I don't care what it's called, I dream of termination with extreme prejudice of the Carbon based, kruft-filled, all-in-one, un-Apple, sync-nightmare currently called iTunes.
I think I might be the only person on HN who actually luv- luv- luvs iTunes, and I say this as someone who once wrote his own MP3 player interface out of extreme music-player-fussiness. The "kruft" ship sailed the minute I downloaded Firefox.
Nope, not the only one. I don’t use an iPod, or an iPhone, or an TV, but I think iTunes is wonderful as a PC music player. It beats the pants off everything that came before (remember all those music player apps whose selling point was that they had pretty, customizable “skins”?), and hasn’t really been challenged by anything since.
For all the talk of bloat, the changes and additions over the last few years to the main functionality have been quite restrained and user-focused: sorting by album by artist, adding a “sort by” metadata field, improving the organization of playlists, “smart” playlists, and playlist folders, views organized by album art rather than text, improvements to the column browser, &c. Even what I would call “bloaty” features like the “genius playlist” and “ping” can be easily turned off.
> sorting by album by artist, adding a “sort by” metadata field, improving the organization of playlists, “smart” playlists, and playlist folders, views organized by album art rather than text, improvements to the column browser, &c
I don't know enough about the history of music players to say whether iTunes created those innovations (though I'd be surprised, except for the album art one), I can say for sure most any other media player these days will do those. And while the bloat can be turned off, I still found it to be have ridiculous start up time on Windows. It would take 10+ seconds just to open. I've said this on HNs before, but switching from iTunes to foobar2000 was by far the best software decision I've made, perhaps just barely behind switching from IE to Firefox. For the longest time I just took it for granted that iTunes was the best music player, but when I looked at the alternatives (pre-update Amarok, foobar2000, etc), I really found iTunes was a lot worse than I thought it was. The only feature I've come to miss are smart playlists, and I wouldn't be surprised if there's a foobar plugin for them.
What I like about iTunes is that, in one window, it shows me all of my music in a way that is clean, consistent, and very easy to navigate. At least for my own usage patterns, the “one big window with an effective search box” display is just what I want. If it takes 10 seconds to start (as it does on my laptop), that’s frankly not a problem, as I just leave it open all the time; it doesn’t take any CPU to speak of when it’s not actively playing music.
At the risk of this topic being hijacked by an iTunes-as-music-player debate, one cannot (with a straight face) compare iTunes on Windows to Winamp. I'll grant you that iTunes may be the bee's knees on OSX, but on Windows it is a dog.
Agreed: most of the things I don't like about it are things that I don't think can be solved just by improvements to the iTunes app but by moving to a more cloud-based system.
I like some things (Genius, the smart playlists, podcasts), am indifferent to a large swath of others (the store, video, radio, DJ, home sharing, library sharing, visualization) and am brought to a white-hot nun-punching rage by the (finite but unbounded) set of bugs, warts and misfeatures.
Why can't I have my view settings sticky across all the various views? Why do you INSIST on showing me the utterly useless genres by default? Why, in list mode, when reverse sorting an album by year (to, say, play your Cows collection from most recent to oldest) it reverses the track ordering? That last one, by the way, is marked "Works as Expected". Works as expected.
See, I use "Genre" as a free-form tagging field, for metadata that has no other home. Therefore, they are unique per artist (for the most part) and serve no useful purpose in browsing. So I never want them in my browser; I can set this for the main library, but the values are not inherited. It's like the iTunes team looked at the Finder and said .... "hmmm".
It'd be a misuse of wherever I put the info. The metadata I want to preserve about my music collection is a superset of the metadata that iTunes provides for.
I'm a fan of the way it exposes and emphasizes metadata. And it's smart playlists are awesome. Really, it's just a great organizational tool (for music). And it starts up pretty quickly on my mac (so it doesn't feel crufty).
Comments
Oh to dream...
You dream of them using a different word than "Tunes"? You need to read more fiction.
I don't care what it's called, I dream of termination with extreme prejudice of the Carbon based, kruft-filled, all-in-one, un-Apple, sync-nightmare currently called iTunes.
I think I might be the only person on HN who actually luv- luv- luvs iTunes, and I say this as someone who once wrote his own MP3 player interface out of extreme music-player-fussiness. The "kruft" ship sailed the minute I downloaded Firefox.
Nope, not the only one. I don’t use an iPod, or an iPhone, or an TV, but I think iTunes is wonderful as a PC music player. It beats the pants off everything that came before (remember all those music player apps whose selling point was that they had pretty, customizable “skins”?), and hasn’t really been challenged by anything since.
For all the talk of bloat, the changes and additions over the last few years to the main functionality have been quite restrained and user-focused: sorting by album by artist, adding a “sort by” metadata field, improving the organization of playlists, “smart” playlists, and playlist folders, views organized by album art rather than text, improvements to the column browser, &c. Even what I would call “bloaty” features like the “genius playlist” and “ping” can be easily turned off.
> sorting by album by artist, adding a “sort by” metadata field, improving the organization of playlists, “smart” playlists, and playlist folders, views organized by album art rather than text, improvements to the column browser, &c
I don't know enough about the history of music players to say whether iTunes created those innovations (though I'd be surprised, except for the album art one), I can say for sure most any other media player these days will do those. And while the bloat can be turned off, I still found it to be have ridiculous start up time on Windows. It would take 10+ seconds just to open. I've said this on HNs before, but switching from iTunes to foobar2000 was by far the best software decision I've made, perhaps just barely behind switching from IE to Firefox. For the longest time I just took it for granted that iTunes was the best music player, but when I looked at the alternatives (pre-update Amarok, foobar2000, etc), I really found iTunes was a lot worse than I thought it was. The only feature I've come to miss are smart playlists, and I wouldn't be surprised if there's a foobar plugin for them.
To each his own. Foobar2000 looks pretty much like all the music players before iTunes: http://www.foobar2000.org/images/img/main.png
What I like about iTunes is that, in one window, it shows me all of my music in a way that is clean, consistent, and very easy to navigate. At least for my own usage patterns, the “one big window with an effective search box” display is just what I want. If it takes 10 seconds to start (as it does on my laptop), that’s frankly not a problem, as I just leave it open all the time; it doesn’t take any CPU to speak of when it’s not actively playing music.
At the risk of this topic being hijacked by an iTunes-as-music-player debate, one cannot (with a straight face) compare iTunes on Windows to Winamp. I'll grant you that iTunes may be the bee's knees on OSX, but on Windows it is a dog.
I have an iPhone, but I blame the iPhone for iTunes syncing, not iTunes itself.
Agreed: most of the things I don't like about it are things that I don't think can be solved just by improvements to the iTunes app but by moving to a more cloud-based system.
And that is probably why you like it so much. Because you're not forced to use it for anything and everything Apple-related on the desktop.
I like some things (Genius, the smart playlists, podcasts), am indifferent to a large swath of others (the store, video, radio, DJ, home sharing, library sharing, visualization) and am brought to a white-hot nun-punching rage by the (finite but unbounded) set of bugs, warts and misfeatures.
Why can't I have my view settings sticky across all the various views? Why do you INSIST on showing me the utterly useless genres by default? Why, in list mode, when reverse sorting an album by year (to, say, play your Cows collection from most recent to oldest) it reverses the track ordering? That last one, by the way, is marked "Works as Expected". Works as expected.
"Genres" is the second most important organizational tool in my library, after artist name and just before Genius.
See, I use "Genre" as a free-form tagging field, for metadata that has no other home. Therefore, they are unique per artist (for the most part) and serve no useful purpose in browsing. So I never want them in my browser; I can set this for the main library, but the values are not inherited. It's like the iTunes team looked at the Finder and said .... "hmmm".
That's what the Grouping field is for.
It'd be a misuse of wherever I put the info. The metadata I want to preserve about my music collection is a superset of the metadata that iTunes provides for.
I'm a fan of the way it exposes and emphasizes metadata. And it's smart playlists are awesome. Really, it's just a great organizational tool (for music). And it starts up pretty quickly on my mac (so it doesn't feel crufty).
count me as #2, have much preferred iTunes for a good few years now.