It’s official, iTunes sucks balls 22
Perhaps not completely but there is a certain level of reliability and common sense that needs to be present in any software and iTunes fails on both counts.
I do like some things so I will try to highlight them as I have a little bitch:
- I love the way it organised my thousands of tracks into Artist > Album folders on the HD.
- I hate the fact that it doesnt support FLAC / WMA, not because it isn’t capable, but because Job’s doesnt want to.
- I love the fast searching
- I hate the complete lack of serious tagging utilities
- I love the store integration (even though I never buy from it, I use it to find similar music)
- I hate the the fact it will take 3 seconds to detect the ipod nano is attached one time, 3 minutes another time, and not at all on other occasions
- I hate having to Eject after a synch if I also want to use disk mode
- I hate the way you can’t monitor a drive for new songs without having to import them into iTunes manually
- I hate not being able to drag n drop to the ipod
- I hate the fact that iTunes seems to implode after a month’s use causing all kinds of issues such as…
- I hate the fact it now refuses to change playlists. I alternate between two playlists, mine and my gf’s depending on who is using it, and it now refuses to clear one to load the other
- I hate the fact I now have to restore the ipod every time we want to change the playlist synched
- I hate the frequent ‘the device cannot be written to or read from’ errors
- I hate the aac format…. really what purpose does it even serve on this planet?
- I hate the RIDICULOUSLY priced accessories… you can happily pay £100 for a pair of headphones from apple that I wouldn’t piss on if they caught fire. But I suppose while there are people in the world stupid enough…
Arrgghhhh…. well yes I headed a little off subject a little at the end. But now it’s off my chest I can be a little more rational. It boils down to reliability. I cannot with any confidence plug in the ipod and expect it to work with iTunes. It seems there is ALWAYS a new problem. When it reaches the point where I am essentially having to reset the device to factory settings every time I want to switch the playlists it’s time to hunt for new software 
So I did, Anapod seemed OK, essentially ipod shell integration meaning its as easy to manage as any other drive on the PC, but it lacks a lot of the library features you would want and expect (plus you have to pay for it bleh!).
Media Player… too easy … I’m leaving it to a last resort
Songbird looks promising but doesnt yet have the functionality I am after
So currently I am using Media Monkey! So far it’s great. Very nice tagging functionality as a start making it very easy to manage large libraries, the autotag feature grabs the tags and album art from amazon for you, ipod plugin comes with it by default and synchs very well (though my playlists don’t appear on the pod, but I navigate by artist/album on the ipod itself anyway), and best of all its free! I highly recommend it, but am open to all other suggestions too.
No related posts.
I imagine you use your iPod with a PC. The overwhelming majority of iPod/iTunes issues are on PCs and are because Windoze, actually, the the ball sucker.
I imagine you use your iPod with a PC. The overwhelming majority of iPod/iTunes issues are on PCs because Windoze, actually, IS the ball sucker.
Hate typos and bad sentence construction, sorry.
Actually Windows is fine – Apples writes arse software for the PC deliberately – 95% of the world’s population can’t be wrong – wake up nah! windows is the dominant OS for a very good reason – go and look up Chuck Peddle’s comments on Gates and Jobs – be informed – be enlightened!
AAC is the audio format of MPEG4 video. If you want to drag and drop to the iPod turn off autosyncing. As for having to eject it, the iPod is a storage medium, would you just unplug a hard drive without ejecting it?
AAC may not be as important to you if you’re encoding your music at huge bitrates, (e.g. 320 Kbps and above). At more the modest bitrates that most people use AAC is dramatically more efficient than MP3. That’s important if you want to get lots of music into a portable player–especially one that uses flash memory. It also helps keep your music library from deouring your computer’s disk drive. I encode most music at 160 Kbps AAC, which subjectively sounds comparable to LAME encoded MP3 at about 224 Kbps.
The flakiness of your iPod connection is not typical. There are lots of things that can cause this so I could only speculate. Could be the iPod itself, could be Windows weirdness, could even be a bad cable or connector–this would be consistent with the unpredictable amount of time it takes for the device to be recognized. I have a Canon scanner that is really flaky and unpredicable when initially connected to my laptop’s USB port. Other devices work fine on the same port but the scanner requires wiggling of cables, incantatons, animal sacrifices, etc.
I too was disappointed that Apple did not adopt FLAC. Their own lossless file format seems to be equally effective but I would have preferred the open standard. There may have been intellectual property or other legal liability issues involved. The legal standard that a large company is held to can be quite different from that of a user community or open-source effort. Some people sue big companies over IP the way others play the lottery. Look at all the recent suits over JPEG, for heaven’s sake. They were eventually dismissed, but not before millions had been spent defending against them. FLAC may not pass a rigorous examination for IP ownership.
After years of Mac users having to endure Microsoft products for the Mac that are lousy and unreliable (when they work at all) as a “sneaky” way to entice us to the other side (with limited success, obviously), it’s only fair that PC users should have to endure a bit of flakiness and unreliability with Apple products for the PC as a “sneaky” way to entice you guys to the Mac platform
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Lots of feedback, thanks for the thoughtful feedback!
James, In Windows XP ejecting is not required for most devices, including storage medium. USB keys don’t need ejecting, I have an external backup hard-drive that doesnt need ejecting, all the other devices I have used in XP for as long as I remember don’t need to be ejected… except for the ipod nano.
Jeff, I understand what you are saying, but it’s also one of the least supported codecs around. Other formats claim to be ‘as’ or ‘more’ efficient. In the days of storage costing pennies/gb is disk space really an issue? I have around 20,000 songs of possibly 50% FLAC, 45% MP3 and the remainder a mix of WMA and others, yet they consume less than 70GB of my 300GB disk. On the plus side, I also installed the Rockbox firmware on the Nano last night and it’s absolutely fantastic. FLAC support is the main benefit, but it also opens up so much more… I plan to write up a little overview of it in the next few days once I have fully explored it! But combined with Media Monkey I think I have everything I wish for!
Strangely the Ipods have (IMO) pretty well priced for the components inside them and the functionality on offer. Now if only they would take away the 30-50% premium they inexplicably charge for their notebook and PC hardware!
I don’t think it’s the ipod itself thats flaky, it’s itunes. All these other alternatives I have played with over the last couple of days have responded instantly and reliably (so far) to the ipod being plugged in.
I’m in complete agreement with you in terms of lawsuit madness, but then Apple don’t help matters coming up with so many proprietary stuff themselves!
I am no more enticed to an Apple PC with/without flakiness than I ever will be until their products are priced as a fair reflection of their components
“I hate not being able to drag n drop to the ipod”
I stopped reading after this since you clearly have no idea what you’re doing.
Perhaps I could have been clearer for those that can’t read between lines
You can drag’n'drop but then have to eject the device, failure to perform this needless right-click operation (In XP at least) will lead to corruption.
It’s not necessary for any of the other software I have tried… so why iTunes?
- iTunes is poorly optimized from a programing perspective and is laboriously slow on operations such as scrolling the library list, adding artwork to music files (writing ID3 tag info) thereby consuming large portions of potentially busy users time in simply navigating it. This is in part due to the programming differences between Macintosh and Windows PCs, namely that Macintosh tend to be more naturally fast due to the RISC-based chip architechture which requires less programmer intervention to take advantage of (this is also a fundamental difference between the users of the 2 PC types : mac users are much more accepting of the OS deciding for them (follower mentality) where Windows users expect to do more for themselves (leader mentality) or rather that iTunes was written originally for the Mac and was ported (probably as an afterthought) to Windows without a code profiling and optimization step.[20][21]
- iTunes is a known memory and processor-hog typically drawing on 100MB and sometimes consuming over 200 MB of system memory for it’s operation.[22]
- iTunes store claims to sell “CD-Quality” music but this is an offense to audiophiles. iTunes store sells typically 128 kbs compressed (read as music data has been lost permanently) audio. True CD-Quality is 700 kbs *uncompressed*. If the iPod or iTunes is ever hooked up to a hifi sound system (one capable of producing sounds 20 Khz) or Shure or equivelent headphones a quality best described as “tinny-ness” is produced from the speakers due to the loss in quality from the original CD-quality recording. This is obviously an advertising error expecting people to lower standards while paying the same price for the product and is therefore and insult to all iTunes users.[23]
- iTunes can only automatically get artwork for *mainstream* music. If you listen to anything other than commonly popular music, you will have to add the artwork yourself which is a slow process (see above) necessitating many hours in front of it to correctly add all the artwork to the music. Moreover, iTunes is extremely inefficient in storing the artwork in the MP3 files needing to literally store the same image in *every* file in the album to have artwork appear on each song resulting in time lost in waiting for iTunes to write the data to the ID3 and size of the library due to data redundency. A much cleaner implementation would’ve been to expect a single (or even multiple are pssible using this technique) “artwork#.jpg” in each album’s folder during the adding to the library which would be picked up and added to the library and displayed *per album* rather than *per song*.[24] [25]
- If your library in iTunes is ever lost (due to a hardrive crash for instance) even if you have all the data on an external harddrive, you will be forced to recreate your library from scratch because the iPod itself can only be synced to a single iTunes library. There are various extraction tools to pull your media from the iPod although this should be unessesary as an extra 3 lines of programming code in the iPod sync function to copy the library to the iPod itself could’ve alleviated this glaring flaw in the iTunes software. From a business perspective the idea is to not allow iPod owners to carry their iPods around syncing to one library after another and thereby supporting music piracy via the iPod. Apple to wash thier hands of this possibility only allowed the iPod to sync with a single library though piracy is still possible via enabling disk use on the iPod settings, rendering the pain caused by this so-called prevention to nill and a major annoyance at best.[26]
sesso video…
news…
“blah, blah, blah….because Windoze, actually, the the ball sucker.”
Oh really? Try using a Sansa player with Windows. You plug it in, it shows up as a drive, you drop your music onto it and it’s done. Couldn’t be simpler.
So it would seem that Apple is at fault here. They don’t know how to build software OR hardware that works in anything other than it’s very, very tiny microcosm.
I know this post is long dead, but what the heck, I might as well leave my two cents…
iTunes is an extremely ineffient program and has gotten even worse as versions progress. I thought it was just because of my massive song library, but it’s not. Winamp runs with much lower resources and I can actually browse my library without excessive lag. My computer isn’t the newest, but there’s a problem if a 3.4 ghz P4 with 1 gb ram has lag while flipping through songs. My computer is clean of spyware and this is with only itunes running on my pc.
As for not recognizing ipods, this is a common problem. I have invested $700 in two different ipods (both of which failed to hard drive problems within a year and a half). Both of these ipods had trouble showing up in itunes even when they were new out of the box. Sometimes they would show up right away, sometimes they would show up in 15 minutes, and sometimes they wouldn’t until I rebooted my pc and tried again. I thought it was the usb so I got a firewire cord and it does the same thing. My computer never had this problem with any other usb devices and now it doesn’t have this problem with my new Sansa.
A post is never dead… until its deleted
Especially not when it’s still (sadly) so relevant. Here we are almost 18 months later and the performance of itunes is worse if anything. The program is now such a mixed up, hodgepodge, trainwreck that they need to completely rewrite it from the ground up.
The sad thing is that at the moment, my iphone is only able to use iTunes, here is hoping something like Media Monkey develops support for it in the near future.
I finally bought an 80GB video iPod thinking it would end some of my frustration with my 3 Zunes….I can’t believe this iPod and iTunes sucks WAY worse than the Zune software and hardware!…
IMHO, the Zune team has done a great job trying to solve all the problems the iPod has…I’m eating my words, but my 30GB Zune is FAR superior to this darn iPod and iTunes…I still can’t believe how cheated I feel after buying this iPod…at least I can pick and choose between several of my music libraries with the Zune, and add to the Zune without deleting what’s already stored…
Apple’s hardware is top level but my 89 year old grandma can create better software
Indeed, iTunes is just crap.
Winamp supports iPods, and it will do everything you want it to incredibly fast. I mean, scrolling down the library even in Media Player lagged the computer, but Winamp does it with no jumps at all, and without taking a while to load album art.
I’ve tried iTunes out on a few Mac’s too, and they actually perform pretty badly even on their native platform. I’m sure it’s slower on Windows but either way, Apple just does NOT listen to their market. They have no idea what they’re doing, they’re just confidently releasing more and more crap while pulling Microsoft’s products. Unfortunately, all the pre-pubescent teenagers listen to the guy in jeans that looks like that guy from Blues Clues, and not the guy wearing a suit and glasses (who is clearly more intelligent).
It’s nice to see some apple fanboys showed up to praise their faulty product, I wonder if the self-edification they receive is from Jobs or their own illusionary ideals…
Itunes sucks, and it doesn’t matter what your platform is. By the way, fanboys, why would apple now offer to run vista DIRECT from their build? LOL, nice argument, too bad your mother Co. proves otherwise, lol!
Why does itunes change filenames of songs? Could it be because they’re greedy and they try to make it as hard as possible to share music? Yeah, like that extra twenty bits of info used to include the REAL SONG TITLE in the file name makes a difference. If that was the case then why not let it be an option? APPLE’S GREED, that’s why. Why randomly place songs into different folders? GREED, that’s why. It makes no sense why you can drop an entire folder of an album into itunes to have it move around the files in to eleven different folders names f00, f01, f02, f03…etc. GREED, that’s why.
I’m done with not only itunes, but apple as well. Windows sucks too, but they’re not as self-serving as apple. apple takes it to an all new level, they suck on purpose. No more ipod for me, I’ll buy an alternative at 1/2 the price and 2x the functionality.
You lose, apple.
By the way, nice “phone,” BWHAAAAHHAAAAAAHAAA!!!!
Good job ignoring the face that network is more important than a touch screen, morons. I can see Verizon Wireless just shaking in fear, LOL!!!
[...] my rant on iTunes’s failings the other day I was driven to find a superior solution. I didn’t [...]
just got one, and now i hate them, because of the fact that you cant just drag and drop the files to it. You need to use iTunes, and i dont now why i had to erace the material that was already on there to move over some songs?? it’s crazy!