Marco Arment on iTunes:
iTunes is designed by the Junk Drawer Method: when enough cruft has built up that somebody tells the team to redesign it, while also adding and heavily promoting these great new features in the UI that are really important to the company’s other interests and are absolutely non-negotiable, the only thing they can really do is hide all of the old complexity in new places.
With the introduction of Apple Music, Apple confusingly introduced a confusing service backed by the iTunes Store that’s confusingly integrated into iTunes and the iOS Music app (don’t even get me started on that) and partially, maybe, mostly replaces the also very confusing and historically unreliable iTunes Match.
So iTunes is a toxic hellstew of technical cruft and a toxic hellstew of UI design, in the middle of a transition between two partly redundant cloud services, both of which are confusing and vague to most people about which songs of theirs are in the cloud, which are safe to delete, and which ones they actually have.
Hard to argue with this take. Apple clearly has both an engineering problem and a PR problem. They’ve also got a showdown coming up with Spotify. They’ve got about two months to go in the first wave of 3 months of free service, when customers will be asked to plunk down actual cash for the privilege of continuing to use Apple Music.
More important than cash, though, is asking users to trust Apple with their existing libraries. And there’s an easy fix for that problem. As Jim learned in his Nightmare post, back up your library before you let Apple Music get its hands on it.
Backups aside, Apple and the iTunes team appear to have their work cut out for them.
Itunes 11 works extremely well for me as an organizer and player of my media collection. The free alternatives are all rather ugly and expect me to manage my video collection as files in a folder tree, no thanks.
It also works when I need to back up/restore or upgrade my ios devices (a few times a year). But I don’t use the store except to purchase media I can’t find afforably in disk format, and I definitely don’t use any of its cloud-based functions or expect it to perform wifi synching.
I understand why Apple has stuck with such a huge and unwieldy app — they need windows users to have to deal with a single program rather than 4 or 5. I don’t understand why Apple hasn’t retooled it into a suite of linked apps (media library, store, synch, and streaming, all launched from a single icon and presenting themselves so consistently that they seem to be a single app), so that the bugs in one don’t impact the experience in another.
Glad to know I’m not alone here. Every day I fail to understand Apple Music/iTunes, the more Spotify wins me over.
Even with Spotify, there is a learning curve, but it’s more forgivable than Apple Music. Before Apple Music, I was completely disinterested in Spotify. Apple, may have inadvertently pushed me (an avid Apple fanboy) right towards their largest competitor.
Who do we blame for this mess, Eddy, Tim, lowly Apple programmers? Not sure, but if they don’t turn things around, head will roll.
What puzzles me is that Apple has so much financial resources to put into their applications, why do I have to use third-party Apps because their own just don’t work right. Mail is one I just replaced.
iTines gets a lot of brow bweating by bright (Marco) and other critics.
But unless you rethink your whole approach, you might not get the desired product you want.
I have no problem with iTunes as is. I use it to play MY music. It organizes well, gives me options for views and then stays out of my way.
would improve it only by making sync a separate app to sync devices.
What don’t you understand about it?
I don’t enjoy admitting Arment’s correct about this. “Junk drawer” is a pertinent metaphor.
Can’t seem to create any playlists with tracks in them. I go through the motions, but when I’m done, nothing shows up. A rather pointless endeavor.
I don’t think you’re missing anything. That sounds like a straight-up bug! If you’re feeling adventurous you could try making a new library (hold down option while launching iTunes and choose Create Library) then see if the issue still reproduces.
hmmmmm, let me ponder that.
I had a conversation with someone in the entertainment industry today. As I brought up Marco’s idea about separating the iTunes library and the Music streaming, I was told that the record label contracts require that the 2 services be intertwined in the faint hope that users will download songs they hear.
So not sure there is anything to do to fix the “hellstew” known as iTunes. But if Jimmy Iovine can do anything about this issue, that alone will be worth the $3B acquisition of Beats.