order to get content off of it on a new PC? Copyright laws?
I rarely use the program, now, despite the fact that I have an iPhone. I back up via iCloud, and I just keep my songs on my iPhone. Since reinstalling my hard drive, I’ve had to create a new iTunes library, because, for some reason, I can’t seem to import my old one.
It should be streamlined enough for me to figure this stuff out on my own as opposed to hitting up a bunch of technical websites.
There’s nothing stopping iTunes from becoming modular. (Remember way back when Apple went obsessive about modular software?) In the meantime…