“At the start of the millennium, Apple famously set out to upend the music business by dragging it into the digital realm. The iTunes store provided an easy way of finding and buying music, and iTunes provided an elegant way of managing it,” Jesse Jarnow reports for Wired. “By 2008, Apple was the biggest music vendor in the US. But with its recent shift toward streaming media, Apple risks losing its most music-obsessed users: the collectors.”
“Most of iTunes’ latest enhancements exist solely to promote the recommendation-driven Apple Music, app downloads, and iCloud,” Jarnow reports. “Users interested only in iTunes’ media management features — people with terabytes of MP3s who want a solid app to catalog and organize their libraries — feel abandoned as Apple moves away from local file storage in favor of cloud-based services.”
“There are some open-source alternatives, but for a Mac user seeking a fully operational iTunes-like app that will manage files with the same ease, Swinsian (US$19.95) leads the pack,” Jarnow reports. “It aims to replicate iTunes’ most elegant functions, strip away the bloat, and add some extra tools.”
MacDailyNews Take: iTunes has become a ridiculous app. Ridiculously bad. Bolt on too much stuff and make the UI enough of a disaster and people will start looking elsewhere, Apple.
This has been building for years. With each new version of “iTunes” (even the app’s name hasn’t been right for many years), we’ve had such high hopes, but all we ever get are more and more appendages bolted on to the bloated mass, when it’s exactly the opposite that’s called for!
iTunes is the Yoplait yogurt cup of UIs.iTunes is the Yoplait yogurt cup of UIs. Upside-down, inefficient, messy, unusable in spots and woefully inefficient. The foil top always tears in half; it never comes off in one piece. Trying to spoon it all out of an ever-widening cup maddeningly gets yogurt all over the spoon’s handle and your fingers. And inconvenient bumps molded into the horrid thing to go along with a wide yogurt-catching lip around the top thwart even the most determined of spoon scrapers. The amount of Yoplait yogurt thrown away due to poor packaging design could feed several impoverished nations. The amount of media hidden away, seemingly inaccessible, and lost inside in iTunes is like leftover yogurt forlornly and forever stuck in that awfully-designed Yoplait cup. What a stupid waste!
Apple, take a step back and look at the iTunes app anew. Look at it as if, say, it was a piece of Microsoft software (it certainly looks and acts like one) and approach it as if you’re about to enter the market. What would Apple do? Laugh at what a POS it is and then get to work creating a coherent, easy-to-use solution.
Just like you did with personal computers, MP3 players, smartphones, and tablets make this experience for end users again. Look at what Apple did with non-linear editing via iMovie. You made something very complex into something simple, understandable, and usable for everyone. Reinvent. Simplify. Delight us. Surprise us. That’s why you get the big money.
Give “iTunes” to another Apple team, or teams, or even bring in some outside talent, and see what their fresh eyes might imagine.
Apple needs to move the Home Sharing functions to a separate application. Call it iTunes Server. Then, it wouldn’t be necessary to launch the bloated iTunes.app just to provide content to Apple TV.
Not to mention that the Yoplait container is lethal to small animals that get stuck in it and slowly suffocate. This is well known. People who think this is funny also have their head stuck up in the dark place.
It would be nice to be able to share more than one library at the same time. I have one that I use for Classical and another for everything else. I can only share one unless I have my machine logged into multiple user accounts which is a right pain.
Here’s are my problems with iTunes. iTunes can’t alphabetize properly. iTunes doesn’t know what to do with podcasts purchased outside of the iTunes ecosystem like Artie Quitter or Anthony Cumia. Nor has Apple made easy add premium podcasts. And iTunes no longer adds playlists to my iPhone with songs in the order that they exist in on my Mac. And iTunes still has no Boolean search, so that if I search for The Jam I don’t also get hits for James Brown and The Kinks.
iTunes 9 was the pinnacle for each of use (that was also the last time it would put my podcasts on a playlist in my music app).
not only can’t it alphabetize properly, it does it different ways depending on the context. the sidebar and the playlist put things starting with numbers at opposite ends of the list. also i recently discovered that playlists starting with special characters such as option 8 can’t be shared or shown on my ipad. and songs sorted by album may or may not be in the right order depending on the order in which the cds are ripped.
Tim redirected the iTunes team to working on a political plan to attack conservatives because they believe marriage is between two opposite gendered individuals. That is the main focus of Apple now – reeducation strategies for Christians and fixing global warming.
You’re an idiot. Nobody gives a shit about religion in 2015. Apple cares about people and they realize the world must continue to be habitable for billions of years, not your own finite laughably short lifespan.
I’m quite fond of Cog, https://bitbucket.org/kode54/cog very simple, plays just about anything and works with any last.fm scrobbler you care to use (I use SimpleScrobbler)
Photo is worse because instead of collecting photos on a central server like iPhoto did, Photos copies the entire collection to all of my devices eating valuable drive space on machines I use for actual work.
iTunes alphabetizes just fine, you have to know how to use “sort” on the sort tab… that said, Tunes is a mess, to many ways to try and display the different libraries, playlists, accessing the sidebar,
As its been discussed, its probably time to separate various media into different apps, Music, Video, Store.. They can perhaps use the same iTunes database, but eliminate the UI clutter and complexity.
Yeah, I’m about ready to leave the iTunes ecosystem and curate my media library elsewhere. I don’t know who’s minding the fort there in Cupertino, but the iTunes management team is increasingly looking like the Republican pool of candidates.
The problem with Apple is they’ve completely lost track of what the core functionality is in iTunes, they’re going for the lowest–and broadest–common denominator of functionality, and the whole thing now looks like Sarah Palin’s Alaska.
I don’t know if i share all the opinions expressed. i know what i like and what i don’t like about iTunes. I don’t like the iPhone app stuff in it, in fact syncing through the app seems to be a little disjointed. iPhoto is separated from it, but almost everything else isn’t…its just not coherent. But, as for home sharing, and having music, movies and tv shows and podcasts all in one app doesn’t bother me so much. I use all of them except maybe tv shows. But they need to fix how you enter in metadata for a movie and tv shows…because its basically metadata fields for music added to a movie. They did just add director…but that was it. Home sharing works great. If the new siri remote could filter to see that it would be awesome. The new apple music stuff is a little annoying. Im toying with it at the same time, but i am not sure about how i feel about it yet. its been nice to have, but also a pain. It also screwed up my album artwork i had worked so painfully to achieve.
Roon is an incredibly good program but it is not for the feint of heart. It requires an annual subscription or lifetime membership.
It is also not for the casual listener but for serious music files and equipment to get your money’s worth.
It’s Tidal integration is second to none for building playlist with your bought files and streaming files together all in CD to DSD quality.
I have put off buying it because Audirvana does most of what I want, just not near as pretty or informative and so far no Tidal integration (it DOES do Qobuz for you Europeans).
I still use iTunes for my iPhone but absolutely cannot stand the iOS Music app. It might be great on a larger screened iPad but is abysmal to use on a phone for a half-blind fat-fingered old man….
No, Roon is pretty useless, it’s only intended to be used within a home music setup with a single computer. There are no Roon apps for smartphones or tablets. It’s very inflexible in terms of how your music is used or delivered, so it’s pretty much dead on arrival.
Now I see how you come by your politics.
Only your needs are important.
It may be useless to YOU but it is a fantastic music player.
It can be loaded on several computers but only one library, with other computers able to stream from it and control it.
It has an iPad app for use as a remote and streamer.
It is actually more flexible for home music than iTunes, depending on what you use iTunes for. Not everyone, especially audiophiles, give a crap about loading music on an iPhone.
I hate this F ing moaning about nothing. This is just the sort of mob mentality that got us flat UI. Same crowd, different moan. They just have to moan about something or their life is not complete!
Thank goodness for this article and you posters above. I was beginning to think my VEHEMENT objections to the current iTunes was just me getting old, or some such thing. NOTE: One of my big 27″ iMacs is still rooted in Snow Leopard because it uses the last iteration of iTunes I could use and understand. This app today is nothing but a homily to the “power user,” the kid/techie who wants ALL THINGS IN ALL PLACES . . . none of which make any GUI sense to this average person. Indeed, that which brought me originally to Steve Jobs, the Apple II, the Mac, the iPod, and early iPad is no longer valued at Apple. IMHO, the company is now catering to the cross-over Windows user (or something abysmally like him/her): the more complicated the app, the better! Patch it up, tack it on, someone get the bailing wire. So sad.
In related news on MDN, Apple is poised to rake in nearly 100% of smartphone profits. And yes it is related news, because that’s where Apple’s priorities are. Not in fixing iTunes, not in correcting UI horrors on the Mac, not in making cloud services to work as expected, not in having product launches go right, not in bringing lost features back into Apple software, and not in making the Apple store experience better. Follow the money.
Currently clinging to iTunes 10.6.3 on a Snow Leopard partition, looking into Swinsian, and after 20 years, thinking about Windows for my next machine. I never thought I’d ever say that…depressing.
You’re right about priorities. At some point they MOVED all their best engineers to iPhone, which as you noted is the fount of money, and kept them there.
New hires, wet behind the ears, took their places. You can see it in their work. They’re learning on the job.
And as long as the P&L sparkles, priorities will not change.
Apple U is being relocated in the subbasement of the spaceship campus. Stone walls, leg irons encrusted with verdigris, skulls for bookends.
Back when Apple was a small company rolling out stuff as fast as it could, staffers were pulled from project to project and in times past that served Apple well as it had limited resources.
These days Apple has more money than gawd- or at least the Catholic Church. They should be able to hire, train and retain the finest software engineers in the world. In the age of the wire there is no particular reason they must be located in Cupertino. Given Apple’s wealth, attractiveness as an employer and breadth of projects, Apple should have long ago moved away from having engineers race from project to project and have developed teams of experts who are familiar with the software they are assigned to work on and expert in the market that product serves.
Based upon the software Apple has released in recent years it is more than apparent that they is not what is happening at One Infinite Loop. ITunes is only the most egregious example of the state of software engineering at Apple. Many of us switched from MS Office to paid versions of iWork only to see them languish, then lose features then be given away. Many of us were blindsided when Aperture was abandoned, or Final Cut Pro, or any number of other software packages.
Apple seems to forget that software drives hardware sales and a Mac is more than an OS with a web browser. Some of us use our computers for more than cloud based bullshit and would appreciate stable software that just works and stays that way. It has been a long season since that was true.
iTunes is the poster child for why when you try to be all things to all people you end up being nothing of value to anyone for anything. We’re it not for it’s monopoly status on OS X and iOS iTunes would be featured on an episode of Where Are They Now?
In late 2015, well past a decade into the revolution of Apple’s digital media store and apps, iTunes still fucks up metadata when you try to assign it to your own files or edit existing ones. As someone who has had a copy of EyeTV on my Macs since the original USB model, I have a large library of content and iTunes seems incapable of playing well with it. Each new version of the SW screws up some aspect of the metadata in your library of media.
The software needs to be centered upon audio files and stop trying to be the master of all media. Apple needs a dedicated team that rethinks and reworks the many functions gathered under iTunes.
Would a combination of Plex and Swinsian do the trick? I would think all of your tagged movies could be used n Plex and now with the new app watched on AppleTV (without jailbreaking).
Obviously all iTunes Store video would still have to stream from iTunes.
This Swinsian music app so far looks pretty straightforward and nice. Not sure how well it handles tags since I’m on the road without my main library.
BTW I still have a FireWire EyeTV 200 working fine (just have to use a digital set top box and no HD). It’s loaned out to a friend for her desktop TV watching.
Work weekends out of town at a rural hospital and carry an extensive library of recorded TV & Movies- the guest network is jut too slow (by design- the other nets are off limits for security and privacy) to stream and the data caps on my mobile are not going to do it.
I use an Eye TV HD to take the output of my Comcast DVR (1080i via the RGB analog hole), use Handbrake for conversion and edit metadata with iFlicks 2.(BTW- El Gato’s Gaming Recording HW will also allow HD transfer via the Analog hole)
For playback I am using iTunes as I have a considerable amount of content purchased from Apple. The problem is that every time Apple updates iTunes it completely FUBARs the Metadata.
I also have iTunes Match which has managed to become a total offing mess (Thanks Apple). Update your Mac and it will compare your library to the one in iTunes and many times will create duplicate copies of your media.
The whole thing is miles away from it just works. A couple of versions of iTunes ago it worked OK- not now.
I think the general phenomenon is that iTunes is now an Amazon-like retail vending app, dressed up as multiple layers of something-for-everyone for TV, apps, music, podcasts. As such it’s easy to get lost in the interface. Also, the mechanics of database management for maintaining the integrity of locally stored content now have taken a back seat to distributed storage of content in sometimes-mysterious places, including the exact structure and accessibility of music in iCloud.
The end of “local storage” as we know it is fast coming to an end.
All Apple wants is ALL of your documents and media in THEIR CLOUD, and they will stop at nothing ’til that happens.
iTunes is the gateway for all media and apps to the cloud, and just as you can store Numbers, Pages, and Keynote docs in the cloud, it won’t be long before that is the ONLY place you can store them. Yes, for MacOS, as well as iOS devices. It won’t be long before all your apps are stored there as well. I think they’ve already taken steps in that direction anyway.
The mind set of iOS devices is very clear: Keep Out! The same holds true for most Apple laptops and iMac’s now too. Keep Out! Don’t open, don’t modify, don’t try to fix it. Once you get to this point, its trivial to move all storage to the cloud even with out your knowing about it, and trust me, that’s where Apple is headed.
iTunes is a mess because it meets Apple’s need to gently FORCE you to their cloud. Apple doesn’t want you to “own” anything… they just want you to “subscribe” forever to music, and they’ve already started getting people to “subscribe” to TV channels as well, thru the new “apps”. HBO to Go is a perfect example of whats ahead. Nothing stored locally, endless lifetime subscriptions to access your documents.
Isn’t that the truth. While Apple used to offer machines that essentially allowed the user to intuitively know what to do, and how things worked, now Apple just wants everyone to subscribe to its services and keep that cash flowing to Apple’s offshore vaults. Does Apple offer the best hardware or software for desktop or standalone computing anymore? It sure seems not. If you spent decades curating your own media, Apple now takes away those tools bit by bit and claims that Apple Music will replace it.
No thanks Apple. We’ve reverted back from the latest versions of OS X and from iTunes. There is no reason to put up with your continued degradation of GUIs and desktop software functionality.
Hey! SoundJam won’t work on El Capitan! What gives?
I guess I am a power user. I have tons of my own MP3s and just want to play and shuffle them. I have no use for almost anything else, nor do I like leaving memory hog iTunes open all the time just so I can play thru my AppleTV. I like the AppleTV server idea a lot.
Apple needs to move the Home Sharing functions to a separate application. Call it iTunes Server. Then, it wouldn’t be necessary to launch the bloated iTunes.app just to provide content to Apple TV.
That just means you’ve got home sharing to actually work.
Not to mention that the Yoplait container is lethal to small animals that get stuck in it and slowly suffocate. This is well known. People who think this is funny also have their head stuck up in the dark place.
It would be nice to be able to share more than one library at the same time. I have one that I use for Classical and another for everything else. I can only share one unless I have my machine logged into multiple user accounts which is a right pain.
Here’s are my problems with iTunes. iTunes can’t alphabetize properly. iTunes doesn’t know what to do with podcasts purchased outside of the iTunes ecosystem like Artie Quitter or Anthony Cumia. Nor has Apple made easy add premium podcasts. And iTunes no longer adds playlists to my iPhone with songs in the order that they exist in on my Mac. And iTunes still has no Boolean search, so that if I search for The Jam I don’t also get hits for James Brown and The Kinks.
iTunes 9 was the pinnacle for each of use (that was also the last time it would put my podcasts on a playlist in my music app).
not only can’t it alphabetize properly, it does it different ways depending on the context. the sidebar and the playlist put things starting with numbers at opposite ends of the list. also i recently discovered that playlists starting with special characters such as option 8 can’t be shared or shown on my ipad. and songs sorted by album may or may not be in the right order depending on the order in which the cds are ripped.
Here’s a thing – a well-meaning techie ‘upgraded’ my old laptop, including to the latest iTunes. Now it’s barely usable.
iTunes for a long time was great software. It seems to have assumed the status of Windowsware.
Tim redirected the iTunes team to working on a political plan to attack conservatives because they believe marriage is between two opposite gendered individuals. That is the main focus of Apple now – reeducation strategies for Christians and fixing global warming.
You’re kidding, right?
You’re an idiot. Nobody gives a shit about religion in 2015. Apple cares about people and they realize the world must continue to be habitable for billions of years, not your own finite laughably short lifespan.
For the past few years, I’ve used EQu, it’s a fantastic equalizer, and very simply and logically laid out.
cook the shook
I’m quite fond of Cog, https://bitbucket.org/kode54/cog very simple, plays just about anything and works with any last.fm scrobbler you care to use (I use SimpleScrobbler)
I gradually stopped buying from and playing my iTunes collection quite some time ago. It’s now plain-Jane and difficult.
And matching iTunes is the POS called Photos.
Photo is worse because instead of collecting photos on a central server like iPhoto did, Photos copies the entire collection to all of my devices eating valuable drive space on machines I use for actual work.
iTunes alphabetizes just fine, you have to know how to use “sort” on the sort tab… that said, Tunes is a mess, to many ways to try and display the different libraries, playlists, accessing the sidebar,
As its been discussed, its probably time to separate various media into different apps, Music, Video, Store.. They can perhaps use the same iTunes database, but eliminate the UI clutter and complexity.
“iTunes alphabetizes just fine, you have to know how to use “sort” on the sort tab… ”
Not quite. You can sort the contents of a Playlist, but how do you sort the actual Playlists ? I don’t think that you can.
iTunes does not sort just fine. it hasn’t in quite a while and every major iteration seems to cause another malfunction.
Yeah, I’m about ready to leave the iTunes ecosystem and curate my media library elsewhere. I don’t know who’s minding the fort there in Cupertino, but the iTunes management team is increasingly looking like the Republican pool of candidates.
The problem with Apple is they’ve completely lost track of what the core functionality is in iTunes, they’re going for the lowest–and broadest–common denominator of functionality, and the whole thing now looks like Sarah Palin’s Alaska.
I’m going to give that Swinsian a try.
“looking like the Republican pool of candidates”
You mean of varied age, sex, heritage and class?
(better than the three old white guys from the left ANY day)
Also, Palin’s Alaska looks much better than Granholm’s Michigan.
But you tried…so here’s a trophy 🖕
I don’t know if i share all the opinions expressed. i know what i like and what i don’t like about iTunes. I don’t like the iPhone app stuff in it, in fact syncing through the app seems to be a little disjointed. iPhoto is separated from it, but almost everything else isn’t…its just not coherent. But, as for home sharing, and having music, movies and tv shows and podcasts all in one app doesn’t bother me so much. I use all of them except maybe tv shows. But they need to fix how you enter in metadata for a movie and tv shows…because its basically metadata fields for music added to a movie. They did just add director…but that was it. Home sharing works great. If the new siri remote could filter to see that it would be awesome. The new apple music stuff is a little annoying. Im toying with it at the same time, but i am not sure about how i feel about it yet. its been nice to have, but also a pain. It also screwed up my album artwork i had worked so painfully to achieve.
I’ve used iTunes since it was SoundJam owned by Cassidy & Green.
It’s become a monster, far too complex. It needs breaking out into separate Apps.
Roon is an incredibly good program but it is not for the feint of heart. It requires an annual subscription or lifetime membership.
It is also not for the casual listener but for serious music files and equipment to get your money’s worth.
It’s Tidal integration is second to none for building playlist with your bought files and streaming files together all in CD to DSD quality.
I have put off buying it because Audirvana does most of what I want, just not near as pretty or informative and so far no Tidal integration (it DOES do Qobuz for you Europeans).
I still use iTunes for my iPhone but absolutely cannot stand the iOS Music app. It might be great on a larger screened iPad but is abysmal to use on a phone for a half-blind fat-fingered old man….
No, Roon is pretty useless, it’s only intended to be used within a home music setup with a single computer. There are no Roon apps for smartphones or tablets. It’s very inflexible in terms of how your music is used or delivered, so it’s pretty much dead on arrival.
Now I see how you come by your politics.
Only your needs are important.
It may be useless to YOU but it is a fantastic music player.
It can be loaded on several computers but only one library, with other computers able to stream from it and control it.
It has an iPad app for use as a remote and streamer.
It is actually more flexible for home music than iTunes, depending on what you use iTunes for. Not everyone, especially audiophiles, give a crap about loading music on an iPhone.
http://www.digitalaudioreview.net/2015/06/roon-review-part-1-walking-on-the/
http://www.computeraudiophile.com/content/640-roon-roon-labs-video-run-through/
I hate this F ing moaning about nothing. This is just the sort of mob mentality that got us flat UI. Same crowd, different moan. They just have to moan about something or their life is not complete!
Thanks for showing us the CORRECT way to moan, Paul.
Thank goodness for this article and you posters above. I was beginning to think my VEHEMENT objections to the current iTunes was just me getting old, or some such thing. NOTE: One of my big 27″ iMacs is still rooted in Snow Leopard because it uses the last iteration of iTunes I could use and understand. This app today is nothing but a homily to the “power user,” the kid/techie who wants ALL THINGS IN ALL PLACES . . . none of which make any GUI sense to this average person. Indeed, that which brought me originally to Steve Jobs, the Apple II, the Mac, the iPod, and early iPad is no longer valued at Apple. IMHO, the company is now catering to the cross-over Windows user (or something abysmally like him/her): the more complicated the app, the better! Patch it up, tack it on, someone get the bailing wire. So sad.
What are you using instead of iTunes? Nothing? Vox and Djay on the Mac were good, but they are adding more crap to their programs too.
In related news on MDN, Apple is poised to rake in nearly 100% of smartphone profits. And yes it is related news, because that’s where Apple’s priorities are. Not in fixing iTunes, not in correcting UI horrors on the Mac, not in making cloud services to work as expected, not in having product launches go right, not in bringing lost features back into Apple software, and not in making the Apple store experience better. Follow the money.
Currently clinging to iTunes 10.6.3 on a Snow Leopard partition, looking into Swinsian, and after 20 years, thinking about Windows for my next machine. I never thought I’d ever say that…depressing.
You’re right about priorities. At some point they MOVED all their best engineers to iPhone, which as you noted is the fount of money, and kept them there.
New hires, wet behind the ears, took their places. You can see it in their work. They’re learning on the job.
And as long as the P&L sparkles, priorities will not change.
Apple U is being relocated in the subbasement of the spaceship campus. Stone walls, leg irons encrusted with verdigris, skulls for bookends.
Does anybody here have apple music and notice that when they click on the “albums” link after doing a search for a band all they get is the pinwheel?
Back when Apple was a small company rolling out stuff as fast as it could, staffers were pulled from project to project and in times past that served Apple well as it had limited resources.
These days Apple has more money than gawd- or at least the Catholic Church. They should be able to hire, train and retain the finest software engineers in the world. In the age of the wire there is no particular reason they must be located in Cupertino. Given Apple’s wealth, attractiveness as an employer and breadth of projects, Apple should have long ago moved away from having engineers race from project to project and have developed teams of experts who are familiar with the software they are assigned to work on and expert in the market that product serves.
Based upon the software Apple has released in recent years it is more than apparent that they is not what is happening at One Infinite Loop. ITunes is only the most egregious example of the state of software engineering at Apple. Many of us switched from MS Office to paid versions of iWork only to see them languish, then lose features then be given away. Many of us were blindsided when Aperture was abandoned, or Final Cut Pro, or any number of other software packages.
Apple seems to forget that software drives hardware sales and a Mac is more than an OS with a web browser. Some of us use our computers for more than cloud based bullshit and would appreciate stable software that just works and stays that way. It has been a long season since that was true.
iTunes is the poster child for why when you try to be all things to all people you end up being nothing of value to anyone for anything. We’re it not for it’s monopoly status on OS X and iOS iTunes would be featured on an episode of Where Are They Now?
In late 2015, well past a decade into the revolution of Apple’s digital media store and apps, iTunes still fucks up metadata when you try to assign it to your own files or edit existing ones. As someone who has had a copy of EyeTV on my Macs since the original USB model, I have a large library of content and iTunes seems incapable of playing well with it. Each new version of the SW screws up some aspect of the metadata in your library of media.
The software needs to be centered upon audio files and stop trying to be the master of all media. Apple needs a dedicated team that rethinks and reworks the many functions gathered under iTunes.
Would a combination of Plex and Swinsian do the trick? I would think all of your tagged movies could be used n Plex and now with the new app watched on AppleTV (without jailbreaking).
Obviously all iTunes Store video would still have to stream from iTunes.
This Swinsian music app so far looks pretty straightforward and nice. Not sure how well it handles tags since I’m on the road without my main library.
BTW I still have a FireWire EyeTV 200 working fine (just have to use a digital set top box and no HD). It’s loaned out to a friend for her desktop TV watching.
Work weekends out of town at a rural hospital and carry an extensive library of recorded TV & Movies- the guest network is jut too slow (by design- the other nets are off limits for security and privacy) to stream and the data caps on my mobile are not going to do it.
I use an Eye TV HD to take the output of my Comcast DVR (1080i via the RGB analog hole), use Handbrake for conversion and edit metadata with iFlicks 2.(BTW- El Gato’s Gaming Recording HW will also allow HD transfer via the Analog hole)
For playback I am using iTunes as I have a considerable amount of content purchased from Apple. The problem is that every time Apple updates iTunes it completely FUBARs the Metadata.
I also have iTunes Match which has managed to become a total offing mess (Thanks Apple). Update your Mac and it will compare your library to the one in iTunes and many times will create duplicate copies of your media.
The whole thing is miles away from it just works. A couple of versions of iTunes ago it worked OK- not now.
I think the general phenomenon is that iTunes is now an Amazon-like retail vending app, dressed up as multiple layers of something-for-everyone for TV, apps, music, podcasts. As such it’s easy to get lost in the interface. Also, the mechanics of database management for maintaining the integrity of locally stored content now have taken a back seat to distributed storage of content in sometimes-mysterious places, including the exact structure and accessibility of music in iCloud.
The end of “local storage” as we know it is fast coming to an end.
All Apple wants is ALL of your documents and media in THEIR CLOUD, and they will stop at nothing ’til that happens.
iTunes is the gateway for all media and apps to the cloud, and just as you can store Numbers, Pages, and Keynote docs in the cloud, it won’t be long before that is the ONLY place you can store them. Yes, for MacOS, as well as iOS devices. It won’t be long before all your apps are stored there as well. I think they’ve already taken steps in that direction anyway.
The mind set of iOS devices is very clear: Keep Out! The same holds true for most Apple laptops and iMac’s now too. Keep Out! Don’t open, don’t modify, don’t try to fix it. Once you get to this point, its trivial to move all storage to the cloud even with out your knowing about it, and trust me, that’s where Apple is headed.
iTunes is a mess because it meets Apple’s need to gently FORCE you to their cloud. Apple doesn’t want you to “own” anything… they just want you to “subscribe” forever to music, and they’ve already started getting people to “subscribe” to TV channels as well, thru the new “apps”. HBO to Go is a perfect example of whats ahead. Nothing stored locally, endless lifetime subscriptions to access your documents.
Isn’t that the truth. While Apple used to offer machines that essentially allowed the user to intuitively know what to do, and how things worked, now Apple just wants everyone to subscribe to its services and keep that cash flowing to Apple’s offshore vaults. Does Apple offer the best hardware or software for desktop or standalone computing anymore? It sure seems not. If you spent decades curating your own media, Apple now takes away those tools bit by bit and claims that Apple Music will replace it.
No thanks Apple. We’ve reverted back from the latest versions of OS X and from iTunes. There is no reason to put up with your continued degradation of GUIs and desktop software functionality.
Hey! SoundJam won’t work on El Capitan! What gives?
I guess I am a power user. I have tons of my own MP3s and just want to play and shuffle them. I have no use for almost anything else, nor do I like leaving memory hog iTunes open all the time just so I can play thru my AppleTV. I like the AppleTV server idea a lot.