“On a chilly, rainy day in San Francisco 15 years ago, Steve Jobs took the stage at the 2001 Macworld Expo to present new Apple products,” Kirk McElhearn writes for Macworld. “After talking about boring technicalities of new hardware and software, Jobs switched registers. He introduced Apple’s digital hub concept, then started talking about a revolution. ‘There is a music revolution happening right now.'”
“Jobs discussed the current state of digital music: how people ripped CDs, put music on computers, created playlists, and how people burned those playlists to CDs to listen on the go or in the car,” McElhearn writes. “People even copied digital music to MP3 players. Jobs said that music player apps were ‘too complex. They are really difficult to learn and use.'”
“Jobs then introduced iTunes, arguably the most important software Apple ever released, other than its operating systems. iTunes set the tune for the company’s next decade and its rise from a ‘beleaguered’ hardware and software company to the industry leader we know today. Admitting that Apple was playing catch-up, Jobs said, ‘We’re late to this party and we’re about to do a leapfrog,'” McElhearn writes. “And they sure did.”
Much more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Here’s to a rapidly-improving iTunes in 2016 and to fifteen more years, at least!
Today, iTunes sucks! That is no exaggeration or hyperbole. It really, really sucks.
I use iTunes every day. And though some things about it are a bit annoying…its still the best music interface i have worked with. So to say it sucks probably means you gave up on using it or never tried it.
I’m less happy with iTunes these days, but it doesn’t suck.
Agreed. I miss the days when iTunes was just a juke box. I hope it can be just that again some day.
While there’s much room for improvement iTunes is certainly not unusable.
Thanks also go to the guys at Sound Jam. Without their company and it expertise iTunes would never have happened. One of the most important acquisitions Apple ever made after buying NeXT.
Exactly. No Sound Jam, no iTunes. That’s the lineage.
And it shows that Apple proceeded to bolt, weld and solder stuff onto Sound Jam without paying much attention to the consequences. What do we call iTunes now, besides a big misnomer? A media OS?
I used Sound Jam for about a year before they were bought out. Loved it.
I was also an early user of SoundJam MT. It’s still an important app, but has grown unwieldy. I’d like to see it split into iTunes, iVideo, and others. They need to keep it simple.
Apple didn’t create iTunes. Cassidy & Green developed SoundJam for Mac OS 9 in Watsonville CA. Then they built an OS X version. Apple noticed and bought SoundJam along with the SoundJam development team from Cassidy & Green. That’s the group that continued to develop SoundJam inside Apple which was renamed iTunes by Apple.💯😀
if they bought sound jam before itunes was announced then apple created it
I can’t help but wonder where Apple would be today if Windows banned iTunes…
Oh, the irony….!
They would be fine. I know a ton of Windoze sufferers and none of them use iTunes.
iTunes was definitely much better 3 years ago than it is today. And the steady loss of functionality is very frustrating to many.
Yeah, selling iPods to just Mac users saved the company…
Riiight!
Consider this, even the monopolists MS didn’t ban anything!
Like I said, irony!
Apple Music combined with iTunes Store works a dream for me. The moaners and groaners a need to get their heads out of their asses and use it properly.
With Music Match and an Apple Music subscription I can literally listen to anything I like streamed to any Apple device I own. I can isolate things I want to hear regularly into playlists. It is a fantastic app and ecosystem that brings together Apple’s huge collection and merges it with things I bring in from the outside. I can even stream my own compositions because of Music Match.
I really don’t get why people think it is such a clunky mess. Tend your garden. I’m learning a Chopin piece on the piano and decided I wanted to hear a pro play it. On the Apple TV I told Siri, “Play Chopin’s Nocturne in Eb Major” and within a couple seconds it was playing through my TV. How is that difficult or even inconvenient?
Classical music is especially a pain in the ass in iTunes.
Let’s just talk about one’s collection, not streaming stuff:
The audiophile would want to choose what pro pianist was playing. He would want to know the date of recording, the original release, the conductor, the orchestra, the hall, and probably other notes too. He would distinguish between live and studio work. Since Apple doesn’t get ANY of that correct in its metadata, the music collector would very much like to be able to easily edit ALL the information conveniently in one big info box. Apple makes it harder than ever to do.
And for pop music, it’s an absolute nightmare. genres are meaningless today. There’s no such thing as a “Soundtrack” genre. A soundtrack is a compilation album, not a type of music. STUPID.
Apple can’t even identify the difference in beat structure, not even fill in tempo (beats per minute, BPM) automatically. A musician or dancer needs to know this stuff and in the end it’s a pain in the ass to fill it all in manually because Apple is too lazy to do it. iTunes can rip and play anything, but the stupid software can’t even count beats.
Then we get into album structures. What a mess. Apple can’t get that right at all. It screws up album covers that the user uploads, replacing them with completely wrong stuff. Apple has no clue how to implement “compilation” effectively. If one imports a “greatest hits” CD, one wants the accurate date and original album release of each song, not the date of the 3rd re-release of the collection. The Comments field should record the specific release that was ripped. For a compilation, which is an album that has tracks from different artists, the same data convention should apply, with the original source noted in the comments.
Finally, Apple makes it a completely manual process to find spelling errors, mistakes, and incorrect data. In fact, when you do edit something, the song view list jumps so one can’t find where they were. Not nice.
Don’t even get me started on languages. In a multilingual household, it takes hours and hours of management to ensure that tags are added so one can make language-specific playlists.
So what has Apple Music and Match and all the ugly iTunes changes done for the audiophile in the last 3 years? APPLE HAS MADE IT WORSE. Streaming is a waste.
To those who say I need to learn how to use iTunes : FSUK YOU!!!! I’ve used SoundJam since OS 9 and iTunes since the day it was released. iTunes has only gotten more cumbersome and harder to use, with more hidden stuff and complex keystrokes necessary to do anything. The Apple apologists can stick it where the sun don’t shine. It iTunes 13 isn’t fixed for better usability, then I’m reverting back to iTunes 10 or a 3rd party solution.
The reason why the turntable was featured at CES this year is because the sound from a long playing record (analog) vs. digital music is sooo much better to the ears. Now if Apple could generate the complete sound spectrum for iTunes consumption (multi-parallel IO instead of single serial output), the turntable would no longer be necessary. Go listen to a long playing record and hear what you’ve been missing from your earplugs. Truly amazing.
iTunes is some sort of Frankenstein application.
Certainly the key Apple app to me. I’d been reading about Macs since the beginning but was both budget constrained (and cheap).
So iTunes for Windows was my first exposure to an actual Apple interface, and I liked so much my next computer was my first (and not last) Mac.
And why today (IMO) Apple’s first (major at least) Android port is Apple Music for similar reasons.
And I would therefore like to see them do more of this with their stuff on Win and Android….
…particularly iMessage… …the world’s all divided into messaging silos… …SMS is archaic, Google Talk never took off at scale, Skype is too video-oriented…. …with FB Messenger as close to a universal platform as we have by the default of being on all major systems….
An iBook G4 running Tiger at 1.33 GHz – bought on a special fall promotion where I saved a bundle on an iPod Photo (60GB!) and a printer.
They had better fall specials then – but more year round discounting deals popping up today….
…and I used iTunes to suck up about 10,000 songs from CD’s that I still have today…..
I think the Dock app is the most important ever. A great user interface. (The Cmd-Tab switcher is provided by it.)
Yep. It sucks. Far too cluttered, the basic “jukebox” function is an abortive mess, and i’m being generous. Can’t locate songs in ways pervious possible, can’t display songs in ways previous possible, and often refuses to play a playlist in order…. sometimes.
I’m with you, I think it’s a disaster. I just posted all the problems that I am having.
Has anyone got any idea as to when they will fix iTunes? At the moment I think it’s a disaster. I rip CDs at LossLess on an iMac as my central media server. I upload to iCloud Music and then download to iPhone or iPad. First problem. ICloud Music turns itself off. 50% of my album artwork is either wrong or missing. It can’t find Adele 25 or the latest Bowie album. On the topic of Bowie’s tragic passing, I set up a Playlist of Bowie tracks. The Playlist turns up on my iPhone, I go to download it and iTunes crashes. In addition, I set up a genius based playlist On my main library, it includes Purchased AAC tracks, but are there are no Purchased AAC tracks in my library. Everything in my library is LossLess ripped CDs. I’m looking for an alternative.
I avoid iTunes. It was great, powerful and simple in the day but no its a do-everything that sucks. It goes against Apple’s philosophy and is much more M$ish.