iTunes, Apple's hub to its digital media player empire, is seriously broken. The only way to sync an iPod, iPhone, or iPad to a computer is through iTunes. As the software has "improved" over the years, it seems to have actually got worse.
I was first introduced to iTunes almost 5 years ago. Prior to using iTunes, I used Windows Media Player and Winamp. I had a small mp3 collection and I still listened to the majority of my music on cds. One day I heard of an audio recording making its way around the internet called "The Revenge Of The Screen Savers". As a big fan of The Screen Savers, I had to check this out. I found the podcast and installed iTunes 6 to listen to it. I was hooked. I started finding podcasts through the iTunes store and enjoyed every minute of it. My wife even bought me a 5th generation iPod with video for Christmas that year. That is when I started to really notice iTunes' shortfalls.
Now that I had an iPod, I needed to convert my large CD collection into mp3s. This was a very time consuming task, but it was worth it. After all, I was going to be able to carry my entire music collection with me at all times. I plugged in my iPod to sync it with iTunes and it took forever. My collection was about 10GB, so there were a lot of songs to copy over. I was surprised that iTunes kept hanging the computer, but I wrote that off since the computer was several years old.
Six months later I bought my first Mac, a 17" Intel iMac. I was very impressed with the interface and it's overall speed. It didn't seem to hang on anything and iTunes ran and looked much better than it did on my Windows XP PC. I had purchased a bunch of used CDs from various sources and imported all of them into iTunes. After a while, my hard drive (only 160GB) started filling up with documents, media, and applications. I decided to purchase an external hard drive for my iTunes library. Moving my library seemed easy enough. I chose not to back up the library database. Since I didn't use playlists or rate songs at the time, I didn't think I needed to. Well I was wrong. There was a bug in iTunes that was preventing the ID3 tag of mp3 files to write to the mp3. All of the music I converted to mp3 on my iMac had it's title, artist, and album information missing. All of the songs were ruined and need to be reimported. To this day, I convert the ID3 tag of any album I import even though there haven't been any reports of this bug in years!
Apple keeps adding more features into iTunes with every release. We now have music, podcasts, video, apps, photos, calendar, contacts, bookmarks, books (audio/e-book), and iTunes U syncing with our Apple devices. In addition, there are Genius Playlists, Coverflow, gapless playback, and iTunes DJ running processes and updates in the background. iTunes seems to hang all of the time now. Unlike other OS X programs, iTunes has the special power to hang my entire system when it freezes. If I get impatient and force quit the application, I have to wait 15 - 30 minutes the next time I launch iTunes while it verifies my library.
Speaking of iTunes freezing, iTunes routinely seems to hang while syncing my 3rd generation iPod Touch. I’m not sure if the software is really hanging or actually syncing my data because iTunes only displays the status of “syncing iPod”. The status bar needs to be more descriptive so users actually know what is occurring with their devices.
Below are a couple of key issues Apple needs to address to improve iTunes.
- Better support for large libraries.
- Improved performance & lower memory usage
- Smart Playlists syncing doesn’t work on iOS devices
- Better descriptions in the status bar
- Improved interface for creating playlists
For being the portal for all of Apple’s profitable “i” devices, it doesn’t seem the company spends too much time improving the performance of iTunes. In it's current kluged together state, iTunes seems more like a product from Redmond instead of Cupertino. Hopefully, the application will be completely rewritten in the next major release.
"I chose not to back up the library database."
ReplyDeleteI think this might be where your problems start. Anyone knows you should always back up.
I've been using iTunes since circa 04. With a library coming in around 30GB. Syncing with 2 previous iPods and 2 iPhones.
Never had a problem.
Yeah, I learned that lesson real quick! I make a backup every other week.
ReplyDeleteI have been a Mac user for literally decades. And I totally understand your frustrations.
ReplyDeleteiTunes is falling into the pitfalls of most of Apple's hardware and software; they are working to get PC converts at the expense of reliability and stability. Pre-2005, my G4 never had a single solitary issue. Purchased in 2000, I was delighted every moment. Then, in 2005, the software changes started being very unstable at times. Initially, most evident for me in iTunes. Then in iMovie.
When I added the Mac Pro to my collection of Apple computers in 2008, I began to have issues that have only become more and more pronounced, complicated and frequent. It has appeared that the Mac is becoming more and more PC-like. The concern for quality and stability in their products is not as important to them and I am not at all pleased.
I originally chose Mac for substance. Now it seems that it's all about hype and status. Very disappointing. If I wanted something I couldn't depend upon, I would've saved $5000 and bought a PC.