Facebook integration. Tweeting my music interests. AppleTV. Full-screen album extras. App management. An entire online store. Smart playlists. CD burning. Ringtone creation. Tips the scales at 88MB. All this in what is essentially the only music player on OS X. At some point enough is enough, and for me it was enough years ago. For god’s sake, Apple, all I want to do is play my music.
For years Apple has been adding to iTunes, and while some improvements have been welcome, many have simply added to the bloat. It’s time — way past time, really — for Apple to put out something lightweight and basic. I understand that iTunes is a wedge (and weapon) for Apple, and I don’t propose gutting it, but considering there are no credible alternatives to the program, it’s at the point where I feel Apple has stopped simply adding to the feature buffet, and has started force-feeding users.
On my PC I use Winamp — have for years, love it. I understand I can’t have a carbon copy, if you will, on OS X, but at the very least give me a program that isn’t 80% features I will never use.
I just prefer apps that do one or two things, and do them well — surely I’m not the only one. I play movies in MPlayerOSX or VLC and organize them myself, as I know many people do. Even if I did use Twitter, I wouldn’t want to tweet what I’m listening to or buying; LastFM works fine for that and already has a client or is embeddable in many services. Same for liking things on Facebook. And App management? I don’t have an iPhone or an iPod, why would I want my media player to include support? You can hide some of it, but far from all of it, and it disturbs me that it’s always lurking there, just underneath the surface. Waiting.
Songbird is out there, I guess (I should switch), but it still emulates iTunes shamelessly and adds yet more features I don’t want in a music player, plus a browser. I already have a browser, guys. Use that one for your fun rich content. What else is there? Audion, abandoned these five years? Cog, abandoned a year and a half? Banshee and Vox, for six months? I’ve seen forums where people recommend running Winamp in a virtual machine to save RAM! We’re in a gilded cage, fellow Mac users, and unlike the iPhone’s gated and patrolled garden of mobile delights, it’s not one you should be satisfied with.
Many Mac users chime in angrily whenever I have the nerve to mention bloat in a precious, perfect Apple product. Is it really such a stretch of the imagination to believe that some people might just want to play their music, or perhaps organize and browse it differently from how iTunes lets you? I think for every person who is excited to let Genius pick their party’s music, there is someone who can’t stand how playlists work. And for every person who likes the way iTunes organizes albums and tracks, there’s someone for whom its method of displaying their collection is frustrating and backwards. For instance:
What’s wrong with this picture? It’s janky as hell is what, and this kind of weirdo sorting issue is far from rare. To say nothing of the many other annoyances I find in this monstrosity of a media player.
So what are people for whom iTunes isn’t right supposed to do? For years now, the answer from Apple and OS X developers has been “just deal with it.”
Meanwhile, among the several options I have to me on XP (and 7) are very competent free and/or open-source alternatives to Microsoft’s iTunes-equivalent, Windows Media Player — which isn’t as bad as everyone says, but lord it ain’t good. Take a look at the features available in Winamp. Now observe the following screen:
(or I could just download the 6.4MB “Lite” version)
Why don’t I have one of those for iTunes? Does Apple not trust me when I say that I’ll never use Genius or Facebook integration? Do they not have the ability to decouple these decadent sidecar-apps from the fundamental functionality of their media player? It’s a fail one way or the other.
At the risk of getting too general in my criticism, the lack of a variety in certain kinds of software is one of the unanswerable complaints against OS X. There are dozens of programs on my PC that have no equivalent (or only a weak one) on a Mac, and rarely because, as is often said, the functionality is duplicated in the OS or what have you. If I weren’t away from my desktop, I’d list ‘em off for you. But this iTunes thing is symptomatic of that larger problem. With no alternatives, Apple’s option becomes more and more entrenched, and as it becomes entrenched, it spreads its tentacles hideously, and results in things like the present iTunes (and to a lesser extent, iMovie, iPhoto, and others). After today’s shenanigans, the program is fatter and more tentacular than ever.
In the end, it seems to me that it would be so easy for Apple to make a smaller media player that they must have made a choice not to do so. Considering there are no other options, that’s a decision that is, to users like me, very damaging. Unfortunately, that’s unlikely to change, since it clearly hasn’t been damaging to their business. Looks like it’ll continue to be their way or the highway, except without the highway.
It’s not spoiled to want what I’ve had for years on the platform Apple disparages as unusable. I think what I’m asking is reasonable enough, though I have no expectation that the way of the world should be suspended for my convenience. Here’s what I’d like:
What do you think? Is that really such a crime?
Update: It’s not a fix for the bloat and so on, but for a clean UI like the one I chopped together above, it’s as easy as context-clicking on a playlist and opening it in a new menu. If you make a smart list that’s your entire library, that can be your only window. Better than nothing! Thanks, Tim F! Update update: Son of a… you can’t delete things or rearrange tracks. Why would you want to though, right?
Update 2: I was mistaken about Cog and Banshee. I checked out-of-date sources apparently, they’re still in development. I’m going to switch to one soon and you should too. The point of this post was not that I can’t resize iTunes or hide the store, it’s that it’s too much to begin with and I don’t want or like the idea of a highly-connected, multi-purpose player. And I think it’s something visible in other Apple applications too — a departure from simplicity and elegance.
100% agreed. I’d like to keep playlists. Not genius ones,etc., but simple playlists.
Someone should make a simple mac music player that reads itunes xml files and does this. I’d pay $4.99.
Have y’all seen Everplay (http://www.snar...topic.php?t=248)? It’s the successor to CoverStream, an app you may be more familiar with it. CoverStream was a minimal iTunes controller, but Everplay works when iTunes is closed (but still reads iTunes XML database for all of your files). Looks like the perfect solution for your problem.
For what its worth, I tried it out but it wasn’t my cup of tea. I like my fully-featured iTunes where I can listen to my collection of music in a bunch of different ways if I so choose.
Ha, $4.99.
Maybe this mentality is what’s keeping a developer from spending any time on this wonderful idea.
iTunes is a bloatware.
A thought : Use the opportunity as it comes.
But here Apple created the opportunity event for flourishing itself, in the same event Apple itself missed to use it. Apple has also left great disappointments. Never can Apple replace things, it paved way for Android and WinMo market.
SongBird replaces finely the iTunes with its player options.
Leave it to TechCrunch to completely miss the fact that the so-called “iTunes Lite” is easily created with a few clicks in the Preferences.
STEPS TO GET iTUNES LITE:
STEP 1: Open up Preferences
STEP 2: Disable features you do not want (in the General and Parental panes).
STEP 3: There is no step 3. You’re done.
….or, better yet….
Select “View -> Switch to Mini Player”
Way to go Devin for failing to spend 5 minutes poking around the General Preferences settings… Well done.
I’ve love iTunes as a music player and a music file manager but hate all the other features. Poopy’s advice is spot-on. And I just followed his advice and I’m much happier.
(I had done what I could with the “General” tab but I didn’t think to use the Parental Control tab to remove more worthless features.)
Between the mini-player and the ability to turn off extraneous features, iTunes can do most of what you want, Devin. Slow startup peed is still an issue, though, I’ll admit.
The features might be disabled; however, in Windows at least, iTunes still hogs up a crap-ton of resources. So your suggestion just manages symptoms, it doesn’t address the real problem.
Wah, wah… I’m afraid that Apple is going to take the time to release a fully lite version of iTunes. It would be a complete waste of their time since it would make zero money for them. If you hate iTunes that much….don’t use it.
* I’m afraid that Apple ISN’T going to take the time to release a fully lite version of iTunes.
May I suggest you read this excellent writeup on Ecoute?
http://mac.apps...es-with-ecoute/
Its been time for that about 5 versions ago.
Itunes lite should not have quicktime in it at all it should include the bare minimum for playing and loading music to your ipod if you choose to add videos you can go with the full version.
They either need a new code and completely new system to trim the fat from all the added s**t or to release a featureless lite edition
You do realize QuickTime is what drives all media on the Mac right?
Your effectively asking for a file manager.
You may be right in the case of Mac but not for windows the first versions of Itunes for pc did not have quicktime at all
Not true. It may not have included QT Player, but it always included QT.
That’s right. Quicktime was required even with the first iTunes on PCs.
I’am talking about Quicktime player
There first versions of itunes for windows only installed itunes not safari, bonjour, quicktime player etc. They need to get back to only install what you need or let you select what you want.
my current iTunes Lite is either:
a) my iPhone
b) the Last.fm desktop app
c) my AppleTV
You got yourself into a closed platform with tiny market share, what do you expect?
But it’s a beautiful machine, isnt it?
+1
-10,000
uh…iTunes works on PCs too.
As a wise man once said…”It’s like offering a glass of ice water to people in hell.”
iTunes on Windows is more like offering a little bit of hell to someone relaxing in a pool.
Uh… yeah, sure it is. That must be why nobody on a PC uses iTunes….’cos it’s soooo bad.
we liked the original itunes for pc we received when we bought our first ipod… 7.3 i think it was… but once apple broke the airtunes support we’ve not played our music since…
i’d also vote for being able to turn off or uninstall unwanted “features” specially for those of us w/o Iphones or any use for AppleTV
Actually Poopy, iTunes on Windows IS horrible, in just about every way an app CAN be horrible.
It completely ignores the OS UI guidelines (which is just bad design from any developer on any platform). It is buggy. It is slow. The QT requirement means it has an enormous system impact and ridiculous footprint. The lag between QT versions on Windows and Mac also means that it can’t even play all media created on a Mac in the Windows version of the software. It can’t even play all the media types every other app on the system can without having to convert them, because it refuses to use the standard CODEC repository. Worst of all, on a platform with so many wonderful little players like Winamp, it chews up unconscionable amounts of system resources.
If I were trying to come up with a list of ways you could screw up a media player for Windows, I would have a hard time coming up with a single failure iTunes hasn’t already done.
@spence bean…If you actually took the time to open up the iTunes Preferences, you would see that you can disable every “feature” in iTunes. So… your wish has already been granted (all along).
@Lee Lloyd… Hmm…I wasn’t aware that Windows actually had UI guidelines. Considering that Microsoft ignores even the most basic principles of UI design (Fitts’s Law, anyone?), and mananges to copy (and butcher) Mac OS X in nearly every way possible (gee, where did that Dock come from you PC fanboys all used to hate so much?) it would be absolutely idiotic to create two different UIs for an application that is truly cross-platform. Who the hell would want to use a different iTunes at work (on a PC) and then go home and use a totally different UI at home?? ….Most users would surely prefer one UI across both platforms. Never mind that Windows is downright fugly. There’s no way that iTunes would be allowed to get uglified in Windows. Apple has a brand to protect.
@poopy you assume too much… i did take time to open preferences… i knew how to turn “features” off… or disable them…
i’d prefer not to download them at all
doesn’t matter now… airport express/airtunes support seems to be abandoned anyhow…
no interest without that capability…
Hi Dev, maybe you should just go and play with yourself. You sound sexually frustrated.
Totally agree with you here. Atleast it should let you disable extra features apart from the basic music player.
I use an app called Ecoute as a lite iTunes version. It has the basic play and share features, as well as providing a cool and customizable interface.
http://ecouteapp.com
Best of all, the dev team seems to be really great about listening to user feedback and quickly fixing things.
Nice, I hadn’t heard of that, I’ll give it a shot.
My solution is to listen to music on my iPod.
Agreed, although repeated references to Facebook integration take away from the piece, since that’s a rumored future feature and not one currently found in iTunes.
It’s in iTunes 9, but thanks for looking out.
Hi Devin:
Sorry about that.
Maybe it’s ineptitude, but I don’t see the Facebook integration, nothing in preferences, nothing in the sidebar. As such, I figured it wasn’t included.
click the down arrow next to the “buy” button next to a song in the iTunes Store, and you’ll see options to share on Facebook and Twitter
Ah. I suppose if I ever used the iTunes store,, I’d've found it.
What a lame Apple event. No game changer for the iPod Touch? I’m switching to the evil side and getting a 32 GB Zune HD now.
By killing off the 16GB Touch and not adding a camera, as everyone had been expecting, they’ve really left a door open for Microsoft.
By not adding a camera to the iPod Touch Apple essentially let Microsoft back in the game. Next year when Apple decides to include the camera, Microsoft will probably also include a camera going mano a mano. They could have stayed a generation ahead of Microsoft, but they blew it.
I think Zune is among the worst brands in history. It’s cooked, no chance to capitalize here.
Zune is at 1.1% market share. Not really a huge threat at the moment. And millions of iPod owners aren’t exactly flocking to the Microsoft Store to find out about Zune HD.
Fanboy.
Steve Jobs is back in almost full form after coming back from near death, the new iTunes enhancements were pretty impressive IMHO, and they dropped the prices on pretty much their entire iPod lineup – oh, and now the Nano has a camera. It was a lame Apple event? Look, not everything Apple does is golden, but why do people expect something earth shattering at every one of these September events? Go get your Zune and have fun.
And if they put a camera in the iPod Touch, they’d be cannibalizing iPhone sales, which is why I get the absence of one in the iTouch. People would just say, “I’ll spend $300 for a 32GB iTouch and just get a basic cell phone”. Apple needs to hold a little back from the iTouch to keep people buying the iPhone.
Microsoft isn’t going to do anything “game changing” with their next Zune because they haven’t done anything “game changing” with it yet. They’ll continue to clone what the other guys are doing and the consumer will suffer. Apple may not do everything its fan base asks for, but they’ve given us a solid product for the past 8 years and I’m not switching any time soon.
What I find interesting is this latest lackluster Apple event seems to be the culmination of Things That Were Developed While Steve Jobs Was Ill. It is rumored that the reason the iTouch did not get a camera was due to poor production quality of the cameras and the scrapped it at the last minute. Steve doesn’t seem the type to let that slip.
I get the feeling that Apple would (again) see a steep decline in innovation and quality if/when Steve Jobs leaves the helm.
Agreed, agreed! I switched to Songbird because iTunes:
1) Wanted me to upgrade 2-3 times a month and required I download 100MB to do it.
2) Kept trying to install Safari and Bonjour on my computer
3) Would continually corrupt my music library (had to rescan on reboot to get the tracks back in)
4) Was slow to load (on a state of the art machine)
5) Refused to add MP3 tracks – I found out later these were slightly malformed MP3 tracks, but ones that WMP and Songbird played fine with. iTunes just wouldn’t load them – no error message, nothing, just silently ignoring them. This was impossible to troubleshoot. Thanks for making it “Just Work!”
All of the points you stated were the ones to make me uninstall whatever Apple had for me, AND to hate my iPod even more. Now it’s lost in one of my purses and I am happier about not getting something telling me if I wanted to install Safari, Bonjour or the way too many MB that iTunes requires to update. If I didn’t want it before, why would I want it now? D:<
I was scrolling down to see if anyone else mentioned this. Not only is iTunes a wedge to draw the user into the Apple world, it’s a wedge to let Apple into your PC.
I keep getting pinged up update software I didn’t know I’d installed! WTF is Bonjour anyway?
http://www.voxapp.net/
Does 100% of what I need.
iTunes jumped the shark ages ago.
Cheers.
Saw that, it’s solid and tiny but not quite as robust as I need it to be to keep track of my library.
“Is it really such a stretch of the imagination to believe that some people might just want to play their music, or perhaps organize and browse it differently from how iTunes lets you? I think for every person who is excited to let Genius pick their party’s music, there is someone who can’t stand how playlists work. ”
You make it sound like Genius playlists or simple playlists mutually exclusive. But they are not. You can easily create a simple playlist in iTunes and organize it any way you like. You can also open the playlist in its own window so you don’t have to be confused by the iTunes “bloat”. If you hardly use any of the functions, it’s perfectly reasonable to want a simpler, lighter, app. But what’s not reasonable is to suggest that Apple should be the company to develop it and support it. It’s an opportunity for an independent developer.
Except that, y’know, iTunes has completely locked down the iPod platform.
Once you start trying to be the all-encompassing destination, certain aspects get short-changed. For that reason and many more, I’ve always believed doing a lot of a little is absolutely the way to go.
On that note, a certain in iTunes was part of the inspiration for the startup (link) we’ve been developing for over 25 months.
I agree with you. I didn’t like itunes on windows at least. Maybe it is different in mac. I never play music with itunes on windows. There are way too many nice alternatives out there like media player and winamp that are fast.
I don’t agree. I certainly don’t use all the features in iTunes but I have never felt distracted by them. Why should they make a separate app just so that it’s a little but simpler.
MacBook Pro Core 2 Duo 4GB RAM:
iTunes 9 playing a song: 7% avg. CPU using 206.5MB real memory.
QuickTime playing same song: 4% avg CPU using 32.9MB real memory.
Seems negligible to me on any modern hardware.
I understand people who aren’t programmers may have the (subliminal) perception that all those features are always there taking up resources, but in reality they only suck your processor and memory when you use them. If 3% CPU and 160MB of ram are an issue for you, then iTunes is the least of your problems.
If you find the interface bloated, Shift-Command-M switches to the mini player. I wish apple would let you access playlists in this mode – then it would be almost like the old WinAmp.
I totally understand that no one is going to want ALL the features, but I bet most of them do get used regularly by some people. You may not use genius, but I do. People who advertise every uninteresting detail of their life on social networks will love twitter + facebook integration. I’ll never use them,… but I’ll still use iTunes simply because it does the job of playing my damn music.
100% agreed. Hopefully Stevie will see this.
Ha ha ha ha ha
What is it with you people and all your whining about Apple software and hardware. If you don’t like it there is this environment called windows full of viruses and software that limps along, barely working. If you don’t like Apple products, then by all means use a “Zune” and some poorly written windows media player. Last time I checked iTunes, iPod, Iphone and Apple completely changed the face of how we listen to music. I personally use and enjoy the majority of options available in iTunes and look forward to new features. I have tried lots of media players over the years including Songbird – honestly they don’t even come close to offering 10% of what is available on iTunes.
I thought this article and some (albeit not all) of the comments were constructive critisism. Good arguments of the current problems they precieve with iTunes and how this could be improved upon.
Without constructive cirtisism products will never improve. This “if you don’t love it exactly as it is, get out” sentiment is not what leads to improvements. ’cause why improve something perfect in every way?
it’s funny, millions of people use Windows everyday, aren’t affected by viruses, and their computers work fine.
Arguing about OS superiority is so 2008. All major OS’s work as well as the others and have their strengths and weaknesses.
And if you are tired of the iTunes bloat, try Double Twist
Have you tried Floola? http://mrte.ch/3x
praise the lord! you’re not the only one who’s had enough of this bloatware. what’s so bad about users telling developers what they want? welcome to product development from the 80s.
and should we really expect that a ‘closed platform with a tiny market share’ should be allowed to do what they want? first of all, they’re not such a small market share when you define the market as being those apps that are required for talking to your ipod. secondly, this idea that they can do what they want smacks of the same paternalistic mentality that spawned so many windows bashers.
to reiterate devin’s refrain: ‘is it too much to ask?’
Completely agree!
I´m not downloading Ecoute.
I meant “I’m now downloading Ecoute”
heh, i was wondering where the venom came from for a second
For me, it’s not about the distractions, but the amount of time it takes iTunes to do anything, like starting up, or switching from my library to the iTunes store. Everything is so slow.
They need to redo iTunes to work faster. They can keep all that crap I don’t use in there, but make it faster for the everyday things, like load time, etc.
first you want more. then you want less. 88MB is hardly large and does not tip the scales
When winamp is about 7 megs and does everything a MUSIC PLAYER needs to do?
So, use WinAmp.
Oh, you’re on a Mac. So learn Objective C and write your own MacAmp.
I mean, you’re idea is so brilliant that you’re sure there’s a huge market for this product, right? You’re asking Apple to develop this software, therefore there’s a huge market for it, right?
So develop the software and sell it, or pay someone to develop it for you.
I use iTunes because it makes it dead-easy to manage all my media, buy new music and video, sync with my ipod/iphone, and I guess I’m one of those crazy people with a million songs and I like sing Genius to come up with new mixes I wouldn’t have on my own.
My hard drive is 300GB, I have 4GB of RAM, I can live with 90MB for a complete media management program.
So what you’re saying is that if someone thinks a certain piece of software would be useful but they don’t have a) the programming experience or b) the money to get it made then their opinion isn’t valid and they should just shut up?
Not everyone wants to use their computer in the same way as you do. And not everyone is interested in writing their own software. Don’t be so conceited to suggest that their viewpoint isn’t important.
When did I say I wanted more?
I resisted iTunes for many years and was sure that I wanted to manage everything for myself with WinAmp, but having used it for 3 years, I find I love and need many of it’s features and am so glad I have them. I have around 13,000 ratings and being able to organizing things based on ratings is essential. Being able to create smart playlists makes my iPhone experience so much better. I love having lists like “4+ stars – Last 60 days” in my car to automatically have a list of recent stuff I’ve really liked. Except for Genius, which I’ve turned off, I haven’t found iTunes has gotten slower with new more bloated releases.
I agree. Even with features I don’t use, iTunes hasn’t slowed anything down for me.
And why the heck can’t you people go to Preference > General to turn off the stuff you don’t want to use? Uncheck the stuff you don’t use???
Want to disable the iTunes Music Store? Go to Preferences > Parental, and uncheck the goddamn iTunes Store.
As a Windows user, I pretty much only use iTunes for either its store or for iPod-related things. I use Foobar to actually /listen/ to music.
I have to say, though, I found iTunes 9 to be much snappier. And yeah, it’s loaded with features, but I feel like they don’t get in the way of playing the music. I’m starting to think about using this instead of Foobar – the only thing that’s keeping me is that iTunes, as far as I can tell, can’t monitor a folder for music and so you have to manually add new songs that you get outside of CD’s or iTunes Store.
I don’t really see why you’d want a smaller distribution of iTunes except for the performance issues (that I’m pretty sure have been lessened in the new version of iTunes) or if you’re OCD about your RAM being used (it’s 2009, I think this really isn’t an issue anymore).
Though I will say that if Apple plans to release a netbook, it better have a minimal iTunes program to go with it.
I think you can do it with smart playlists, or maybe make a smart folder that adds stuff in.
++1 This is definately what I have been saying to myself the entire time iTunes has been going on. WINAMP – The holy grail of media players… Wow what iTunes used to be. A simple store, and a music player… I like genius, and everything that is MUSIC related. But cut the FAT, there is tons of crap loaded in iTunes that is worthless, and it bogs down my system.
It is just no longer worth while to even use iTunes as a music player. It is literally easier to load pandora in chrome, and skip a few songs till I hear the one I want than to load itunes, and wait for it to do anything. It’s a slow piece of junk.
I agree, that iTunes is a big bloated, but I hate Winamp.
I hate it extremely bad.
BTW: Why not use Songbird, Vox, Theremin, Ario, kea2 or others.
Another thing: I don’t think Apple should make another app.
Winamp isn’t a Microsoft thing either, so that does not count as a argument.
And as I said in my previous comment, there are light-weight music players on the mac.
If you are not in Mac, try Zune (http://www.zune.../en-US/software)!!! Apple software for PCs lacks of a transparent update policy and custom feature installation. Sorry Steve Jobs but this is the land of user choice.
That’s funny.
A minimal player is already built in to iTunes.
You can enable it by clicking “view,” then “switch to mini player.”
Agreed. The Mini player is key.
Other than the large download, I think Apple actually does a good job of keeping the original feel of iTunes intact. The “mini player” is one way….Also, if you just select “Music” in the Library list, you basically get the original iTunes.
Apple makes it pretty easy to hide the bloated features….unlike every Microsoft app ever created and overbloated beyond belief.
Agreed that iTunes is tries to do too much of everything and what I’ve noticed from Apple is that there is only the Apple way.
I do really like one feature in iTunes, the Genius playlist is great for people with very large libraries.
And now I have a dedicated device (iPhone) to play music. I only use iTunes to sync.
If its such a PITA, why you don’t just use winamp? I mean from what you write it seems that you do have access to Windows 7
I use a mac and a PC. I don’t want to have to dual boot just so I can listen to music without tweeting about it.
Just because Arrington makes you tweet while listening to music, doesn’t mean you can blame it on iTunes.
Weird, been using iTunes 9 all day, and it hasn’t tweeted once… then again I don’t get paid to write clickbait.
THANK YOU !? iTunes Lite should have been out 5 years ago. And you gave Winamp the credit it’s due, too !! Amazing, god bless you, good sir!
Now y’all get out there and set up your Winamp with Bento skin and finally realize what you been missing on all this while you’ve been using iTunes thinking it was all that.
Songbird would be the clear solution here.
IF they stopped developing extra crap like video integration and concentrated more on getting load times down, improving search performance, and anything else that affects audio performance – i.e. all the steps one does to load the application, search for a tune, play the tune.
It’s close at the moment but still a big of a dog. Once they’ve nailed the basics and polished the UI, then add movie shit etc. as optional extras.
“What’s wrong with this picture? It’s janky as hell is what, and this kind of weirdo sorting issue is far from rare.”
If you click on the column heading labeled “Album”, iTunes will sort by album and the tracks will be in order. If you’re only sorting by Artist, as in your screenshot, albums won’t necessarily be in the correct order.
If you click the Album column twice, it’ll sort by Artist then Album, which is to me the most logical.
yeah – It actually won’t sort Inverness right if I do it by Album, but it will if I do it by Artist and Album. Good times.
I can’t get this to occur for myself on the Mac; is this only on Windows? Can you provide steps for reproducing?
Not overly suspicious or anything, just curious, but I think you may be doing something that is affecting your own sense of “right” possibly and would like to check this out further for myself.
I have produced sorts that didn’t always preserve track order (if that is what you mean by “right”), but it was exactly what I wanted to do in those cases.
No it’s on mac, but it has to do with those last two mp3s not having “disc 1 of 1″ in their tags. Sure, it’s easily fixable, but there are lots more little issues. That one just presented itself while I was writing the article.
Okay, so by “right” you mean “as I wish iTunes would know I secretly wanted it to if I didn’t poorly tag my files.”
That’s what I thought.
Nice job of making sure you cropped out evidence that sorting was, in fact, working “right” and was not buggy, btw.
By “right” I mean in numerical order. You don’t have to consider it a problem if you don’t want to.
If I wanted to consider it a problem, I would point out the poor tagging.
I wouldn’t claim iTunes had a problem with sorting (What if you had a double disc album by the same artist, do I want: track 1 of 12, track 1 of 15, track 2 of 12, track 2 of 15 or do I want track 1, 2, … of disk 1, track 1, 2, … of disk 2? According to you, I’d want the former.), go out of my way to produce a bad sort based on bad tags, crop out the offending tag field which makes it clear that sort is working properly, then claim this was only one of many problems but that it just happened to be convenient (By the way, saying so is admitting you realize this is working perfectly correctly and you should have thought of a better example but you couldn’t at the time).
I’m curious: does every other music app actually enforce supremacy of track order over all other sorts applied? Because to me, personally, that seems like bad and wrong behavior.
In fact, the more that I think about it and bother to check out a few options, what music player won’t do exactly what Apple does? A default sort of music with matching artist, matching album, not matching disk #, sequenced track numbers should sort in that order and never should sort artist/album, track number, disk number unless you are specifying that you want to sort track number ahead of the disk number.
Seriously, I find this interesting that you blame iTunes and Apple for this behavior.
And I have no problem with the idea of critiquing iTunes metatagging based on Gracenote and other data sources or the fact that piecing together tracks from disparate sources is likely to produce tag problems (neither of which are exclusive to iTunes), but sorting… ?
I have just checked this in iTunes 9. You can sort by album, and the tracks are ordered correctly. In fact, I haven’t been able to get it to do what you have shown. There could be something wrong with your metadata, that’s my only suggestion. iTunes is great, but it’s not a mind reader.
Tim F. nailed it here. People who complain about iTunes’ sorting do not understand that music must be tagged properly.
You can make a simple playlist in iTunes too: just create a new list and drop the music you like into it.
On Windows, I’ve been treated to ‘processing file’ hell for the past few iTunes versions. Downloading a song purchased from the store is pretty much instantaneous, and then iTunes will sit there at 100% CPU processing the heck out of *something* for minutes on end. Now I just purchase the music on Amazon; they download and insert into my iTunes library pretty much seamlessly.
The *only* reason I use iTunes is for syncing with my iPhone. iTunes is probably the only thing about the iPhone that I’m deeply dissatisfied with.
My two cents.
Same, the Ipod/Iphone biggest weakness is iTunes.
Holly shit!! 88 MB!!!
That “carbon copy” pun was funny, even if it was unintentional. +1
I just use Grooveshark in a fluid app. If I’m at my desk, why do I need to worry about managing all of my music locally on one machine. Music on demand services let me pick and choose from a collection as big as the Internet.
That’s what the ipod/itouch is for … I don’t use iTunes anymore except to sync to the itouch and then use the itouch to listen to stuff.
I just hate the way iTunes (and OS X for that matter) looks. Why can’t iTunes integrate into Windows 7 the way Office 2008 integrates into the OS X theme? It’s so snobby and presumptuous. I would otherwise leave iTunes running all the time, but I close it because it looks like crap.
Snobby and presumptuous?
You might want to look around at the landscape of Windows music players and their total lack of any sort of uniform UI. WinAmp comes to mind… Are those apps “snobby and presumptuous” also?
Except Winamp has skins. Look, they even have a Mac skin for you: http://www.wina.../details/126371
Oh, also, as for what you said you’d like: Unix, of all systems, has had a player precisely like that for *years* (though only recently is the thing actually stable). It’s called Rhythmbox. I went searching for a player for OS X much like you did, and settled upon Rhythmbox. Too bad it didn’t want to build without X11; I should try building it with and see what happens (I don’t balk at running X11 on my Mac as I already do; Apple’s Terminal is *still* 16 colors in Snow Leopard and iTerm is just pathetically slow when displaying 256 colors over ssh (something I really do, every day, before some wisecracker asks), and all the other options fail in one of the above categories).
I agree, Rhythmbox is the best player. Although, I use it on linux. I’ve no experience with media players on Mac and little on Windows. I’ve used Foobar and Winamp there, but it’s been awhile.
On a Mac, I don’t feel any bloat (last couple of versions have seen improvements even), and there are few distractions. Features I don’t use, I am not bothered by. Some hiding would be nice, but even some of the most obtrusive, unused features don’t phase me: the Genius List toggle button, for example. I don’t think it’s going to eat me or force me to buy T-Pain or anything.
For very slim alternatives, there are several good options on the Mac. As for missing apps, there are a host of great compliments and enhancers to iTunes.
I guess I’d rather have more features than fewer until I actually see iTunes bogging down a reasonably maintained Mac in my use to the point where it affects my experience of music or any other tasks I may be performing while listening to music. Don’t think I’m ever going to see that though, whereas I can always hope for features that aren’t here yet.
100% agree. I would love the check box for features and was hoping for this sort of thing with snow leopard since the idea is stripping down and streamlining. The truth is, they will never do it because at this point it is the centerpiece of their entire strategy. Strange. Its bloat over simplicity is the exact opposite approach of os x.
I stopped using it long ago because I could not understand how such a massive app didn’t even have basic features like automagically watching folders built in yet it took three times as long as a simple player to just simply a clicked-file.
The irony is that the most winamp like player I ever used on the mac was soundjam which is the program apple bought and turned into itunes.
Agree. The check box feature would be a dream.
I have an iPod, but I don’t need the store or anything to do with an iPhone or iPod Touch.
Way too much bloatware.
Devin, you do realize that VLC is also a perfectly fine and lightweight music player, right?
Yep, I didn’t want to rely on the betas though. Thanks for reminding me.
VLC is at 1.0.1, so I wouldn’t call it a “beta”.
It’s by no means perfect, but worth looking at again.
Oh yes, sorry, I meant before, when the Mac betas were so unreliable. I have 1.0.1.
This is where Linux takes the cake with their “do one thing well” philosophy.
rhythmbox has improved so much over the last year or so.
http://thatpoll...ayer-do-you-use
I’ve got to say, I’m so pleased to hear it’s not just me!
I’ve been a PC guy my entire life, but was just recently donated a rather old, but trusty imac G3 that I decided to use as a media server.
Imagine my delight when I discovered that there’s basically no comparable software to winamp/QCD/any simple mp3 player! All I want to do is play tunes across a network – how hard can that be?!
I’ve since discovered an app called macAmp lite, that appears to be a rip of winamp, and pretty much does the job. (Vox was also great, and great to look at, but no playlist is a big negative). The only downside to macAmp is that it takes aaaages to queue up tracks. Of course, that could be a network or processor related issue more than anything else, and as long as I anticipate adding tunes far enough ahead, it’s not too big an issue.
I cannot believe however, with all the fanfare and rampant loyalty that Apple tends to generate around it’s products and services, that it was as difficult as I found it to find a free (or even cheap) basic music player.
I know there’s things that PCs generally and Windows specifically could improve on, but screwing over it’s customer base seems to be something Apple has down to a fine art…
How is Apple “screwing over” their user base?
You’re using a G3. It’s about 10 years old. Consider an upgrade.
I have two replies to that comment – pick you favourite…
a) I rest my case.
or
b) I’m trying play mp3s, not prove the existence of the Higgs Boson! Why should I have to buy new hardware?! Oh yeah… to enable me to run the latest and greatest shiny bloat-app from SteveCorp. Refer to response A.
Why do you not have to upgrade your hardware but you have to upgrade your software? None of the new features are desired so why didn’t you stick with iTunes 3 or any other app that will just play mp3s?
Pwnd. Try the same experiment with Windows XP, 256MB or even 512MB of RAM and a Pentium III 766 – hardware similar to the iMac G3.
Ready? Ok now install a current version of WinAmp and try to play tracks, move around your library etc. with a similar number of songs.
Sucks exactly the same as your Mac doesn’t it? Oh noes PC hardware makers are out to screw me. Oh noes!! (Note I didn’t even suggest installing Vista, because you’d still be waiting for it to boot if it even ran on that hardware.)
You’re right. On Mac, it’s frustrating to look for an alternative. iTunes often slows down and bloats the screen with extras unnecessary.
Great job putting the facts together, you stated some I didn’t even think about most of the time.
:]
Devin, you’re desired UI is 100% achievable in iTunes by the way.
Playlists can be opened in their own “iTunes Browser” window that doesn’t carry over all the fluff. Create a Smart Playlist that is your entire library. Double-click on that playlist so that it opens in its own window. Close the “iTunes” window. Presto!
Won’t turn iTunes into an 8MB size app with no features and RAM footprint in the tens of MBs, but it will give you EXACTLY the UI you desire. Should be easy enough to AppleScript and Automate too.
Ha! That’s great. Would have saved a lot of time on the photoshop front. I’m gonna add that in to the end there. A good compromise for now.
Who woke up Grandpa for this post?? If you want something liter go to the women’s gym, Curves. It’s always something with you techies…
Yea I really miss winamp…haha! Too funny!
http://mpd.wiki...wiki/MPD_on_OSX
88MB and still no FLAC support. Songbird rules.
Why would they spend any time on supporting a format that barely anyone uses, and the primary use for it is trading live performances?
For those that want lossless, you can do it with AAC, so they’ve got no impetus to add FLAC support.
AAC != lossless
ALAC = lossless
That, coupled with your misinformed belief that people “barely use” FLAC, make me think that you know absolutely nothing about what you’re talking about.
+1 FLAC rocks. I rip all of my old CDs with it. Native support in Winamp also rocks.
i love me some flac and winamp too
The short answer is because if they wrote the app like any modern media player on any modern OS, then it would use the OS CODEC repository, and they wouldn’t have to spend a second on supporting any format. This is how everyone but Apple has been doing it since the days of IRIX and BeOS. Apple is the lone holdout still insisting that all media be decoded by their app, using only the CODECs they approve, and in their approved wrapper.
It is not only inefficient and a needless duplication of effort, but it also gives rise to all sorts of questions like “why doesn’t it support this type of file?” It is just bad design, foisted on the consumer as a “feature” because Apple has a compulsive need to control every aspect of everything they touch.