General Discussion

Going on 2 years, my 3rd generation 4GB iPod Nano has been my constant companion.  Every day, I sync my podcasts and my latest music.  In my car, plugged into a cassette adapter.  At my desk at work, plugged into some cheap radio shack speakers.  Out walking or on the bus, plugged into my skull.  I’ve probably gone through 4 sets of ear buds.  

It’s the only Apple product that I’ve owned out right.  I’ve certainly got my $150 worth.  I wouldn’t think of buying an MP3 player from any other company.  What baffles me is how Apple can make a near-perfect device and then pair it with such awful software.  

After the first year of running iTunes on my XP laptop, the program pretty much gave up entirely.  It’s an immense resource hog.  It would take over 2 minutes to load and eventually stopped loading altogether.  The library file, which indexes my media files, has corrupted on a least 2 separate occasions.  I shudder to think what would have happened if I actually bought music from the iTunes store.  Would I loose it all?  As it stood, I had to re-import all of my music files into iTunes, losing all of my play count and ratings data in the process.

I’m now running iTunes and my media library off of my Windows 7 HTPC.  That machine has enough horsepower to play PC games and stream HD video at 1080p.  You would think that this would be enough power to run this simple media database and remote device syncing program.  So far, so good.  But I’m weary.

Needless to say, I’ve been intrigued by the new iteration of Apple TV and in following the news about Apple’s ambitions in the living room space, I heard about Ping.  Then I got the notification windows saying that iTunes 10.0 was available for my computer.  I threw caution to the wind and gave it a spin.

I regretted the decision almost immediately.  The update was relatively fast and light, a paltry 80 megabytes.  Installation did not take long.  The first thing I noticed was that my cover-flows had been borked.  iTunes has never been good about cover art.  It offers album art discovery but if you didn’t buy the music from Apple, odds are that the art won’t be found.  I learned this the hard way, when I joined the iTunes family 2 years go.  Because I’m that kind of obsessive, I painstakingly went through hours of web searches and third party sources to get all of the cover images imported into my iTunes library.  With the advent of iTunes 10.0, all that effort is for naught.  The installation wiped all of the custom images and most of the album art from the music I had bought from other sources, such as Amazon.

So, Apple took away my custom cover art.  What did it give me with this new update?  The text on the menu interfaces appears to be improved.  Other than that, there’s Ping, a social networking music service.  I’ve logged hundreds of hours on my iPod, since the last time that my music library was corrupted.  I’ve got thousands of play counts in there.  Ping should be able to read that data and tell me what else I might want to listen to.  Wrong.  Ping didn’t use any of my play count data.  The only source it seemed to be pulling from was the handful of purchases that I have made through the iTunes store.

I was expecting Ping to be like Last.FM.  In spite of the clunkiness of their iTunes scrobbler plugin, Last.FM has done a fantastic job of tracking my audio habits, providing relevant music suggestions, and delivering the added value of free streaming.  The radio service doesn’t play exactly what I tell it to, it usually starts off with a few tracks from my library and then branches out to similar artists that I may or may not have heard of.  There is a ‘Buy Track’ button that links the song’s details to iTunes, the Amazon MP3 store, and other sources, for fast and easy purchase.

Instead of integrating the best ideas from the competition, Ping seems to rely on the ubiquity of the Apple brand.  They are taking for granted that a significant portion of the market will use their software by default and are offering little or no innovation to win anyone else over.  I don’t appreciate being locked in by brute force.  Apple is the industry leader in hardware design.  Why can’t their software division be as good?    

@Scotty_Gun said:

  Apple is the industry leader in hardware design.  Why can’t their software division be as good? 

Because they are a hardware company.  You should be glad that even some of their software is good.  Most hardware companies are horrible at making any sort of software. 
Remember, Apple is a hardware company before they are a software company.  They keep their software exclusively on their hardware as much as possible.
They have a fairly small software devision.  I doubt they allocate many engineers to iTunes when they have such a large cache of software to update and manage (more than almost any other hardware company). 

And that's why people like Apple hardware and MS software :)

Apple software has always sucked, particularly on PCs. Even something as simple as their software updater is intrusive and annoying. No, I would not like to install Safari, thank you very much. When my cell phone contract expires I'm switching over to Android. Not because I don't like my iPhone, but because I hate dealing with iTunes. I still don't understand how they haven't included features as basic as folder monitoring.

So, for the first time, I read objective complaints about iTunes. Everything I read before was just about denigrating an Apple product. But it's still relatively surprising, I own an iPod for about four years now, and I never really had any complaints about both hardware and software. I might add that I ran iTunes in Windows XP back then, not Moc OS, because I only had 20GB or so on the iMac (1st gen). I admit the switch from Winamp/Windows Media Player was a little difficult for a while (using the explorer to find whatever you want to play, then run it, instead of directly running the music soft). But the options available back then (if my memory's still working fine, and that's not guaranteed) were either Archos' fridge sized player, Sony's tiny round player, and lousy cheap thumbdrives shaped ones. I first bought the cheap ones, easy to use, just drage and drop the files/folders, sorting the files into folders to get an album... relatively easy to use. But the audio quality was just worst than a MacBook built-in speaker! So after a few weeks, that made me begin a new search of another MP3 player (and also because the battery was drained after a couple hours, top). So I bought a Sony tiny one, Atrac3+, beautiful, nice audio quality, very long bettery life and all, but only 2GB. But it wasn't really easy to use, because the Album/artist display wasn't working at all. My entire music library was MP3 (maybe some OGGs too), so I had to re-encode everything using the provided Sony software, and this software was this only option to put music on the player (dragging and dropping the files wasn't working at all), it was very slow, seen the player pluged only once in a while, a pain in the ass when it came to manage the music to put on the player manually... And after using such terrible software, switching to iTunes less than a year later was a relief. I don't remember the name of Sony software, but it was meant to be able to play the music, it was actually sort of a Sony version of iTunes... but I've never been able to use it... 
Then my library kept growing (beyond the 20GB), so I needed a substantial storage upgrade. And the girlfriend I had then had an iPod 2nd or 3rd gen (the one that didn't have the button around the wheel), and it was awesome. So, it was either a gigantic Archos player, or an iPod (didn't want to have anything to do with a Walkman anymore). As I was relatively satisfied with the iMac, and wanted to be able to fit the player in my pocket, I opted for the iPod. And coming from Sony's software (no way to edit anything stuck with what the software first read from the ID3, and having to re-encode the entire library using Sony's codec...), iTune was awesome.  I didn't first used it to play my music, but to put the music on the player only. Some, after four year with iTunes, and almost two with Windows XP, I never really had any big complaint about this soft. But if I remember well, the windows version needed to re-encode part of the music (don't remember what were the criteria to do it or not to do it...), and the mac version never did so, but it might be because it was later, so newer version. But now I spend most of my time with Mac OS, I only use iTunes, and none of the complaints above. My experience's been good so far, but I admit that the album art is definitely not working, and there's no easy way to fix it (except with any Apple script, but with Windows, as far as I know, nothing's available), the only way to have the artwork is either by ripping the CD using iTunes, or buying off iTunes store. Any other way, you're screwed.  
Also, I never experienced any slow down, long launch times or library nightmare you talked about, even though I have 25473 songs, lasting 74.6 days, taking 167.60GB of space (Yes, I love music, yes I can't live without music, and yes, I would really be depressed if I couldn't listen to music), so that would be a good reason to be slow... but it isn't.
 
Regarding iTunes 10. I think it was just the way Apple chose to add their new way to force you to buy something from them, taking the form of Ping. Personally, I don't use any social network, I had a facebook a while back, but I never really used it, so, that's just one more I'm going to ignore. But if I were (and it's a big if) someone that would use social networks, I believe I would think that it's just big mistake. Ping should be part of existing social networks, because it's just one more, among the several already existing, and just not worth creating a new account (esp. knowing it will be used by Apple to sell you more stuff, maybe more accurately, but still, sell more). Other than this, I don't see anything new, except the icons that are now color less (on Windows too?), that now fit better in my OS X theme that also is color less.  
 
Anyhow, it really seems Apple should improve their software for Windows. 
 
But I don't agree with you @Forte, Apple has long been both hardware and software designer, and ever since their first Macintosh (or Lisa, can't remeber the first one) System, they've been recognized as a software firm too, having some of their software being taken as references. And still today, they have excellent softwares, I'm not going to be Apple's advocate, but you probably know what I'm talking about. Anyway I agree that iTunes is nothing near their usually quality.

Truly good Apple software is a rarity. 

@100_Hertz said:

" Truly good Apple software is a rarity.  "

huh,i just wish there was an option to make it look like the old iTunes.

@Halberdierv2: Are you with Mac OS or Windows? And old iTunes, is that 9.2 or, older?

@Halberdierv2:  Got you covered mate. 
 
Skin it FTW!!!

@Forte: slight problem, Im using vista, so i cant use that, sorry.

I have to agree with your discontent. Itunes is probably one of the worst non-functioning pieces of software I have ever been forced to use. I loathe every time I need to plug in my iphone, sync up, and maybe attempt to make a simple task out of updating my music library. Half the time, iTunes just decides it would rather freeze my entire PC before it actually does something, and there is no such thing as letting it sit around and sync in the background. My PC is not the most super powered gaming PC or anything, but its definitely not without enough stuff that something like iTunes should cripple it so badly.

I'm right there with you, i love my nano, but the price to pay for the hardware is the annoying and troublesome iTunes and all its faults. I'd even be open to some other library software that would sync podcast RSS feeds and still work with the iPod but I'm guessing thats hard to find. 

@Vao:   If you ran Linux, you'd have a fair few options to use including Amarok among others.  The problem in Windows is that MS doesn't see a market need for really manageable music libraries and so leaves it up to Apple's iTunes.

@seriouslynow:
Zune.  Windows Media Player.
 
seriously, now.  ;)

I'm actually a huge fan of iTunes, it's probably one of my favourite pieces of software, but that's with one major caveat.  I use it on the Mac.  I think the experience between iTunes on the Mac and Windows is night/day, which is really a shame because it is a very positive experience on the Mac.  Additionally,  I've been increasingly impressed with the music selection on iTunes, with an increasing amount of Korean and Japanese music available on the US store that always surprises me.  
  
I fully agree that Apple sucks royally at making Windows software (as much as Microsoft makes crappy Mac software) and it isn't really an advisable solution for Windows.   I make no arguments there, cause Apple really does just fail at making Windows software.  Which I guess makes a certain degree of sense.  Though they still aren't as bad at making management software as Sony, which has given me nightmares in the past.
 
The only big change with iTunes 10 (besides the UI shifts, which are debatable) seems to be Ping.  Like you, I was hoping and expecting it to be more like Last.fm that'd scrobble tracks I listen to, but alas it doesn't seem to [yet] have that functionality, which is a huge shame.  I DO buy all my music from the iTunes store, so it's good in that regard, but it doesn't fully replace services like Last.fm.  I really hope that functionality gets added, cause I hate using plugins like the Last.fm scrobbler on iTunes.   I've been much more impressed with Genius (which makes pretty good recommendations for me now, with how much I've bought on the iTunes store) than with Ping.  Of course, that assumes you buy your stuff from the iTunes store, which I do.  I believe that the Genius Playlists themselves don't actually require purchasing to function however?  
 
Oh, and the first thing I did with iTunes 10 was run a simple terminal script to fix those stupid vertical widgets that should always be horizontal (like on every other Apple piece of software ever).  Consistency please, Apple!  Why change something you are consistent on with every other piece of software you have ever made.