damn iTunes
My blog started as a place for me to rant into the ether my gripes with a company, and it seems I have no shortage of gripes lately. I’ve always hated iTunes, I held off for quite some time in using it. I preferred Microsofts Media Player to iTunes as a lesser of two evils. I later shifted and tried out Media Monkey, which was impressive for it’s ability to help me get the meta data of my mp3 library up to date using Amazon and the like (which was how I did it manually until then). But overall I have yet to use a music player, besides Media Player, that feels like a polished piece of software that will just generally work and give me no hassle.
I was able to hold off so long because my only mobile music player was the Shuffle (the old school one that looks like a pack of bubble gum). I found a Python app that someone built that would allow me to just drag and drop music files onto my device like a USB thumb drive, then run the app and all worked as expected.
Enter the iPhone. I again held off on getting one so as to not be sucked into Apple’s shitpile that is iTunes, and also trying to avoid all the hype around the “amazing”, “game-changing”, “omg” device. But, I finally caved to my desires and was able to get one. I’m now forced to use iTunes. Things have been “usable” for quite a while, but I definitely had lots of issues with iTunes. Here are a few of them:
- slowness – why does it take so long to do anything in iTunes? opening the app, adding songs to the library, updating genius, determining gapless playback, etc.
- whack meta data – why can it only get information/album art for only like 20% of my music? the album art is 9 times out of 10 sitting in the same damn directory because media player put it there…just USE THAT!?
- podcast interface – I hardly ever use this, but when I do actually listen to one in iTunes, I’m absolutely clueless as to exit out of this ridiculous interface and usually end up closing the program to get out of it
- responsiveness – heaven forbid I attempt to do one of the things that causes iTunes to slow down, because if I do iTunes is basically unusable during the entire task, which can often be for 10, 20 minutes while it figures out what the heck it’s doing…or maybe I need to rebuild my computer: ~30 minutes to install Windows, 10+ hours to re-add my iTunes library
I have more issues with iTunes, but those are all that are coming to me at the moment. But the new reason for me to hate iTunes is because I finally installed the latest 8.2 update. They asked me to restart my computer. Ok. I restart, come back and open up iTunes to finally listen to some music and….what does iTunes greet me with? That wonderful circle/exclamation mark next to every one of my songs! Which means it, some how, no longer knows where any of my music is…all 22,000+ songs…oh gee, just what I wanted to do today. I didn’t really want to listen to my music. I just wanted to re-add all of my frickin music back into my library…because iTunes does that so quickly anyway…arghhhhh!
Damn you iTunes!
Update: Ok, so for the record I closed and re-opened iTunes and all my music was accessible again. But I still hate iTunes.
Update 2: I’ve since had to reboot my computer, and now iTunes once again doesn’t know where any of my music is…oh joy…my hatred is still well grounded and intact.
Update 3: Well I think I’ve figured out a stupid work around for when this happens, that just makes iTunes even more annoying. Just do a “Get Info” on any song, and it will actually pull up the proper location of the song, you don’t have to select the song you can just hit cancel. Then close iTunes and reopen it and voila…iTunes magically knows where all my music is again. AAAAAHHHHH….