“One of the most-used programs, regardless of platforms, is iTunes,” Dwight Silverman reports for Houston Chronicle.
“Given that the iPod is far and away the dominant media player, and that Apple has sold hundreds of millions of iOS devices, the application used to buy and manage audio, video, apps and books is ubiquitous,” Silverman reports. “It’s also, frankly, pretty bad. iTunes’ design hasn’t been updated since its initial 2001 release. It’s bloated and notoriously slow. It’s incredibly non-intuitive.”
Silverman reports, “On Windows, iTunes is prone to lockups and crashing. On the Mac, it’s more stable but still balky… Apple kicks hardware designs to the curb every few years, but it doesn’t seem inclined to redo software. Still, iTunes is long overdue for a do-over. Please fix it, Apple.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: At this point, iTunes certainly could use some work.
iTunes has become a joke between me and my friends. I’d rather troubleshoot Windows than tech support people’s iTunes woes. Seriously.
I agree 😛 hahaha….
Let me guess. You never bothered to red the instructions.
MacDaily found SOMETHING about Apple that it doesn’t LOVE?! Wow. Progress.
You must be new here. MDN has a long history of criticizing and finding faults in Apple’s products and strategies.
The only apparent progress is you finally noticed.
That is absolutely true.
Haha, you must work for MDN. Seriously, their criticism of Apple is few and far between and when they do criticize, it is tepid at best.
MDN is absolutely fair when they criticize apple. At the same time, they are quick to kick overblown criticisms from others to the curb.
If there’s a problem, MDN will address it… BUT, they will be fair and evenhanded about it, and will not make claims about devices overheating when there’s no real issue.
mmmmmmmmm not so much. Pretty much rah,rah but seldom any real objective comments. MDN did actually knock iTunes in this article’s republishing. Then, iTunes does suck. It’s pretty hard to be defensive about a product that has been around for years and only get’s worse. Apple screws up too just not that often. All readers want (except fanboys) is good objective news coverage. Not gushing praise and circling the wagons whenever there is criticism.
I couldn’t agree more!
On MDM if Microsoft or Android break they suck, if Apple breaks it is only a glitch. I think a bit of balance is called for.
By objective comments do you mean hateful things about items that are not PERFECT??
Yep, I agree that iTunes could use help. I have suggestions myself. But could you name a better music player that connects all your music, video, movies, etc to where ever you are. A friend uses Microsoft music player…. nuff said.
PS, consider the amount of people using iTunes… Just that must make it a busy program.
Look up objective. Then you’ll see that your comment is anything but objective. Geez! Fanboy.
Now those comments do sound a little like Fox news – fair and balanced – maybe you work for both.
Murdochian – news corp
my comment was for – dinjin201 — fair and balanced
Hahahahahahaha
Works great on my MBP. I agree that it could use an update, but compared to what Windows has to offer for a complete audio, video, app management, and phone backup, it is still years ahead of the compitition.
I feel sorry for the Windows users though. /s
100% agree.
iTunes isn’t perfect, but it works fine for me.
Only problem I ever have is sometimes my network drive goes to sleep (plugged into my airport) and iTunes forgets where everything is. Not hard to fix.. But it’s annoying sometimes.
Beyond that, it works fine.
I agree. iTunes works fine for me as well. I’m sure it can be improved, but “awful”? Not even close.
Agree here….works fine for me! I know people I work with complain about it, but they all use Windows. Maybe its the Windows version that is so horrible. Alot better than what I have seen available!
Only thing I don’t like are certain videos open in iTunes instead of quicktime. I don’t like videos opening in iTunes. Personal preference.
Other than that I just got an iPhone and think everything works fairly well. I wish I had the option to mount the phone as a USB thumb drive though.
Other than that good here.
From what I’ve read the Windows version has problems. I’ve never felt like iTunes on the Mac was “awful” or non-intuitive. The author is being simply hyperbolic in claiming that iTunes hasn’t been updated since 2001. I am wondering what the wish list of fixes is. Maybe I should have list is to fix iTunes. Maybe I should have the article.
I stopped at “awful” and “incredibly non-intuitive”. Is it great? No. But calling it awful is hyperbole. Non-intuitive misses the mark by a long way. Because of the the number of functions it serves, it certainly has a number of thing that are not straightforward.
I’d give the interface an overall grade of good. The speed is sub-snappy. Fair enough. But I don’t think it ever gets to the point of being awful.
I’ve heard the same about the Winblows version, but I think the current version – and really ever since iTunes 10 came out – iTunes has been pretty good.
Yea, he seemed to be a bit hysterical for no good reason other than generating clicks. Did he give an example of how it should be fixed?
Sounds like the SNL commentator on the economy,
Just FIX IT!!!!
Yes, use a real indexed DATABASE to store the data for everything in the library. It’s embarrassing that any minor change, even updating a playcount for a single track, causes the whole “iTunes Library.xml” text file to be rewritten. Slows any large library to a crawl.
I don’t have a problem with iTunes, it works fine, I can easily find what I’m looking for. Please someone say plainly what is so horrible about iTunes? And what is the vision for a updated iTunes?
I’m not quite sure what the problem is for other Mac users, as it works fine for me.
Sure, but a new Mac Pro is much much more important. Hopefully Apple will care about us Pro users as well. Tim, don’t forget us.
Gosh, do you think the employees at Apple can do more than one thing at a time?
Never had a single problem with it. It is straight forward and easy to use.
Anyone who has used Windows a lot often have trouble with using well written software though.
+1
A sense familiarity with the program.
I can see it evolving but if you stray to far from the original design you risk losing something. Change it and I’ll have 20 hours of phone calls my 70 year old mother and a bunch of her friends asking me why and how to use it. Crap!
+1
No problems here.
Itunes needs to allow for all your library and backup files to be easily hosted on external drives, via an easy to enable setting. The iTunes library and all my iOS backups took Up 95gb on my 128gb ssd. I had to manually reprogram OSX via the terminal in order to be able to host all those externally when syncing. That’s not the way to go in the limited memory ssd future, and is currently its biggest flaw IMO.
Isn’t the ability to point to other drives in Advanced Preferences > Advanced tab? I’ve used the setting for “iTunes Media folder location” to point external drives.
Your iOS backups are unfortunately not inside the default iTunes folder, so that won’t work.
…and if you backup to iCloud, who cares?
Thanks for reminding me of this! I just deleted the iOS backups I didn’t need and my backup folder went from 47GBs down to 18GBs.
Ya, I’d like to keep my iOS backups in my iTunes Library folder, but don’t want to do a symbolic link.
One can also hold the Option key down on launch and choose another library, or create one, and iTunes doesn’t care where that library is, whether on your boot volume or an external one. Mine is on an external 750 gig drive and works just dandy.
same here. (1tb, ext)
I’ve had my iTunes library on an external drive for 5 years, never a problem with my local drive getting full.
Using the “suggestion” from Alvin, quite a while ago – I have all of my music, movies, books, apps, etc filed on a 2TB external drive – never a problem. And I currently have used 1.5 TB of disk space. My confuser is a MBA 13″ w/ 27″ Thunderbolt display. All seems to work just fine.
As for an update/upgrade for iTunes: it needs some tweaking but I see that happening as time passes.
As I see it: Things are more like they are now than they ever were before.
Cheers
I have my iTunes library split so that my movie files (1400 movies = ~ 1.1 TBs in reduced format that can be transferred to an iPad) on an external 2 x 2 TB RAID 1 drive and my music files (13,000+ songs = ~60 GBs) on my MBP internal drive.
I’ve had no problems with iTunes.
I’ve used it since it was a Mac OS 9 application (as version 1), so I understand how it has evolved over time to encompass more and more functions and features. I can certainly understand how someone who is brand new to it (right now) would be confused by its interface. If and when Apple does a MAJOR overhaul, I’ll understand why, but I’ll probably miss the “old” iTunes.
Whether you like it or not, it’s pretty hard to say iTunes has not been updated in over 10 years. It’s changed quite a bit from the original version. I have no problems with it, but I also have not looked at the alternatives in a long while either.
I dunno, I’ve never had much issue with iTunes. It’s not very exciting or interesting to use anymore though so I’d be cool with a change.
iTunes is great – if you own a Mac. You windows sufferers – not so good. Tough!
First, change the name! What do TUNES have to do with movies, apps, etc.? It’s so much more. Interface needs simplifying.
Needs work… a monster of a program just to play a song. Syncing is like having a root canal. Hate it.
Why can’t I just drag some songs I want on my iPhone. Instead I have to go thru the Spanish inquisition…. U must sync your 400 apps, and all kind of other crap.
Monster of a program? Maybe so, but it takes less than 1 second to launch on my MBP with a 7200 RPM Hard Drive and over 6000 songs and 100 movies. I would have to say that it is a non issue with me and is FAR from AWFUL! Other end of the scale for me. On Windows however it is closer to OK. Windows is AWFUL not iTunes. It’s the OS that makes it not run so great.
It takes 34 seconds between the time I click on iTunes and the time I can click on a track in the library. This is on a first gen Mac Pro with 13 GB of RAM and the iTunes library files on a 3-drive RAID-0 7200rpm set. The Library files are external, over 300k tracks. It’s glacially slow to change or update any info, as it re-writes a gigantic text file (XML) for any minor change. It needs to work SOLELY with an indexed database file that should be able to handle billions of tracks.
You sir, are in the 0.1%.
better get an ssd for that old bag
Wow. 6000 tunes. Why even post that. Of course it can handle it. Try it with 4T of storage. What a lame dog it can be. That’s raid storage on an 8 core processor with a ssd boot drive.
That’s funny. I’ve never had a complaint with iTunes.
I would think they’re likely to break iTunes into parts, a la iOS…
At the very least have the Mac app store take all the iOS apps.
Glad to hear I’m not the only one suffering from sluggishness.
I’m a digital pack rat. My library is over 800GB. That includes over 600 apps, 105,000 songs, and a bunch of ringtones, books, podcasts and videos. I also have several libraries for personal, business (we produce media) and shared usage. I’m not bragging… I have a problem.
I love iTunes.
I’ve yet to see anything that comes close to it. When people complain about it, it’s never in comparison to anything else. At least this article attempts to name something else, but then mentions *Zune* and even gives a screenshot.
Look, we want something usable, not something that looks pretty in a screenshot.
iTunes isn’t without it’s flaws, notably it doesn’t manage video as well as it could, and there are some performance issues, but I’m running my 800GB iTunes library off a 1TB 2.5″ slow hard drive without issue, so I’m pretty impressed with the overall performance.
I just hope Apple doesn’t dumb it down for the idiots who can’t be bothered with any effort whatsoever to learn. And I really hope Apple doesn’t break it up into multiple apps.
“I just hope Apple doesn’t dumb it down for the idiots who can’t be bothered with any effort whatsoever to learn.”
Wow. I heard the same thing long ago… from DOS-using PC users 20 years ago.
iTunes is not Final Cut Pro. iTunes is meant for consumers, and Apple’s consumer products are supposed to “just work”. You and I kept up with all of iTunes incremental changes, so it’s easy for us to use, but I can see where a new user might have problems deciding where to start with the current iTunes.
Yeah, they have to learn to use it, but don’t be so damn condescending about it. Regular users, especially Windows sufferers, are downright scared to learn by click-exploring, thanks to the various bad and unexpected stuff that can and will happen if you deviated from the instructions they were given for Windows and office programs.
@mossman,
I don’t really disagree with anything you wrote, but maybe I wasn’t clear in what I wrote.
I’ve worked with a lot of new computer users, older, and certainly not ones who found learning about computers easy. The funny thing is in working with getting them on a computer and online, iTunes would usually be something I pointed to, but spent time over more important goals. And yet iTunes was something almost everyone figured out on their own in some capacity.
My problem is with people who will blog about things and spend far more time complaining about iTunes than typing “can iTunes encode mp3” into Google or some other issue that is easily resolved by going to preferences.
“iTunes is not Final Cut Pro. iTunes is meant for consumers”
Ya and that’s my fear for it being dumbed down. Regardless of intent, iTunes is used from level 1-10. Unless Apple is going to come out with a Pro version of iTunes (which I doubt), then we “10” users are going to want the app to maintain at least the same level of functionality.
People *can* learn, but level 10 users can’t use features that aren’t there.
Honestly though, I think iTunes does a pretty good job of scaling from levels 1 to 10.
iTunes runs fast and nimble on my Mac. Nary a problem with it. I don’t know what the whining is about. Here, have some cheese with that.
My cousin has had nothing but trouble with iTunes, since he started using it. The biggest problem with iTunes is its sync mechanism and sync management. It Sucks. Even Steve Jobs thought so, because now we having syncing to the Cloud, which allows you to bypass local sync entirely.
My cousin experienced regular loss of data or duplication of data trying to sync photos, notes, address book, calendar and e-mail, either with the Office for Mac Suite or with the Apple apps. Syncing Apps was always a nightmare. He regularly experienced the weirdest anomalies, such as disappearing folders on the iPhone and on the iPad, causing apps to be dumped all over the available screens, resulting in painstaking manual rebuilding of the folder organization. Photos were even worse, as the internal iPhoto database would regularly become corrupted, either causing loss of entire photo libraries or meaningless duplications. Calendar sync had its own personal hell, causing sync to hang, dozens of multiple calendar entries, partial or unpredictable sync results. Check the various online forums for the past several years for these issues: this was not an isolated problem.
These issues have largely disappeared for my cousin once he switched to iCloud, knock on wood.
For myself, partly as a result of having to troubleshoot these myriad problems for him, I have now become obsessive with making Time Machine backups, and taking extra steps to ensure photos and music are synced ‘properly’.
Send your cousin back to grade school.
If they would break out videos into their own app, that would make me happy. Currently I manage all my music on one mbp and all the videos on another mb. Breaking up the media into two apps, I could manage everything from the mbp!
I never use it for Video. iTunes is a horrible video player.
You would think they could have used Quicktime for this, shouldn’t be too hard do add a library and sync capabilities, similar to iPhoto.
Been using iTunes daily since it came out. I have no serious gripes with it at all and I have a substantial library. Always remember people, “Be careful what you wish for!”
I do agree it would be nice to have a more appropriate name, but that has nothing to do with its performance.
The one change I would like to see is a family library. Most of the kids music I don’t care about so that can be separated. But solos, movies, video, TV. Having one shareable account for everything not music would most convenient.
I suspect a users satisfaction with iTunes is directly linked to how hard they are pushing it. In my house we have four iOS devices, three non-ios iPods, three apple tv’s and over 4TB of data. Trying to get anything done quickly is pretty much impossible.
As someone mentioned above, you just want to sync a some new music to your phone and iTunes goes through a six step process that takes 10 minutes. There should be an easier way.
With iTunes handling so many different tasks I often have freezes that last for several minutes when trying to alter the meta data for a video file. iTunes should be better multithreaded to handle these various tasks without locking up the whole program.
there is an “easier way” to sync music of course. it’s called iTunes Match.
how fast is your wifi? how old are your computers?
i’ve got as much crap as you do, but don’t have your iTunes problems. my video file initial meta data save, for example, takes tens of seconds, not minutes, for files of several gigs. meta data updates after that only take seconds.
Like mredofcourse, I have a lot of media. I use an external 8 GB raid.
No problems.
Make that TB.
I have used iTunes since I got my first iPod, the firewire model… I have liked most of the changes, but not all… Only have seventy seven hundred songs but no problems for me at all… it does everything I need and is customizable in preferences to suit most personal whims… also getting to know and use the “info” window can help a lot…
I have spinning wheels too often in both iTunes and iPhoto. I’m also sick of iTunes kicking up an error message dialog box every time it loses WiFi connection with my iPhone or iPad. I don’t need to know that the connection was lost, only if it happened during a sync which was not completed. Notifying me every time my iPhone leaves the house is ridiculous.