iTunes WTF?

Bucket

ICBM said:

On the other hand just about everyone I know who uses a PC seems to have endless trouble with it, so perhaps the problem is the type of computer you're running it on.

It's a pretty ballsy marketing strategy isn't it, making your life as a PC user needlessly difficult and tiresome until you eventually submit and give them a ridiculous amount of money for one of their hateful computers just to make it stop.

Although annoyingly, I have been considering getting a Macbook just so I can use Logic for college work. I'm pathetic.

beed84

Bucket said:

ICBM said:

On the other hand just about everyone I know who uses a PC seems to have endless trouble with it, so perhaps the problem is the type of computer you're running it on.

It's a pretty ballsy marketing strategy isn't it, making your life as a PC user needlessly difficult and tiresome until you eventually submit and give them a ridiculous amount of money for one of their hateful computers just to make it stop.

Although annoyingly, I have been considering getting a Macbook just so I can use Logic for college work. I'm pathetic.

I don't think it is Apple making PC users lives needlessly difficult.  PC users do that them by themselves. 

Axe_meister

Now I've never had iTunes delete music. Yes the database has corrupted itself a few times, but so has windows media player. However it does often duplicate things especially if you some sort of disk cleanup. The problem really lies with the fact there is no uniform standard for indexing music and film. Every company does it differently, which mean lots of different programs writing to the same directories. I use iTunes to manage my files, I.e. It imports and organises music on the hard disk. Then I have another program to write meta data that windows media player can read. But it then gets copied to a NAS which can under stand the previously indexed files, but then I have Lodi running on my raspberry pi which has it's own index. Unfortunately Xbox music can't read Non windows NAS hosted files.

Drew_TNBD

guitargeek62 said:

I don't getthe hate, but I've never had an issue with it in the 10ish years I've used it, and on multiple platforms and OS'.

Well I can tell you after 10 years of using it, with the EXACT same mp3 library for the most part... iTunes has managed to completely fuck up my track names, my folder ordering, and my id3 tags.

Fuck iTunes. I only use it for my iPad these days.

Drew_TNBD

bingefeller said:

Jalapeno said:

People who report that they've never had an issue don't really get it (and could themselves be on borrowed time and not realise)  - loosing the entire music library happens to far too many people and with alarming regularity.

It's still there though, on your hard drive.  There will be a reason why it's gone missing and it should be solvable.  

Yeah but...

IT JUST WORKS DOE!!!

bingefeller

Drew_fx said:

bingefeller said:

Jalapeno said:

People who report that they've never had an issue don't really get it (and could themselves be on borrowed time and not realise)  - loosing the entire music library happens to far too many people and with alarming regularity.

It's still there though, on your hard drive.  There will be a reason why it's gone missing and it should be solvable.  

Yeah but...

IT JUST WORKS DOE!!!

That's right, Drew.

guitargeek62

I just remembered something, my database corrupted once (maybe 7 years ago), but that was right after migrating everything over to a new laptop so I can't really comment.

All the tracks were safe though, but I lost the playcounts & history etc in the .xml file.

I can't feel your pain @drew_fx as I don't remember the last time I needed specific filenames, or used id3 tags, but I'm sure a nice cup of tea will make it all better... sort of.

Drew_TNBD

guitargeek62 said:

I just remembered something, my database corrupted once (maybe 7 years ago), but that was right after migrating everything over to a new laptop so I can't really comment.

All the tracks were safe though, but I lost the playcounts & history etc in the .xml file.

I can't feel your pain @drew_fx as I don't remember the last time I needed specific filenames, or used id3 tags, but I'm sure a nice cup of tea will make it all better... sort of.

Do you put songs on your phone to play when you're travelling? Chances are... you're using id3 tags.

I have a cup of tea right now as it happens, and it still hasn't fixed my hatred for iTunes!

ICBM

Drew_fx said:

guitargeek62 said:

I don't getthe hate, but I've never had an issue with it in the 10ish years I've used it, and on multiple platforms and OS'.

Well I can tell you after 10 years of using it, with the EXACT same mp3 library for the most part... iTunes has managed to completely fuck up my track names, my folder ordering, and my id3 tags.

I've been using it since the launch of version 1 - 14 years now - also with the same library, on four different Macs plus secondary devices, and the only time it's ever gone completely wrong was when I tried to be clever with it and re-organise the library outside iTunes… which turned out to be a very bad idea, but I was able to restore it from the backup.

Maybe it's because I don't try to manipulate stuff outside iTunes? Don't know. I do use a separate mp3 trimmer app sometimes, but when I've done that I always re-import into iTunes and correct the id3 tags manually.

There are a few times it gets things wrong that I have noticed - for no apparent reason it will sometimes put one track on an album into a separate album. You can cure this very easily by deliberately renaming the whole album to something different, then re-renaming it back to the correct name. It must just be a glitch in the tag management. (Yes, I am a bit OCD about having things organised correctly!)

stickyfiddle

I've used itunes for 10+ years now and honestly never had a problem that was caused by itunes itself. It's important to let it make a copy of anything imported AND to tell it to organise your media folder for you, AND THEN DON'T FUCK WITH THAT FOLDER. If you don't do all of that then itunes will get very very confused if any files get moved around, and that isn't Apple's fault.

Once I had a crashing PC that would nuke the library file if it crashed while that was being accessed. Backing that up made it no more than annoying. It doesn't delete the mp3 files.

I also had a won't-sync issue where I couldn't get new music onto my old 4S, but that was the phone not itunes that was buggered. I had the same issue on PC and mac, but never with ipad or newer iphone, so very confident it was the phone causing at fault. Since getting a new iphone too I've had no problems at all.

bingefeller

stickyfiddle said:

I've used itunes for 10+ years now and honestly never had a problem that was caused by itunes itself. It's important to let it make a copy of anything imported AND to tell it to organise your media folder for you, AND THEN DON'T FUCK WITH THAT FOLDER. If you don't do all of that then itunes will get very very confused if any files get moved around, and that isn't Apple's fault.

Exactly.  I have my suspicions that the people who are having problems with iTunes have done something to cause these problems or have installed another piece of software that has done something to conflict with iTunes.  

guitargeek62

Drew_fx;567422" said:

guitargeek62 said:

I just remembered something, my database corrupted once (maybe 7 years ago), but that was right after migrating everything over to a new laptop so I can't really comment.



All the tracks were safe though, but I lost the playcounts & history etc in the .xml file.



I can't feel your pain @drew_fx as I don't remember the last time I needed specific filenames, or used id3 tags, but I'm sure a nice cup of tea will make it all better... sort of.





Do you put songs on your phone to play when you're travelling? Chances are... you're using id3 tags.

I have a cup of tea right now as it happens, and it still hasn't fixed my hatred for iTunes!

Always, but via an iPhone so it's basically inconsequential. I meant that I've not had to be concerned about id3 tags for a loooooooong time because I'm quite content within the apple/itunes ecosystem.

As the guys above say though, one of the key components to smooth usage is to let itunes do the file organisation for you. I'm sure that it opens up a small possibility of file loss/corruption (and what software doesn't?), but it's generally very stable & tidy.

If you're a non iOS user then, again, I can't comment as I haven't had a non-apple MP3 player for 8 years, and switched over to iPhones almost 5 years ago.

Either way, I hope the brew was good regardless

sweepy

There were a few updates, that, if like me you have your music on a dedicated drive and prefer not to let iTunes organise it suddenly decided to put everything In the root dir and reorganize it all

holnrew

Basically, Uncle Tim and Uncle Steve know/knew best, if anything goes wrong it's because you disobeyed?

ICBM

holnrew said:

Basically, Uncle Tim and Uncle Steve know/knew best, if anything goes wrong it's because you disobeyed?

That aspect of Apple does piss me off too. I want to decide how I use my computer, not them.

That said it does often work better when you decide to accept that to some extent and not try to deliberately fight it. As someone with OCD who has certain ways of wanting to do things, that can be difficult - especially when they change things without warning or asking. But I've got used to it mostly.

bingefeller

If you want "complete control" over your music library (on a Mac) then you'd be better off using something minimalistic like cmus, which is a command line player.  All you need to do is create a folder for your music and point cmus towards it.  It's a learning curve getting it up and running but, as I said, you will have 100% control over your files.  

ICBM

In what way don't I have 100% control over them with iTunes, and if I don't, why does it matter? I seem to be able to organise them how I want now.

They do sometimes change stuff for no apparently good reason which annoys me for a bit, but it's almost always been possible to put it right - about the only exception being the global shuffle, and I can live with that given the overall ease of use.

stickyfiddle

holnrew said:

Basically, Uncle Tim and Uncle Steve know/knew best, if anything goes wrong it's because you disobeyed?

To an extent. They assume that most users will keep their library in iTunes and not use anything else for organising. How could you expect to have a program catalog a bunch of any files and keep track of them if the user moves them around?

Travisthedog

I haven't used itunes in about a year - Vodafone game me a free spotify account and I've never looked back

I would say that each subsequent upgrade of itunes up to the point I stopped using got more and more confusing - and Im a dyed in the wool Apple fanboy

ICBM

Travisthedog said:

I would say that each subsequent upgrade of itunes up to the point I stopped using got more and more confusing - and Im a dyed in the wool Apple fanboy

I used to think that as well - there was one change (10 to 11) where I seriously thought about reverting to the old version and never upgrading again - but I made myself learn to use it and now I actually prefer the newest version, with the sole exception of the shuffle thing… there are other useful features which I miss when I'm using my old workshop computer which is limited to 10.

There is a current irritation which is that they've changed the artwork window again, so when it's maximised it crops a non-square image to square rather than fitting the larger dimension to the screen, but that really just means I need to improve the quality of some of my older artwork.