“People have been complaining about iTunes for ages,” Adam Clark Estes writes for Gizmodo.The bloated and confusingly arcane piece of software has been updated and repurposed and jerry-rigged to handle new tasks for the past 18 years, and one developer says it won’t live to see its 19th birthday.”
“It looks like Apple is finally about to kill iTunes and release separate apps for music, podcasts, and books,” Estes writes. “Rest in peace, iTunes, you digital dinosaur.”
“Developer Steve Troughton-Smith recently said he’d found evidence that a new suite of media apps appeared to be in the works ahead of Apple’s annual World Wide Developer Conference in June,” Estes writes. “And quite conspicuously, it looks like the new apps do all the things that iTunes does.”
https://twitter.com/stroughtonsmith/status/1114261872029700098
“A new Music app for macOS would handle Apple Music and any songs you actually own. A new Podcast app would handle podcasts, and a new Books app would have all your book stuff. Then the TV app would be all of your watchable stuff,” Estes writes. “And if this workflow sounds familiar, that’s because this is how this already works on iOS devices. Apple could bring that simplicity over to your Mac, and that would be beautiful.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Rest in pieces, you mean.
Regardless, this is a great idea that can’t happen soon enough!
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. — MacDailyNews Take, July 17, 2015
Well, we’ll see if Apple can pull off a new music app for the Mac that doesn’t destroy a legacy library — 150k+ tunes and meta data collected over 18 years.
I fear it will dumb it down like it did Final Cut when it cut the Pro out of it 8 years ago.
Oh, the promise that will be made is that it will eventually catch up and be “just as good”…
….just like how Apple promised that for Photos after iPhoto.
In the meantime, Photos turned 4 years old literally yesterday (8 April). Still waiting.
Oh, and the Photos library conversion app was never able to accommodate transferring many-years-in-use iPhoto libraries either. The conversion tool would run (24+ hours if you had a large Library) and claim that it was good, but then opening it in Photos would fail & crash.
That’s my worst nightmare. And why I never migrated to Apple Music or iTunes Match. 90% of my music was ripped as AIFF files for use with Traktor.
My files are MY files and I don’t want Apple giving me anything less or storing it in the cloud. I want them on my personal drive with easy access, with or without an Internet connection.
When do you find time to listen to 150,000 songs. That’s like years of listening. I’m curious as to what the average number of songs most iTunes users have. No wonder I’ve never had any problems with using iTunes as I only have about 15,000 songs and about 5,000 language learning files. Maybe the people that have the most problems with iTunes have huge song libraries.
Some of the music is sound clips, part of the b-stock for the video and documentary film companies I work with. A lot of it is ripped from old vinyl (45’s and 78’s) that is collected by the thousands and auctioned off. Material from concert production and our music publishing company. A lot of it is vinyl/CDs we’ve collected over nearly 60 years of purchasing/listening. A lot is just speculative collecting waiting for the opportunity to listen. A variety of other materials. For sure, some of it has never been listened to — maybe a quarter to a third.
If whatever software Apple concocts to replace iTunes with can’t import/convert a large library, well then we’ll look at alternatives and/or maintain legacy systems to manage assets.
In other words, Apple would be wrong to call the new music app “iTunes Pro.”
I hope you back it up!
Does Apple really need to blow up iTunes? Can they basically retain it for music and pull one non-music app after another? Movies could be pulled first, followed by TV shows. And so on.
In the end we’d just be left with iTunes and Apple avoids reworking the huge mess of people’s music. That for me would be the KISS approach.
ITunes has remained a monolyth for so long because on Windows it provided the Trojan horse Apple needed for users to install Apple software (rather than users having to deal with umpteen fragmented ITunes “components”).
It’s 2019, and I am still running iTunes 7.7 ….works great as a music player, and I don’t give a damn about managing photos, video, apps, phone backups etc on it….so have never upgraded.
Maybe its because I am on an older version of the OS but the separate Music/ iTunes apps are deeply confusing to me on my iPad especially when out side apps like Shazam want to access them.
We have not reached “Peak Apsp” yet. Still more apps to come!
We have not reached “Peak Apps” yet. Still more apps to come! Pardon me if this post seems identical; I tried to abort it in order to make a correction.
Apple will do whatever Apple wants to do and then try to convince us that it’s what we want.
iTunes? Ain’t that the app you use when you want to back up your phone to a hard drive??
Other than that….
And what about managing iOS devices ? Backing them up etc.? Please don’t tell me Apple thinks iPads are mature enough “computers” that don’t need to be backed up or managed locally!
I really wish they hadn’t removed Apps from iTunes, it was an awful horrible decision. Every time I restore a device I have to download them all from Apple store which is a lot of bandwidth. Then, any apps Apple decided to purge cannot be downloaded again !
Thanks Apple for that Clusterf$^k of removing apps from iTunes, and now I bet you want to remove all local device management too, don’t you? Then try to sell me on Cloud storage… I can sense it coming.. hope I am wrong!