Him: “Hey, can you help me with an iTunes problem?”
Me: “Dial 1-800-275-2273” [The AppleCare # I know by heart]
Him: “It’ll be really quick”
…and so begins 2 hours of work to resolve a single iTunes issue. I think iTunes is in desperate need of a re-working and I hope it happens this year.
iTunes was a simple application for managing music. Rip, Mix, Burn was the slogan where the only real purpose of it was to rip CDs, mix them up and burn them back to CDs because that was the most logical and most common thing people were doing with sound management applications in 1999. The iPod came in 2001 and it was logical that iTunes was the place that you loaded up the iPod and the slogan became Rip, Mix, Send to iPod. The iTunes Music Store wasn’t released until 2003 and most people assumed iTMS would not actually be iTunes but be a website or separate application. It wasn’t and was built right into iTunes. That’s fine and the integration worked well.
When Apple released Music Videos, TV Shows, Movies, Apps and Books and now Magazines via the iTunes [music] Store, the feeling is that iTunes is simply being taxed to the limits. iTunes manages nearly everything digital in my life and iCloud isn’t going to make my life any easier when it comes to simplifying what part iTunes plays in my life. iTunes needs to be split into 10 applications or re-written from the ground up to expand beyond music. Most of us old timers realize that iTunes has remained unchanged since its initial release when you look at the basic organization of your content. It worked for music but if you try to organize something that is a .mov but is actually a music video and is part of a compliation and you want to show up as a music video on your iPod how much work that is in the Get Info area of that file. Also, most of those classifications don’t go into the files ID3 tag so if the iTunes Library DB files go, so does the majority of what you’ve done manually in iTunes. Playlists, categories, sound check, equalizer settings, sync properties, where you are in a book and what podcasts you’ve listened to and their ratings…that’s all gone. Poof. iCloud won’t be fixing that. That’s a Time Machine role to keep the iTunes Library functional in the event of corruption or failure but not everyone backs up their iTunes Library.
It takes an expert to manage a large iTunes Library.
- My friend had two Windows XP notebooks running iTunes (His work laptop was running an older version of iTunes)
- He had an iPhone & iPad Both syncing to the work laptop
- Podcasts & Apps were on the work computer with some music
- A lot of the music and rich media purchases were on his home laptop
- Some older apps he wanted to get back were on his older laptop and going through the iTunes store on the work laptop to re-download those was something he wanted to avoid
- He wanted to move the entire thing to his home laptop and integrate both iTunes into one
- He wanted to retain all playlists, playcounts, podcast current positions and which podcasts he had played and he wanted to not have to re-sync either iOS device
I completed the task without breaking a sweat even though it took quite a bit of time. I did it and he was pretty thrilled. I doubt any Apple Store Genius would do this for you even on a slow day. I doubt anyone on an Apple Forum would try to help you make this happen. Let’s face it. This was hell for most users but I manage 21K songs, 1,000 movies, 500 Music Videos, 300 TV shows and over 5,000 podcasts as well as 500 apps, 30 books and multiple apps across many devices with 3 computers and two iOS devices along with 40,000 photos in iPhoto. I’ve done this sort of thing a lot and I made it happen.
The problem is, when I was driving home that day, I thought about how much work that was. Apple focuses a lot on getting users to switch from Windows to Mac but I really feel like iTunes is nearing the equivalency of fixing an MsSQL installation or troubleshooting an Exchange Server Mail Store Service that just won’t start or stop. It’s almost as if the re-writting that goes on in Mac OS should be done on iTunes and it should be done very soon.
We may joke about the complexities of Windows and how it takes an MCSA or MCSE to work on a problem and get it fixed. Well I’m an MCTS and have been working on Windows for years and iTunes is equivalent to a PC that won’t boot some days. It crashes often and everything goes in and out of it. If you want to simply play music in iTunes, prepare to need at least a gig of ram and spend a lot of time disabling all of the extra things. I remember thinking the Radio feature in iTunes was “bloat” back in 2004 and now I feel like everything in iTunes is bloat. I don’t even use iTunes for music anymore. I use my iPhone for that because iTunes has turned into a database for all of the stuff that matters to me and I only hop in to sync my devices and get the fuck out as soon as possible.
I hope that changes soon. iTunes is becoming too much like Windows.