Ask HN: Who else hates iTunes?
I've been chewing on different side project ideas and I've become fixated on creating an alternative Apple Music player.
I spend ~10h a day (or more!) at my desktop, mostly coding and listening to music. And iTunes, my primary music player and browser, is awful -- bloated, slow, and tied to an ecosystem of hardware music players that's basically irrelevant to how I listen now.
I want to build a new, minimal Apple Music client that lets you play everything from AM with a clean, attractive interface, and consumes minimal resources.
Some potential features/additions: - Daily/weekly links to reviews from AllMusic, Pitchfork, NYTimes, etc, so you can listen to albums alongside the reviews - Better sorting and organization of albums in iTunes -- eliminate duplicates/remasters, categorize into "real" albums vs EPs and compilations, etc - Social features that don't suck, based on your existing social networks (email, twtr, fb, etc) - Better recommendations by artist, album, genre, etc - TimeHop-style features for music from different years
Anyone else have this problem with iTunes? Any thoughts/feedback?
59 comments
[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 117 ms ] threadOne example is if you have a song in your queue and press play on another song you get a message (which of course blocks the UI):
"You are about to start playback. Do you want to clear the song previously added to Up Next?" [Play song] [Cancel] [Clear Song]
Also, introduction of iCloud sync for files and backup vs. iTunes local sync.
It's atrociously bad.
Especially in iOS, where it did not understand the concept of not having a constant internet connection, like it was implemented by some 21 year-old newb that had never made any production code in their life. This made Apple Music completely useless for my primary use case; driving along the coast on Highway 1.
And that's not even getting to their poor aping of Spotify's UI, without even understanding what makes Spotify work, and mucking up everything in the process. And the atrociously non-functional and ugly flat UI with no communication about what you can tap and what is not tappable.
Never again will Apple Music get any of my money, and never again will I trust Apple with my music. It was a major turning point in everything I do with them; I've always had easy escape routes for all my data to leave the Apple ecosystem, but it was the first time I had to use one in practice.
I've switched to Spotify, abandoning all my investment of time and money into my music library. I don't have time to invest in that anymore.
Building an app on top of anything Apple Music is folly, you'll always be fighting against their changes in formats, and you can be locked out at any moment.
We are only 1 change from having our house of cards toppled, if we depend on their being consistent. And that can change for them, say, if making X change makes them a fistfull of dollars, they will to the detriment of users.
Sure, in your case, Spotify makes sense. Cool. Unfortunately, they are 1 or 2 major changes that alienate their user base. Id rather have control and ownership of my data. And yes, that does mean some growing pains in how to do that effectively. But it also means some arbitrary choice in a boardroom doesn't affect me.
However,there's other audio players and media organization programs, why not use one of those instead? I only know of Clementine, which is open source. I can't vouch for it's features or anything - I only know it exists.
Edit: I guess the question is about Apple Music, specifically, my first read through I thought you meant you were playing raw MP3s. So disregard this post.
* I love high quality audio books
* I use a classic iPod
* Audible is really the main game in town.
I think of ditching the iPod and using the Android App, but that makes me a bit sad.
What I'd really like is a Keyboard Kindle with 160GB of storage (I like knowing things are on the device) and some enhanced audiobook features. That's kind of my dream really. Which let's face it is unlikely to turn up soon.
What I did was get a dedicated android device for audible/music. One of those that looks like a mobile but doesn't have a sim card. A lot of people comment on how I could simply be using my phone instead, but you get a surprising amount of battery life out of a device that doesn't have cellphone, wifi or bluetooth active. And as a bonus, unlike my iPod I can simply flip on the wifi temporarily to sync up instead of having to plug into my computer.
Worse, it is 100% guaranteed that if I use it across devices, then eventually my library will be destroyed on one of those devices, because they've made syncing about as intuitive as git.
The 'normies' in my family also cannot figure out how to use it effectively, at all, and for once I can't help them. Apple must have no incentive whatsoever to fix any of this.
They just go so ridiculously bad: form over function, buggy software, worse UI and features compared to competitors.
But I had assumed that almost everyone uses it now. Or maybe it's less popular than in the iPod days, because the phones/ipads are more independent.
My friend just recommended a podcast, and I didn't even realize that iTunes is where you get a lot of podcasts! I've never even tried.
Anyway, for buying music, I use Amazon's MP3 service and recommend it. You just download the album as a .zip file. Then I put it on my own music server. (I guess this is another reason I'm a dinosaur; I prefer listening to an entire album over streaming individual songs.
I switched to Spotify for awhile, but the quality was noticeably bad on my speakers. I use Sonos and when hooked up to good speakers, you can really tell. Amazon MP3s sound indistinguishable from the original recordings. And even streaming Amazon music, but not Spotify.
11,300 songs
800 music videos
50 movies
1100 TV episodes
80+ playlists
I would be hopelessly lost without it.