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Monday, April 27, 2009

Why I hate iTunes



Somehow, Apple abandoned the drag-and-drop simplicity they more or less invented with iTunes for Windows. Essentially, they put a long list of barriers between me and playing a song, which is intensely frustrating.
  1. Be of the right file type. MP3 or AAC. Or go find a plugin. For Windows Media format files, it will try to convert them, a process that drastically cuts the quality (think a VCR recording of an other VCR recording).
  2. Go through the library first. You want to drag a music file onto the application and have it play THAT file? Nope. But I want it to play whatever file I put there. Nope.
  3. Wait for iTunes to analyze it. So after putting it into the library, wait for it to run crap like gapless playback and album search that I could care less about (that I can't turn off), and can't run in the background while I'm ... I dunno ... listening to my song. Slow machine? Get comfortable.
  4. Find the file in the list. If you have a lot of audio and its not tagged clearly, that could be a while.
Then I've got to select play.

Worse, I go from place to place and have different music collections in different places so my library quickly gets invalidated from location to location. I have to resubmit files or get a lot of annoying error messages saying "do you want to remove this file from the library?"

Why don't I just NOT use it and quit complaining?

I have to have it for my iPod (Floola's not yet a full replacement).

(Image at top of article care of this guy.)

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