itunes is terrible!

I've used itunes for something like 7 years now with countless pcs, OSes, ipods, iphones and now my ipad. I'm sure if there was some inherrent reason for it randomly wiping tracks and doubling albums and freezing etc etc I would have found some way of making it happen.

The fact i haven't just leads me to assume a lot of the whining on here is user error or at the very least not bothering to find out how something works. I just find it totally seamless.

And feek is right, smart playlists are awesome.
 
matt100 said:
The fact i haven't just leads me to assume a lot of the whining on here is user error or at the very least not bothering to find out how something works.
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Absolutely and unquestionably the above :). I have used iTunes for years, right back from a 3rd Gen iPod so however long ago that actually was, and NEVER had a problem that wasn't down to me or my system.

It's either ignorance, stupidity or incompatibility caused by the user's own choices in building their hardware/OS that causes problems.

There is quite simply NOTHING wrong with iTunes. Yes, you can have a preference not to like it, but that's not the software's fault.
 
It would be good if Itunes was optional and they just made the iphone drag and drop.

Also itunes is needed to tether which is a school boy error. How the **** do i get online to download itunes if I can't tether to get online. Who was the dump arse who thought that idea up ?

MW
 
I have used iTunes for years too without any real issue. However, I have had some issues with duplicate tracks showing in iTunes library. This is a known problem and Apple have actually included a fix built into iTunes though it's not always 100% successful.
 
Never liked it in Windows, and I'm slowly warming to it in OSX. It's not terrible, but I don't have a massive music library and I tend to use Spotify or Youtube for music rather than keep a collection.
 
My main gripe with iTunes is that it expects you to add music via it. I have all my music stored on WHS and the files are added to the shares directly. I then have to run some third party app to detect "new" tracks and add them to iTunes :rolleyes:

When I used my Zune, the software for that (basically a rebadged Media Player) actually watches the folders you've selected and updates itself when you add new content.
 
Just set the iTunes music folder to live on the WHS and let iTunes to organise the library then.

The whole point of iTunes is that it's easy to use so that my Mum can use it. Manually organising the file system with your music is so 90s...

Maybe I should write Steve Jobs an email and get him to bring back Winamp v2 and VQF files too.
 
I love how most of the complaints about iTunes are due to the users trying to do arse backward things with it and then complaining that it's the softwares fault that it doesn't work seamlessly. 99% of the people will either be using the iTunes store, or inserting a CD into their computer, clicking the rip button, and that's it.
 
I've said it before and I'm sure I'll say it again. iTunes is great providing you let it do what it wants. Tick the boxes that say to keep music together and organised and then just throw stuff into it, correcting the tags as you go.

I originally tried to manually organise my music as I'd done on windows with folders for artist, then for album and with each album having its own playlist file. It was a disaster. In the end I let iTunes do the magic and I'd never look back.

Oh, and have I mentioned that smart playlists are a gift from the Gods? I have? Well, it was worth mentioning it again :D
 
I started using iTunes in September last year when I decided I was going to get an iPhone and wanted to sort out my music collection.

I made a new blank folder called "Organised Music" and then manually retagged an album of songs and placed it in "Organised Music" in a folder hierarchy of "Organised Music > Artist > Album > Track.mp3".

Once an album is sorted out correctly like that with correct tagging and albuma rtwork included, I drag the album folder from explorer to the iTunes window whcih adds it to it's library.

All options within iTunes to let it automatically sort out my music are 100% DISABLED. This makes iTunes do what YOu want it to rather than what IT wants to do.

The songs then show up perfectly within iTunes and I and create smart playlists (they are a godsend by the way) and sync to my phone.

I ahve been using this method since September 2009 and it has worked and still works perfectly.

Yes, iTunes is bloated and have too many extra services and whatever but for playing music, syncing to iPods and iPhones, creating playlists, subscribing to podcasts, it works perfectly.
 
What's the advantage of that method over letting iTunes organise the music?

Let iTunes organise the library and by default it uses iTunes Music\Artist\Album\Track Number Track Name.ext
If it's a compilation album then it's iTunes Music\Compilations\Album\Track Number Track Name.ext
which is essentially the same as you are setting up manually...

In case of badly tagged tracks, retag the tracks in iTunes and it updates the file paths as appropriate and renames the tracks.
 
Started using iTunes in June when I got my iPhone 4. First take was that is was terrible. It's really picky when reading ID3 tags. My collection which was fine in Foobar, was completely messed up in iTunes. Also it was slow to boot up in comparison to any other music player installed on my system. The forwads and backwards buttons on my mouse control the skip forward and backwards between tracks instead of navigating through screens like in every other application on my PC. Lastly, there was no way to sync by album on my iPhone. Could sync by artist and genre but not by album.

My take on it now is that it is still slow when booting up and loading album art. Also I haven't found a way to change how the forwards and backwards buttons function on my mouse. The other problems were sorted when I bit the bullet and retagged my entire 770 album library. It took around 3 hours using Media Monkey to get the tags in the same format and to add album art to each album. I then dropped all my music into the "Automatically add to itunes folder" and everything worked.
The sync by album came with the latest version of iTunes which was nice, although I can't understand why it wasn't there in the first place:confused:

Overall, I still don't think it's that great of an application as it'll never work for video, unless you purchase everything from iTunes, or transcode everything into MP4 which obviously isn't an option.
 
Malc said:
or transcode everything into MP4 which obviously isn't an option.
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All my video is in iTunes, I either watch on my Mac or stream to my AppleTV. Converting everything to MP4 is no hardship at all really.
 
A question which is sort of unrelated but I have some Blu-Rays which have a data version of the film too, can I drag that off the disk and stick it in my iTunes library?
 
K1LLSW1TCH said:
A question which is sort of unrelated but I have some Blu-Rays which have a data version of the film too, can I drag that off the disk and stick it in my iTunes library?
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Might need transcoding. The copy of Harry Potter 6 I bought came with an iTunes download code for a digital copy.
 
LOAM said:
on the 12th of September an itunes update deleted 200 albums from my HDD, not lost them, not moved them, Deleted them. It then decided that the ipod that was called "phils ipod" was no longer my ipod that was tied to my account and found a new one called......."phils ipod" and proceeded to ask me to sync my "new" ipod with my now deleted music library and thus wanted to delete the contents of my touch.

Que much screaming and gnashing of teeth. Some recovery software later all the music was back so I figured I would recreate my itunes library, this was clearly a task to much for old apple and it decided that having albums arranged in actual folders by artists > album name was somehow a silly way of storing things and went about mixing up approximately 2000 tracks into varios locations that made little or no sence. Even itunes couldn't locate where it had put stuff and 90% of albums had at best one, at worst 50% of all tracks missing and listed in "unknown" folders.

To top it all it had also made huge amounts of copies of random tracks. I have spent, on and off since about the 20th of September manually sorting through 2000 mp3s and putting them back into their correct folders and deleting duplicates (there was nearly 100gig of duplicate tracks).

The end result is that my touch is now useless in so much as I cant add any more albums to it because I wont let itunes anywhere near my music folder ever again, its purely there not to manage getting istore bought stuff off the ipod and backing up apps until I can organise a replacement for the Ipos (thats not a spelling mistake). As soon as I have time to find a replacement then the ipod is going to undertake some hammer testing in the back garden.
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Myself and my wife have had similar experiences, iTunes randomly decides to re-organize your music folder and somehow managed to duplicate my wifes music collection three times into the same store folder whilst also muddling them all up so there was no easy way of seperating them. We've also had issues with authentication of purchased music where for some reason it will no longer play a large potion of the music we've bought no matter what we do. It's an absolute bloody nightmare!

Now media player isn't perfect either, but its considerably less intrusive and more reliable than itunes is!

E-I
 
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