Apple does well when it reinvents something. But in music, Apple has recently allowed streaming music services to reinvent one of Apple's bread and butter businesses. Apple was then late to incorporate radio and Shazam into their platforms--a nice touch--but not ground breaking today. I think simply making Beats Music cheaper and adding it to the iTunes brand will not reinvent streaming music, any more than Beats already did.
Why is reinvention important here? Because that is Apple's secret sauce against entrenched encumbants. Apple reinvented the phone and tablet, and before that, the way we bought music and carried it with us. And they're reinventing the cloud and with continuity, they're reinventing the way we use our different (otherwise competing) technology form factors. When Apple hasn't reinvented something, they've stumbled. For example, Ping was an attempt to duplicate what? Twitter? If Apple is not going to be first to market, they had better shake things up if they want to get a major piece of pie, or else quit and do something they can reinvent.
Music discovery is huge, and others are racing ahead. Thinking back on the last dozen songs or albums I've purchased, most were simply heard in the wild and identified through Shazam. IMO, Apple took 1-year too long to integrate it into iOS. Others were heard on XM radio while driving. I also used to browse the previews of my iTunes genius recommendations--those are sometimes pretty good. After I started tuning into iTunes Internet radio, I started buying music heard there too, but I can't find stations/collections that I consistently like without frequently clicking the "next track" button. So, yes, Apple needs to get busy changing the way he hear and buy music. Whether it is purchased by song, album, or rented per month. Keeping up is not an option.
Originally posted by anantksundaram: "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."
Fully agree. Apple has a crown jewel in iTunes, which does a fine job of managing my music collection, In my opinion, sometime next year, Apple will re-energize (revolutionize?) iTunes, perhaps in conjunction with the next generation Apple TV, and sweep us off our feet.
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.
The new iTunes is indeed better than the previous version except for the fact that you still can't double click on the upper border and make it go to the doc like every other App.
I blame the music industry for declining sales- the quality of music itself has greatly diminished over the year.s This generation sadly has no great music - only hip hop for which Beats was created out of. I would never in a million years subscribe to Beats and still baffled why Apple paid $3Billion for it?
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).
Dude, don't just make stuff up so it sounds sophisticated and technical. There are plenty of software design patterns that don't cause complexity to increase exponentially. In fact, with later revisions to iTunes Apple has been doing exactly that. More functions are now completely hidden until you're in the relevant mode. For example, unless/until you click on .../Podcasts, you see nothing about Podcasts. I'm sure the underlying code has minimized dependencies between various media modules as well.
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.
I'm curious how you're successful in playing all your physical media on all your devices. Aren't their plenty of DVDs and Blu-Ray titles out there that don't come with a digital copy (and/or require a higher price for that?). So how are you playing your Blu-Rays on your MacBook or your DVDs on your iPad?
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)]
At first I was going to write that I really didn't understand the iTunes complaints and that it's not a mess. But then when I started thinking about the problems that did exist, I realized that it actually is a mess. Still usable, but a mess. Having said that, it almost doesn't matter because once you download a track from a store or upload it from a CD and place it in a playlist, you really don't have to think about it anymore or even go to iTunes if you only listen on portable devices, as I do.
But I do think there are problems:
- For neophyte users, it's at least a two stage process: downloading a track AND putting it into a playlist. I find that many people I help out don't understand that concept.
The way it should really work is that iTunes should "know" how much space you have left on your devices and have a default playlist that new music automatically goes to. It should "fill up" up until the amount of space you have available.
- The default view of "My Music" should be whatever the last view was, not "Albums".
- In the Album view, under "Recently Added", it's showing some individual tracks (that are audio files, but not music) that have nothing to do with albums, so they shouldn't be showing in that view at all. They have no album metadata.
- The "Composer" view works differently than other views. Only one composer shows up at a time. They have to be selected from the left hand list. Whereas if you select "Artist", you get every album and you don't have to make selections from the left hand list. Seems to me that's illogical and inconsistent.
- In the Genre view, "OIdies" is listed twice, both spelled exactly the same. It should recognize that's the same genre. And there's "Unclassifiable", "Unknown Genre" and "Unknown genre". Seems to me iTunes should be able to clean that up.
- Most of my holdings were actually uploaded from CDs, and iTunes added the metadata, but not genres, so most of my tracks are unclassified, thereby making Genre selection useless.
- It doesn't make sense that you can add tracks to "Purchased on iPhone" and the Songbird subcategories. Why does Songbird even exist?
- There's nothing in my "recently played" list. How can that be?
- If you delete a track from within iTunes, it works, but if you delete the actual file, iTunes doesn't recognize that it's gone - it should.
- sometimes wireless sync doesn't work or it takes a long time to recognize a new track.
- once you realize it's there, it's fine, but the iPhone icon in the menu bar is a bit too subtle, IMO.
- iTunes store: I don't think anyone has found the solution yet to searching for music when you don't really know what you want. I'm not sure anyone will. When I try this, I usually get frustrated not being able to find something new that I like and just stop.
- I completely disagree with those who feel that each media type in iTunes should have its own application. Now that would be a mess.
- IMO, the big mess is the photos app and associated synching. I find it indecipherable and inflexible when it should be a no-brainer. After resynching from a saved folder (after an iOS upgrade that crashed) I now have lots of images on the phone that can't be deleted from the phone. Also, it seems to me that when you edit images and/or move them to folders, it makes copies of those images in at least some cases, thereby taking up lots of unnecessary space on the phone. Everything in a folder should either really be in that folder or it should be a pointer. It should never be a duplicate file.
- And I just noticed in the iPhone view of Music, there's no vertical scroll bar so while I can see Playlists and Artists, I can't scroll down to see Genres and Albums and anything below that. But in any case, it's inconsistent that I can make these selections to chose what to synch for music, but for photos, I can't see my photos and can only choose a folder.
- Pandora and Spotify are far more advanced and useful than iTunes radio. Don't even know why Apple bothered.
about 5 yrs ago, owning physical media for digital content (i.e. CDs) seemed antiquated.
now owning digital content itself seems antiquated.
just let me access anything at any time either via the cloud or local cache
But only if you prefer to rent your music which many people prefer not to do. Sell thru of music still brings the bread and bacon home to the media companies.
Also those who use these services, like Spotify prefer the free version. Very very few actually pony up the money each month for a paid subscription.
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.
But do you pay for Spotify because most of the subscribers who listen to Spotty prefer and only use the free version. Free music does not = a healthy music industry.
<div class="quote-container" data-huddler-embed="/t/183038/itunes-sales-down-13-this-year-as-apple-plans-to-rebuild-rebrand-beats-music-subscription-service/40#post_2626808" data-huddler-embed-placeholder="false">Quote:<div class="quote-block">Originally Posted by <strong>Relic</strong> <a href="/t/183038/itunes-sales-down-13-this-year-as-apple-plans-to-rebuild-rebrand-beats-music-subscription-service/40#post_2626808"><img alt="View Post" src="/img/forum/go_quote.gif" /></a><br /> <p>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.</p></div></div><p><br />I'm curious how you're successful in playing all your physical media on all your devices. Aren't their plenty of DVDs and Blu-Ray titles out there that don't come with a digital copy (and/or require a higher price for that?). So how are you playing your Blu-Rays on your MacBook or your DVDs on your iPad?</p>
Yes, thank you, I circumvent the DRM on DVD's and Bluray's, though I still obtain the original. We have two, 200 disc Sony BluRay changer, JukeBox's where we store the good ones. Since the BluRay system can be accessed via the network, I use a Nvidia Jetson K1 development board to rip and than encode the BluRays to MP4, I use the GPU instead of the CPU via a program written in CUDA, encoding time takes less than 30 minutes, sometimes 45, depending on how large the file is, where if you were to use say a MacBook Air with a mobile i7 it would take hours. True testament to GPU computing. I wrote a program that does all of this automatically ever time a new disc is inserted into the system, it than uploads the newly created media file to the cloud.
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.
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.
Totally agree. I use the store on a need to basis and even then I find myself saying " do I really want to put myself through this ? " and then blow it off anyway.
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 think most will agree the player is better. It's the store that is a disaster. It's just not fun to use anymore and sales show this. Why can't we search by producer or engineer or mixer or label? Discographys seem to be in random orders and the sort by options never stick. I could go on but man it's just a mess, it really is.
about 5 yrs ago, owning physical media for digital content (i.e. CDs) seemed antiquated.
now owning digital content itself seems antiquated.
just let me access anything at any time either via the cloud or local cache
I would agree since any thing new coming out of the music industry suck the songs have no value beyond the short listening horizon. I have not bought anything in a long time since I own what I want to own. The music is so bad these days and the radio and such over play the few songs which with have a catch beat which drive most people to listen.
People listen to a song for a period of time and move on and never want to hear that song again. This is the issue today, you do not have artists who are spending time in writing and composing an entire album with is fill with good songs with staying power. Yes I know there are some people who like everything a single artist may put out, but is not the mass appear of the Band from 30+ plus years ago. You know most of those bands are still tours and packing venues with people of all ages. Even these band are not putting out new stuff and the studios are just remixing the old stuff in hope people will buy it one more time. Keep in mind these bands (record companies) sold their music on singles record, LP, 8-tracks, Cassettes, CD and not digital down loads, and one you have it digitally you never need to buy it again. But wait record company are putting Vinyl out again since there is a group would will buy it yet again.
This is not an iTunes issue it is the sad state of the music industries and now they suckering people to pay a fee each months for crap music which they know they could not sell otherwise.
Yes, thank you, I circumvent the DRM on DVD's and Bluray's, though I still obtain the original. We have two, 200 disc Sony BluRay changer, JukeBox's where we store the good ones. Since the BluRay system can be accessed via the network, I use a Nvidia Jetson K1 development board to rip and than encode the BluRays to MP4, I use the GPU instead of the CPU via a program written in CUDA, encoding time takes less than 30 minutes, sometimes 45, depending on how large the file is, where if you were to use say a MacBook Air with a mobile i7 it would take hours. True testament to GPU computing. I wrote a program that does all of this automatically ever time a new disc is inserted into the system, it than uploads the newly created media file to the cloud.
Sorry for stalking you.
Do you ever encode to .mkv? I like to preserve all of the subtitle and audio tracks from the blu ray and .mp4 almost never works reliably.
I use handbrake and it pegs the CPU like nobodies business. It encodes anywhere from 25-60 frames per second for blu ray and closer to around 400 frames per second for a plain old DVD. The rig is an i7-2600k clocked up a bit for fun and an AMD 6870, so nothing super new but works great.
Why does it not surprise me that you rolled your own?
Edit: I forgot to mention that first I need to rip the blu ray to the hard drive with make mkv, then re-encode it. You figured out a slick all in one solution. I take out the blu ray, then rip it, then put it back on the shelf to hopefully never to be touched again, then re-encode it.... good grief.
Do you ever encode to .mkv? I like to preserve all of the subtitle and audio tracks from the blu ray and .mp4 almost never works reliably.
I use handbrake and it pegs the CPU like nobodies business. It encodes anywhere from 25-60 frames per second for blu ray and closer to around 400 frames per second for a plain old DVD. The rig is an i7-2600k clocked up a bit for fun and an AMD 6870, so nothing super new but works great.
Why does it not surprise me that you rolled your own?
Edit: I forgot to mention that first I need to rip the blu ray to the hard drive with make mkv, then re-encode it. You figured out a slick all in one solution. I take out the blu ray, then rip it, then put it back on the shelf to hopefully never to be touched again, then re-encode it.... good grief.
The MP4 container is oddly missing both proper chapter and subtitle support, but Handbrake is suppose to support that just fine with the QuickTime container (which is a variance on the MPEG-4 container which it will end in M4V) for those that use iTunes for their media storage. If you don't use iTunes I see no reason to not use MKV exclusively.
One app I think is well worth it's price despite having some poor UI designers is iVI Pro. This uses a lot of open software that they've put into a streamlined app for converting media as well as grabbing the proper data and posters for movies and TV shows.
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.
Normally I'm the first one to knock down the "Music ain't what it used to be" argument so I can see why people are quick to react to that but you aren't saying that here. You are just saying this particular year hasn't been that great for releases and albums and with that I would totally agree. At the same time something needs to be done about the signal to noise ratio and the cost of music. You're willing to tolerate more noise at a lower price point aka a "B" grade album is worth $9.99 versus an "A" grade might fetch $12.99. The problem is of course everyone thinks their album is worth $12.99 and this is especially true when they add "premium" content like five remixes of the lead single and think they have done something great for you.
So the cost of the product has risen ($9.99 to $12.99) while a competitor has showed up with lower costs. (Streaming for $8-10 a month.) In addition to that the number of big songs or hits hasn't been great this year. All spell lower revenues but there isn't really much Apple can do about that.
Quote:
Originally Posted by lkrupp
I still buy music and always will. I have hundreds of LP albums from my youth as well as CDs and purchased digital content. Since I generally eschew pop music for classical I love having multiple performances of various works and artists. 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.
And I sure as hell don’t consider iTunes to be a bloated mess. It’s a great app and does what it advertises and does it well. I love it that Apple usually never listens to the perpetually underwhelmed and whining crybaby crowd.
I still enjoy iTunes as well. I do think they need to refine the discovery aspects of the program more or perhaps hybridize them with streaming. I'd love to be able to play from my own music on cellular and then play from a hybrid my music/new streaming discovery when on wifi option. I don't think I've seen much of that out there. Apple has a clear advantage in terms of managing the larger storage on the phones they sell and should be encouraging people to still own media that they want locally stored because it makes them buy 128 gig iPhones instead of 16 gig. So tools that allow you to use what is stored but possibly add to it with new purchases would be the best.
Quote:
Originally Posted by cali
The amount of people that want everything for pennies and b**** because they can't is disgusting.
Great content sells itself. It's hard to add premium value to bland music and to bland artists. There are more of said bland artists out there than every before and the tools for finding great stuff need to get better. Information age is a bit of a misnomer in my opinion. It is more the misinformation age with information out there if you have the right tools, time and inclination to sort past the crap. The cost to get past the crap is part of the cost of acquiring the good stuff. Right now people find the cost too high to acquire the good stuff. It isn't just a financial cost. It is sort through hundreds of albums, links or video. They turn on streaming hoping something good will roll past them as an alternative. Better tools can help. That doesn't mean iTunes is terrible or Apple is doing something wrong though.
Comments
Why is reinvention important here? Because that is Apple's secret sauce against entrenched encumbants. Apple reinvented the phone and tablet, and before that, the way we bought music and carried it with us. And they're reinventing the cloud and with continuity, they're reinventing the way we use our different (otherwise competing) technology form factors. When Apple hasn't reinvented something, they've stumbled. For example, Ping was an attempt to duplicate what? Twitter? If Apple is not going to be first to market, they had better shake things up if they want to get a major piece of pie, or else quit and do something they can reinvent.
Music discovery is huge, and others are racing ahead. Thinking back on the last dozen songs or albums I've purchased, most were simply heard in the wild and identified through Shazam. IMO, Apple took 1-year too long to integrate it into iOS. Others were heard on XM radio while driving. I also used to browse the previews of my iTunes genius recommendations--those are sometimes pretty good. After I started tuning into iTunes Internet radio, I started buying music heard there too, but I can't find stations/collections that I consistently like without frequently clicking the "next track" button. So, yes, Apple needs to get busy changing the way he hear and buy music. Whether it is purchased by song, album, or rented per month. Keeping up is not an option.
"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."
Fully agree. Apple has a crown jewel in iTunes, which does a fine job of managing my music collection,
In my opinion, sometime next year, Apple will re-energize (revolutionize?) iTunes, perhaps in conjunction with the next generation Apple TV, and sweep us off our feet.
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.
The new iTunes is indeed better than the previous version except for the fact that you still can't double click on the upper border and make it go to the doc like every other App.
I blame the music industry for declining sales- the quality of music itself has greatly diminished over the year.s This generation sadly has no great music - only hip hop for which Beats was created out of. I would never in a million years subscribe to Beats and still baffled why Apple paid $3Billion for it?
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).
Dude, don't just make stuff up so it sounds sophisticated and technical. There are plenty of software design patterns that don't cause complexity to increase exponentially. In fact, with later revisions to iTunes Apple has been doing exactly that. More functions are now completely hidden until you're in the relevant mode. For example, unless/until you click on .../Podcasts, you see nothing about Podcasts. I'm sure the underlying code has minimized dependencies between various media modules as well.
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.
I'm curious how you're successful in playing all your physical media on all your devices. Aren't their plenty of DVDs and Blu-Ray titles out there that don't come with a digital copy (and/or require a higher price for that?). So how are you playing your Blu-Rays on your MacBook or your DVDs on your iPad?
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'
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)]
Love this idea ! ! !
At first I was going to write that I really didn't understand the iTunes complaints and that it's not a mess. But then when I started thinking about the problems that did exist, I realized that it actually is a mess. Still usable, but a mess. Having said that, it almost doesn't matter because once you download a track from a store or upload it from a CD and place it in a playlist, you really don't have to think about it anymore or even go to iTunes if you only listen on portable devices, as I do.
But I do think there are problems:
- For neophyte users, it's at least a two stage process: downloading a track AND putting it into a playlist. I find that many people I help out don't understand that concept.
The way it should really work is that iTunes should "know" how much space you have left on your devices and have a default playlist that new music automatically goes to. It should "fill up" up until the amount of space you have available.
- The default view of "My Music" should be whatever the last view was, not "Albums".
- In the Album view, under "Recently Added", it's showing some individual tracks (that are audio files, but not music) that have nothing to do with albums, so they shouldn't be showing in that view at all. They have no album metadata.
- The "Composer" view works differently than other views. Only one composer shows up at a time. They have to be selected from the left hand list. Whereas if you select "Artist", you get every album and you don't have to make selections from the left hand list. Seems to me that's illogical and inconsistent.
- In the Genre view, "OIdies" is listed twice, both spelled exactly the same. It should recognize that's the same genre. And there's "Unclassifiable", "Unknown Genre" and "Unknown genre". Seems to me iTunes should be able to clean that up.
- Most of my holdings were actually uploaded from CDs, and iTunes added the metadata, but not genres, so most of my tracks are unclassified, thereby making Genre selection useless.
- It doesn't make sense that you can add tracks to "Purchased on iPhone" and the Songbird subcategories. Why does Songbird even exist?
- There's nothing in my "recently played" list. How can that be?
- If you delete a track from within iTunes, it works, but if you delete the actual file, iTunes doesn't recognize that it's gone - it should.
- sometimes wireless sync doesn't work or it takes a long time to recognize a new track.
- once you realize it's there, it's fine, but the iPhone icon in the menu bar is a bit too subtle, IMO.
- iTunes store: I don't think anyone has found the solution yet to searching for music when you don't really know what you want. I'm not sure anyone will. When I try this, I usually get frustrated not being able to find something new that I like and just stop.
- I completely disagree with those who feel that each media type in iTunes should have its own application. Now that would be a mess.
- IMO, the big mess is the photos app and associated synching. I find it indecipherable and inflexible when it should be a no-brainer. After resynching from a saved folder (after an iOS upgrade that crashed) I now have lots of images on the phone that can't be deleted from the phone. Also, it seems to me that when you edit images and/or move them to folders, it makes copies of those images in at least some cases, thereby taking up lots of unnecessary space on the phone. Everything in a folder should either really be in that folder or it should be a pointer. It should never be a duplicate file.
- And I just noticed in the iPhone view of Music, there's no vertical scroll bar so while I can see Playlists and Artists, I can't scroll down to see Genres and Albums and anything below that. But in any case, it's inconsistent that I can make these selections to chose what to synch for music, but for photos, I can't see my photos and can only choose a folder.
- Pandora and Spotify are far more advanced and useful than iTunes radio. Don't even know why Apple bothered.
about 5 yrs ago, owning physical media for digital content (i.e. CDs) seemed antiquated.
now owning digital content itself seems antiquated.
just let me access anything at any time either via the cloud or local cache
But only if you prefer to rent your music which many people prefer not to do. Sell thru of music still brings the bread and bacon home to the media companies.
Also those who use these services, like Spotify prefer the free version. Very very few actually pony up the money each month for a paid subscription.
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.
But do you pay for Spotify because most of the subscribers who listen to Spotty prefer and only use the free version. Free music does not = a healthy music industry.
Yes, thank you, I circumvent the DRM on DVD's and Bluray's, though I still obtain the original. We have two, 200 disc Sony BluRay changer, JukeBox's where we store the good ones. Since the BluRay system can be accessed via the network, I use a Nvidia Jetson K1 development board to rip and than encode the BluRays to MP4, I use the GPU instead of the CPU via a program written in CUDA, encoding time takes less than 30 minutes, sometimes 45, depending on how large the file is, where if you were to use say a MacBook Air with a mobile i7 it would take hours. True testament to GPU computing. I wrote a program that does all of this automatically ever time a new disc is inserted into the system, it than uploads the newly created media file to the cloud.
I always enjoy MarvinInsider.
Totally agree. I use the store on a need to basis and even then I find myself saying " do I really want to put myself through this ? " and then blow it off anyway.
I think most will agree the player is better. It's the store that is a disaster. It's just not fun to use anymore and sales show this. Why can't we search by producer or engineer or mixer or label? Discographys seem to be in random orders and the sort by options never stick. I could go on but man it's just a mess, it really is.
about 5 yrs ago, owning physical media for digital content (i.e. CDs) seemed antiquated.
now owning digital content itself seems antiquated.
just let me access anything at any time either via the cloud or local cache
I would agree since any thing new coming out of the music industry suck the songs have no value beyond the short listening horizon. I have not bought anything in a long time since I own what I want to own. The music is so bad these days and the radio and such over play the few songs which with have a catch beat which drive most people to listen.
People listen to a song for a period of time and move on and never want to hear that song again. This is the issue today, you do not have artists who are spending time in writing and composing an entire album with is fill with good songs with staying power. Yes I know there are some people who like everything a single artist may put out, but is not the mass appear of the Band from 30+ plus years ago. You know most of those bands are still tours and packing venues with people of all ages. Even these band are not putting out new stuff and the studios are just remixing the old stuff in hope people will buy it one more time. Keep in mind these bands (record companies) sold their music on singles record, LP, 8-tracks, Cassettes, CD and not digital down loads, and one you have it digitally you never need to buy it again. But wait record company are putting Vinyl out again since there is a group would will buy it yet again.
This is not an iTunes issue it is the sad state of the music industries and now they suckering people to pay a fee each months for crap music which they know they could not sell otherwise.
Have you heard of ripping? :what:
Yes, thank you, I circumvent the DRM on DVD's and Bluray's, though I still obtain the original. We have two, 200 disc Sony BluRay changer, JukeBox's where we store the good ones. Since the BluRay system can be accessed via the network, I use a Nvidia Jetson K1 development board to rip and than encode the BluRays to MP4, I use the GPU instead of the CPU via a program written in CUDA, encoding time takes less than 30 minutes, sometimes 45, depending on how large the file is, where if you were to use say a MacBook Air with a mobile i7 it would take hours. True testament to GPU computing. I wrote a program that does all of this automatically ever time a new disc is inserted into the system, it than uploads the newly created media file to the cloud.
Sorry for stalking you.
Do you ever encode to .mkv? I like to preserve all of the subtitle and audio tracks from the blu ray and .mp4 almost never works reliably.
I use handbrake and it pegs the CPU like nobodies business. It encodes anywhere from 25-60 frames per second for blu ray and closer to around 400 frames per second for a plain old DVD. The rig is an i7-2600k clocked up a bit for fun and an AMD 6870, so nothing super new but works great.
Why does it not surprise me that you rolled your own?
Edit: I forgot to mention that first I need to rip the blu ray to the hard drive with make mkv, then re-encode it. You figured out a slick all in one solution. I take out the blu ray, then rip it, then put it back on the shelf to hopefully never to be touched again, then re-encode it.... good grief.
The MP4 container is oddly missing both proper chapter and subtitle support, but Handbrake is suppose to support that just fine with the QuickTime container (which is a variance on the MPEG-4 container which it will end in M4V) for those that use iTunes for their media storage. If you don't use iTunes I see no reason to not use MKV exclusively.
One app I think is well worth it's price despite having some poor UI designers is iVI Pro. This uses a lot of open software that they've put into a streamlined app for converting media as well as grabbing the proper data and posters for movies and TV shows.
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.
Normally I'm the first one to knock down the "Music ain't what it used to be" argument so I can see why people are quick to react to that but you aren't saying that here. You are just saying this particular year hasn't been that great for releases and albums and with that I would totally agree. At the same time something needs to be done about the signal to noise ratio and the cost of music. You're willing to tolerate more noise at a lower price point aka a "B" grade album is worth $9.99 versus an "A" grade might fetch $12.99. The problem is of course everyone thinks their album is worth $12.99 and this is especially true when they add "premium" content like five remixes of the lead single and think they have done something great for you.
So the cost of the product has risen ($9.99 to $12.99) while a competitor has showed up with lower costs. (Streaming for $8-10 a month.) In addition to that the number of big songs or hits hasn't been great this year. All spell lower revenues but there isn't really much Apple can do about that.
I still buy music and always will. I have hundreds of LP albums from my youth as well as CDs and purchased digital content. Since I generally eschew pop music for classical I love having multiple performances of various works and artists. 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.
And I sure as hell don’t consider iTunes to be a bloated mess. It’s a great app and does what it advertises and does it well. I love it that Apple usually never listens to the perpetually underwhelmed and whining crybaby crowd.
I still enjoy iTunes as well. I do think they need to refine the discovery aspects of the program more or perhaps hybridize them with streaming. I'd love to be able to play from my own music on cellular and then play from a hybrid my music/new streaming discovery when on wifi option. I don't think I've seen much of that out there. Apple has a clear advantage in terms of managing the larger storage on the phones they sell and should be encouraging people to still own media that they want locally stored because it makes them buy 128 gig iPhones instead of 16 gig. So tools that allow you to use what is stored but possibly add to it with new purchases would be the best.
The amount of people that want everything for pennies and b**** because they can't is disgusting.
Great content sells itself. It's hard to add premium value to bland music and to bland artists. There are more of said bland artists out there than every before and the tools for finding great stuff need to get better. Information age is a bit of a misnomer in my opinion. It is more the misinformation age with information out there if you have the right tools, time and inclination to sort past the crap. The cost to get past the crap is part of the cost of acquiring the good stuff. Right now people find the cost too high to acquire the good stuff. It isn't just a financial cost. It is sort through hundreds of albums, links or video. They turn on streaming hoping something good will roll past them as an alternative. Better tools can help. That doesn't mean iTunes is terrible or Apple is doing something wrong though.