Jason Snell for Macworld:
The iTunes we’ve all come to know has had a good run, but it’s reached the point where it is a crazy agglomeration of features and functionality. If someone were to design it today, it wouldn’t remotely resemble its current state. And as a portal to iOS devices and the iTunes Store, iTunes is too crucial to Apple’s business to ignore or run on auto-pilot.
When it comes to hardware, Apple is bold in replacing popular old products with something new that’s different, but better. It’s time for the company to do the same with iTunes.
I could not agree more. I’ve come to hate iTunes, partly because I’m required to depend on it to do so much. For a company so well-known for simple, effective design, Apple really needs to completely rethink iTunes’ “kitchen sink” approach.
Exactly! iTunes, the App Store and the all the other iMarkets are endless lists of icons, with some being bigger the the other. Nothing else. I don’t remember Apple ever liking ‘lists’..
There is another problem – with Netflix’s expansion into Europe, Apple has to really push the TV Shows category into more markets, HD TV shows are available in only 5 markets. I know that the TV industry is very different from the movie industry, but if Apple wants to lead the way, they should make the effort and provide next-day TV shows to most of its major markets (EEA, at least).
Remove the store from iTunes itself and make that into a separate app like the App Store is. Would certainly be a nice starting point to fixing iTunes.
Merge the Mac App Store, iOS App Store, and iTunes Store into a single app accessible on each platform so it is easy to see what you’ve purchased in each of them across all your devices. Then iTunes should go back to just being a music player.
In my opinion, Apple needs to break iTunes into multiple apps. I suspect a lot of people would disagree with me, but here’s my ideal setup:
1. A “player” app, with simple playlist management and media queuing, iTunes DJ etc.
This should completely get out of the way and have basically no “editing” functionality beyond basic playlist manipulation. Hitting play and pause on the keyboard should play and pause music in this app, no matter what else is happening. Albums should continue playing unless another album is selected. My number one gripe about iTunes is the way it gets confused if I’m ripping CDs while playing, or editing tags for a piece of music I’m not listening to. The play/pause/next track logic is contextual based on what I can see, but that doesn’t work properly for me. Separating the player from the library would help enormously with this. Using standard “media browsers” (a beefed up version of what’s available in the Finder) would help to keep this functional and smooth. The iOS Music app would be a great place to start with this (although I can’t say I like like the sort-of skeumorphic interface of the current iPad Music app much).
2. A “library” app, functioning much like the bulk of iTunes does now – managing media, apps, and books: tagging, ripping, importing etc. In my opinion, this is where iTunes shines, and not much needs to change as long as it’s separated out.
3. A “store” app – to buy things. I find that the iTunes Store causes iTunes to eat up gobs of RAM and never release it, so break it into a separate process or app.
4. A “sync” app – to manage syncing with iOS devices. Separate it out, and have it use standard “pickers” from the library. Allow it to run in the background if necessary, and keep it slim. That way, iTunes wifi sync would make a lot more sense.
As I’ve said, I doubt many people would agree, but this setup would help me enormously.
Agreed, as Apple continues to add more and more types of content to iTunes, along with more and more features, it has turned into an unmanageable headache. When it works it’s bearable, but when it randomly decides to stop doing things like WiFi sync for one device, or decides that Home Sharing needs a reset, it’s facepalm time. I think the break it into multiple apps idea is a good one, and hopefully something that Apple will ponder.
Ah yes, the annual “iTunes is broken” article. Someone had to do it. I don’t disagree, but someone has to do something more serious than write any article to make Apple budge on this. It’s been years and they just keep adding to it. I think their strategy is to slowly deprecate the Mac and by inference, iTunes as well, since they want iCloud to be the storage for your media. So I doubt anyone is going to get a lot of traction on this, unfortunately.
Again not saying I disagree, just saying this is not going to get looked at soon.
I like the idea of separate apps and most people are more than capable to remember which app does what. My intelligent and respected father often taps iTunes on his iPad when looking for new apps. 🙂
I think breaking things up does have a learning curve associated. Not to mention the millions of people who know iTunes = everything I need. The reason Apple hasn’t acted upon the ‘broken’ ecosystem of iTunes is because they haven’t figured out a better way.
This complaint has become a commonplace. I don’t really see why. What is there works fine for me. My iPhone and iPad sync just fine, new downloads of season passes and Podcasts appear automatically, and after using the application for almost a decade, I have no problems finding anything. Album art comes automatically, home sharing works great, lossless files sound pristine (using a good DAC).
I do have some issues, none of them have to do with too many features though…
– Still no way to split libraries (my external 4 TB drive should be full within a few months and then I might have to invest in a SAN)
– Why do I have to download songs again from iCloud (consuming tons of bandwidth), when a computer having the files already is in the next room?
– Still no support for additional screens for video playback – have to manually drag windows to the right screen every single time.
– Still no way to remove files I do not want from the download queue (I do not want the SD version of movies or TV shows or iTunes Extras for movies, why must I download them or deal two weeks with support to have them removed, which always fails, as they also remove files that were added between sending the request and them taking action… quite a PITA).
These missing features do annoy me, iTunes itself doesn’t.
Regarding this point: “Why do I have to download songs again from iCloud (consuming tons of bandwidth), when a computer having the files already is in the next room?” – you can just copy the files over the LAN using Home Sharing.
Main Problem is here. How they have to treat iTunes for Windows? If they do a complete rewrite, they also have to rewrite the windows app at all.
That’s a crazy big cross plattform project, which has to rollout in the same time (if we listen to Jamie Zawinski to cross platform shipment in “coders at work”).
ITunes is cross platform and thats the innovation show stopper for Apple.