It has been fairly heavily trailed that Apples is going to sunset the current itunes programme, and split out music, TV/film and podcasts into separate apps, as already happens on ios. So how we are feeling – good riddance to what is a pretty bloated piece of progamming, or oddly sentimental about the potential end of such classics as ‘View as artists’ ‘Create new smart playlist’ and ‘sort by songs’. Having gone through the near-death experience of losing a decade’s worth of playcounts I am kind of more relaxed about it in terms of stats. However, it’s still insanely useful for those of us who burn CDs – and can’t help feeling that will go too. There are many around here who still use ipods, and I wonder what it will mean for them.
A farewell to itunes
by 131 Comments
I hate it, so good riddance.
Moles, I salute you.
Merely reading the phrase losing a decade’s worth of playcounts may necessitate me having to lay myself down in a darkened room. I’ve only ever had the experience of losing 2-3 years’ worth and that was bad enough. Oh god, it was.
The exact circumstances we will draw a veil over – let’s just say the phrase ‘Shall I delete all the files’ was OKayed by someone that was not me. However, it does mean I am in a much better place if I have to jump ship to Musicbee. Will be listening for what happens to the iphone – as use it to play my sizeable store of mix compilations while running.
It’s by far the most important software on my Mac and the reason I bought an iMac in the first place, back when it was only available on a Mac. I’ve got my fingers crossed that this will be a good thing
“iTunes isn’t dying completely, however. 9to5Mac reported last month that the new Music app in macOS 10.15 will still be based on iTunes code, and integrate certain legacy iTunes features”
Ooh please can we keep the function that splits albums up into multiple pieces, never to be reunited?
It’s an interesting point though, I’ve got a Mac Mini but I don’t really use iTunes on it – I wonder if it’s better on there than the PC version? If moving the library wasn’t such an utter nightmare I’d shift it over.
Well, it was designed for Mac, so I wouldn’t be surprised if it worked better. I’ve used iTunes since, oh, Jan 9 2001, and although I’ve occasionally been irritated by some bit of messing around I can’t honestly say I’ve ever had any real issues with it. I don’t really understand the general hatred, it’s just a database really, with a bit of extra functionality bolted on. I’ve never had an album split up into multiple pieces either, though I admit I haven’t ripped a CD for at least 5 years.
I don’t use iTunes but Linn’s LP12 (version LVII) does that.
After the first five or six tracks I have to turn it off and on again to hear the second half.
Nobody? Well, it made me laugh. Paging @minibreakfast
Worse still, you have to do the adverts yourself.
(A joke for Free Spotify users… if anybody knows any of them)
Erm, I know there is a lot of hatred for iTunes, but I’ve seen no evidence that Apple are ditching the software.
I think the big news is the closure of the iTunes Music store, meaning Apple are moving totally away from download purchases towards steaming.
Most reports say that they are unbundling TV/video and podcasts from itunes, which will be a standalone music app. So not clear what happens to backing up your phone, for example. I’ve no hatred for it, and actually will welcome it being just focused on music. But i have 25,000 mp3s that I would like to continue to play through it.
This is what Sony have done with Media Go (ie replaced it with a music-only app).
People who complain about iTunes doing random shit to their files ought to try Media Go. A whole world of fun…
I used Media Go several years ago, when copying files to a PSP. It was, let’s say, an interesting experience.
I don’t think I’ve ever hated a piece of software as much in my life and I use excel regularly.
Excel is a pygmy in the shit software stakes. iTunes is even worse than the not-remotely missed Blackberry Desktop used to be.
Shrug of shoulders and barely audible “So what?”.
It’s been more than a decade since I kicked iTunes to the kerb.
As I understand it, Apple will be releasing the new version of Mac OS X in September (as they’ve done for several years) and this version drops support for 32-bit applications and several other APIs. iTunes isn’t compatible with these changes, and hence instead of re-writing it to fit, Apple have decided to migrate to a new replacement application.
iTunes is very old of Apple software – the first version having been written for iOS 9. There must be a lot of legacy code in there that needs ditching, plus things left over from when iTunes also handled iOS apps and books. A re-write has been on the cards for years.
It’s Apple’s annual developer conference this week, when they announce plans for future software, and release previews of this software to registered developers. I suspect these changes will be announced at tomorrow’s keynote talk, which should start at about 6pm UK time.
Apple have also recently released several beta versions of iOS 12.4. Oddly for a beta of this nature there’s currently no major changes or enhancements to the previous version. In the past when this happened Apple have dropped in a new feature one the beta gets an official release. I suspect that iOS 12.4 will replace references to iTunes with those to the new application – such as the animated icon that appears when you put an iPhone in recovery mode.
I think 12.4 is lots of under the hood stuff, including changes to wallet for the launch of Apple Card in the summer, before the September launch of 13, then a new phone at the end of the month. I run betas on my phone as a matter of routine and haven’t noticed any visible differences in operation so far. I’ve not installed Catalina beta yet, and may wait a couple of iterations before trying it on the Mac. I’ve usually been quite early with beta on the tv and phone, but may also change back for these this summer – there are a lot of plumbing changes going on for the phone, so I may wait until beta 2 or 3 at least before taking the plunge this year. (I’m considering maybe waiting until after bluedot, where I’ll need my phone a fair bit, I think)
The splitting of iTunes has been coming for a long time, and it’s overdue to be honest. And I think that splitting out tv and video is sensible form a home sharing point of view. I have a quite apple-y house, so this works pretty well for me: appletv, homes, phone, Mac should all play nice for me, which is nice. I had quite a lot of music sitting on the mac, and still have an iTunes match subscription, so it will be interesting to see how that pans out too. But I haven’t bought anything for a while for the store. I either stream to buy physical for stuff I *really* want to keep (both music and movies)
I think I must be alone then, as I absolutely love iTunes and couldn’t live without my iPods, as I listen to them daily. I have iTunes open all day and I’m always adding something to it or changing playlists around (I must have more than 150 playlists set up) to update my iPods. Actually, I like Excel too! I have countless spreadsheets and I’m fiddling about with them constantly as I work through my album ranking project. I know so much more about Excel now than when I used to work with it. In fact, I wouldn’t like to think how much time I could have saved had I bothered to learn about it much earlier. I hasten to add, what I use them for is very basic!
But the thought of no more iTunes is bringing me out in cold sweats. I have spent so much time using it and tidying it up that I am convinced I must have the tidiest iTunes library (127,052 tracks) around. What’s more, I run 4 iPhones, 3 iPods, 3 iPads and an iPod Touch off it and it took a very long time to organise it so that I can plug one in and fill it up with the right tracks with the minimum fuss. I’ve even sorted it so that only artists with full albums appear on the ‘artists’ list on the iPods and only full albums appear in the album view on the phones/iPads. This is essential for the wife and kids’ phones, so they can easily find the rubbish they listen to, without having to wade through dozens of single tracks, but I also like my phone and iPad looking neat like that, as I get far more pleasure than I necessarily should by scrolling down through them!
I’m guessing though that even if Apple pulled it from the market I could still use the version I have downloaded on to my laptop, even if I can no longer use it to connect to the Apple store? So I can still use it to fill up my iPods at least, and can add music to the iTunes library from CDs and files I have on my laptop, although I would have to enter the track information myself (not a hardship, as I change most of what is autofilled anyway)?
I’ll just have to make sure I don’t update it until I am certain I can use the new version the way I want. I guess it may mean me needing two accounts and two libraries at some point, because the phones and newest iPad will eventually stop working with the old version of iTunes, whereas the iPods should be okay as I don’t think the software has needed updating on them for some time.
I don’t like streaming. Not everything I like is available! And I really don’t want to be changing to another platform, after all the effort I’ve put into this one. Harrumph!
Not alone, Paul. I’ve never had any problem with it at all. And I’m totally “anal” (as I believe they say) about everything being properly sorted, labelled etc.
Indeed. I’ve used iTunes from the beginning, and I never had any problems. “Split albums” never happened here – like most other complaints about iTunes the cause is often sloppy tagging and not understanding (or caring about) how things work.
And yes, I’m very meticulous with tagging and information about the tracks (just over 100,000 songs, each with cover pic, producer credit, recording date, composer, etc.).
Those who’ve listened to my Afterword CD swap compilations will have a good impression of what iTunes can do.
So tell me then, when you have ripped an album and it’s fine and a few weeks later it’s been split into multiple bits, how do you reverse that? I have tried all the tag editing, changing the name, changing it back etc that are discussed on Apple sites by the thousands of people with this problem.
I’ve never had that problem and can’t understand how things on itunes could possibly change by themselves after a few weeks with no interference.
I have had the problem occasionally of it splitting an album up when I first load it. Doesn’t happen often and I’ve always found it easily resolved by fiddling around with the “album artist” box.
Whenever I add an album to my iTunes library and it’s split into different artists because some of the tracks are by X feat. Y (and this happens very regularly because I have around 1800 rap albums in my library), I just tidy it up.
Firstly I move the names of the featured artists on to the song title, so it looks like this – ‘Gorgeous [Featuring KiD CuDi & Raekwon] and then I ensure the artist slot just says the album’s artist. Then I remove anything that is entered for ‘album artist’ unless it is a compilation that is done under the name of a specific artist, like a LateNightTales mix or something. The reason I leave album artist blank is because I mark odd tracks that I have put into a playlist as compilations before updating a device, if the full album isn’t going to be on the device, so that the artist or album view isn’t bogged down by all the individual tracks. Once I have finished updating the iPod I uncheck the compilations field. If you do this but still have the artist’s name in the album artist field, the song will still appear as an album on the artist/albums search engine. Took me ages to realise this!
But once I have done this I have no problems with albums splitting off into multiple bits. Occasionally, for some reason, the first track on an album will separate away from the rest of the album. I’m not sure why this happens, must be a bug. But it’s easy to rectify by just toggling the compilation field on and of for that track or the second track on the album. This happens very rarely though.
If you post a screen shot of an album that’s splintered off for you I should be able to talk you through what you need to do to rectify the problem.
Here you go. There are dozens of examples.
Thanks!
Okay, change the view from albums to songs, highlight all the Highway 61 tracks and right click on them and when it says do you want to edit multiple items click yes. Then take another screenshot. And then click on the sorting tab at the top and take a second screenshot. Post both of those and I should be able to sort this out for you.
Here you go! Thanks
And that’s covering all 9 tracks? Sorry, could you post a picture of them in ‘song’ view. There will be a line separating them into the two different albums. You don’t seem to have made any mistakes with the fields, so it looks like it could be one of those bugs that I mentioned, whereby you have to toggle the tracks until the two parts fall back together. Occasionally it takes deleting the information in the artist/album field and then re-entering it.
We’ll get there eventually, hopefully!
This? Don’t see a line…
Sorry, @twang the reply button has disappeared from your last post. Could you right click in the field section at the top and click ‘add artwork’ as that will separate the two albums, so we can see which tracks are causing the problem. That will bring the lines I rather vaguely mentioned!
This will absolutely, definitely be the last picture, promise! I’ll then be able to give you some tips as to how I rectify this problem and hopefully one of them will work.
iTunes seems to always have been more susceptible than it’s rivals to getting confused by bad ID3 tags.
I think the answer to that problem may be doing all of your own tagging yourself, and not letting the software do it from the various online databases that they use. As you might have noticed, there are all too many people around who can’t spell, can’t read properly or just don’t f***ing listen to the tracks they tag, submitting tags to the databases their music software uses. I suspect at least some, possibly all, of these databases are sending out corrupted tags.
OK so Paul Wad is a GOD. He has shown me the way, the truth and the light and the way out of multiple split album hell. We took it off the thread into PM land but because I am that sort of guy I share it here:
Right click on Like a Rolling Stone and click on song info.Check the compilation box. Move to the next track using the arrow box in the bottom left corner. Move back to Like a Rolling Stone and uncheck the compilation box, move to the next track again and that should do it. It solves the problem straight away about 95% of the time.
If it doesn’t work repeat it but by turning Tombstone Blues into the compilation and back again.
And if that doesn’t work you can move on to other options, such as:
– highlighting all the tracks, right click, click on song info and tick compilation, press OK, and then highlight them all again, right click and untick compilation
– highlight them all, right click, song info, delete anything in the field ’album artist’
– highlight them all, right click, song info, delete anything in the field ’album artist’, take the final N off the end of Bob’s name in the artist field, press OK, and then highlight them all, right click, song info, put the N back on
The last couple are really for if you have made a mistake that isn’t visible, like the extra space after the artists name that I told you about. I’ve come up with all these workarounds by means of trial and error, because as I say, I spend a lot of time fiddling around with iTunes. I’m confident the first method will work, but if none of them do let me know and I’ll rack my brain for other methods I may have used. Once you have got it all looking good again you should find that this kind of thing happens very rarely.
I’ve never really invested the time to get to grips with iTunes but it does annoy me that it needs to be tweaked like this when the Apple mantra is “it just works”. I should point out that I am a Mac user but this will probably be my last Mac for personal use as they are just so expensive now and Windows machines are so much better.
Oh it doesn’t just work. That’s fanboi bollocks. As long as you only do the things they think you should do the way they think you should do them they’re great, but you have to “get” Apple. I don’t, so I’m slowly de-Appling my world!
I’d probably still have an iPhone as I don’t like Android or maybe I need to try harder. I had a One Plus for a week a couple of years ago but sent it back. Being able to restore an iPhone to an exact clone is a major plus for me which I don’t think is available on Android (cue someone telling me I’m wrong!)
In Apple’s defence (*puts tin hat on*) they didn’t produce iTunes for people like us who do a lot of ‘curating’ of our music collections. The fact that they think someone might want to download one track out of a whole album proves that. They produced it for people who only download whole albums from the iTunes store and refer to it as ‘content’.
I hesitated to get involved in Twang’s problem because @paul-wad was on to it, but like him and @dai I’ve been messing around under the bonnet for years. If you don’t want to do that, fine – but I repeat, at bottom it’s just a cataloguing database and has to be managed as such.
Been doing that sort of thing for years. Apple deciding that an album with, say, 11 Van Morrison tracks and 1 by Van Morrison and John Lee Hooker is a “compilation” drives me around the bend.
Most of the “problems” people have with iTunes wouldn’t occur if they’d only make the effort of typing in the information themselves – instead of relying on automatic tagging from Apple, Amazon or The Net. Having worked with several download services I can assure you that absolutely no-one there bothers to check anything that’s supplied to them. Which is often copy-&-pasted from an out of date spreadsheet by a bored intern, and then subjected to a mad automatic spell-check.
Well, I take your point and it doesn’t affect me much but if Apple, Google and Amazon are charging for a service, no matter how little and how they charge for it, shouldn’t the information be correct?
“…charging for a service…” – indeed, that’s what I would expect, too. But look at what happened with the iTunes “Special albums” series (download albums with full credits, illustrated booklets as PDF plus videos): the record companies hated the “extra work” (= 10 minutes converting a print booklet to PDF), and customers weren’t willing to pay 50p extra for it. They all vanished after two years.
The problem is that so much of the tagging information is User-Generated and poorly or completely un-checked. Software suppliers don’t usually do tagging themselves, they use one or more of the rival outfits that send out tags on request. They all accept user-generated tags back, supposedly to fill gaps in their catalogues and to correct errors. If their checking of these isn’t up to scratch (and let’s face it, the sheer amount of recorded music getting tagged is constantly growing and the internet is full of people who can’t spell) errors get propagated.
There is no excuse for mis-tagged tracks from artists on the mainstream labels. Getting the tags right should be part of their preparations for release of material. Minor label and hobby releases may have the excuse of shortage of time and resources. Now that we are in an age of digital music, it’s unprofessional for major labels with their money and resources to have badly-tagged music out there.
Type in info for thousands of albums? Life’s too short. Most of it is correct anyway.
How does that explain why albums which were bought from the itunes store or which were initially ok but then split up? iTunes is corrupting the tags somehow.
It’s definitely a bug in the system. Tends to happen to me when I’ve updated one of the devices. To ensure that odd tracks don’t appear as albums I mark them all as compilations before filling the device and then change them back afterwards. It doesn’t happen very often though.
One of the worst bugs is when it suddenly loses the artwork for a bunch of tracks. It may be 15 tracks, it may be 1000, but usually it’s less than 100. Often it’s the first track of an album, so it’s easy to see, but when it’s tracks further down an album’s track listing you can only see that when you click on the individual track. With over 127,000 tracks it can be a very time consuming job, so I just have to fix them as I notice them.
Or, as someone else mentioned, when it suddenly loses tracks. If you’re not careful when you are finding the missing tracks and tick on the wrong one you’re in danger of accidentally deleting a track. I’ve done this a few times.
My wife laughs at me though because I am pretty anal about how the fields are filled in. Every word has to start with a capital letter unless it is stylised as starting with a lower case letter by the artist, which a few rap artists like to do. I then have any information about the song in the title line in square brackets, e.g. a featured artist, the name of the remix, demo, live, etc. So when we’re in the car and have a device plugged in she’ll tease me if a track pops up that hasn’t been formatted properly, as according to my ‘rules’, knowing it’s going to bug me until I go in and change it.
Not exactly difficult to edit the album and untick the ‘compilation’ flag in ‘get info’!
But what if you already have lots of albums by Bob Dyla?
Asking for a friend.
In the sorting menu you can set “rules” for artist names. Highlight all the wrong spellings (including Blind Boy Grunt) and set them to Bob Dylan, to be filed under “D” – like German band Die Ärzte who are requesting their fans to always file them under “D” (not “A”).
Takes only one minute and updates all 241 of your Russian bootlegs in one go. Tell that to your “friend”.
That should also sort out Tangoed Up In Blue, New Moaning and Must Be Santana. Cheers.
I’ll be heartbroken too. My library is huge!
they take the ipod classic off me & now this.
I already had an 80gb and 160gb iPod, but was having to ration what was going on them, when my wife’s mate said she had a brand new 160gb in her drawer that she’d never used. She then offered me it for £80. Result! So I’ve now got a 160gb iPod for rap/drum & bass/electronica/post-rock/post-punk…basically all the cool stuff! And another 160gb for the guitar based stuff and ‘less edgy’ synthpop, etc, with the 80gb for 50s/60s, jazz, classical, soundtracks and all that. I still have to agonise about what to remove each time I add something, but my album ranking project is handy for that, as I remove stuff I least like (unless it’s something I think might grow on me of course).
And now they’ve started doing 120gb iPhones, so I’ve filled that with the best stuff from across all three, although it’s 90% from the cool iPod. I listen to 2 or 3 of the iPods every day, along with CDs.
I absolutely love them. I have so many playlists set up I can’t be bothered to count them. Loads of best ofs, loads of collections of non-album tracks, I’ve set all compilation albums up as playlists, as it makes it easier to find them, and then all my ‘alternative albums’. By this I mean things like my alternative Dylan albums, where I’ve used a mixture of live tracks, demos and alternative takes to make up alternative versions of his best albums. For my alternative Blonde On Blonde though, I’ve started it off with The Beatles’ Version of Rainy Day Women, as I don’t really like the few alternative Dylan versions I have. Truth be told, I don’t really like the song.
My favourite playlist is ‘Paul’s favourites’, my electronic version of John Peel’s box of singles. There’s 608 songs and I bet it’s the only playlist where Skepta, NWA, Wreckless Eric, Kraftwerk Captain Beefheart and Sex Pistols sit alongside David Soul, Alvin Stardust, Lonnie Donegan, Chas and Dave, Joe Brown and Roger Whittaker!
It frustrates the hell out of me mainly because it HATES you loading stuff that’s not on Apple Music. Like a whole lot of my own demos and recordings.
BUT it’s great for my weekly radio show, I create a Playlist and can change the order and add/remove things as I go. But I HATE it when it automatically sets things up so it plays the rest of the Playlist. I have to go in and clear it each time. I’m so used to i now but I wish it didn’t do that. OTOH I quite like “Play Next” in this context.
I’ve never loaded anything from Apple Music (except the famous time when they gave everybody a U2 album). No problems ever!
Do you have the use iTunes library in the cloud, or however it is titled, ticked? I would never do this because so much of my library isn’t in Apple music’s library, so they wouldn’t be able to match it. Also, I have heard so many scare stories about iTunes Match and losing your own music.
But I rarely download from Apple Music, cos it is so expensive, so at a guess I’d say I have entered 126,500 tracks myself, some of which I have made myself by capturing live tracks off radio shows, etc, and I’ve never had any problems that can’t easily be fixed. If it’s a track that Apple don’t recognise (so your demos will fit into that category) you just have to enter the information yourself. As I go through and amend all the fields for everything I add to the library, that’s no real hardship.
That’s my experience – it has quirks but you can normally get around them
The only time I’ve had a problem with iTunes was when MediaGo did it’s stuff and rewrote a load of tags randomly, so hundreds of songs “disappeared” from my iTunes library and had to be found again, usually one-by-one. My fault for allowing MG access to my iTunes folder? Probably.
I don’t use iTunes currently but always did in the past when I had an iPod. I would probably still be using an iPod if they still made them. I liked it, and I never really had many issues with it. I don’t think I ever had a massive music library on it though – maybe 3,000 – 4,000 songs? (But untidied, ie there were probably duplicates and stuff in there).
I moved on to Spotify which I loved for a while, but I went off it when I felt it was cheapening my love of music. I’m back to buying CDs and records now!
I’ve recently de-tethered myself from the mobile internet world completely. I don’t even have a smartphone now! Got one of those £15 Nokia stripped down, oldschool things (calls, texts… and Snake, and that’s about it).
So I’m a bit in flux at the moment – the only “portable” music carrier I have is my old minidisc player! I might buy a budget MP3 player at some point, but at the moment I’m not missing “music on the go” and I’m reading more books as a result!
In what is now somewhat of a tradition for me, this is where I say:
“Buy a Fiio”.
QI KLAXON!
I thought I’d done quite well getting this far down the thread before I said it.
It had occurred to me, yes!
What software do you manage it with @fentonsteve?
FiTunes? 🙂
Agree with all the “I like it” comments
The other, emotional thing is – as an early adopter (I have my library intact from 2003), I can get nostalgic looking at the pattern of what I was adding to my library at particular times. I have tones of playlists for family birthdays etc.
I can only imagine that, however it changes, you will be able to keep/migrate this…but it has made me a bit nervous
What with this and emusic going down the dumper – it’s the end of an era.
emusic is terrible now …I don’t know why I haven’t cancelled
I am giving them until my annual was ridiculously good value grandfathered sub renews next April, hooving up what catalogue remains (today’s discovering Prince Far I and the Arabs – brilliant classic dub reggae). But the new releases are down to basically Merge and Fire.
I’ve never used itunes. I wouldn’t know where to start. If I want to hear music I put a record on.
Difficult on the M4 …
I have one of those CD player things. And Radio 4.
And silence.
It’s given me one or two headaches in the past, but on the whole this is bad news for me. I use a number of apps which have iTunes integration – prime example being Get iPlayer Automator – that integration probably being dependent on the fact that there’s a single iTunes library for TV Shows, Movies, Podcasts and Music. The complexity of modifying these 3rd party apps to integrate with a combination of several replacement apps will probably be the kiss of death to that simple integration. Then there’s the ease of pointing an Apple TV at your iTunes library (under the “Computers” applet) which will doubtless have to be totally re-jigged.
Fair enough, some of you can’t stand iTunes – but I daresay that means you don’t use it, so it makes no odds to you, does it? For those addle-headed dimwits of us (like me) who DO use it, this is at very least problematic news. And I thought my worst iTunes problem was the lack of a full SQL-type facility for defining Smart Playlists!
Just use Plex (available on the massively overpriced Apple TV), any downloaded TV show will just show up, no point messing around with iTunes for this sort of stuff.
I’m another one who has no real problem with iTunes. My own version isn’t perfect (lack of cover art for some album etc) and I don’t particularly bother with the background information, but it suits me fine.
No excuse for missing artwork, my Oriental friend. Just google the cover image and add it yourself in the “get info” bit.
I admit it looks a bit of a mess, but it’s too time consuming (i.e. I can never be bothered) and I have the artwork on the shelves anyway should I wish to gaze at, I dunno, the cover of ‘Country Life’ whilst I listen to Roxy Music.
Hey, that’s a thought. I might set the artwork for the entire library to Country Life. Why limit gazing at it to when you listen to Roxy Music?
I make all the iTunes covers myself (yes, I probably have too much time…):
https://wordpress.com/view/chickswithdisks.wordpress.com
Your implication that messing about with the artwork in iTunes is somehow not a worthwhile activity leaves me baffled….
Changing the artwork is a good 50% of the appeal of a digital music library for me.
Sometimes it is remedial rather than recreational: for example the very wonderful An Old Raincoat Won’t Let You Down has an extremely unwonderful sleeve. My solution? Replace with a tight close-up of the album’s beautiful Vertigo label. Result – I’m not carrying a sick visual joke about child abuse around in my pocket. Hooray!
After today’s keynote talk, it seems that the iTunes replacement will be appearing with the new version of Mac OS X which is set to appear in September. Registered developers will be able to install an early beta version of the OS today. There’s still a possibility it could appear sooner than September.
Apple have split iTunes into three components – named Apple Music, Apple Podcasts and Apple TV, with syncing tools moved to elsewhere in the OS. By the look of things Apple Music doesn’t seem to be that different to iTunes, but we’ll find out more once people get their hands on the beta.
There’s no news yet on the Windows version.
Probably time to migrate my library to the Mac then. Oh no….
My librarian background was bloody handy when wrestling with iTunes. Having spent most of the last 20 years fixing dodgy metadata in my day job, managing my music collection became something of a busman’s holiday. I’ve never felt the appeal of streaming though, I don’t have enough hours to listen to the stuff I already own, and as others have pointed out, not everything you want to hear is available.
Lately the double whammy of a slow, aging PC and the declining battery life of my iPod classic have led me to go back to all my original ripped files and upload them to Google Play, which rarely gets a look in when different services get compared. You can upload 100,000 tracks for free, and it’s pretty good actually. No need for a devoted player, just carry everything on your phone and use headphones / cast to a speaker. There were a few quirks when I imported everything but didn’t take me long to tidy it up. I think I’m converted.
I’m still keeping the CDs / original ripped files though, you never know when you might need to start the whole thing over again.
Google Play: I did that too, and I use it a lot. On the whole it works really well, though it occasionally splits albums up in the manner complained of by Twang – but I assume that’s an uploader error. It doesn’t bugger about with giving you the wrong versions of tracks like Apple Music is supposed to do, though.
You can re-download albums too, for playing in the car or whatever (although my generous down-under data allowance means I stream direct in the car most of the time). I imagine Google will eventually get round to charging us for using all that space, but in the mean time I’m happy. It’s like Spotify, but with your own music.
Google Play is essential ‘if all fails’ cloud backup as it automatically uploads what is added to itunes (with the desktop music manager).
Actually, it’s a mere 50,000 tracks now. Seems enough, though.
Hopefully worst case concerns might be premature…
Doug Adams, who comes up with those fantastic Apple Scripts for iTunes has tweeted that the code he looked at for the new thing was iTunes but just without TV etc
https://twitter.com/dougscripts/status/1135660466968117248
He says “Yep. It’s essentially iTunes, just no “other media” aftertaste”
[https://dougscripts.com/itunes/index.php if you haven’t seen before]
So they’ve de-bloated. Got there eventually.
The whole notion makes me feel a bit queezy and anxious, if I’m totally honest as I’m a slow adoptor of tech and a blockhead to boot ( I clung on for ages to Mini discs mostly because I couldn’t really grasp the notion of iPods etc.).
So having said that, can anybody lay out what the best options are for someone who still buys CDs & likes to rip them to iTunes via a Mac mini so I can listen to the new ones on a device in my pocket ( a 160gig Classic in my case)?
I will not be streaming music via a phone ever in this life.
Is there another package that would work to achieve the same end ( that can be downloaded by a dunce & utilised) ? & if so, would a Classic still work or would a rival device do it?
Really grateful for any helpful suggestions & pointers towards help online etc.
Buy a Fiio.
Fiio are solid-state high-resolution audio portables at various prices from £79 which take micro-SD cards and play back almost all file types including CD-quality (and above) lossless and your iTunes mp4 files. The sound quality is better than a CD player, let alone better than an iPod. Some in the £200+ range are touch-screen Android devices with pimped audio playback circuits.
I use Exact Audio Copy for ripping, mp3tag for tagging, VLC for playback. All are free.
Fiio don’t do the sort of playlist/playcount/scrobbling things iTunes does, though.
With that level of knowledge and enthusiasm, it’s a wonder you haven’t said this before.
PS.No playlists = no sale. Playlists are my life.
There are playlists, but they’re not as easy as iTunes, or something. I don’t use them, so it doesn’t bother me. I only play albums.
Of course, if you buy one of the Android OS Fiios you can run VLC or whatever and not bother with the fairly basic Fiio UI.
Hi @fentonsteve – thanks for that- forgive my utter ignorance but am I right in thinking that Exact Audio Copy & VLC etc. are bits of software I can just download onto the mac & the interface would not be entirely alien to somebody used to iTunes ( although obviously not identical)? i.e. the CD you are ripping is ‘magically’ recognised & then the file goes onto your player?
Can you get idiot proof tutorials online or is it genuinely intuitive to do if you’re as basic as I am?
Yep. I’m no Mac expert, though.
EAC isn’t available for Mac but runs under WINE or Virtual PC Win 98. http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/en/index.php/support/faq/
VLC has a Mac version.
https://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-macosx.en-GB.html
mp3tag runs under Wine.
https://www.mp3tag.de/en/mac-osx.html
In truth, you probably only need VLC unless you have scratched CDs (EAC’s strength is the bit-perfect ripping) and don’t want to edit tags.
The alternate to EAC on a Mac would be dBpoweramp….
https://www.dbpoweramp.com/
Faster than EAC but gives less accurate copies. Probably not important unless you want to rip scratched CDs.
I’m currently trying it out and may well purchase, as it finds and downloads good-quality album art for just about anything and the tagging seems extremely accurate (although there’s one tagging bugbear that annoys me and needs to be watched out for – some, but not all, artists coming up as “Animals, The” or “Teardrop Explodes, The”).
It does enable ripping of hidden pre-tracks (see separate AW thread), which is an excellent thing.
You need to bear in mind that it currently costs £37.20 for the full version, however. The free version has quite a few limitations.
on the tagging..I think it uses a few database sources so it could be one of those is problematic and could be deselected
Also, a handy feature of it is that you can rip MP3 and FLAC from a cd at the same time
Thanks for outlining that, much appreciated.
Having looked at Fiio ( & the competition) I’m staggered that this whole sector was unknown to me – it makes perfect logical sense, especially for the likes of me who are pretty phone/streaming phobic, but I had NO idea!
Lots to explore – I think the way forward for me may be to get an entry level gizmo & then work out which combo of sofware I get on with & when more confident splurge on a swish model & gradually sashay away from the iPod/ iTunes malarkey.
Don’t bother with less than the Fiio X1.
I bought Mrs F a cheap Fiio M series device and it is a bit, well,
crapunderwhelming. I then bought her a X1 which is 99% as good as my X3.There are other Fiio users on here.
Indeed, have given my X1 heavy hammer and although the interface (controls) take a bit of getting used to the sound – when paired with a decent set of headphones – is ridiculously better than say, your phone, with 320kps mp3’s.
Good riddance.
Any iTunes users who are used to the iTunes way of managing their digital music – try Music Bee – I switched to it a couple of years ago – it requires some effort and you may need to take your time and READ THE INSTRUCTIONS – which I know flies in the face of Apple’s way which is to dumb everyone down and make you not want to have to press too many buttons but give it a chance. MusicBee does everything iTunes did, but much better.
https://getmusicbee.com/
It’s PC only, so I’ll stick to iTunes (or whatever), thanks all the same.
MusicBee also has no podcast subscription capability, which is a big minus for me.
If it keeps/has ‘play counts’ and the ability to play shuffle songs by album (i.e. play one album in sequence and then randomly choose the next album) then I might consider it.
Tried to give it a go – won’t install on my Windows7 machine.
I’m a bit conflicted about iTunes. On the one hand I’m a bit like Paul Wad in that I spend a long time tinkering with iTunes (I think of it like gardening) and I love it for the playlists. However, because I’m have such a large library (153,000 songs) and hundreds of smart playlists, it’s also very slow.
If the new incarnation sorts that I’ll be very happy. However, if it also deletes all my play counts and gets ride of my playlists, I’ll be be very sad.
Time for a plug for MediaMonkey.
The free version has pretty good basic capability, but the “Gold” version ($25 for a version 4 license or $50 for a lifetime license) basically does just about everything you’re likely to want to do with your music library. Version 4 also handles video and pictures but I don’t use it for those.
My music library is currently 133,809 tracks (including saved podcasts). MediaMonkey is fast, using all cores of your computer’s processor, scans your designated music folders and updates the library automatically whenever new tracks are added, has a very good tag editor built in and it incorporates a podcast downloader. It can be set up to stream from any device on your network to any other device. It supports playlists imported from other software, automatically created playlists via a huge range of keywords and parameters and of course playlists of hand-selected tracks. It plays pretty much any file format you care to chuck at it as long as the files aren’t DRM-protected.
PC only 🙁
Will MediaMonkey sync with old Ipods? Like Jungle Jim I am a very late adopter (took me about 7 years to catch on to ipods) and will never stream to a phone. I use a PC to organize music. Am annoyed they are messing with Itunes and all my carefully-learned methods will have to be re-invented but the only constant thing in life is change, I suppose!
Glad to learn it’s not just me that gets the heebie jeebies from these kinds of announcements!
@junglejim
It’s defnitely not just you. I’m at a loss to understand much of what is said when it gets a bit technical. Like iTunes and love my classic iPod, so a bit unsettled at the moment!
Me too, pretty much.
I’m still dazzled by my iPod. I love the thing. Basically, the contents of a (perhaps rather small) record shop IN MY HAND.
That still flips my much needed wig.
I depend on ITunes but given that my iPod will die sooner rather than later my loins are mid-gird and I’m looking at Filo’s on the quiet.
Yes it will, but possibly you need to have Apple’s Quicktime software on your PC. Any old QT version will do as it’s there just so it’s drivers are available. I deleted all the Apple software except QT on my machine so that Apple’s Updater doesn’t annoy me or hog resources that it doesn’t need.
Thanks a lot. Just checked and I’ve got Quicktime so will give Mediamonkey a go when they finally pull the plug on Itunes.
I’ve got a sneaking suspicion I bought it a while ago. Must have a look. There was some reason why I didn’t use it but I can’t remember why now. Maybe it didn’t do podcasts which I don’t get via iTunes now anyway.
It does do podcasts, as long as they provide a non-iTunes subscription URL. That’s how I get all mine.
Must have been some other reason you didn’t like it.
I don’t think I didn’t like it, just couldn’t be arsed to make the switch.
Media Monkey saved my life! My old computer died in conjunction with a corrupted i-pod, and I thought I was fucked, But I used Media Monkey to “suck in’ all the then unattainable music files and pumped ’em into a new i-pod. It did it, allowing me to start from scratch with a new computer. I downloaded it all back onto my new mac, where, because of apple, it just filled up i-tunes. God knows how or why, but even as I can no longer use it, AND use again i-tunes, eternally grateful.
How do you import playlists from iTunes then Mike? I lost them all once when I moved iTunes to a new pc so if I can move them over that would be cool.
I’ve never needed to import from iTunes, but as long as you can save your iTunes playlists and the files referred to by them are there in your library, MM will read and play them.
You may need to save each one individually and the menu option for that would be something like “export as .m3u playlist”. Save them all to somewhere in your library folder.
I would have thought a new iTunes install would read them, as the .m3u format is pretty much an industry standard. A lot of album downloads come with .m3u album playlists.
Install MM and press find music files…..
Astonishing and uplifting.
I’ve mentioned this before I think, but for me the best digital music software is Roon…..
https://roonlabs.com/
It takes care of all the database for you, has full content, is massively hyperlinked and streams flawlessly in high resolution to “Roon Ready” hardware (most networks enabled players these days).
But (and it’s a big but) it’s expensive – USD119 a year or USD499 for a lifetime subscription.
I do still use iTunes (and Roon just sees the music folders so no need for separate setups) but only mainly for TV and Movies to stream to the Apple TVs
I’m sure most AWers would prefer the yurt-ready spelling Rune.
Mini ATM – anybody know a decent music file conversion app eg going from Flac to MP3? I used to have one but made the mistake of letting it update and surprise surprise the new version was a “trial”.
I’m not Mini (obvs) but I’ll give an answer anyways, because I care. I use Music Converter Pro. I started off with Music Converter Lite and thought it was fab, but it only let me convert one song at a time, so I went for the pay versh. It has never let me down or required me to consult someone of less limited intelligence.
If you are on a Mac then XLD is probably one of the best (and it’s free)
Alternatively dBpoweramp is a pretty good file converter as well as being a CD ripper, I think there is both Windows and Mac versions
https://www.dbpoweramp.com/
Thanks both. Hours of cheerful and pointless dicking about awaits.
XLD 100% – free and easy to use
Foobar2000 also does that and much more (and is free)
Also, LAME Front-End.
LAME is the best mp3 encoder, the Front-End is a small freeware app with drag and drop interface. There’s a limit of about 100 files at a time.
A bit more information than in the original article….
https://www.theguardian.com/music/shortcuts/2019/jun/04/itunes-is-over-what-this-means-for-you
The app’s core features will be split out over three new apps – Music, Podcasts and TV – as well as a few older ones. Music will continue to be the home of users’ downloaded music libraries
Apple have today issued a support document, outlining the forthcoming changes for Mac users:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210200
And here’s the view from Australia 😉
http://www.theshovel.com.au/2019/06/04/apple-scraps-itunes-to-focus-on-exciting-new-ways-to-lose-your-music%ef%bb%bf/
Arf!
Hurrah!
https://slate.com/technology/2019/06/apple-wwdc-itunes-songs-playlists-music.html