What do some not like about iTunes?

undecided · March 14, 2011 7:49PM

Every so often I see posts in some article comments expressing a dislike for iTunes. Most of the time the comments are relatively vague -- at most saying that the software is bloated, and probably some other complaints. The point being: I don't recall seeing a post that clearly enough expresses a good reason for the distaste.

One recent comment in the recent Zune-dead thread, with a few people agreeing, has pushed me to ask for clarification:

Quote:

I liked Zune software much better than iTunes!!!! Please Apple, fix that "user experience"!!!!!

I'm really honestly curious. I'm not saying that the opinion is wrong or silly. It's just that iTunes works great for me, and has increasingly so with each upgrade it seems, both on my MBPro, and on a newer Windows7 machine that I've recently been copying CDs over to for someone.

So if you're not a fan of iTunes, could you please explain why? To me, it's incredibly easy to organize music and edit id3 tags (I haven't needed a third party tag-editor since I moved to a Mac more than a year and a half ago), it runs smoothly, and it doesn't slow down my computer from what I can tell.

Comments appreciated! Thanks!

kingofsomewherehot · March 14, 2011 9:25PM

I'd like to help you out here, but I can't. I agree with YOUR point of view. It's a good piece of software that does the job it's designed to do, and does it well.

The name is kind of misleading these days though, as it has evolved to handle so much more than just "tunes".

I don't buy the "bloated" remarks though, as I would HATE to have to fire up several different programs to sync music, movies, books, apps ... on iPods, iPhones, iPads... What some people think of as "bloat", most folks see as "convenience". (If you think of it as iMedia instead of just iTunes

)

undecided · March 15, 2011 12:36AM

Here's another comment that I read recently that just completely baffled me over:

Quote:

I've all but given up on this bloated cow and am now looking at other solutions such as VLC for my music and video library needs.

http://forums.appleinsider.com/showt...hreadid=119840

VLC is great, but the two serve almost completely different needs. I guess I was just, briefly, under the impression that there were some issues or completely-necessary tweaks that I wasn't noticing, but now I'm guessing that most who complain about it simply don't have a need for its main purposes and selling points, or they're just on very old and worn down PCs.

tonton · March 15, 2011 5:40AM

Plus, plus, plus. I share your exact sentiments. There was a report just 2 weeks or so ago called "The iPhone is great until you want it to do something Apple doesn't want you to do." Turns out the author wanted it to store songs in his own folder arrangement. That's it. He criticized iTunes for being a spreadsheet. Um... how else do you present lists of thousands of files? Icons? Oh... iTunes does that, too. The author was out of touch, and basically was looking for something to dislike, when there really wasn't anything there.

The "I hate iTunes" Emporer has no clothes.

Ah, here it is... not the iPhone at all, but Macs:

I don't hate Macs, but they do give me a syncing feeling

And the woefully ignorant money quote:

Microsoft gets a lot of stick for producing clunky software. But even during the dark days of the animated paperclip, or the infuriating ".docx" Word extension, they never shat out anything as abominable as iTunes – a hideous binary turd that transforms the sparkling world of music and entertainment into a stark, unintuitive spreadsheet.

lonestar · April 4, 2011 1:27AM

My only two real problems with iTunes is that there's no extensive tagging solution as seen in iTunes Producer. Sure, not everyone wants that kind of functionality, but personally I would go crazy over it.

Another thing is DVD importing. If Apple really want to kill physical media, they've got to give us a way of helping them along that path. There are other solutions, but they are illegal and annoyingly difficult.