Who uses iTunes?

[Edd]

I bought an iPhone recently and was hesitant about downloading iTunes because I've heard negative stuff over the years. As far as music goes I just use Rhapsody or play my files with Windows media.

People are telling me I need iTunes as an iPhone owner so I downloaded the software out of curiosity. Wow. First impressions are horrible. It only incorporated 30% of my library and the way it organized the files is a notch better than throwing darts at a board. Looks like junk software at first glance.

I wasn't planning on using it for music anyway but do I need this software on my computer to enjoy whatever the backup or other benfits iTunes is supposed to offer?

 

[Puck it]

Yes, in order to get updates.

 

[deadheadskier]

I think iTunes sux personally. I let my wife mess with it to load our music onto the ipod.

For a company that prides itself in creating user friendly and intuitive electronic devices, iTunes is a huge swing and miss by Apple IMO

 

[Edd]

I made an appt for Apple to call tomorrow so I can fix this. I've always been leery of Apple but I'm very impressed with the iPhone after 8 days. I honestly wasn't expecting a problem despite what I'd heard but I can't believe how bad this download went.

 

[ctenidae]

I find iTunes nearly impossible to use. I really dislike it.

I'm actually fairly strongly anti-Apple. Just don't generally like their products functionally. Design is great, I just dont like the way their OSs think.

 

[Geoff]

I have about 70 gig of music stored in iTunes on my spare notebook computer. The MP3's are scattered across the machine and I don't have enough disk space to tell iTunes to consolidate them into one directory so I can move them off the machine. At one point about 4 years ago, I did an editing marathon of a bunch of music where the artist/album/song were all screwed up. I'd hate to lose that. I'd love to figure out a way to just archive it all off to a USB hard drive and preserve the iTunes XML database.

 

[Glenn]

I don't like how it handles music. Thankfully, we just use it to update our iPad. Even then, though, every time you update the OS, you have to wait for iTunes to update first. I'm hoping the wirelss sync takes care of that song and dance.

 

[Puck it]

I had a bunch of music from Napster and it did not have all of the info. I downloaded this TuneUp Companion. It cleaned up iTunes music files. I also use this program Itunes Sync to download iTune music to non Apple products.

 

[kickstand]

The things I don't like about iTunes (or maybe this is a device/o-s thing):

1. I can't custom order a playlist. It appears to be either random or alphabetical by album and by track number within each album

2. The way it seemingly randomly assigns some albums as "compilation" when it's not. If anyone has Santana's "Shaman", perfect example. It also breaks out the guest artist who is with the main artist. On my iPod, below Santana, I have about 12 additional entries of "Santana feat. XXXXX". So annoying. And when you go to disk, you don't find it under Santana - Shaman, it's under Compilations - Shaman.

3. Minor annoyance, but Garth Brooks should be under B, not G. That's how I would look for his albums at Newbury Comics, that's how I would expect to see it in iTunes.

There was one other thing that annoyed me from the very beginning, but I can't remember what it was. What I find is, almost anything I had downloaded from Napster or any file sharing program, I can't expect to have the correct metadata on the file. That alone makes importing music a bit tough. Because of that, I never imported everything all at once. I did it in small chunks, so it would be easy to find and correct all the bad files.

I have an external HD, maybe 500GB, for all my music. Nothing sits on the C-drive. It may be a little scattered in terms of directories (I have my own little system for what goes where), but it's all centrally located. Personally, I don't trust ANY of these programs to organize the files the way I want them. I never let the programs automatically detect anything.

My iPod is also super-old. The version in the About menu says 1.2.1. Maybe a newer one, or at least an o/s upgrade, would solve some of the issues I find with it.

 

[darent]

I have no problems with I-tunes, I don't know anything about computers , struggle with e-mail and can barely post to this forum. but Itunes has my music listed by artist on my old nano, I didn't do it and it auto assembled my favorites list so it is easy for me. It took me aehile to relize that I-tunes on my desktop is the same as my nano and whatever I did on the desktop affected my nano, learned some hard lessons; all in all it works for me, but I.'m easy

 

[AdironRider]

Ive been a Mac user my entire life and really dont get the itunes hate.

Maybe its because I started out using it from day one, and have built my entire music collection with itunes but I have no issues.

I think most people coming from a Windoze world have lots of control issues with itunes and mac stuff in general and are really missing the point on why macs kick ass in the first place. They just do the stuff you want them to do, when you want it. Its when you Windows people (and I admit since that stuff always needs fixin you must be trained a certain way hah) try and monkey around with everything that it gets a bad rap.

Just upload some tunes and let the mac do its thing. You can pretty much guarantee it will still be working years from now with no issues.

 

[deadheadskier]

:lol:

my computer and software preferences are the most bestest in the world

 

[mondeo]

Ive been a Mac user my entire life and really dont get the itunes hate.

Maybe its because I started out using it from day one, and have built my entire music collection with itunes but I have no issues.

I think most people coming from a Windoze world have lots of control issues with itunes and mac stuff in general and are really missing the point on why macs kick ass in the first place. They just do the stuff you want them to do, when you want it. Its when you Windows people (and I admit since that stuff always needs fixin you must be trained a certain way hah) try and monkey around with everything that it gets a bad rap.

Just upload some tunes and let the mac do its thing. You can pretty much guarantee it will still be working years from now with no issues.

Jobs forbid if you want to do something differently than the way He intended.

Pic somewhat related.

 

[Edd]

:lol:

my computer and software preferences are the most bestest in the world

:lol:

 

[bvibert]

Ive been a Mac user my entire life and really dont get the itunes hate.

Maybe its because I started out using it from day one, and have built my entire music collection with itunes but I have no issues.

I think most people coming from a Windoze world have lots of control issues with itunes and mac stuff in general and are really missing the point on why macs kick ass in the first place. They just do the stuff you want them to do, when you want it. Its when you Windows people (and I admit since that stuff always needs fixin you must be trained a certain way hah) try and monkey around with everything that it gets a bad rap.

Just upload some tunes and let the mac do its thing. You can pretty much guarantee it will still be working years from now with no issues.

Thanks for pointing out one of my biggest issues with Apple products; you either do it Jobs' way or no way. That may be fine for some people, but for me I want some amount of control over how I do things. If it doesn't do what I want to do then why would I care how long it works for?

It's not that Windows always needs fixing, it's that it allows one to tweak things to their preferences. I leave my Windows XP desktop at work running 24/7 with zero issues.

Try making a Mac do something even slightly outside of what Jobs' originally intended and let me know how headache free it is. When my wife had a Mac I had more trouble getting it to do the simplest things than I ever had with a Windows machine. For example; I had to dumb down the encryption of our wireless network just to get the Mac on it. Those experiences really turned me off to Macs. I was kinda glad when the motherboard prematurely died in that thing. At least she went back to a Windows machine.

 

[o3jeff]

Thanks for pointing out one of my biggest issues with Apple products; you either do it Jobs' way or no way. That may be fine for some people, but for me I want some amount of control over how I do things. If it doesn't do what I want to do then why would I care how long it works for?

It's not that Windows always needs fixing, it's that it allows one to tweak things to their preferences. I leave my Windows XP desktop at work running 24/7 with zero issues.

Try making a Mac do something even slightly outside of what Jobs' originally intended and let me know how headache free it is. When my wife had a Mac I had more trouble getting it to do the simplest things than I ever had with a Windows machine. For example; I had to dumb down the encryption of our wireless network just to get the Mac on it. Those experiences really turned me off to Macs. I was kinda glad when the motherboard prematurely died in that thing. At least she went back to a Windows machine.

H8ter

 

[bvibert]

H8ter

Fanboi

 

[Edd]

So I spent a bunch of time organizing music in a file I can manually feed to iTunes so I can avoid duplicates, which is something Rhapsody and Windows Media seem to do with ease. It's converting the songs now to AAC. At the rate it's going it looks like this will take days.

I don't even know why I'm doing this but it's nice to have another place to store my music. When I have a technical problem I get obsessive about solving it.

 

[AdironRider]

Thanks for pointing out one of my biggest issues with Apple products; you either do it Jobs' way or no way. That may be fine for some people, but for me I want some amount of control over how I do things. If it doesn't do what I want to do then why would I care how long it works for?

It's not that Windows always needs fixing, it's that it allows one to tweak things to their preferences. I leave my Windows XP desktop at work running 24/7 with zero issues.

Try making a Mac do something even slightly outside of what Jobs' originally intended and let me know how headache free it is. When my wife had a Mac I had more trouble getting it to do the simplest things than I ever had with a Windows machine. For example; I had to dumb down the encryption of our wireless network just to get the Mac on it. Those experiences really turned me off to Macs. I was kinda glad when the motherboard prematurely died in that thing. At least she went back to a Windows machine.

Good for you on your work computer, but you cant seriously be arguing that Macs dont have a far more reliably operating system. How many windows ME's or Vistas do we have to go through before they find one that works? All I know is 2000 worked pretty well, and XP now works ok although it took them the good part of a decade to get it right. Anyone remember XP before service pack 2 came out? Total shitshow.

And you can make a Mac do plenty of things you want it to. I seriously doubt it was anything beyond user error that is giving you problems. Just because its different doesnt mean its bad, its just not what you are used to.

Meanwhile Apple keeps trading blows with Exxon for the most valuable company out there. At one point this summer they had more cash on hand than the US govt, clearly they are doing something horrifically wrong there.

 

[bvibert]

Good for you on your work computer, but you cant seriously be arguing that Macs dont have a far more reliably operating system. How many windows ME's or Vistas do we have to go through before they find one that works? All I know is 2000 worked pretty well, and XP now works ok although it took them the good part of a decade to get it right. Anyone remember XP before service pack 2 came out? Total shitshow.

And you can make a Mac do plenty of things you want it to. I seriously doubt it was anything beyond user error that is giving you problems. Just because its different doesnt mean its bad, its just not what you are used to.

Meanwhile Apple keeps trading blows with Exxon for the most valuable company out there. At one point this summer they had more cash on hand than the US govt, clearly they are doing something horrifically wrong there.

They do a terrific job at marketing, I'll definitely give them that.

I'm not buying that they're super reliable, ours certainly wasn't, but it sure did cost more than a comparable Windows laptop.

I'll take Windows with some quirks over OSX any day, and that's not saying much, I'm not particularly fond of Microsoft either.

Some of my Mac problems may have been user error, but I chalk that up to the interface not being intuitive for anything beyond mindless computing amongst other Apple products.