simra.net Doing stuff since 1973

The reasoning behind Apple's lack of attention to key features that would make everyday iTunes users happy is simple:

iTunes is a music management/player software that Apple created for a single purpose - to allow users easy access to the iTunes Store, where they can easily download and listen to thousands of different songs.

For that purpose, iTunes excels. You buy the music, you listen to the music, you burn a compilation CD is you like to do so. Those things are incredibly easy to do within iTunes, most people will agree.

That those things are what Apple NEEDS the software to do in order to make them the most money. So long as consumers can easily access, download and listen to their music with ease, Apple is happy.

That's why Apple puts marketing focus on using iTunes with your iPod - they want consumers to buy iPods and then buy iTunes music, because it puts more money in their pockets.

So of course they're not going to focus on making it easy to add your own music, content not from the iTunes Store. It doesn't make them any extra money, and although you could say that that functionally might appeal to consumers considering buying an iPod to use with iTunes, consumers with that mindset are of far less importance to Apple than those consumers actively purchasing music from the iTunes Store.

So if you want a media player with all those features that Apple could care less about, look elsewhere. If I might suggest, the open-source Mozilla media-player, Songbird is looking mighty fine.

Apple says "Think Different."

Almost sounds like a call to think about something besides Apple - hey, I'm already doing that...

I bought an external hard drive.
I moved my music to it.
All the links are broken.

I don't have my music in the itunes folder.
Is there any solution to repair the broken links as a batch. If there was only a way to change all the files with the tree: MyMacHD/Media/MP3/... to MyExternal/Media/MP3/... as a group.

Is there? An apple script maybe?

Dude, when i saw your blog i said "i am not alone!"

I have 2 computers; like all the human beings i have 2 libraries....then i realized that is dumb to keep Gb of music on the master drive (thank god for firewire and usb2.0 and external devices), so i have my collection on a secondary drive on my mac pro, and on my external usb drive for my laptop.

now...good mother of our souls...i import a song...and i loose the players count and the ratings! then i import podcasts....and wow! even if i have the frikkin files, iTones don't see that i have the file and ask me to download again the same file, carefully renaming the old files with a number after the filename!

Multiply this hassle for 450 Gb of podcast, music and video clips and you will figure out that is better to use WMP on a pc and on a mac with Parallels instead of using frikkin iTunses.

rules of reason and logic:

1) do you have a mac? you use itunes? MERGE for god sake! is a frikkin XML file that contains all the info for each track, parse the file, find duplicates.....LAZY!!!!

2) podcasts: do you ahve a bunch of them? do you update them? well....MAKE A PODCAST LIBRARY FILE! So is possible to avoid the good old blasphemy every time that you try to import the podcasts.

3) scared that someone can steal your music, so you avoid that someone can use another library? PRESS ALT WHEN ITUNES START! so you can choose your library, and can use the library that doesn't belongs to you....and doing the backup and a CD-R of the protected contents and ripping again on iTunes gives you a copy of the song without protection....so please stop the BS and give us a product that works as Christ command!

BTW if you guys like itunes maybe you use it in the only way that the smart engineers planned for you....that's why you do market research! this user click this button? no? TAKE IT OFF! Does the user save the music in his MUSIC folder on the main drive? GOOD! HE WILL HAVE THE WORLD IN HIS HANDS!

Otherwise who cares....is his business not ours, and he can use windows if he wants to do "advanced or complicated" stuff

oh my.....

I agree 100% with your post.

Sooo, while on a search to find an answer I came across your post AND this:

http://www.markelsoft.com/html/dupe_eliminator_help.html

So sweet.
I receive validation AND a solution!

What you guys seem to miss is:

Everything you want to do is scriptable, and there are already TONS of apple scripts that handled ALL of these functions, like removing broken links, etc etc.

Easy.

Search iTunes AppleScript

See?

A

I went thru the same pains (and more) and I totally agree with you on all the points. It should not be so hard as Apple makes it, especially if you consider that those features are available for a long time in other jukeboxes. It makes iTunes seem so primitive.

Since you are running Windows and as long as you are not stuck with iTunes store, you have way more options when it comes to "intelligent" library management. There are few third party add-ins for Windows Media Player that will enable iPod synchronization with WMP (google "wmp ipod") plus almost all third party (ie JRiver) jukeboxes for Windows will sync with iPod. The last option is to forget about the iPod altogether (what I did after it died) and buy MP3 player that actually works with any software/platform.

Wow, just found this thread via Google, and it confirms all the cussing I've been doing. Of all the apps I run on my MAC(!), iTunes database is the only one so prone to life-f**king corruption. And god help you if you have not been doing daily backups if you're a heavy ripper/song adder/playlist maker and need to rebuild it....

So...first feature I would add to your list is intelligent database repair/rebuild/compaction...i.e. MAINTENANCE. Recognize that it's a living thing and a big, complex thing and will occasionally get sick and need treatment for a small problem before it becomes a fatal problem. Steal this from some of the other massive database managers that were around before iTunes. (Or from Entourage even.) Canto Cumulus comes to mind (designed to manage huge stock photo agency libraries of tens or hundreds of thousands of photos tagged with keywords, etc.). It is kludgy in many ways, don't get me wrong, but if it ever hangs or requires a force quit, first thing that comes up on relaunch is "The catalog ______ is damaged. Do you want to repair?" Yeah, it won't solve the problem of innocently moving your music folder to an external HD when it gets too big and you don't do the officially approved iTunes square dance. But it's a start.

And a variation on your #3--give us the ability to merge duplicate files. I want the rating, play count, and even file date from the "bad" file moved to the new, "good" file. And again, I want to do this as a batch as well as one song at a time.

Also, let me set global column views in Prefs. No way to simply change all 100 or so of my existing playlists to what I want instead of Apple's retarded default (play count and last played???). Again, I have to do this one by one. Grrrr.

Apple clearly doesn't grasp what a huge marketing and brand image blunder the iTunes issues are for them. This is the first software experience many Windows users will have with the company. If you can't get a freakin' database manager right, you expect me to trust you with an entire OS?

I think what tend to frustrate me is how much manual work you have to do to keep things working.

I currently have my iTunes library on two seperate external hard drives.
One for Movies/TV Shows and the other for my music.

On top of that I switch from a MAC at home to a PC at work and then back again each day.

So, here's what tends to bug me the most. Going from a MAC to PC and vice versa, why is it that the library file is not the same for both? Why is it that when hooked up to my MAC at home the Library file automatically gets stored on my local hard drive rather on my external drive. Means I have to copy the library files to the external drive, and then of course change the extension to work on the PC.

Of course that means I have to try and add things on one computer.

It also means that I get a ton of the exclamation points.

Recently I've been adding Movies and Shows on my own (thanks again Apple for not offering Canada these files!) Can't stand that I have to add TV Shows and that they get classified as Movies right away.

Also don't understand why the ID3 tags of movies/TV Shows don't work.
I'd really like to see Apple invest into fixing these issues.

Some of the folks, above, have posted comments about how you can simply use control+Alt+delete to get rid of unwanted files in iTunes. Of course you can. But if you read the original blog entry, you'll discover that that's not really the point. The point of much of what this blogger has said is to be able to do these tasks in *fewer mouse/key clicks* so that you can perform cleanup or maintenance in a reasonable amount of time — say 20 minutes instead of spending your entire FRIGGEN DAY (or night).

Even if the person complaining at the top of this page is disorganized in the way he maintains his iTunes library, so what? Let's face it: Not everybody is a tech geek or neat freak. So if Apple's sorting features allowed *normal users* to "clean up" their library easier, I would say that the onus is on the software engineers — who are getting PAID to think of such things — to make such tasks easier on the rest of us (aka "end users").

My problem with iTunes occurs under my native Mac OS X 10.3.9, and nobody can fix it (that is to say that it has been over a year and it's still broke). I've downloaded dozens of updates over the past year so that I am using the latest iTunes software, but the issue is never resolved. What problem? Well, if I want to launch iTunes I have to restart the computer (a dual processor G4). If I fail to reboot and launch the iTunes app RIGHT AWAY, the library goes through the appearance of loading — meaning that I see the status bar moving — and then… nothing. Nada. Zilch. Where is my playlist? It doesn't appear. Where is the window? It never materializes. Why is there a spinning beach ball? It won't stop no matter how many hours it spins. Why can't I get the sprung app to quit without doing a force-quit? (To stop it from "not responding"?)

Even if I reboot the computer and immediately launch iTunes so that I can get the application to launch correctly, my troubles are far from over. If I let iTunes sit open on my desktop for too long and I walk away or use another application and then try to switch back to iTunes, say as little as 1/2 hour later, the application will have frozen with nothing but that infernal rainbow beach ball. What the heck it is doing is anybody's guess. Looking at the Terminal Window doesn't reveal any clues.

So I call a family member who supports Macs for a living, and even with that kind of help at my disposal, his guess is as good as mine. I am told to reinstall QuickTime (did that, no improvement). If that doesn't work, the next step is to remove the iTunes files from the system and to reinstall from scratch (tried that too, but the iTunes download from Apple failed to launch. Go figure — I'm right back at square one). Meanwhile, if I go to Google there is nothing I can find on this issue. How do you even Google it? "iTunes library launch failure"? "iTunes stop responding"? UHGGGGGGGgggggggg! I HATE computers. They do not save time. They waste time. It is said that the average person will spend two years of their life standing in line. If that's true, it could also be said that the average computer owner will spend 15 years in front of a computer keyboard. (And that could even be a conservative guess since most full time working people use a computer on the job!)

And lest you think this is another ignorant newbie writing to bash Apple, this rant is coming from someone who has been a loyal Apple user since the Apple IIe days (that's the 1980s, for those of you who were born 15 years ago). Once upon a time, my friends and family members considered me the resident Mac expert. Now I'm just as befuddled and angry as the rest of the non-geek population.

Since most Internet readers who post comments love playing the "blame game", let's ask where the bulk of the responsibility for these boulder-sized software problems rests (to include, let us not forget, even the ability to take for granted a clean download from the Apple Web site, or a glitch-free installation of the original OS). Do we finger the non-geek computer-using population? Or are we better off expecting the people who *make their living writing code* to work the kinks out before they solicit the rest of us to become UNPAID VOLUNTEERS? I don't know about the rest of the folks reading this blog, but I personally do not have the time or desire to serve as an unpaid software tester for any software manufacturer. There was a time about 15 years ago when I would have considered fiddling with my computer for hours on end a "learning opportunity" or a "challenge" to be conquered. Well, let's just say the computer "honeymoon" is over.

I love my iPods, and I like the iTunes store, but my experience with the iTunes software has eliminated any desire I might once have had to use any other Apple software. Is this really the product that Apple wants to present to the massive PC user base?

I have to say that after moving my library (now over 8000 tunes/movies etc.) five times from desktop to external drive to desktop to laptop to desktop to external drive - where it is going to stay - over a number of years and versions of itunes, you seem like an untidy person.
I don't want to be rude but most of the stuff you are talking about comes from just being messy.
Seriously.
Perter

Damn, it's been years and iTunes is still broken. That reminds me of the time that Steve Jobs Ruined My Thanksgiving:

http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/005732.html

I'd have hoped things would be better by now.

Jeremy

I completely agree. Another feature I've been waiting for is the option to 'Watch' a folder so any new tracks copied to the folder, or any tracks removed, changes will be reflected in iTunes without the user having to do anything.

THIS IS THE ONLY REASON I DONT HAVE IPOD OR ITUNES