Why all the iTunes hate?

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

if you guys really HATE itunes then time to ditch your ipod touch and iphone.

I have a 160GB iPod Classic. The only reason I got it was for use with the Pioneer AVIC Z110BT.

 

[JackBurton]

I love iTunes.

 

[TheStu]

I know this is about the iPod and iTunes, but can the Zune sync with anything other than the Zune software?

 

[oynaz]

I you use iTunes exactly as Apple has imagined you would, it works, but it is severely limited.

More than one user of the computer with more than one iPod? You're screwed.
More than one computer in the house? You're screwed.
More music than you can fit on your iPod? You're screwed.
Moving your iPod between multiple computers? You're screwed.

+ It's bloated, slow, tries to install all kinds of crap, and is just plain annoying.

Winamp (which unfortunately tends towards bloated as well) can control iPods. Use that instead.

Or get a non-Apple mp3 player, and use VLC. Or Foobar.

 

[evident]

if you guys really HATE itunes then time to ditch your ipod touch and iphone.

I got one for christmas. my brother would be pretty offended if i got rid of it. and it's a pretty neat little device, except itunes blows.

I hate how you can only sync your ipod touch w/ one computer, and if you connect it to any other computer, your entire library can easily get clobbered.

you can move music to ipod w/ mediamonkey, but videos and photos still have to go through itunes.

Also, have you noticed how much bloatware *cough* spyware*cough* apple installs on your windows machine and bogs it down? like quicktime and all these other services that run in the background that try and take over your machine? its their secret way of getting computer novices to bitch about "how slow windows is" and plant the seed to get a mac. I also wonder how much those services drain battery life on a laptop

 

[Rubycon]

I hate how you can only sync your ipod touch w/ one computer, and if you connect it to any other computer, your entire library can easily get clobbered.

This * 10^23

 

[Phynaz]

I you use iTunes exactly as Apple has imagined you would, it works, but it is severely limited.

More than one user of the computer with more than one iPod? You're screwed.
More than one computer in the house? You're screwed.
More music than you can fit on your iPod? You're screwed.
Moving your iPod between multiple computers? You're screwed.

What are you talking about?

The above explains my situation exactly (4 iPods, three computers) and it works fine.

I think you are just parroting things you have read and never actually used it.

 

[Phynaz]

I hate how you can only sync your ipod touch w/ one computer, and if you connect it to any other computer, your entire library can easily get clobbered.

Just turn off auto sync.

Problem solved.

 

[GodlessAstronomer]

More music than you can fit on your iPod? You're screwed.

I ran into this one and was so annoyed by the inability ot iTunes to handle it gracefully that I returned my 8gb iTouch and bought a 32gb

Or get a non-Apple mp3 player, and use VLC. Or Foobar.

It pains me to say it because as far as I'm concerned Apple is one of the worst companies on the planet, but the iPod Touch is simply the best MP3 player available (those idiots at MS never released the Zune HD in my country or I would have one of them).

 

[GodlessAstronomer]

Also, have you noticed how much bloatware *cough* spyware*cough* apple installs on your windows machine and bogs it down? like quicktime and all these other services that run in the background that try and take over your machine? its their secret way of getting computer novices to bitch about "how slow windows is" and plant the seed to get a mac. I also wonder how much those services drain battery life on a laptop

I don't know what you guys are doing wrong but there is no trace of Quicktime or any other Apple software except iTunes on my PC.

 

[Barfo]

I don't know what you guys are doing wrong but there is no trace of Quicktime or any other Apple software except iTunes on my PC.

Really? Perhaps they've done away with them in the latest version. I used itunes for 4 years and it would always install quicktime and other random crap, which is why I'm glad I got rid of it, I miss my usage statistics from all that time though.

 

[pennylane]

I hate iTunes. It's bloated and slow and I keep my music organized myself. It doesn't let you control a lot of things (ASIO) or play FLAC. It feels like it's niche is for people who generally listen to singles... bunches of songs from different artists. I don't find it very convenient for playing albums.

I use foobar to load music onto my iPod and then I can transfer music out of it to other computers very easily. (If it matters, I only got an iPod because of a hot deal, though I like it a lot more now that I don't have to use iTunes with it)

foo_dop
It's a little complicated at first but some benefits are:
-being able to organize music on the iPod how you want to
-being able to copy music from the iPod to a different computer
-being able to automate some tag adjustments for file uploads (ie, I keep album tags on the iPod as "%date% - %album%" because otherwise it doesn't order albums chronologically. Doing that manually in iTunes was a huge pain)
-automatically loading album art that's not embedded into the mp3 file but sits a separate file in the album folder ("folder.jpg")

It's not for everyone because it's complicated, but I find it very worth it.

 

[GodlessAstronomer]

It feels like it's niche is for people who generally listen to singles... bunches of songs from different artists. I don't find it very convenient for playing albums.

Although I agree to some extent I don't think that's a totally fair assessment. I usually listen to individual songs in my own playlists, but not just singles. I make lists of songs I enjoy. However this morning I decided to play Deftones' White Pony album and realized there is no way to just play an album - how retarded. It's dead simple in WMP but not possible in iTunes. I had to do a search for 'White Pony' and play the results. Lame.

I find I'm using the "Genius" feature to make automatic playlists more and more and it surprises me how good it is most of the time. If I'm in the mood for some particular song, Genius seems to be really good at finding other music I'm in the mood for.

 

[pennylane]

Although I agree to some extent I don't think that's a totally fair assessment. I usually listen to individual songs in my own playlists, but not just singles. I make lists of songs I enjoy. However this morning I decided to play Deftones' White Pony album and realized there is no way to just play an album - how retarded. It's dead simple in WMP but not possible in iTunes. I had to do a search for 'White Pony' and play the results. Lame.

I find I'm using the "Genius" feature to make automatic playlists more and more and it surprises me how good it is most of the time. If I'm in the mood for some particular song, Genius seems to be really good at finding other music I'm in the mood for.

Oh, when I said people that listen to singles, I meant that to include playlists. iTunes is better for people who like to make playlists consisting of single songs from various artists than people who generally listen to albums (just my opinion from my experience).

 

[bigi]

iFiles is your friend for many years to come...

 

[martensite]

Itunes was coded by Satan himself; it's a slow and clunky POS with a nasty GUI.
Unfortunately I am forced to use it to sync movies and video podcasts my ipod touch.
Once I get rid of the Touch (when I buy my next cell phone), I hope that I never have to install itunes again.

 

[realmike15]

It used to be slow as all hell. It's gotten a little better, but compared to Songbird... performance wise... it's crap.

 

[oynaz]

What are you talking about?

The above explains my situation exactly (4 iPods, three computers) and it works fine.

I think you are just parroting things you have read and never actually used it.

You think wrong. We collection is much larger that the capacity on me and my wifes' mp3 players., and we listen to different music. I cannot get iTunes to keep one library for me, and one for my wife. I might be possible, but I gave up on it, and switched to WinAmp.

 

[Maximilian]

Itunes is meh... i would ditch apple and try out zune if they didnt force me to use that POS zune software. MS makes a great media player everyone is familiar with, its called windows media player, they should have the zune use that.

 

[GodlessAstronomer]

After a few months of use I take back anything good I ever said about iTunes. What an absolute pile of shit. Fuck you Apple for subjecting anyone to this poorly written piece of software.

 

[Murloc]

I use itunes because of the ipod.

Anyway I like the interface, it's well organized and I love to order songs by clicking on the column names, with the triangle indicating how they are ordered.
It organizes the music in folders too.
I just use the library and ipod sync functions anyway, I don't use the menus, so I don't notice that the settings are under the modify menu when they should be under tools menu.

 

[TheStu]

After a few months of use I take back anything good I ever said about iTunes. What an absolute pile of shit. Fuck you Apple for subjecting anyone to this poorly written piece of software.

What changed?

 

[GodlessAstronomer]

What changed?

I used the program more. It sucks balls. I can't be bothered enumerating all of the reasons iTunes is a fucking joke, but here are a few.

• About one in three times when I plug in my iPod it can't sync and gives me some bullshit error message
• About one in the remaining two times when I plug in my iPod iTunes just locks up and I have to end the process
• Half of my podcasts will randomly refuse to download with some fucking bullshit error message like "Error -89". Yeah, that's fucking helpful
• I can't create a playlist while listening to another playlist. What the fucking fuck? U SRS?
• I can't play music by album
• I can't play music by artist
• I can't play music by year
• I can't play music by genre
• My song play count doesn't sync from my iPod
• It keeps turning shuffle off for no good fucking reason
• Constant fucking ads in the right sidebar
• Every few days I get some fucking popup wanting to install Apple's shitty fucking web browser. I have to manually opt out EVERY FUCKING TIME. FUCK YOU APPLE AND YOUR SHITTY BROWSER.
• My library has randomly corrupted itself twice.

etc.

 

[TheStu]

I used the program more. It sucks balls. I can't be bothered enumerating all of the reasons iTunes is a fucking joke, but here are a few.

• About one in three times when I plug in my iPod it can't sync and gives me some bullshit error message
• About one in the remaining two times when I plug in my iPod iTunes just locks up and I have to end the process
• Half of my podcasts will randomly refuse to download with some fucking bullshit error message like "Error -89". Yeah, that's fucking helpful
• I can't create a playlist while listening to another playlist. What the fucking fuck? U SRS?
• I can't play music by album
• I can't play music by artist
• I can't play music by year
• I can't play music by genre
• My song play count doesn't sync from my iPod
• It keeps turning shuffle off for no good fucking reason
• Constant fucking ads in the right sidebar
• Every few days I get some fucking popup wanting to install Apple's shitty fucking web browser. I have to manually opt out EVERY FUCKING TIME. FUCK YOU APPLE AND YOUR SHITTY BROWSER.
• My library has randomly corrupted itself twice.

etc.

Are you on a 64 bit OS?

• About one in three times when I plug in my iPod it can't sync and gives me some bullshit error message
  I can't say I have ever had that problems on Windows or OS X, but I haven't used Windows to sync my iPod in years
• About one in the remaining two times when I plug in my iPod iTunes just locks up and I have to end the process
  Again, I haven't used the Windows version in a while
• Half of my podcasts will randomly refuse to download with some fucking bullshit error message like "Error -89". Yeah, that's fucking helpful
  Although the error code message is delightfully vague, have you googled it or gone onto Apple's forums to determine what it means?
• I can't create a playlist while listening to another playlist. What the fucking fuck? U SRS?
  I don't believe I have ever had this problem. Are you generating a Smart Playlist, or trying to create playlist B as composed of files from playlist A? I just did the latter with no problems, and have done the former
• I can't play music by album
  How do you mean?
• I can't play music by artist
  How do you mean?
• I can't play music by year
  How you do mean?
• I can't play music by genre
  How do you mean?
• My song play count doesn't sync from my iPod
  Never had that problem, ever
• It keeps turning shuffle off for no good fucking reason
  I have noticed that it maintains shuffle settings on a per-playlist basis, it is not a universal setting. If that is not what you mean, then I fear that I have yet again, not encountered your problem
• Constant fucking ads in the right sidebar
  Have you considered closing the right sidebar?
• Every few days I get some fucking popup wanting to install Apple's shitty fucking web browser. I have to manually opt out EVERY FUCKING TIME. FUCK YOU APPLE AND YOUR SHITTY BROWSER.
  That is annoying, I agree.
• My library has randomly corrupted itself twice.
  Are you entirely sure that it was random? I have moved/copied my library between at least 10 hard drives, across 3-4 systems, multiple times. It has been maintained and updated since 2004. It has been corrupted once, and that was due to the source drive.

No offense, but first of all, you seem to be spewing a lot of vitriol over a piece of software that as others have pointed out, has alternatives, especially if you are on Windows.

Secondly, to me at least, it is possible that a few of your problems could stem from user error, or your unwillingness (completely understandable I might add) to conform your 'workflow' to iTunes methodology. If I want to listen to just one artist, then I type the artist's name into the search box and I am left with just their music. If I want to listen to just one album, then I would do the same, or switch to album view. As for the genre or year, that would require a smart playlist, but that takes 5 seconds to setup.

And yes, Safari is fairly bad on Windows, it doesn't fit at all.

 

[velillen]

I guess i am odd. i've had an ipod since 2006 (ipod 5th gen) and just got a ipod touch 3rd gen in jan. never had any problems with itunes. I use it everyday infact. Never had problems with syncing or ipod to itunes problems. i can sort by album, artist, or genre. Whatever i feel like.

Bloated wise...beats me i disable the crap it sets to start on startup. I think quicktime is installed...never use it though but it doesnt bug me nor try to "take over". it does run a bit more memory usage than other options like foobar im sure but meh it doesnt slow my system down at all.

Guess i am odd and/or lucky that it works just fine for me. In fact the only problem i had was user error when trying ot reinstall my os and accidentally formated my backup drive and media drive. Took about 10 minutes to find a "ipod to hard drive" free software and it pulled the songs off my ipod to the hard drive. Then had to load em into itunes and have itunes organize the folder and i was back to where id began (minus a few podcasts/videos that i hadnt synced ot my ipod)