Rachel Lerman and Anick Jesdanun for The Associated Press:
It’s time to bid farewell to iTunes, the once-revolutionary program that made online music sales mainstream and effectively blunted the impact of piracy.
That assumes, of course, that you still use iTunes — and many people no longer do. On iPhones, the functions have long been split into separate apps for music, video and books. Mac computers follow suit Monday with a software update called Catalina.
Music-subscription services like Spotify and Apple Music have largely supplanted both the iTunes software and sales of individual songs, which iTunes first made available for 99 cents apiece. Apple is now giving iTunes its latest push toward the grave. For anyone who has subscribed to Apple Music, the music store will now be hidden on the Mac…
Over time, iTunes software expanded to include podcasts, e-books, audiobooks, movies and TV shows. In the iPhone era, iTunes also made backups and synced voice memos. As the software got bloated to support additional functions, iTunes lost the ease and simplicity that gave it its charm.
And with online cloud storage and wireless syncing, it no longer became necessary to connect iPhones to a computer — and iTunes — with a cable.
MacDailyNews Take: R.I.P., iTunes, savior of the music industry!
iTunes could NOT keep up with changing technology….If you would like to see what iTunes should have been…check out Roon . You will be blown away…!
iTunes or Apple’s Music app, they both work well enough for me. I never had the problems with iTunes some people must have had. If it hadn’t been for iTunes over the years, I would never have built up a large music collection. I only used iTunes for music and language audio files so I suppose I never taxed it to its limits. I never lost any files moving from each version of iTunes but I keep everything backed up in multiple devices on drives and iPods. To me, iTunes is the greatest music database ever. I started most of my music collection in iTunes on Snow Leopard.
When I installed Catalina, all my music and audio files stayed intact in Apple’s Music app and all the playlists I tried out still worked. A perfect transfer as near as I can tell. I doubt I’ll miss iTunes because Music app works about the same for me. I’m a satisfied customer and I give thanks to Apple.
I had to read the entire article to confirm that Apple Music subscribers can still buy music in Catalina by changing Music’s default behavior in Settings.
Has anyone else made any actual profit like Apple has with a similar program? THERE ARE NONE…
So, if I want to browse thru iPhone Apps on my Mac with a nice big screen and make notes, take screen shots and what not. How do we do that now?
I do hope that the, increasingly difficult to discover, iOS/iPadOS advanced recovery functionality, will persist in some app. Why aren’t MacDailyNews and others covering this issue properly?
So how do I play all my music I have bought, to be honest I don’t even bother with music on my iPhone it just wants me to subscribe to AppleMusic all the time, which I don’t wish to do. Ironic that I long chastised Apple for ignoring streaming of music because it would become mainstream for many, but now that they have and committed to it totally, those of us who are happy with the music we own are no longer required. Funny I always remembered MDN parroting about how people want to own their music, I suspect the new regime will affect them rather less than me who was always open to it.