“The smart money said if anything were going to go wrong, it would be Beats 1: something live is automatically the most likely to fall over in some way. If someone had already taken that bet, you’d settle for guessing that massive demand would overload the streaming servers,” William Gallagher writes for MacNN.
“Yet instead, the bit of the Music app and Apple Music launch that caused problems — and continues to cause them — is good old iTunes for OS X,” Gallagher writes. “We’ve had iTunes for nearly 15 years, and every thing else in Apple Music for a fortnight but it’s iTunes for the Mac that has fallen down and can’t seem to get up.”
“What’s happening is that people’s iTunes libraries are getting corrupted. Not everyone’s, and not in a usefully predictable enough way that we can easily fix it,” Gallagher writes. “This is threatening the ‘it just works’ fan-invented catchphrase…”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Beyond the library corruption issue, Apple, especially under Steve Jobs, has shown a great and admirable willingness to cannibalize themselves. They obliterated their iPod business with the iPhone, for one example. But, when it comes to iTunes, they seem paralyzed by fear of change. Apple paralyzed by fear is not a pretty thing and it doesn’t yield pretty things, It yields hot messes like iTunes.
iTunes screams to be broken up into separate, streamlined apps. It’s been screaming that for years. But Apple seems to be scared silly to do so — perhaps 800+ million credit cards have something to do with it — so they’ve tinkered around the edges, making questionable tweaks here an there and bolting on even more bloat.
Grow a pair, Apple, and do what needs to be done already.
What about making “iTunes” be a like “Wallet” (née Passbook) which serves as a central repository for different “cards” (apps)? There’d be an app for TV shows, My Music, Apple Music, Apple Music Radio, Internet Radio, Movies, Books, Podcasts, iBooks Store, iOS App Store (on iOS devices) and the Mac App Store (on Macs), the return of the dedicated iTunes Music Store, etc.
Each app can then be tailored to deliver the best possible experience for each media type: television, music, radio, books, etc. When you’re in that app, you’re focused only on that media type. One click or tap takes you back to iTunes where you can choose another type of media or store. iTunes would simply be the container, where your account info is stored and where you login, unlocking all of your media apps in one fell swoop.
