...only if you also install apple music or apple tv. If you don't you can still use it for music/videos.
>When you install the Apple Music or Apple TV app, you can only use those apps for your music, TV shows, and movies; you can continue to use iTunes to listen to your audiobooks and podcasts.
While offline playback will be unaffected, I wonder how long iTunes's connection to the iTunes store ecosystem will keep working and whether you'll eventually be forced to install Apple Music for accessing the iTunes store?
Messy branding is now par for the course at Apple. The iPad line alone is something out of a Dell catalog: iPad, iPad 10thgen, iPad Air, iPad Mini, iPad Pro.
The only one that really sticks out as odd there is the 10th gen. Basic, Air, Pro is also their laptop lineup, right—it has been for quite a while, and nobody has complained. Mini seems like a reasonable and easy to interpret addition give tablet use-cases.
I’m guessing the 10th gen is the one with the super long support lifetime or something like that? That’s a slightly weird iPad-ism.
In the most recent iteration of this lineup, the 12-inch MacBook was comically underpowered, especially for its price, there was no good reason to purchase that instead of an Air or a Pro. This was also quite short-lived, with an official discontinuation after four years.
Huh, I didn’t know they’d dropped the basic model.
It always made sense to me, at least: “pro” is premium in a power direction, “air” is premium in a lightness direction, and the base model is just the base model.
But I guess it is unsurprising that Apple doesn’t want to do a base model, haha.
Another way of looking at it, I guess, is just that it is an evolutionary process, and every MacBook is a descendent of the Air now.
The 2015-2019 12-inch MacBooks had zero benefits over MacBook Air, maybe other than the Retina screens, until the release of the 2018 Retina MacBook Air. Other than that, they had CPUs <= 1.4 GHz, a single USB-C port, and even the camera was only 480p. They were never cheaper than the base model of the 13-inch MacBook Air.
The issue with the Mini is that you'd usually expect it to be the budget option (since it has a smaller screen), but it's more of an Air with a smaller screen in terms of hardware and features, with a price to match.
And it doesn’t help that the original one was a budget model. (If I remember correctly.)
Personally, I like my mini being a mid-tier device. Apple probably positioned it this way to avoid undercutting their cheapest model. It’s also a bit cramped. You’re sacrificing some usability for size and they’d rather people make that trade off because they want it rather than it being cheaper.
I assume this is to cover the gaps in the new apps. In macOS they moved extra stuff to Finder. It seems the device sync app might make more sense on Windows. Maybe that will happening in time.
It’s weird branding. Your local music and iTunes purchases live in the Music app. Apple Music the service also lives in the Music app.
(Music purchased on iTunes can be downloaded directly to the device without syncing, but you need to manually sync with your computer to transfer over music that you acquired elsewhere. Either that or you subscribe to the iTunes Match service assuming that sticks around)
Basically, in the PC version of these apps the main difference compared to Mac seems to be that Apple didn’t split Podcasts and Audibooks into separate apps. They’re just mushed into an app that’s weirdly called iTunes. I feel like they should have clumsily but less confusingly called it “Apple Podcasts and Audiobooks”
I recently tried Apple Music and then gave up because it didn’t support podcasts and the podcast apps that exist in the Apple ecosystem aren’t as good as Spotify
>> the podcast apps that exist in the Apple ecosystem aren’t as good as Spotify
Do you mean Spotify is better because it's all in one? Or specifically as a podcast client it's better? Because, as a podcast client, Spotify is shockingly bad. Perhaps the worst podcast client available. Apple Podcasts, Overcast, and Pocketcasts are all much, much better.
This is Spotify's main advantage: most people already have it installed, and it's good enough if you don't care that much about the podcast-listening experience.
Did they really invest in Rogan and podcasts just to keep their existing customers? I thought it was to entice podcast connoisseurs to the Spotify platform, who WILL care about podcast listening experience?
I was in this boat. Now I'd really like to get off. The UI is bad but I got used to bad. But I've been asked to change my password *checks email* 10 (!) times in the last few months. I don't share my password with anyone, but I do use a VPN.
Anyways, I can't seem to find a suitable alternative that will keep track of my listening progress across both linux and iOS.
Chapter support, playback rate control, smart speed (skips silences), voice boost, a UI that’s less horrific than Spotify’s are the main things for me.
The UI is lackluster, since it's just the same one from the normal Spotify Music experience.
Because they bought Joe Rogan they had to add video too and video is horribly implemented. There isn't even an obvious way to turn it off.
I consider myself tech-savy but I gave up trying to turn off and just switched to Apple Podcasts.
Podcasts and Music are not the same.
Please if you really want Podcasts to happen then, Spotify, make a separate App for it.
Spotify podcasts were what made me jump ship to Apple Music. At least back then, Spotify would heavily prioritize their podcasts in the UI. Podcasts were front and center on the main screen. I don't just mean the desktop or mobile UI, but in Apple CarPlay and Android Auto too, where screen space and attention are at a premium. I had to keep fighting the UI to get to what I was paying Spotify for: the music. When I tried out Apple Music and saw that it was music only, it was easy to leave Spotify because their priorities were no longer aligned with mine.
Not a spotify nor Apple Music/Podcast/itunes user here.
Aren't both audio stuff where you press play, pause, stop, rewind and fast forward?
The only difference I can think of is that you might sometimes want to accelerate playback of podcasts but that doesn't mean it can't exist in the same player.
Podcast apps, good ones, have many features you don't need in a simple app like a winamp or vlc.
1) An online catalog of series that is searchable (probably both by name and topic and participants).
2) That catalog must contain metadata both at a series level and an episode level.
3) That online catalog must also be navigable without search, of course.
4) Ability to subscribe to any given series and for the app to have an option to pre-cache an episode for offline use.
5) Several content controls that aren't really required for music listening but are must haves for podcasts such as timed skips (30s, 60s) and playback speed adjustment (only useful in a music player where you probably want to do beat matching).
I think the biggest differentiator though is the episode/series catalog. It makes podcasts actually discoverable.
There are audio players that allows you to find radios by various criterias: genre, bitrates, location, etc.
I don't think it is hard in term of UI nor does it justify a different app when you can have an additionnal tab that allows to find podcast. You just have to change the criterias.
Subscription to podcast is done via rss right? I don't think that is a huge deal either.
More the inverse, that Podcasts is bad because it doesn't have the integrations Apple music has, eg there's Sonos support for Music, but none for Podcasts.
Though that's mostly on whoever processed the audio. When I still had a podcast, I ran it through something or other equalize volumes (and do a couple other things) and it was pretty good and easy.
Podcast apps let you subscribe to feeds, so it automatically downloads new content when available. Some also have quality-of-life features like speeding up playback, syncing progress between devices, and letting you view text data that accompany the audio (e.g., episode descriptions and links).
Podcasts also tend to carry different metadata than music files, e.g. chapters which makes a dedicated client a little nicer since it’s guaranteed to handle all of that correctly.
Could Cider[1] be what you're looking for?
It's basically a open source frontend for Apple Music that works on Linux and Windows. It's what I use to listen to my Apple Music songs on Linux, and it's amazing.
They're currently working on a complete remake of Cider [1], which is "powered by Rust. With a partial shift away from Electron". That might fit your needs?
The latest release, v2.3.0, also supports forcing the player to use 256kbps[2]
Cider seemed to struggle just getting the 256kbps. So getting the lossless options, are not gonna be any easier, but hopefully Cider can figure it out with time!
Yup!
I'm not sure about music that you've added/uploaded to your library, haven't tried that, but given that Cider "iCloud library" I would imagine that it should just work.
This app is INCREDIBLE. I have been extremely unhappy with macOS music compared to iOS and this seems to address all my use cases. thanks for sending it along :)
I like how Apple's page starts with "When iTunes was originally released, it had everything you needed to be entertained. Now, there are individual apps for all your media" - yes, exactly! That's the problem!
Perhaps its the elder millennial in me, when I am on my desktop PC, I like to keep my taskbar clean and not have all these windows scattered about to keep me entertained, gives me a feeling of clutter. I like to have one app that just does everything for me when it comes to audio entertainment, I like the Spotify app for that reason.
Maybe it was a function of iTunes rather than an integrated app but I always found it sort of a mess. As I recall the only reason I started using it for music was that syncing from my other music library app just got too cumbersome.
Podcats (I use Overcast) are pretty different from music and I wouldn't generally intermix them. And you already have Library and Streaming modes of Apple Music so podcasts would be yet another mode.
On the other hand Apple Music already has audio streaming and playback and a Library mode so should Podcasts write their own?
While yeah debundled separate apps will make probably the main use case of what was the bundled app better it also likely leads to stagnation and buggier experiences over time in the apps where the less popular features were debundled into.
Like all knowledge and talent required to code the Audiobooks app is the same as whats required to code the Music app so which team would you rather be on given the choice.
The things is that iTunes also allows you to manually reclassify you media files as a podcast, and I found (still do, actually) that very useful for managing my collection of radio comedy scrounged together from all sorts of places (downloads from BBC iPlayer, downloads from various places collecting that kinds of shows, a very few genuine podcasts). That way I could keep them out of the main music library, gain the listened/unlistened episode display and playback position tracking, and still easily sync them over to my phone [1].
Without iTunes, I would have to set up some fake local podcast feed on my computer to get those episodes into the podcast app of my choice instead.
[1] Using iSyncr + Rocket Player after switching from an iPod to an Android phone – sadly those apps were sold by the original developer two years ago, though, and the new owners are seemingly just trying to turn them into a cash grab, so I cannot recommend them any more, though for now the old versions sort of keep working, albeit you need a rooted phone to work around some issues.
Because there are specialization that are important. Longer form audio generally requires a more robust set of controls for chapters, audio playback speed, timed skips and resume than a bog standard audio player. Not to mention that a podcast player is going to need functionality for finding new podcasts, displaying information both at a podcast level and individual episode level, providing some kind of way to 'subscribe' and thus download said podcast (for offline listening) or stream it on the fly.
General tools are great and I'm never going to argue that there should not be generalized tools (like say a VLC), but specialized tools are also great and should be encouraged where they make sense. To me the differences between listening to music and listening to audiobooks or podcasts are different.
> Because there are specialization that are important. Longer form audio generally requires a more robust set of controls for chapters, audio playback speed, timed skips and resume than a bog standard audio player
That's merely a reason not to use one /inadequate/ app for all audio.
My problem is – certain features of podcast apps (like tracking of your playback position and tracking of listened/unlistened episodes) are also very useful for my collection of radio comedy. That collection however mostly doesn't come from actual podcasts, but instead has been accumulated from all sorts of places.
Most podcast client apps don't allow manually importing files, so I'd have to maintain fake podcast feeds for all my local files. There's software for that, too, but it'd still be more cumbersome than with iTunes where I just need to set the media type of those files to "Podcast" and I'm done.
My issues with the individual apps isn't that they're individual, it's that they're all Catalyst apps. This brings with it mandatory sandboxing, so my media files must live on my system drive. Any attempt to relocate them violates the sandbox, and it's recreated clean.
It's pretty neat, and pretty surprising, that I can still sync my iPod in 2024. But having a large collection of audiobooks means there's a lot of data clogging up my system drive - where audiobooks would otherwise be an ideal candidate to be offloaded almost anywhere else (they're slow, they're infrequent, etc).
I disagree. It is nice to have separate apps for Music, Podcasts and audiobooks. You know, do one thing well.
Spotfiy tries to do all of these and it's a bloated mess.
Back in the day, you uploaded all your own media. you didn't have access to hundreds of thousands of streaming options across music, podcasts, and movies. Having a single app to upload your media and sync to your MP3 player was optimal.
Now that everything is streaming, and accessible on mobile without a need to sync to a local source, the benefits of media type unity is much weaker. It's easier to have individual apps that provide access points to each type of media library and optimized for that type of media.
But,
There are still those of us (such as myself) that prefer the local media sourcing, using iPods, etc, and that would love a unified app without any store. Just a window into my personal media library and the ability to sync it to a handheld device. Though the options for handheld devices these days are both slim and expensive...
One thing I miss with the move to mobile and cloud-first is that you used to be able to organize your phone apps on a desktop which I did every 6-12 months to clean them up. I find that's a real pain on an iPhone. I guess I can just remember names and search but I liked a more organized layout over 4 or 5 screens by general category.
To be fair iTunes wasn't that great either, it was mostly a necessity to use iPhone (Update etc). Personally I haven't used any of these apps since it became possible to perform backups and updates without a computer.
As opposed to just ... a tab in iTunes?
There's a lot to hate about iTunes historically, but having the useful stuff in one place was not the thing to hate, and the additional value each app brings is almost nothing, whereas the clutter they bring is real.
It's good to be able to focus on things, but this is way too categorized and just drives even more clutter.
“Do one thing well” isn’t the same thing as “make several almost identical copies of a monolith, all wearing different hats”.
I just hope this doesn’t actually come with three times the resource impact of iTunes. As far as I remember from my Windows days, iTunes was enormous and basically supplied half the macOS standard library and frameworks compiled to DLLs with it.
The new apps seem to take more advantage of the open source collaborated cross-platform version of Foundation rewritten in Swift that uses as much of Windows' WinUI and other native libraries as it can get away with (via more direct WinRT/Swift bindings), much thinner than the Objective-C Foundation the old iTunes was built on that used very few Windows native libraries. The apps themselves are still closed source so we don't know for sure, but overall they seem less bloated and more "Windows native" than the old iTunes, while apparently still sharing a lot of Swift code with their Apple platform relatives.
It's a fascinating new version of the old stack that works much better on Windows, if those things are true. At least in my usage so far, the Apple Music and Apple TV apps feel much better on Windows than iTunes ever has.
Unlike Apple, which can have all their apps installed by default on their OS, Spotify doesn’t have such luxury. They’re lucky if users take the time to download and install their one app let alone asking them to install multiple apps.
I’m sure if Spotify had the choice they would split things into separate apps. Having separate apps makes it much easier to deploy changes since you don’t need to coordinate (as much) with other teams for every release.
> They’re lucky if users take the time to download and install their one app let alone asking them to install multiple apps.
In practice, this doesn't appear to be an obstacle. Companies like Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, etc. have many apps in the App Store "Top Charts".
If anything, this would be a smart marketing strategy if Spotify could (for example) make a compelling standalone "podcast" app, because it would allow them to double or triple their footprint on App Store charts.
I doubt anybody would care about Spotify putting everything in one app if podcasts, etc were just sidebar items, especially if there were settings to hide them, but the issue is that they’ve intentionally made these things hard to avoid. There’s no way to signal to the Spotify app that you care only about music and will never be interested in other Spotify offerings.
That's because they're a bloated SaaS company trying to monetize M4A files.
A music app simply lists what you have available. SaaS bloatware on the other hand constantly changes its UI to maximize engagement and nudge users towards ad-stuffed podcasts, because the music is a loss-leader for them.
I don't know if you remember but iTunes was the overbloated app from hell that couldn't be refactored because it was too far gone. Every year it got slower and buggier and increasingly just wouldn't work.
Thank god they started cleaving off chunks into separate new apps that got built from scratch. It was a monstrosity.
I don't understand why you think separate apps is a problem. Heck, the #1 complaint about Spotify is that they added podcasts and audiobooks into the existing app rather than as new apps, which clutters up the interface.
Strong disagree, when itunes was about managing your phone generally (backups, resets, file transfer), managing your personal music collection on and off your phone, managing and playback (sans books i think) your itunes store purchases (music/movies/books)... it was too much. It created a weird usability nightmare where things that should have not been blended were blended.
As long as I can still move pictures from wife's phone. Still, this is such an annoying change. As in, Itunes on PC always sucked, but it did not occur to me that Apple would want to actively make it worse.
edit: This reminds me. Wasn't there a FOSS project that has most of Itunes functionality?
If I plug iphone in to a PC without itunes, best I can hope for is extraction of images. To even access a small portion of the rest of the filesystem, I need(ed now ) itunes.
What I recall using once for some backup purposes was a itunes like program that gained access to almost everything ( all media ).
I like how they fail to mention that the Apple Music App on Windows is hot garbage riddled with bugs. A few weeks ago they broke reordering of upcoming songs, the "play next" feature and I don't know what else.
I have submitted bug reports with exact steps, reproducible on at least two accounts on five different conmputers. Haven't heared back, doubt I'll ever will.
Anyone can recommend a streaming service that isn't Apple Music, Spotify or YouTube Music? Bonus points if I can just add a plugin to my old trusty winamp to use it.
It's incredible how bad it is both for macOS and even on iOS.
I know people like to criticise Spotify's UX/UI but whenever I'm using Apple Music on my partner's devices (she has AM, I'm on Spotify) it's a quite marked difference in snappiness of the UI, Apple Music for some reason has the same weird loading behaviour that the App Store suffers from (and sometimes even fucking System Settings on macOS goes through), and I can't understand how Apple can drop the ball that much in their own platforms...
I don't understand. These are "just" media players and all split up to do one thing each. How do they all do that one thing so miserably. TV hangs for multiple seconds every single time I download or delete episodes of TV shows and the player is so incredibly bad and doesn't save your progress properly
Huh, it never occurred to me that you could download episodes on an Apple TV. What’s the use-case? I download shows on my iPad so I can watch them when I’m traveling without internet, but my Apple TV is always plugged in. Intermittent connectivity in the home? Maybe bugs stick around because the feature is rarely used?
I'm not talking about the device btw. I am indeed talking about the TV app that comes preinstalled on Apple devices. I watch from my Macbook. The TV app is confusingly also Apple TV with a subscription service called Apple TV+
My use case is I've found that, for reasons unknown, the streaming quality is worse than if I download the episodes. Streaming always stays at 720p or lower whereas downloading gets me 1080p every time. And being able to watch things when I move around even with spotty internet
It's definitely one of the worst apps I've ever used in a long time. Finder is another POS.
Slow. The main "Listen Now Screen" is slow. It's an un-cached webview or something, that should be instantaneous.
The "Search area" is on the scrolling side bar on the left, and the toggle for searching between Apple Music and just your own library is on the right. It's not in the toolbar at the top where it should be and where it is on damn near every other macos app.
The lyrics can't expand to bigger, unless you switch to fullscreen mode, and then they're often unreadable because of the background colours.
Cider[0] is a client I've seen for Apple Music. It seems to have pretty good reviews. It is paid software, but it's a one time purchase of $4. Worth a shot!
I can’t do the most basic of tasks on Apple Music on my Windows PC - I literally can’t play music!
I’ve tried:
- redownloading the app
- deleting all local state in the Music folder
- logging out of my account, and logging back in
- deauthorising my PC, then reauthorising it
It just never starts playback, no matter what I do!
Cider works fine. The Music apps on my phone and Mac work fine. Very weird.
edit: plus, they have a lot of problems with music artists getting mixed together - if an artist has a common name, say “Ray”, you’ll see music from other artists with the same name mixed in. Apple’s support totally disclaim responsibility and said I should contact the record label to get them to correct it. This is absolutely ridiculous, and the record label predictably doesn’t care. It ruins recommendations :/
And VLC plays for sure. I was just looking at videos captured by a (wild) game camera and the Microsoft Media Player could only play some of them, I was sure they would play with VLC and they were right.
Thanks, I hate it.
I tried to transfer some audiobooks I have using iTunes and it didn't work. The music app is buggy as hell.
I'm not sure if Apple wants me to buy a Mac or switch to Android but I'll probably go with the latter.
iTunes on PC has always been so much worse than iTunes on Mac. I was on Android for awhile in no small part due to having tried to use iTunes with an iPhone (remember when you had to do that?) and hating it.
Apple’s podcast apps have been second rate since the very early days also. So they should just give iTunes for PC the Viking funeral it deserves.
> iTunes on PC has always been so much worse than iTunes on Mac.
Like Flutter, its unfixable jankiness comes from not using native controls. Anyone using iTunes for Windows is really using a bit of pre-X Mac OS in the form of Carbon/QTML. This is surely one of the reasons that Apple is gradually giving iTunes for Windows that Viking funeral you're asking for.
Apple Music is mostly fine. And as long as you're going to sync to an iPhone, it probably doesn't make sense to use a different app. (Though I use VLC for other things.)
I’m liking Jellyfin’s music support for my giant collection of FLACs (other formats are supported). I can pull it up on any browser (don’t need to install anything on my work PC). There’s also an iOS app called Fintunes that provides a great native music-listening experience.
I've been mostly happy with Plexamp. Main issue with it is the inability to sync my entire music library offline onto my phone (FLAC->Opus) which according to their support pages is not a feature they plan on supporting.
This is a shame. iTunes on Windows has been pretty good for bulk ID3 tag editing. Feels like a decent chance capabilities will be removed in the future.
Yeah if you're a creative professional you often have a Macbook for web, presentations, comms, coding, photoshopping, design then a PC for video editing, AI and 3D.
I feel like this is largely Apple realizing that their iPhone, iPad, and even Mac customers sometimes need to use Windows.
Given this also went along with an iCloud for Windows redesign.
Instead of them fighting Windows, make the experience slightly better for their customers which really just helps keep them in your Ecosystem, just slightly expanded.
iPhone/iPad is a gateway to the Apple ecosystem. If a Windows users couldn't share their media with their phone, they may never buy any Apple hardware at all.
I think the Windows client will live as long as the iTunes Store.
Which I was sort of more confident about when it seemed to just be in a forgotten corner of Apple somewhere just ticking along. Now it's clear someone has come up with a strategy™, I think there's more risk they might screw with both to push people into subscription services, and I can't help but see an iTunes Store shutdown as being the beginning of the end for digital music sales.
You can still buy movies and tv shows from Apple through the TV app, even though AppleTV+ exists. My guess is the iTunes Store simply becomes the Apple Music Store.
I do, although I use an older version. I used it to play the local music files I've accumulated over the years (I don't always sub for spotify and it doesn't actually have a lot of that stuff anyway).
Even on win10, windows media player is still garbage. iTunes has the column browser which, although disabled by default, is superior for navigation. Its also better for editing file metadata and managing playlists. You can automate iTunes via COM and I have my own command line music player program that uses this, to get playlists and similar metadata.
I hope ability to get photos off iPhones is improved. I can NEVER get it to fully work for more than a few pictures. I know we are supposed to sync them to the cloud now but it's nice to be able to put them on the big drive on the PC sometimes too.
Hmm, I have never had a problem dragging and dropping them off my iPhone via the device that shows up in the My Computer screen when I plug my phone in via USB.
Sounds like you are doing a few photos at a time? My library count is now over 200k photos. It worries me that it is almost impossible to get a guaranteed backup of them from iCloud to local storage. Even when I tick the box in Mac photos app to store originals, from my own testing I’ve found lots of images are still only locally loaded when first viewed. Not great for making local backups!
I downloaded my iCloud library from privacy.apple.com, you can request a copy of your data there. It will take a few days before they send you a link that expires in a week but you'll get your whole library in 50GB zipped chunks.
I have tried it both this way and via some tool like import via MS Photos and earlier Picasa. It works for a while but after a few hundred photos, just seems to die. I've had this problem on every PC I own, with all iPhones I own, using a ton of different USB wires and ports. And it seems to degrade over time somehow, the first attempt I might get 200 photos moved, then the next time I get 20. Stuff like that. I assume it was related to the driver because when it stops working, the phone disappears from the file explorer. Of course, it could totally be me somehow, but I've tried everything I know to eliminate user error.
I’ve noticed this and it seems like the biggest factor is the transfer setting in Photos. I have constant issues (e.g. file copy stops after a few files, can’t see all files in the folder, or phone just disconnects) if (under Transfer to Mac or PC) it’s set to automatic, but when changing it to keep originals, the files copy without any problems. I assume the automatic setting makes the iPhone try to convert between HEIC and JPG.
If you want a certain format for the images, just set the camera to use that format, or convert it yourself after copying off the phone.
Thanks for the tip. It seems I have it set to "keep originals", if I recall this is one thing I changed when having this issue. It has been some time though since I last tried it (because I hate it so much). I'll give it another go sometime soon.
It's only available on macOS, but I've been using the built in "Image Capture" app to do this. It's the only thing I've found that correctly handles all the photos and dumps them in a sensible way.
My process is:
* Connect iPhone to MacBook or similar
* Use Image Capture to dump all photos to a local directory in $HOME
* rsync the directory to my NAS
* Run a wrapper script around ExifTool [0] to sort the photos into folders
Has iTunes on Windows ever been good? I think I tried it in 2003-4, and it was garbage then, so I uninstalled it. In the intervening 20 years, I've never heard anyone say "it's good now!", so I never re-installed it. I assumed that if you were a dedicated Windows user, you just wouldn't use iTunes, and if you weren't a dedicated Windows user but loved your iPhone, you'd do what Apple wanted you to do in the first place, and switch to MacOS.
I’m dedicated to Linux but I like my iPhone. iPhones are more-or-less standalone devices nowadays. They can backup straight to iCloud. The only thing I’d need to borrow a Mac for, as far as I know, is a factory-reset.
I last used iTunes on windows in like 2010 or so, I think. It was pretty awful. Although, it did have a neat feature, you could share your library over the lan, so it was neat to listen to other people’s music in a dorm. I’m sure they’ve removed that feature by now, it was too good to be true.
If the phone is functional (as in you can access the Settings app), you can factory reset from the phone, as well. You can also remote wipe from Find My if need be.
True! Actually, I have an ancient iPad that I’ve forgotten the pin for. I think I’d need a Mac to reset it. Fortunately the reason I forgot the pin is that I got a laptop and stopped using the iPad as my SSH client as a result, haha, so recovery is not really a pressing issue.
Anecdotally I had a friend who exclusively used iTunes on Windows XP back in the day for all his music management and playback. I still have a screenshot of his library that he sent to me over AIM. At the same time I was using Winamp for playback and Mp3tag [0] for tagging.
Present day, I only ever install iTunes on a Windows machine to do backups. My parents still use it to copy CDs to their phones, but that's it.
As someone who generally hates Apple, I actually enjoyed iTunes on Windows in the ~2007-2012 era when I had to use it to manage my iPod Touch (and second one a friend gave me, since I ran out of space on the first, spreading the MLPMusicArchive across both). Performed fine on my somewhat-potato laptops, had a nice interface and search function, got the job done syncing the iPods. I never got the big deal about iTunes in particular.
Huh, that's exactly when I had to interface with iTunes and remember disliking it. It was horribly non native to the point that both it and Safari (which had a windows port in those days) ported the Apple font rendering which stuck out like a sore thumb.
Performance was also bad compared to Windows Media Player, never mind Foobar2000 etc.
And for syncing, the non apple devices just let you copy the files onto them as USB Mass Storage devices, only the iPod needed special software.
> And for syncing, the non apple devices just let you copy the files onto them as USB Mass Storage devices, only the iPod needed special software.
Loved me some Creative Zen MICRO. I'm sure there were better competitors but it's what I had. There was a tiny 1" mechanical HDD in it with a compact flash interface. The drive is now part of my office desk flare. A real conversation starter.
As someone who generally loves apple iTunes on any platform has always been a usability nightmare. In previous generations and mostly on windows it's attempt to both 'be my winamp, vlc and ebook manager AS WELL AS manage my phone more generally' was just a usability clusterfuck of epic proportions.
I have a friend who never used a Mac nor an iPhone, but he owned an iPod and so installed iTunes years ago and used it to manage his entire music library, and continues to do so to this day. I'm sure he's probably an outlier but Windows iTunes users do exist :)
I do this! My personal computers run Windows. I have an iPod touch that I use for listening to music on a stereo in my living room. I use iTunes to manage my music library. When I want more music, I buy CDs (or mp3s if those aren't available).
It's nice owning things. It has no ads, unlimited skips, and music doesn't sporadically disappear.
> I have a friend who never used a Mac nor an iPhone, but he owned an iPod and so installed iTunes years ago and used it to manage his entire music library, and continues to do so to this day.
Same here. I eventually replaced my iPod with an Android phone, but found a software combo that allowed you to sync your iTunes library to your phone just as easily, and also enable reverse syncing of ratings and playback counts. Sadly those apps have been sold to some company that's trying to turn them into cash grabs, but at least for now the old versions keep working for me, even on my new phone and Android 14 (albeit with some tweaking that's rather requires a rooted phone).
The advantage of iTunes is that it's perfect for also managing my collection of radio comedy, because you can easily re-classify manually imported files to be treated as podcasts, which makes for a nice UX (podcasts remember their playback position, and podcast apps track which episodes you've already listened to and which are still unlistened). Most other podcast apps don't allow manual file management, so I'd have to set up fake podcast feeds for my local files otherwise, which would definitely be a hassle.
A couple years ago I was rebuilding my nas that i keep my music on. So I decided to trial all the popular streaming services. Apple Music had a generous 3 month trial compared to the usual 7day-1month ones. I cancelled the service on the second day. Because the Windows iTunes experience was incredibly horrible - laggy/glitchy mess. If hell exists then the worst torture there would be being forced to use iTunes.
Somehow, in high school around that same period, while everyone was over on Winamp, it was still my favorite to both catalogue/tag and listen to the ~80GB library I had back then.. Genuinely can't remember why, though, but I do remember everyone else hated it.
I liked using iTunes for library management even before I got an iPod, I kinda liked the “hub” UI design rather than the miniplayer + library window (and even + playlist window) the others had.
Even if— sorry, when— my library got corrupted, and when different sections started taking 1-2 seconds to load, I still liked using it.
I was briefly excited to hear that media synchronization had been separated from iTunes. That gave me hope that I would be able to put media on my phone without a cloud intermediary and without the crippling mess of iTunes. But, sadly, my experience is that the Apple Devices App simply doesn't recognize my phone at all, so it's non-functional for me.
I cherish the memory of using the local music streaming feature on iTunes, until the day they introduced unreasonable restrictions.
The sentiment surrounding the iTunes release for Windows was notably intriguing. I recall that quite a few people seriously considered taking a day off just for its launch!
Every PM who worked on iTunes should be cancelled from the tech industry. Having iTunes on your resume should be the Mark of Cain as far as I'm concerned. I've never had the displeasure of working on a more terrible piece of software in my life and it shouldn't be this bad. Shame on everyone who worked on it, even though given Apple stock price, they are likely 8 or 9 figure millionaires.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 412 ms ] thread>When you install the Apple Music or Apple TV app, you can only use those apps for your music, TV shows, and movies; you can continue to use iTunes to listen to your audiobooks and podcasts.
I’m guessing the 10th gen is the one with the super long support lifetime or something like that? That’s a slightly weird iPad-ism.
In the most recent iteration of this lineup, the 12-inch MacBook was comically underpowered, especially for its price, there was no good reason to purchase that instead of an Air or a Pro. This was also quite short-lived, with an official discontinuation after four years.
It always made sense to me, at least: “pro” is premium in a power direction, “air” is premium in a lightness direction, and the base model is just the base model.
But I guess it is unsurprising that Apple doesn’t want to do a base model, haha.
Another way of looking at it, I guess, is just that it is an evolutionary process, and every MacBook is a descendent of the Air now.
Personally, I like my mini being a mid-tier device. Apple probably positioned it this way to avoid undercutting their cheapest model. It’s also a bit cramped. You’re sacrificing some usability for size and they’d rather people make that trade off because they want it rather than it being cheaper.
(Music purchased on iTunes can be downloaded directly to the device without syncing, but you need to manually sync with your computer to transfer over music that you acquired elsewhere. Either that or you subscribe to the iTunes Match service assuming that sticks around)
Basically, in the PC version of these apps the main difference compared to Mac seems to be that Apple didn’t split Podcasts and Audibooks into separate apps. They’re just mushed into an app that’s weirdly called iTunes. I feel like they should have clumsily but less confusingly called it “Apple Podcasts and Audiobooks”
Do you mean Spotify is better because it's all in one? Or specifically as a podcast client it's better? Because, as a podcast client, Spotify is shockingly bad. Perhaps the worst podcast client available. Apple Podcasts, Overcast, and Pocketcasts are all much, much better.
This is Spotify's main advantage: most people already have it installed, and it's good enough if you don't care that much about the podcast-listening experience.
Anyways, I can't seem to find a suitable alternative that will keep track of my listening progress across both linux and iOS.
What is so special about podcast-listening experience that you would need a specific player for?
The UI is lackluster, since it's just the same one from the normal Spotify Music experience. Because they bought Joe Rogan they had to add video too and video is horribly implemented. There isn't even an obvious way to turn it off. I consider myself tech-savy but I gave up trying to turn off and just switched to Apple Podcasts.
Podcasts and Music are not the same.
Please if you really want Podcasts to happen then, Spotify, make a separate App for it.
Not a spotify nor Apple Music/Podcast/itunes user here.
Aren't both audio stuff where you press play, pause, stop, rewind and fast forward?
The only difference I can think of is that you might sometimes want to accelerate playback of podcasts but that doesn't mean it can't exist in the same player.
1) An online catalog of series that is searchable (probably both by name and topic and participants).
2) That catalog must contain metadata both at a series level and an episode level.
3) That online catalog must also be navigable without search, of course.
4) Ability to subscribe to any given series and for the app to have an option to pre-cache an episode for offline use.
5) Several content controls that aren't really required for music listening but are must haves for podcasts such as timed skips (30s, 60s) and playback speed adjustment (only useful in a music player where you probably want to do beat matching).
I think the biggest differentiator though is the episode/series catalog. It makes podcasts actually discoverable.
I don't think it is hard in term of UI nor does it justify a different app when you can have an additionnal tab that allows to find podcast. You just have to change the criterias.
Subscription to podcast is done via rss right? I don't think that is a huge deal either.
It just comes down to that management/browse/search task dwarfs the playback code.
I'd rather have small apps that do one thing well, not a megaapp that does all things badly.
I like listening to mine on Overcast (previously with the Apple Podcasts app)
* discover/search podcasts and subscribe to them.
* download new episodes automatically
* create a playlist of episodes; when an episode is finished, it's removed from the list and deleted automatically
* keep track of your position in an episode; since they can several hours long, you don't want to restart from the beginning
No alternative. No 'get a code on another device', just PFO.
[1]: https://cider.sh/
First world problems of course, but just needlessly frustrating.
The latest release, v2.3.0, also supports forcing the player to use 256kbps[2]
[1]: https://cidercollective.itch.io/cider
[2]: https://cidercollective.itch.io/cider/devlog/674855/cider-v2...
Persistent Felony Offender?
https://www.macrumors.com/2024/02/06/apple-id-security-keys-...
Edit: nope, "security keys not supported on icloud for windows"
Edit edit: need to first install the latest icloud for windows (which I don't want but fine). Seems to provide an auth layer so now it works.
Not sure if it’s already pushed out.
It's a a fork of a fork of the old Amarok, supporting more features and modern support while retaining the original UI.
But that's probably with the forcing podcasts on me when I don't want them rather than anything intrinsic.
I listen to music when I work because it blocks stuff out and I don't need to actually listen to it.
Podcasts catch my attention when one of hosts says something like:
Wait, you can't say that. You'll offend all the furries.
Then I'll have to rewind and listen to understand why they are talking about furries on an F1 podcast. But then it turns out I misheard it anyway.
I don't see why a user should be forced to use different apps depending on the type of the audio content.
While yeah debundled separate apps will make probably the main use case of what was the bundled app better it also likely leads to stagnation and buggier experiences over time in the apps where the less popular features were debundled into.
Like all knowledge and talent required to code the Audiobooks app is the same as whats required to code the Music app so which team would you rather be on given the choice.
Without iTunes, I would have to set up some fake local podcast feed on my computer to get those episodes into the podcast app of my choice instead.
[1] Using iSyncr + Rocket Player after switching from an iPod to an Android phone – sadly those apps were sold by the original developer two years ago, though, and the new owners are seemingly just trying to turn them into a cash grab, so I cannot recommend them any more, though for now the old versions sort of keep working, albeit you need a rooted phone to work around some issues.
General tools are great and I'm never going to argue that there should not be generalized tools (like say a VLC), but specialized tools are also great and should be encouraged where they make sense. To me the differences between listening to music and listening to audiobooks or podcasts are different.
That's merely a reason not to use one /inadequate/ app for all audio.
Inadequacy is not an app requirement.
Most podcast client apps don't allow manually importing files, so I'd have to maintain fake podcast feeds for all my local files. There's software for that, too, but it'd still be more cumbersome than with iTunes where I just need to set the media type of those files to "Podcast" and I'm done.
It's pretty neat, and pretty surprising, that I can still sync my iPod in 2024. But having a large collection of audiobooks means there's a lot of data clogging up my system drive - where audiobooks would otherwise be an ideal candidate to be offloaded almost anywhere else (they're slow, they're infrequent, etc).
Back in the day, you uploaded all your own media. you didn't have access to hundreds of thousands of streaming options across music, podcasts, and movies. Having a single app to upload your media and sync to your MP3 player was optimal.
Now that everything is streaming, and accessible on mobile without a need to sync to a local source, the benefits of media type unity is much weaker. It's easier to have individual apps that provide access points to each type of media library and optimized for that type of media.
But,
There are still those of us (such as myself) that prefer the local media sourcing, using iPods, etc, and that would love a unified app without any store. Just a window into my personal media library and the ability to sync it to a handheld device. Though the options for handheld devices these days are both slim and expensive...
It's good to be able to focus on things, but this is way too categorized and just drives even more clutter.
I just hope this doesn’t actually come with three times the resource impact of iTunes. As far as I remember from my Windows days, iTunes was enormous and basically supplied half the macOS standard library and frameworks compiled to DLLs with it.
It's a fascinating new version of the old stack that works much better on Windows, if those things are true. At least in my usage so far, the Apple Music and Apple TV apps feel much better on Windows than iTunes ever has.
I’m sure if Spotify had the choice they would split things into separate apps. Having separate apps makes it much easier to deploy changes since you don’t need to coordinate (as much) with other teams for every release.
In practice, this doesn't appear to be an obstacle. Companies like Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, etc. have many apps in the App Store "Top Charts".
If anything, this would be a smart marketing strategy if Spotify could (for example) make a compelling standalone "podcast" app, because it would allow them to double or triple their footprint on App Store charts.
A music app simply lists what you have available. SaaS bloatware on the other hand constantly changes its UI to maximize engagement and nudge users towards ad-stuffed podcasts, because the music is a loss-leader for them.
I think that's overly reductive.
They have different kinds of metadata, distribution mechanisms, and ideal UIs.
I don't know if you remember but iTunes was the overbloated app from hell that couldn't be refactored because it was too far gone. Every year it got slower and buggier and increasingly just wouldn't work.
Thank god they started cleaving off chunks into separate new apps that got built from scratch. It was a monstrosity.
I don't understand why you think separate apps is a problem. Heck, the #1 complaint about Spotify is that they added podcasts and audiobooks into the existing app rather than as new apps, which clutters up the interface.
edit: This reminds me. Wasn't there a FOSS project that has most of Itunes functionality?
At best it merely avoids some users caring.
If you don't install the other app, iTunes is the same.
You indicated a preference for the new Music experience by installing it.
If you don't indicate that preference, iTunes doesn't change.
They did it by making the new app disable functionality of the existing.
> You indicated a preference for the new Music experience by installing it.
By that insane logic, installing e.g. Edge would justifably prevent use of Chrome.
What is that functionnality? If it is about playing audio, there are tons of apps for that.
If I plug iphone in to a PC without itunes, best I can hope for is extraction of images. To even access a small portion of the rest of the filesystem, I need(ed now ) itunes.
What I recall using once for some backup purposes was a itunes like program that gained access to almost everything ( all media ).
I have submitted bug reports with exact steps, reproducible on at least two accounts on five different conmputers. Haven't heared back, doubt I'll ever will.
Anyone can recommend a streaming service that isn't Apple Music, Spotify or YouTube Music? Bonus points if I can just add a plugin to my old trusty winamp to use it.
I know people like to criticise Spotify's UX/UI but whenever I'm using Apple Music on my partner's devices (she has AM, I'm on Spotify) it's a quite marked difference in snappiness of the UI, Apple Music for some reason has the same weird loading behaviour that the App Store suffers from (and sometimes even fucking System Settings on macOS goes through), and I can't understand how Apple can drop the ball that much in their own platforms...
I don't understand. These are "just" media players and all split up to do one thing each. How do they all do that one thing so miserably. TV hangs for multiple seconds every single time I download or delete episodes of TV shows and the player is so incredibly bad and doesn't save your progress properly
My use case is I've found that, for reasons unknown, the streaming quality is worse than if I download the episodes. Streaming always stays at 720p or lower whereas downloading gets me 1080p every time. And being able to watch things when I move around even with spotty internet
Slow. The main "Listen Now Screen" is slow. It's an un-cached webview or something, that should be instantaneous.
The "Search area" is on the scrolling side bar on the left, and the toggle for searching between Apple Music and just your own library is on the right. It's not in the toolbar at the top where it should be and where it is on damn near every other macos app.
The lyrics can't expand to bigger, unless you switch to fullscreen mode, and then they're often unreadable because of the background colours.
I can't exactly recommend it because I haven't used it since 15 years and it surely must have evolved since.
0: https://cider.sh/
I’ve tried:
- redownloading the app
- deleting all local state in the Music folder
- logging out of my account, and logging back in
- deauthorising my PC, then reauthorising it
It just never starts playback, no matter what I do!
Cider works fine. The Music apps on my phone and Mac work fine. Very weird.
edit: plus, they have a lot of problems with music artists getting mixed together - if an artist has a common name, say “Ray”, you’ll see music from other artists with the same name mixed in. Apple’s support totally disclaim responsibility and said I should contact the record label to get them to correct it. This is absolutely ridiculous, and the record label predictably doesn’t care. It ruins recommendations :/
Could be for helping you tune your musical instruments.
Apple’s podcast apps have been second rate since the very early days also. So they should just give iTunes for PC the Viking funeral it deserves.
Like Flutter, its unfixable jankiness comes from not using native controls. Anyone using iTunes for Windows is really using a bit of pre-X Mac OS in the form of Carbon/QTML. This is surely one of the reasons that Apple is gradually giving iTunes for Windows that Viking funeral you're asking for.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QuickTime#QuickTime_2.x
Also, foobar2000 of course.
Given this also went along with an iCloud for Windows redesign.
Instead of them fighting Windows, make the experience slightly better for their customers which really just helps keep them in your Ecosystem, just slightly expanded.
Which I was sort of more confident about when it seemed to just be in a forgotten corner of Apple somewhere just ticking along. Now it's clear someone has come up with a strategy™, I think there's more risk they might screw with both to push people into subscription services, and I can't help but see an iTunes Store shutdown as being the beginning of the end for digital music sales.
Even on win10, windows media player is still garbage. iTunes has the column browser which, although disabled by default, is superior for navigation. Its also better for editing file metadata and managing playlists. You can automate iTunes via COM and I have my own command line music player program that uses this, to get playlists and similar metadata.
I have done it this way since forever.
Everything has always transferred off just fine at least for me.
For a huge library like that I would go with a reliable software like iMazing.
https://github.com/libimobiledevice/ifuse
I type "ifuse /mnt/iphone" and there is a DCIM/###APPLE dir with the images and videos where I use "cp -a" to copy the files to my computer
If you want a certain format for the images, just set the camera to use that format, or convert it yourself after copying off the phone.
My process is:
* Connect iPhone to MacBook or similar
* Use Image Capture to dump all photos to a local directory in $HOME
* rsync the directory to my NAS
* Run a wrapper script around ExifTool [0] to sort the photos into folders
[0] https://exiftool.org/
I last used iTunes on windows in like 2010 or so, I think. It was pretty awful. Although, it did have a neat feature, you could share your library over the lan, so it was neat to listen to other people’s music in a dorm. I’m sure they’ve removed that feature by now, it was too good to be true.
Present day, I only ever install iTunes on a Windows machine to do backups. My parents still use it to copy CDs to their phones, but that's it.
[0] https://www.mp3tag.de/en/
Performance was also bad compared to Windows Media Player, never mind Foobar2000 etc.
And for syncing, the non apple devices just let you copy the files onto them as USB Mass Storage devices, only the iPod needed special software.
Loved me some Creative Zen MICRO. I'm sure there were better competitors but it's what I had. There was a tiny 1" mechanical HDD in it with a compact flash interface. The drive is now part of my office desk flare. A real conversation starter.
It's nice owning things. It has no ads, unlimited skips, and music doesn't sporadically disappear.
Same here. I eventually replaced my iPod with an Android phone, but found a software combo that allowed you to sync your iTunes library to your phone just as easily, and also enable reverse syncing of ratings and playback counts. Sadly those apps have been sold to some company that's trying to turn them into cash grabs, but at least for now the old versions keep working for me, even on my new phone and Android 14 (albeit with some tweaking that's rather requires a rooted phone).
The advantage of iTunes is that it's perfect for also managing my collection of radio comedy, because you can easily re-classify manually imported files to be treated as podcasts, which makes for a nice UX (podcasts remember their playback position, and podcast apps track which episodes you've already listened to and which are still unlistened). Most other podcast apps don't allow manual file management, so I'd have to set up fake podcast feeds for my local files otherwise, which would definitely be a hassle.
Even if— sorry, when— my library got corrupted, and when different sections started taking 1-2 seconds to load, I still liked using it.
I only switched away from iTunes when I switched to subscription-based streaming.
No. It has always been awful.
I was briefly excited to hear that media synchronization had been separated from iTunes. That gave me hope that I would be able to put media on my phone without a cloud intermediary and without the crippling mess of iTunes. But, sadly, my experience is that the Apple Devices App simply doesn't recognize my phone at all, so it's non-functional for me.
The sentiment surrounding the iTunes release for Windows was notably intriguing. I recall that quite a few people seriously considered taking a day off just for its launch!
More like noTunes then