I also wind up with recordings from European labels that you won’t find on iTunes or some ‘curated’ streaming service. Subscription/smorgasbord services just don’t do it for me.
I don't know much about classical music although I bought a couple dozen random titles at the music store a number of years ago just to round out our music collection. Now I mostly listen to new acoustic singer/songwriter style from relatively unknown artists which is why I like DJ mixed internet radio or satellite since I would never find those artists on my own and the DJ has already identified the best tracks on the album.
I use iTune to manage (on going project of digitizing) my wife and I huge CD and DVD collections dating back from late 80's. I agree, it's been bloated, but I do see improvement. Streaming, I prefer pandora, trying out iTune radio, so far no complaints. At times, enough for me to buy Albums thru iTunes, I will play an artist Album to death!! That goes for movies as well.
all need their own app set... maybe one DB in the back end, and a 'department store' mega app (like ITMS is now) but with boutique app-stores built around the end user and the end product
That's what I understand the Beats Purchase was supposed to do on the 'front end'
(the back end was to use Jimmy to swing the deals that Apple's corporate aura couldn't schmooze out of the labels and artists)
[And stuff like syncing and device management... build that into the Mac System Preferences layer (preferences on how to manage 'your' iOS ecosystem)]
A lot of media is linked - the book of the film, the podcast and the movie, the music to the movie, etc. One of iTune's strength is that it links all these when searching. This can obviously be done in a web page but I am not sure the web page would be any quicker, or any easier to manage. It would be a drag to have to jump from app to app to look for the particular edit one is after. Having said that I would prefer to separate everything to individual apps with a shared search functionality. I am looking forward to Beats. I refuse to use Google play.
iTunes has become a bloated mess in every sense of the term. It has become the kind of unmitigated disaster that Microsoft was famous for. I simply avoid it whenever I can.
Way past time for Apple to thoroughly re-imagine and re-create what is still perhaps the most important, valuable piece of software in the iOS ecosystem.
What the heck? I seriously have to wonder what kind of crappy computers the people who whine about iTunes use. I'm running it on an eight year old Mac and it runs without issue. iTunes 8-10 was slow, yes, but 11 and 12 have been quite good.
Bullshit. It has become LESS bloated in the latest version. The UI is much, much simplified, cleaned-up, and many functions (such as ebooks) have been offloaded to other apps. "Um-mitigated diasaster"? Wow, talk about sensationalism. Do you have any specific complaints, besides baseless comparisons to Microsoft software? Or ideas of how it needs to be "re-imagined"? iTunes works perfectly for me, and hundreds of millions of others.
I've been using iTunes for awhile now and I've enjoyed using it, and that even on Windows 7, and now Windows 8.1. Of course it isn't perfect but I don't think it's anywhere near as bad as techies make it out to be. There's like what, 500 million users of iTunes now? They can't all be wrong.
To this I agree. Although I was thinking IBM/Lotus Notes as the unmitigated disaster (the app everyone has to use and everyone hates now that a real internet model has come to fruition).
Apple needs to decouple and build an 'app family'
Books
Movies
Music
stuff I've bought/uploaded/downloaded...
stuff I desire/could-desire to listen to...
curated/genned streams of music [pseudo radio]
Real Radio (streams of OTA/Satellite radio)
TV Shows
Pod casts
audio
video
etc. etc.
all need their own app set... maybe one DB in the back end, and a 'department store' mega app (like ITMS is now) but with boutique app-stores built around the end user and the end product
That's what I understand the Beats Purchase was supposed to do on the 'front end'
(the back end was to use Jimmy to swing the deals that Apple's corporate aura couldn't schmooze out of the labels and artists)
[And stuff like syncing and device management... build that into the Mac System Preferences layer (preferences on how to manage 'your' iOS ecosystem)]
That sounds horrible. Why do I want 20 different pieces of software to buy stuff?
Am I the only one who enjoys iTunes, especially iTunes 11 on Mavericks? I love that I can see CD covers on my desktop, at the roughly size of real CD cover nonetheless (old habit from CD era I know, but it's such a joy especially when it changes according to the song played)..
And my library is neat. Home Sharing is awesome. Smart Playlists, how can I praise it enough. Up Next feature is God-send. iTunes Radio is priceless for discover or re-discover music, and it's free. And coupled with Singer Song Reader, which is free, I got lyrics automatically downloaded to the songs played. Wow! I like it so much I even bought songs from it for the first time in my life.
It works fine for me. And with iOS 8 the iTunes Store on the iDevice has been greatly improved and actually loads fast now, it was a pig in iOS 7.
iTunes has become a bloated mess in every sense of the term. It has become the kind of unmitigated disaster that Microsoft was famous for. I simply avoid it whenever I can.
Way past time for Apple to thoroughly re-imagine and re-create what is still perhaps the most important, valuable piece of software in the iOS ecosystem.
It seems to have quite a hefty binary size at 40MB when it's mostly just playing back music tracks but they've made it into a device management and content purchasing app, which the original SoundJam never was.
I find the online stores including the Mac App Store work excruciatingly slowly. I visit Amazon and pages load quickly but the App Store, it's always the 'accessing iTunes store....' loading bar, which I gather must be for caching data before showing it but it can load the text first and asynchronously load the image content, there should be no pausing like that. The device management side can also be slow as it always goes through the whole backup/sync routine even if I just want to drop a song on a device or pull a photo off.
I actually think the OS should take care of the playback so that you don't have to load iTunes to do this. They have widgets in the Notification Panel now so a small media player can go in there and this can launch iTunes movies too.
The new Spotlight can be used for finding tracks to play. One feature that I think would be nice is being able to search songs by lyrics. Sometimes I get a tune in my head that I know a line from but not what the song was. Google can get it but Apple can limit the search more easily to my own library of music or at least music in general. Being able to hum/whistle a part to Siri to figure it out would be useful too.
The lightweight music player can let you sort music so you'd be able to delete, rename, rate tracks and add them to playlists from the mini player.
I also don't like the idea of going to a digital store for music because it's not really something that needs to be browsed through excruciatingly slowly. The music player sidebar can have a box that lets me put in a search for 'Fall Out Boy' and it just brings up a list of songs in seconds. I shouldn't need to go to a store, sit and wait on the pages loading image content. This should then let me stream the full songs but if they need to protect the tracks, they can put some audio on top at certain intervals - an audio watermark - but one that isn't irritating to hear. One thing they can do is just crop a tiny portion out so it makes an audio hiccup, even doing that 1-2 times during an audio track means people won't try to capture the track for free.
The buy button can be right next to search results or a subscription button to allow access.
The big thing is discoverability and this needs to use songs I like. They take the whole privacy side seriously, which is fine so they don't need my IP but take my offline tracks list and play count and give me a 'recommended for you' streaming playlist. I don't want to have to go looking for things based on my playlist when I can't send my playlist because I have to do it manually.
"Simply handing over your iPod to a friend, your blind date, or the total stranger sitting next to you on the plane opens you up like a book," Steven Levy wrote in The Perfect Thing. "All somebody needs to do is scroll through your library on that click wheel, and, musically speaking, you're naked. It's not just what you like — it's who you are." So one day, when we were sitting in his living room listening to music, I asked Jobs to let me see his. As we sat there, he flicked through his favorite songs. Not surprisingly, there were all six volumes of Dylan's bootleg series, including the tracks Jobs had first started worshipping when he and Wozniak were
able to score them on reel-to-reel tapes years before the series was officially released."
They have 500m customers but aren't looking at how they listen to music - they'll track how they buy music from their store but do they really think that everyone with 5000 tracks has spent ~$5k on music? The majority of music is going to be shared between friends so the way to make a sale in future is to profile listening habits. Same with movies.
Notifications are annoying if they are spamming items to buy but they can take these anonymized profiles and tailor a 'what's new' section to show new music and movies in the past month that you'd like to see. I don't care what romantic comedies or kids movies are popular right now, I care about what I want to see so track what I watch and tell me what's related to that. It should let me add and remove items or rate items that it uses for the profile. I might see a movie at a friend's house that I liked that the profile would never pick up on so I should be able to add it.
This might go a bit too far but that's the kind of thing that would work quite well for a social network - matching up content interests. Not that everyone who matches has the same interests but you never know. It could be a way of finding new friends or partners more easily than doing it manually. It could just say there are iTunes users who match your viewing habits, do you want to connect with them and you can ignore it if you don't. It doesn't have to say what's matched, just have a percentage match and anonymous ids. Then you can send iMessages to each other - it can use rough locale to use as a percentage match so that it's more likely you'll find people with similar interests nearby. They'll know payment info so who's single, who has kids etc and ages to be able to keep it safe and avoid people with the same names so you don't end up hooking up with your sister: 'we've found a match for your viewing habits, she's in the next room, should we put some romantic music on?'.
In short, iTunes needs to be faster to get to music, especially new music and other content and more personal.
To this I agree. Although I was thinking IBM/Lotus Notes as the unmitigated disaster (the app everyone has to use and everyone hates now that a real internet model has come to fruition).
Apple needs to decouple and build an 'app family'
Books
Movies
Music
stuff I've bought/uploaded/downloaded...
stuff I desire/could-desire to listen to...
curated/genned streams of music [pseudo radio]
Real Radio (streams of OTA/Satellite radio)
TV Shows
Pod casts
audio
video
etc. etc.
all need their own app set... maybe one DB in the back end, and a 'department store' mega app (like ITMS is now) but with boutique app-stores built around the end user and the end product
That's what I understand the Beats Purchase was supposed to do on the 'front end'
(the back end was to use Jimmy to swing the deals that Apple's corporate aura couldn't schmooze out of the labels and artists)
[And stuff like syncing and device management... build that into the Mac System Preferences layer (preferences on how to manage 'your' iOS ecosystem)]
Yeah, becayse people will just LOVE setting up sync settings in 10 different programs, instead of 1.
My 2 cents.. hopefully I won't get trolled like every other time I post on AI:
The year for music hasn't been that great from artists. There have been a few really good artist releases, but not enough to stave off a lower sales year from the industry. There are still big albums being released closer to Christmas, so 13% for the year off might not end so low after another month. Taylor Swift's album is expected to sell 800,000 in the first week. That has to factor in somewhere for Apple's revenues.
Then, there's the whole vinyl hipster crowd, that is buying new records in a non-digital format. It's not likely that those people will buy in vinyl and digital.
Maybe the decline is from the fact that artists don't make any money selling music anymore. Touring is the only way. When you go on tour everyone wants to hear the past and not have new music introduced. Where is the incentive to make new music that is your best work? How many artists end with their last recordings being their best? Very few. Digital is going to kill the quality of music or maybe it already has.
Sorry, my bad. Since you said you were on "10.9.5 + 8.1" I assumed that you weren't running iTunes 12 (thought it was Yosemite only).
Is iTunes "bloated"? Compared to an app that does one and only one thing, absolutely. Having said that, for all the things it does, it's incredibly streamlined. Not counting the basics (apple, iTunes, File, Edit, Help) it only has 4 menus (View, Controls, Store, Window) and none of them are especially long. So comparing this to anything from Microsoft is a joke. And it's gotten better in recent versions. As others have said here, I don't see how we'd be happier if Apple blew this up into 10 different apps when people just want a media player/management app.
Expanding on the idea of a social network is social playlists. People used to make mixed tapes manually but it's so easy now doing it digitally. iTunes can have a system of tags like twitter does and these can be used in marketing material. A billboard can have something like 'check out our new album ?Maroon5' and using that tag would be a playlist for their latest album. Again, no visiting a store, this just goes into the player and you listen instantly. People can share these tags on twitter for playlists they make themselves but they'd choose a unique prefix id first to make sure it's not frustrating to make tags. twitter could then interpret these for multiple devices and data detectors can let someone play the list immediately. So you'd get couples on Valentines day tweeting or iMessaging audio mixes like a modern-day mixed tape. Disney would have a prefix like ?Disney and they'd append a movie name like ?Disney-frozen and that tag would give you the movie's soundtrack without having to browse the store and this tag can be on their promo material.
This is what I'd like to see for all media content. People share Youtube movies like this all the time but Youtube is just amateur content. Why can't I embed a link to a book at a certain page for a quote, a mainstream movie or music? All iTunes content can be accessible this way but the only way it can work is by getting rid of the paywall. This can be via subscription or just find a way to make it viewable without it being copiable. Links to mainstream movies and TV shows can perhaps be restricted to scenes or time limits like Vine clips. If you try to see more, it can then prompt to pay somehow.
Please stop making really stupid assumptions. It's quite likely that my computer set-up is perhaps a tad better than yours.
You and Slurpy should stop acting like I kicked your cat or something.
Grow up. Or take your meds. Or whatever.
That does not speak well for your computer. I have a creaky old 2006 Mac Pro that runs iTunes without a hitch. In fact, I also own what is likely the slowest Mac that can run iTunes 12, a 2008 MacBook Air running Lion, and again, performance is fine. Heck, I have a G4 Cube running iTunes 9.2.1 with only 384 MB of RAM and it's not that bad.
So I have doubts whenever anyone complains that iTunes is bloated.
A lot of media is linked - the book of the film, the podcast and the movie, the music to the movie, etc. One of iTune's strength is that it links all these when searching. This can obviously be done in a web page but I am not sure the web page would be any quicker, or any easier to manage. It would be a drag to have to jump from app to app to look for the particular edit one is after. Having said that I would prefer to separate everything to individual apps with a shared search functionality. I am looking forward to Beats. I refuse to use Google play.
We are in violent agreement.
The apps can link where appropriate and there's no reason why I can't buy a DVD in the Movies app, that doesn't include a link to the ebook that automatically opens in the iBooks app. And there's no reason what a 'spotlight' capabilility couldn't be built into every app to show 'things related to your search intent' and let people cross link if they want.
(we should only assume it's a drag because of the current HW... in a couple years, context switching in iOS should introduce little neck jarring breaks in the user experience.)
And I'm not saying the store has to be cratered, I'm saying iTunes (the app[s]) can't be all things. Separate and Simplify.
As suggested by me and others, just pulling out radio,streaming,podcasts and sync removes a lot of interface cruft that has to work together now in QA... (The complexity of an app goes up minimally by the square of the functions. In iTunes' (the App) case, it's the cube, because it's a music manager/player, a device sync tool, and a retail store front).
Yeah, becayse people will just LOVE setting up sync settings in 10 different programs, instead of 1.
That's closer to the truth now. iTunes, iphoto, Contacts, Mail, reminders, iMessage, Pages/Numbers/Keynote etc etc. all have different syncing control methods.
iTunes Sync was a good idea when you had an iPod Classic. As soon as the the iPhone arrived, a new sync tool was needed.
If you look at syncing 2-to-many devices, I think the metaphor of managing printer devices is the better model.
take the Sync windows from iTunes, change the view to show all devices previously synced, and move to systems preferences. you connect a device that you want to add to your sync, pop up the prefs screen with 'add device' and configure. Done. Then like Printer Manager, when a syncing opportunity presents itself, the sync control app starts, gives you an operational interface to complete the sync, manage errors, etc.
When I'm syncing 2 devices now, the interface sucks big time, with the iTunes control window alternating status displays, showing my music playing, my CD burning, my DVD importing, all in the same little portal. Stupid.
1 operational program, one system pref panel with an Sys Pref App that we all have to use anyway, using an existing device management metaphor.
I'm actually surprised it's only 13%, my family hasn't bought anything from the iTunes store for at least a year. I don't think I can remember the last time I even started iTunes. I've moved on to Spotify and haven't looked back. I periodically buy vinyl records to keep my collection fresh and that's it. Movies, I will buy physical media until they stop making them, I will fight DRM until as long as I can, not because I'm against paying, I pay for everything, but if the media doesn't play on every single platform I use including Unix, I want nothing to do with it. Especially media that requires a particular program to be used to play that media, yuck.
That's closer to the truth now. iTunes, iphoto, Contacts, Mail, reminders, iMessage, Pages/Numbers/Keynote etc etc. all have different syncing control methods.
iTunes Sync was a good idea when you had an iPod Classic. As soon as the the iPhone arrived, a new sync tool was needed.
If you look at syncing 2-to-many devices, I think the metaphor of managing printer devices is the better model.
take the Sync windows from iTunes, change the view to show all devices previously synced, and move to systems preferences. you connect a device that you want to add to your sync, pop up the prefs screen with 'add device' and configure. Done. Then like Printer Manager, when a syncing opportunity presents itself, the sync control app starts, gives you an operational interface to complete the sync, manage errors, etc.
When I'm syncing 2 devices now, the interface sucks big time, with the iTunes control window alternating status displays, showing my music playing, my CD burning, my DVD importing, all in the same little portal. Stupid.
1 operational program, one system pref panel with an Sys Pref App that we all have to use anyway, using an existing device management metaphor.
I know iOS can't do this, Android can but in OSX why don't you just use your cloud storage as the main HD. Just have which ever program you use, save and open it's files directly to/from the the cloud. I don't think I have actually used sync in 2 years. In Windows I use OneDrive, Chrome OS, Google Drive, OSX I use OneDrive and iCloud depending on the program. This also includes media applications.. Anything you save to your iCloud drive is automatically synced to both your HD and cloud, including iTunes, just move the directory path. Forget about all of that fancy syncing crap, never works the way it's supposed to anyway.
This time it needs to be international from day one. The wait for international launch each time Apple introduces a media solution is paving the way for other crappy alternatives. (iTunes Radio, I'm watching you!) Apple has been like this before though. Once they decided to trash an old idea, and go with a new model, they simply stop developing the existing offer. iTunes Match, for instance, is very slow to sync, and it has not been fixed. Apple is probably instead working on an entirely new solution with Beats.
If iTunes sales are off, then Apple needs to look at the quality of the email advertising they do. The stuff I get in my email is bland as boiled barley. I am far more likely to click through on the Amazon email, and have been surprised at the quality of the GooglePlay email ads. (I don't buy from GooglePlay because of the Android connection. I also get email from the Nook store, but have avoided shopping there because it would make my music and eBooks too hard to handle.)
On the strength of their advertising, I buy a lot of eBooks and music from Amazon. While on the Amazon site I'm more likely to buy a used CD or used hard copy book then buy their mp3 music or their new hard copy books. That said, their well produced email offers got me to their site where the email from Apple doesn't do it for me.
I will often go to the iTunes store when looking for a song that's a bit obscure. Apple offers more variety of a song by various artists, or a song made popular by a vocal artist may be available in an instrumental version and Apple will have it where Amazon won't. The iTunes store is easier to shop for music than the Amazon store, so I go there to find what I want. Their ads rarely ever pull me to the site.
Another thing Amazon does to pull me to their store is to look at what I buy or have in my wish list or have searched for — and that is how their email ads are constructed/targeted. Apple must send out the same damned email to every one of their customers because it's a shear accident anything they are promoting is akin to what I usually buy.
I use iTunes daily both at home (2007 iMac) and work (Win 7 HP). I'm totally baffled at when people call iTunes "bloated" or call it's interface too busy, confusing and such. To me, it's a breeze to use (of course I have my minor quibbles) and I can't imagine my digital life without it.
As far as purchasing well, iTunes is my go to for all music, books and TV shows. I mostly still buy Blu-ray movies but more and more I'm buying movies from iTunes. Looking through my history, I've purchased eight albums and numerous singles so far this year.
When people talk of splitting iTunes up, I always think of the Podcast app for iOS and the iBooks app for Mac Both are really problematic. The podcast app doesn't sync properly and I still can't find a way for it not to mirror my Mac. The Mac iBooks app is a real nightmare for finding your book files. In short, you can't (as far as I can tell). It also doesn't let you change any of the ID tags for your book files. If these examples are what we can expect with a broken up iTunes, I want no part of it.
Comments
I also wind up with recordings from European labels that you won’t find on iTunes or some ‘curated’ streaming service. Subscription/smorgasbord services just don’t do it for me.
I don't know much about classical music although I bought a couple dozen random titles at the music store a number of years ago just to round out our music collection. Now I mostly listen to new acoustic singer/songwriter style from relatively unknown artists which is why I like DJ mixed internet radio or satellite since I would never find those artists on my own and the DJ has already identified the best tracks on the album.
Start by separating store and sync (managing devices). Then work on the awful UI.
Using iTunes should be a pleasure, not penance.
Apple needs to decouple and build an 'app family'
all need their own app set... maybe one DB in the back end, and a 'department store' mega app (like ITMS is now) but with boutique app-stores built around the end user and the end product
That's what I understand the Beats Purchase was supposed to do on the 'front end'
(the back end was to use Jimmy to swing the deals that Apple's corporate aura couldn't schmooze out of the labels and artists)
[And stuff like syncing and device management... build that into the Mac System Preferences layer (preferences on how to manage 'your' iOS ecosystem)]
A lot of media is linked - the book of the film, the podcast and the movie, the music to the movie, etc. One of iTune's strength is that it links all these when searching. This can obviously be done in a web page but I am not sure the web page would be any quicker, or any easier to manage. It would be a drag to have to jump from app to app to look for the particular edit one is after. Having said that I would prefer to separate everything to individual apps with a shared search functionality. I am looking forward to Beats. I refuse to use Google play.
What the heck? I seriously have to wonder what kind of crappy computers the people who whine about iTunes use. I'm running it on an eight year old Mac and it runs without issue. iTunes 8-10 was slow, yes, but 11 and 12 have been quite good.
Yeah, people who care about sound quality (a growing niche) won't bother with cloud services.
Pretty much.
This.
That sounds horrible. Why do I want 20 different pieces of software to buy stuff?
It works fine for me. And with iOS 8 the iTunes Store on the iDevice has been greatly improved and actually loads fast now, it was a pig in iOS 7.
It seems to have quite a hefty binary size at 40MB when it's mostly just playing back music tracks but they've made it into a device management and content purchasing app, which the original SoundJam never was.
I find the online stores including the Mac App Store work excruciatingly slowly. I visit Amazon and pages load quickly but the App Store, it's always the 'accessing iTunes store....' loading bar, which I gather must be for caching data before showing it but it can load the text first and asynchronously load the image content, there should be no pausing like that. The device management side can also be slow as it always goes through the whole backup/sync routine even if I just want to drop a song on a device or pull a photo off.
I actually think the OS should take care of the playback so that you don't have to load iTunes to do this. They have widgets in the Notification Panel now so a small media player can go in there and this can launch iTunes movies too.
The new Spotlight can be used for finding tracks to play. One feature that I think would be nice is being able to search songs by lyrics. Sometimes I get a tune in my head that I know a line from but not what the song was. Google can get it but Apple can limit the search more easily to my own library of music or at least music in general. Being able to hum/whistle a part to Siri to figure it out would be useful too.
The lightweight music player can let you sort music so you'd be able to delete, rename, rate tracks and add them to playlists from the mini player.
I also don't like the idea of going to a digital store for music because it's not really something that needs to be browsed through excruciatingly slowly. The music player sidebar can have a box that lets me put in a search for 'Fall Out Boy' and it just brings up a list of songs in seconds. I shouldn't need to go to a store, sit and wait on the pages loading image content. This should then let me stream the full songs but if they need to protect the tracks, they can put some audio on top at certain intervals - an audio watermark - but one that isn't irritating to hear. One thing they can do is just crop a tiny portion out so it makes an audio hiccup, even doing that 1-2 times during an audio track means people won't try to capture the track for free.
The buy button can be right next to search results or a subscription button to allow access.
The big thing is discoverability and this needs to use songs I like. They take the whole privacy side seriously, which is fine so they don't need my IP but take my offline tracks list and play count and give me a 'recommended for you' streaming playlist. I don't want to have to go looking for things based on my playlist when I can't send my playlist because I have to do it manually.
"Simply handing over your iPod to a friend, your blind date, or the total stranger sitting next to you on the plane opens you up like a book," Steven Levy wrote in The Perfect Thing. "All somebody needs to do is scroll through your library on that click wheel, and, musically speaking, you're naked. It's not just what you like — it's who you are." So one day, when we were sitting in his living room listening to music, I asked Jobs to let me see his. As we sat there, he flicked through his favorite songs. Not surprisingly, there were all six volumes of Dylan's bootleg series, including the tracks Jobs had first started worshipping when he and Wozniak were
able to score them on reel-to-reel tapes years before the series was officially released."
They have 500m customers but aren't looking at how they listen to music - they'll track how they buy music from their store but do they really think that everyone with 5000 tracks has spent ~$5k on music? The majority of music is going to be shared between friends so the way to make a sale in future is to profile listening habits. Same with movies.
Notifications are annoying if they are spamming items to buy but they can take these anonymized profiles and tailor a 'what's new' section to show new music and movies in the past month that you'd like to see. I don't care what romantic comedies or kids movies are popular right now, I care about what I want to see so track what I watch and tell me what's related to that. It should let me add and remove items or rate items that it uses for the profile. I might see a movie at a friend's house that I liked that the profile would never pick up on so I should be able to add it.
This might go a bit too far but that's the kind of thing that would work quite well for a social network - matching up content interests. Not that everyone who matches has the same interests but you never know. It could be a way of finding new friends or partners more easily than doing it manually. It could just say there are iTunes users who match your viewing habits, do you want to connect with them and you can ignore it if you don't. It doesn't have to say what's matched, just have a percentage match and anonymous ids. Then you can send iMessages to each other - it can use rough locale to use as a percentage match so that it's more likely you'll find people with similar interests nearby. They'll know payment info so who's single, who has kids etc and ages to be able to keep it safe and avoid people with the same names so you don't end up hooking up with your sister: 'we've found a match for your viewing habits, she's in the next room, should we put some romantic music on?'.
In short, iTunes needs to be faster to get to music, especially new music and other content and more personal.
... and instead repackage the service it acquired as part of a $3 billion acquisition of Beats earlier this year.
Or maybe Apple could just punt and sell Beats Music to Microsoft for $12.5 billion.
You know, make them drastically overpay.
Oh wait. Ballmer isn't at Microsoft any more.
Never mind.
Yeah, becayse people will just LOVE setting up sync settings in 10 different programs, instead of 1.
My 2 cents.. hopefully I won't get trolled like every other time I post on AI:
The year for music hasn't been that great from artists. There have been a few really good artist releases, but not enough to stave off a lower sales year from the industry. There are still big albums being released closer to Christmas, so 13% for the year off might not end so low after another month. Taylor Swift's album is expected to sell 800,000 in the first week. That has to factor in somewhere for Apple's revenues.
Then, there's the whole vinyl hipster crowd, that is buying new records in a non-digital format. It's not likely that those people will buy in vinyl and digital.
Maybe the decline is from the fact that artists don't make any money selling music anymore. Touring is the only way. When you go on tour everyone wants to hear the past and not have new music introduced. Where is the incentive to make new music that is your best work? How many artists end with their last recordings being their best? Very few. Digital is going to kill the quality of music or maybe it already has.
What makes you think I am not?
Sorry, my bad. Since you said you were on "10.9.5 + 8.1" I assumed that you weren't running iTunes 12 (thought it was Yosemite only).
Is iTunes "bloated"? Compared to an app that does one and only one thing, absolutely. Having said that, for all the things it does, it's incredibly streamlined. Not counting the basics (apple, iTunes, File, Edit, Help) it only has 4 menus (View, Controls, Store, Window) and none of them are especially long. So comparing this to anything from Microsoft is a joke. And it's gotten better in recent versions. As others have said here, I don't see how we'd be happier if Apple blew this up into 10 different apps when people just want a media player/management app.
What the heck? I seriously have to wonder what kind of crappy computers the people who whine about iTunes use.
Pretty much.
Please stop making really stupid assumptions. It's quite likely that my computer set-up is perhaps a tad better than yours.
You and Slurpy should stop acting like I kicked your cat or something.
Grow up. Or take your meds. Or whatever.
This is what I'd like to see for all media content. People share Youtube movies like this all the time but Youtube is just amateur content. Why can't I embed a link to a book at a certain page for a quote, a mainstream movie or music? All iTunes content can be accessible this way but the only way it can work is by getting rid of the paywall. This can be via subscription or just find a way to make it viewable without it being copiable. Links to mainstream movies and TV shows can perhaps be restricted to scenes or time limits like Vine clips. If you try to see more, it can then prompt to pay somehow.
That does not speak well for your computer. I have a creaky old 2006 Mac Pro that runs iTunes without a hitch. In fact, I also own what is likely the slowest Mac that can run iTunes 12, a 2008 MacBook Air running Lion, and again, performance is fine. Heck, I have a G4 Cube running iTunes 9.2.1 with only 384 MB of RAM and it's not that bad.
So I have doubts whenever anyone complains that iTunes is bloated.
A lot of media is linked - the book of the film, the podcast and the movie, the music to the movie, etc. One of iTune's strength is that it links all these when searching. This can obviously be done in a web page but I am not sure the web page would be any quicker, or any easier to manage. It would be a drag to have to jump from app to app to look for the particular edit one is after. Having said that I would prefer to separate everything to individual apps with a shared search functionality. I am looking forward to Beats. I refuse to use Google play.
We are in violent agreement.
The apps can link where appropriate and there's no reason why I can't buy a DVD in the Movies app, that doesn't include a link to the ebook that automatically opens in the iBooks app. And there's no reason what a 'spotlight' capabilility couldn't be built into every app to show 'things related to your search intent' and let people cross link if they want.
(we should only assume it's a drag because of the current HW... in a couple years, context switching in iOS should introduce little neck jarring breaks in the user experience.)
And I'm not saying the store has to be cratered, I'm saying iTunes (the app[s]) can't be all things. Separate and Simplify.
As suggested by me and others, just pulling out radio,streaming,podcasts and sync removes a lot of interface cruft that has to work together now in QA... (The complexity of an app goes up minimally by the square of the functions. In iTunes' (the App) case, it's the cube, because it's a music manager/player, a device sync tool, and a retail store front).
Yeah, becayse people will just LOVE setting up sync settings in 10 different programs, instead of 1.
That's closer to the truth now. iTunes, iphoto, Contacts, Mail, reminders, iMessage, Pages/Numbers/Keynote etc etc. all have different syncing control methods.
iTunes Sync was a good idea when you had an iPod Classic. As soon as the the iPhone arrived, a new sync tool was needed.
If you look at syncing 2-to-many devices, I think the metaphor of managing printer devices is the better model.
take the Sync windows from iTunes, change the view to show all devices previously synced, and move to systems preferences. you connect a device that you want to add to your sync, pop up the prefs screen with 'add device' and configure. Done. Then like Printer Manager, when a syncing opportunity presents itself, the sync control app starts, gives you an operational interface to complete the sync, manage errors, etc.
When I'm syncing 2 devices now, the interface sucks big time, with the iTunes control window alternating status displays, showing my music playing, my CD burning, my DVD importing, all in the same little portal. Stupid.
1 operational program, one system pref panel with an Sys Pref App that we all have to use anyway, using an existing device management metaphor.
I'm actually surprised it's only 13%, my family hasn't bought anything from the iTunes store for at least a year. I don't think I can remember the last time I even started iTunes. I've moved on to Spotify and haven't looked back. I periodically buy vinyl records to keep my collection fresh and that's it. Movies, I will buy physical media until they stop making them, I will fight DRM until as long as I can, not because I'm against paying, I pay for everything, but if the media doesn't play on every single platform I use including Unix, I want nothing to do with it. Especially media that requires a particular program to be used to play that media, yuck.
That's closer to the truth now. iTunes, iphoto, Contacts, Mail, reminders, iMessage, Pages/Numbers/Keynote etc etc. all have different syncing control methods.
iTunes Sync was a good idea when you had an iPod Classic. As soon as the the iPhone arrived, a new sync tool was needed.
If you look at syncing 2-to-many devices, I think the metaphor of managing printer devices is the better model.
take the Sync windows from iTunes, change the view to show all devices previously synced, and move to systems preferences. you connect a device that you want to add to your sync, pop up the prefs screen with 'add device' and configure. Done. Then like Printer Manager, when a syncing opportunity presents itself, the sync control app starts, gives you an operational interface to complete the sync, manage errors, etc.
When I'm syncing 2 devices now, the interface sucks big time, with the iTunes control window alternating status displays, showing my music playing, my CD burning, my DVD importing, all in the same little portal. Stupid.
1 operational program, one system pref panel with an Sys Pref App that we all have to use anyway, using an existing device management metaphor.
I know iOS can't do this, Android can but in OSX why don't you just use your cloud storage as the main HD. Just have which ever program you use, save and open it's files directly to/from the the cloud. I don't think I have actually used sync in 2 years. In Windows I use OneDrive, Chrome OS, Google Drive, OSX I use OneDrive and iCloud depending on the program. This also includes media applications.. Anything you save to your iCloud drive is automatically synced to both your HD and cloud, including iTunes, just move the directory path. Forget about all of that fancy syncing crap, never works the way it's supposed to anyway.
On the strength of their advertising, I buy a lot of eBooks and music from Amazon. While on the Amazon site I'm more likely to buy a used CD or used hard copy book then buy their mp3 music or their new hard copy books. That said, their well produced email offers got me to their site where the email from Apple doesn't do it for me.
I will often go to the iTunes store when looking for a song that's a bit obscure. Apple offers more variety of a song by various artists, or a song made popular by a vocal artist may be available in an instrumental version and Apple will have it where Amazon won't. The iTunes store is easier to shop for music than the Amazon store, so I go there to find what I want. Their ads rarely ever pull me to the site.
Another thing Amazon does to pull me to their store is to look at what I buy or have in my wish list or have searched for — and that is how their email ads are constructed/targeted. Apple must send out the same damned email to every one of their customers because it's a shear accident anything they are promoting is akin to what I usually buy.
I use iTunes daily both at home (2007 iMac) and work (Win 7 HP). I'm totally baffled at when people call iTunes "bloated" or call it's interface too busy, confusing and such. To me, it's a breeze to use (of course I have my minor quibbles) and I can't imagine my digital life without it.
As far as purchasing well, iTunes is my go to for all music, books and TV shows. I mostly still buy Blu-ray movies but more and more I'm buying movies from iTunes. Looking through my history, I've purchased eight albums and numerous singles so far this year.
When people talk of splitting iTunes up, I always think of the Podcast app for iOS and the iBooks app for Mac Both are really problematic. The podcast app doesn't sync properly and I still can't find a way for it not to mirror my Mac. The Mac iBooks app is a real nightmare for finding your book files. In short, you can't (as far as I can tell). It also doesn't let you change any of the ID tags for your book files. If these examples are what we can expect with a broken up iTunes, I want no part of it.