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I really hate iTunes. Part of it is how I need to handle my music and how iTunes isn’t designed for it, and part of it is that the program is just badly tuned for the systems it runs on, but, in the end, I really hate iTunes. I have 60GB+ of music and a 30GB drive in my computer. This means all of my music resides on a server at home and, when I am home, I mount the share and start iTunes. It’s set to use a folder on that remote share as the library location and that generally works. Except when it doesn’t. If the share is not mounted when iTunes is open then it says all my music doesn’t exist rather than trying to open the share and check, which it curiously does when I try to play any of that music by double-clicking on a song. Once it knows one track in a folder exists, one would think it would say “all of these others should exist, too” and check for them. No. I have to either manually play each one or quit and re-open the program for it to see that the library is there. Even “next song” doesn’t work. I have to double-click each song for it to realize that it’s now there, even though it could know that the music library now exists. The combination of the two is bad, but I can work around it. I have an AppleScript with iTunes’ icon pasted onto it that mounts the share and then starts iTunes. It works. What I can’t fix is the podcast handling which is about to make me use Juice instead. I have a single-processor G4. Who in their right minds decided to download four podcasts simultaneously on my iBook when they are each doing work on the main thread at the same time? For some reason, iTunes is completely unusable when it’s updating podcasts. It picks up four to download and for the duration of the downloads I can’t use iTunes because the menus are slow, the clicks are delayed, and the program gives me the Gay Pride Pinwheel of Death at every turn. It’s crap. Then, while updating, it rotates that damned single display at the top to show me things I couldn’t care less about. I’m playing a podcast and I want to skip ahead. So I click on the unintuitive triangle in the display thing to get the view that has the slider (while it’s downloading four podcasts). This takes forever, but I get to it. When I finally do, it takes so long to respond to the mouse click that it’s rotated again! So, I want to stop all of these downloads to use the program, right? So I click on cancel for one of the downloads … only for it to pick up another download. So I click madly on the cancel button (5% of the clicks get through) until they’re all cancelled. I do what I need to do and hit Update again only to find that none of the podcasts resume where they left off. What kind of crap is this that Apple is pawning off on us? In general, I really like the program, but … it’s crap. What competition does this software have on the Mac? Audion’s gone, Sound Jam was mutated into this, and XMMS is fugly and needs X11. Are we out of options for a well-behaved music jukebox now that iTunes has become a sad joke of horrible programming inflicted upon the Mac community? What does it do well? Basic organization, locating, and playing of music files. It gets the core stuff right. What does it do that attaches me to it?
I realize Juice can do podcasts and that there is a program for doing AirTunes, but iPod and Smart Playlists are essential for the way I listen to music, so I’m stuck with it. I just can’t believe I’m the first one the kool-aid is wearing off of. What else is irksome of this evil program?
About Adam Knight
 Author Biography Adam Knight is one of the founders of Mac Geekery and is a geek at heart. Programmer by day, hacker by night, his daily life revolves around the Macintosh platform, which he has been a user and programmer for since the early days of System 7 when his LCII replaced his Apple //c. In-between tech jobs, he’s managed to learn the basics of any web hacker: PHP, MySQL, Perl, Apache, Linux, *BSD, and the intricacies of ./configure —prefix=~/bombshelter/. Today, codepoet is concentrating on blogging again, writing some software for the Mac by himself (including Notae) and for his company (such as Switchblade) and has a few other toys coming out soon. Bug him over AIM or email [link fixed]. |
I hate iTunes because it makes duplicates of all my songs. Try an open source player like VLC, it plays virtually everything.
Seriously, iTunes SUCKS!!! I bought an iPod thinking I could, ya know, maybe enjoy it or something (after all, I paid 200USD). I have to restart my computer every single time I disconnect the iPod if I want to reconnect it. Otherwise, iTunes won’t read it. I hate iTunes so badly and I hate Apple for having imposed their poor excuse for a bug-riddled program. In all honesty, Macintosh is more stable than Windows, but jeez. Don’t buy an iPod or download iTunes. It’s been more frustrating than spyware.
I wish I would have bought a Zune, for no other reason than iTunes sucking.
I had never used itunes until a little while ago but now I see what you mean. I got a new ipod nano 3g and now I have to use itunes. so much for gtkpod and realplayer.
I am so relieved to hear that people who are more computer literate than me hate itunes! I was thinking the other day about how peaceful my life is, how I don’t really hate anything at this moment, then itunes popped into my head…so, I DO hate after all. It’s the most worthless, unusable program I’ve ever encountered! I am thinking of selling my ipod, even tho it was a gift. What should I get to replace it?
Soon to be itunes free!
I fucking hate iTunes, too. It places a totalitarianism state on your music collection and throws a giant wet-blanket on top of the listening process. The thing that’s most frustrating about iTunes is all of the people that seem to fucking love it. For every logical, reasonably grounded person that expresses their hatred for iTunes, there’s 3 apple fanboys singing the praises! it’s like being an atheist at a Christian athletes convention.
I fucking hate itunes, the fucking program is totally bugged and is a piece of junk. I though i could enjoy it but its just cause more problems and is more bugged than any other prgram i have seen in my life. I fucking hate apple now, its so hard to make a usefull software? This fucking shit have problems to snyc music every time i connect it. So.. ITUNES SUCKS BALLS I FUCKING HATE IT.. I WASTED MY TIME AND MONEY ITS FUCKING FRUSTRATING.
I WANT TO SLAUGHTER THE ITUNES CREATORS. I HATE THE FUCkING DIPSHITS WHO CREATED THIS PIECE OF JUNK. Now, songs that I have PURCHASED with MONEY are all of a sudden “LOST”. BULLSHIT. This system is a joke. I’m holding off the pyracy thing, trying to be an honorable music listener. I just spent $400 on my second ipod. I’M SO PISSED OFF!!!!!!!!!!!!
I’m glad that these problems aren’t only windows related. This may give you a giggle I left this as feedback for the iTunes developers
“It’s about time you bunch of wasters at iTunes devlopement pulled your finger out and got your useless software sorted! I told the program not to sync my music as I would manually manage my Music as now use the much more reliable and user friendly Windows Media player to sync my music (even though I had to buy a patch to make the iPod work with it). I bought a new game for the iPod and got it installed, only to get to my destination to find bloody iTunes had deleted all 7,000 tracks from my iPod, what a pain in the ass! I have to run iTunes to update the software on my iPod and I use it to sync my games, contacts and video’s, if I find a way of doing this without the need for iTunes my life will be so much simpler. I have to run iTunes on an old laptop which is about to die as your software tells me I would be better running 64 bit iTunes on my computer but then I can’t find any such software on your website, My main computer op system is windows XP pro X64 edition.I can not run any later version of iTunes than 7.5 as it gives an error and starts down loading again I went through this twice and then it started again for a third time until I stopped it.
Also while I’m having a rant I want all my purchased music in MP3 format not M4P how do I get that sorted? there is no option for this in the preferences or if there is you bunch of tossers burried it somewhere in the bowels of your shabby software. any way thats enough ranting because you people at Apple software are so far up your own arses you have to open your shirts to clean your teeth, so I won’t be holding my breath for a response to this.
ps watch out for the forth coming website www.itunes_sux_balls.com.”
Hope this gives you guy’s a giggle and do watch out for the web site I’m seriously considering that part of it.
A shame that the developers of MacAmp or Audion didn’t see the value in allowing their products to live on as open source (or the value in an anti-trust law suit). Other projects, such as Cog, haven’t been able to generate enough interest (or the right interest) to make them swing.
I converted my 80Gig iPod to ROCKbox, initially with a little apprehension. Now I can move or copy music to my iPod using the Finder instead of iTunes. To select music to play I can browse the folders rather than a database built from the tags. Additional music formats, FLAC and Musepac are supported.
It seems that it doesn’t do anything nasty to your iPod and is easily removed, though I haven’t actually tried to do this yet.
The caveat is that the interface is not as polished as the default iPod one, its not as reliable or as fast. It doesn’t seem to play videos. I couldn’t recommend it to anyone even slightly geek-challenged but it works for me.
I still use iTunes for podcasts and I don’t know a better music player for Mac OS, but ROCKbox was the answer for my iPod.
I dont hate so much when purchased music is lost— those I back-up, and honestly, I dont buy via Itunes often— I like having the CD, and it is sometimes cheaper at retail prices. But what I hate is that every time I plug my Ipod in, and sync it to pick up new purchases, it delets everything that was NOT purchased. Like I really want to re-download 3000 songs from cd every month.
I really hate itunes. I’m on my 3rd iPod, a 160GB classic, because I have at least 32,000 songs now and am still growing. What can I say, I’m a collector. Of course, I have to store it all on an external USB drive. ITUNES SUCKS. Right now, it neither works as an editing and storage platform, or as a music player. I have a playlist of 520 (legally) downloaded cuts that have been converted from old Edison cylinders. Some are duplicates, having been cleaned and filtered. The man who created the list thought it was funny to code the labels as “T1ME 2 GO”, and such, so I need to both listen to and edit labels and delete some. If I listen to a tune, it bumps the LOADED ITUNES program to about 223,000,000 bytes, and then everything goes to shit. You can’t type, all clicks are delayed if they even get recognized, and it will play about 1/2 second of music and then stop for 5 seconds, then play another 1/2 second. If you stop the play and wait two or three minutes, the memory usage drops to about 117,000,000 bytes, and you can edit again, but it is still incredibly slow. Sometimes the clicks are delayed, and you think they were missed, so you click again. Ha ha, they are then BUFFERED, so iTunes gets a double-click on a tune and it starts playing again!!!!! SUCKER!!!!!!!! Seriously, whoever wrote this crap was a lazy, underpaid, shit programmer. I could have written a better piece of software in my freshman FORTRAN programming class in 1971. APPLE TAKE NOTICE: I will never buy another iPod, because I HATE ITUNES. I will never buy from the iTunes store, I will never buy a MAC, because I HATE ITUNES (iTunes sucks on MACs too, I have heard). FIX IT OR DIE.
I have only recently been introduced to iTunes after successfully avoiding it in every way possible. Without any real experience I could immediately tell that is was going to suck hard. Then I bought an iPod Touch (which I think is great when jailbroken) and thought iTunes can’t be THAT bad. Well, it is. It’s just that assfucking, child molesting, donkey raping, shit eating bad and I want to kill the fuckers at Apple for making me use this bullshit fucktardness they dare call a program. It’s so damn picky about which formats it chooses to play it’s like fucking filetype racism. And the duplicates piss me off too. And the album arts… Oh man, where do I even start? The first thing that pissed me off, I quess, was that the piece of shit won’t let me download album art if I don’t register to iTunes store, which I can’t do BECAUSE I’M 18 AND I DON’T HAVE A FUCKING CREDIT CARD. So okay, I can just manually choose the proper pictures for the albums that iTunes didn’t automatically find the art for (about 99% of the albums, even though like 80% had the pictures in their folders). Now this is what sucks the most. The basic navigation of folders and files seems to be so infested with bugs and glitches that I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to pick the album covers, thus making the CoverFlow-function in my iPod practically useless. iTunes just crashes whenever I try to go the parent folder, or even choose a folder from the list. Sometimes it crashes straight away when it opens the file selection window. The only way to stop it from crashing then is to change the name of the folder it opens by default(!). Sometimes when crashing iTunes even takes explorer and some other processes with it, effectively jamming the whole fucking system! I don’t think that’s all of it, but these are the main reasons for me for hating iTunes and everyone who’s ever participated in the making of such a useless piece of shit. Thank you SO MUCH for making me have to use this you sick fucks! And I probably will be forced to use it for a long time. I’ve paid 350€ for my iPod and I WILL keep on using it. If only there was a way for syncing it without iTunes. I will seriously BJ anyone who shows me a way to do this without iTunes. iTunes, I hate you even more than I hate Microsoft.
I hate having to hunt for programs, but if there’s one thing I hate more than hunting for a program, it’s a bloated program. Apple has horribly bloated iTunes to the point that if it (or any other modern Apple program) is open on my Mac (granted, this is an older G4 model), the system runs like a slug in January molasses. iTunes is among the lower offenders, along with Mail, while Safari and iPhoto are in the higher positions. These are all fine programs which do NOT have this effect on my only slightly stronger Windows laptop, though, and I wonder how much of the performance is because I have an old machine running new programs — then I realize they’re just hogging up my RAM and HDD space.
I both love and dislike the database — I hate the automatic sorting (I prefer to file by album, not artist, and not by ‘compilation’), but I love the centralized location for all of my music. I was doing that before iTunes, so having it automated when I get new music is a small price to pay for the unlikable aspect of sorting by artist. I have never had a problem with downloading podcasts slowing the system down any more than iTunes does otherwise, though, and the only thing I can propose to “hate” about iTunes now is that it’s a multimedia hub program that won’t play most of my videos. Give users the option to use an audio only version of iTunes, Apple. It would reduce the bloat and it could make things a LOT easier for users who aren’t buying new hardware every 18 months… or five years. Or however old my computer is…
The iLife programs and Safari use more processor resources than necessary for the tasks they perform, and so their memory consumption skyrockets beyond reason. my iTunes is usually using 250 MB RAM (combined real and virtual), while my typical Safari jumps all they way up to the unreasonable 1GB (again, combined) of memory. Granted, I rarely leave my browser off, and I often have dozens of tabs open (I’m a glutton for internet), but it still slows down my nearly full computer by an insane amount. I know I could free up a lot by clearing trash data, cleaning up my file structure, just burning some backup discs every now and then. But it doesn’t remove the problem of iTunes being overly cluttered, or poor trash data management in the iLife suite and Safari. Do I hate iTunes? No. But do I love it? Not since they added video and the program started to get bloated.
just drop itunes amd get amarok i have two ipods a 6g and a 5g and it works with them perfect with them and as of now amarok works with linux and mac and version 2 will work with linux mac and windows
The invevitable flame – this is what you people get for going with style over substance.
I totally agree with everyone’s comments, even though I’m not very technically literate. I must say, what REALLY REALLY sucks is when you are trying to TRANSFER iTunes libraries from one computer to the next. Their web tutorials are a piece of shit that a four year old could write better, and the people on the phone only offer “complimentary service for 90 days” 90 days? are u fuckin kidding me? I will die before I have to pay 29.99 per month to ask a fucking question, thank you. Finally, I figured out how to beat their system and got to a real human being (this is after 4 hours, mind you) and then their program specialist told me that my computer had “done something wacky” – his words, I swear, and that I would have to find all of my songs because iTunes was too much of a pussy to find all of my songs in iTunes and place them in their own FUCKING ITUNES FOLDER! UNBE-FUCKING-LEVIABLE! So now I’m sitting here with my iPod after about 6 hours trying to control-click on every single song I own and put it in the file they should have done this in the first place! I am so mad! If anyone knows of an alternative to iTunes, please post it here. I will be more than glad to use it.
tunes raped my music structure and i dont have the patients/time to get it back, it is lost. my only hope is to shield all my future music from this succubus.
can someone with adequate know-how start writing a itunes alternative or itunes look alike???? think about how much money you could make off it, even if it was open source just host it on your website and get paid on the traffic… I kno everyone thats ever used itunes once would check it out…
Og how I hate Itunes and Apple. They behave in a way that would get Microsoft exiledc to Greenland. Every couple of weeks I log onto my PC to find Apple waiting to update my Quicktime application and kindly ‘give’me Safari and Itunes too. Safari is a crippled flaw ridden browser, Itunes is a horrific corporate ware piece of crap designed to lock me into some sort of horrific relationship with Apple. I’ve never even used a Mac and now, i really don’t think I will because of their utterly reprehensible behaviour, trying to smuggle their shitware onto my pc
I have also begun to really despise itunes. It is a very irritating and bad working software.
I have bought a ipod touch, which is a very nice products. However i have to use itunes when transfering music and movies to this ipod. And this is were all the frustration and anger begins. You should think that a product that good, should also have a piece of software, but no. Apple has decided to give us itunes.
My problems with itunes goes as follows.
The program wont let me be in charge of the program, it forces its own will.
The program doesnt remember my settings, forcing me to repeat them again and again. Like if i decide to unmark the sync music check box, it wont remember this choice next time i use ipod touch.
way to often i have to restore my ipod touch.
If im syncing many files it just stops, saying it timed out.
Having full control over which music you want to share is not possible.
it has integrated the buying of music and etc, with itunes. I dont want to buy anything , i just need it for my ipod touch.
I keep repeating the same questions over and over again, making it cumbersome to use.
These are the reason i can think of right now. There are a few more important ones, however i cant remember them right now.
OMG, so glad to be among friends. Yeah, I hate it too, it’s a total piece of shit, which I’ve been trying to tell people for years, but as others here have pointed out the majority of the public seems to have no problem with it, which never ceases to blow my mind. My theory is that they made it run like a piece of shit for the PC to force people to think twice about possibly switching to a Mac, but after reading the comments here it sounds like you Mac users have the same issues as us PC users.
I won’t repeat all the problems I’ve had, as many have been stated already, but here’s a brief list of issues I’ve had:
- Upon updating to the latest version (which seems to come out every few days), my entire library is erased – thankfully I’ve never purchased any music from Apple or I’d be SUPER PISSED to have lost my purchases in the process. – Upon inserting a CD or adding a folder to my library it decides to make two copies of each song in the library – very helpful feature. – And yes, there is a feature that will attempt to show you duplicate songs, but the fucking morons neglected to add the follow-on feature to that which is to have it DELETE the duplicate songs. So I have to go through one-by-one and do it myself. Thanks, Apple. – Upon attempting to download the frequent updates it locks up or gives me an error message. Most recently, 5 minutes ago it told me I had to download it manually using the tool menu, blah, blah, blah. – Upon updating Itunes, it also updates quicktime, despite me having no need for that even shittier program. This pisses me off because each new version of quicktime is set to automatically check for updates every so often, which typically happens when I’m in the middle of an intense game of BF2, which thus crashes my game. I then have to go in and turn off the auto-update feature myself. Great…. – Same issue the original author posted about it not finding the drive with the music (mine’s on an external USB drive), so then it thinks you’re entire library has vanished and you have to quit/restart. – But my favorite is when I’ve have to reinstall my ENTIRE LIBRARY for like the 100th time, and in the process it deletes the contents of my playlists. Although it leaves the playlists there, just to mock you, but they’re all devoid of content. I suppose it would be too difficult to just have it leave those file shortcuts alone. It’s not like I’m reloading everything into the exact same directory where it was in the first place, so if it would just leave them alone they would all continue to work fine. That really fucking pisses me off…
this software its truely bad, but so are the ipods so is the iphone and so are all macs so apple you need to do somthing!! APPLE WORSET COMPANY IN THE WORLD!! TESCOS CAN DO BETTER THAN THAT!
HOW FUCKING IDIOTIC IS THIS ITUNES~~~!!
makes me wanna throw my iphone out of the window..
What whas i thinkingg!!
I was so excited when I bought my 30gb ipod. I’d been saving for weeks. Little did I know that the ONLY way to put music on my ipod was through itunes. Okay, i thought, fine. Previously i had used Windows Media Player for everything and i knew it in and out. itunes doubled all my music (8gb) but my hardrive has only 13gb to begin with. PLUS is it so much to ask that i get album artwork?? I have an account on itunes but not on the store because I don’t have a credit card, and they won’t let you open one with out it. Also, I hate that I can’t listen to one artist and play their songs at random. When I want to listen to Metric but not anything else i have to let it play through each song in order until it then goes to Metro Station. I just want my music organized like Windows: Music, Artist, Songs, not by forcing me to make lame playlists. I have spent HOURS (so far approx. 20) renaming, organizing and adjusting all of my songs and files because of what itunes has done. All i can say is that if I hadn’t of spent so much on my ipod i would have thrown it and itunes in the trash months ago. This blows. I think itunes should take some hints from Windows for once.
I can’t believe how crappy itunes is. I absolutely hate it. It takes forever to burn my cds. My computer crashed and I have a backup of the iTunes folder except now I can’t get the new itunes to recognize the files.
I am so angry at all the time I have spent on this. It is disgusting. If I spend any more time on this it will be thrown away or sold. I seriously can’t stand the idea of burning all those cds again just to lose them when itunes can’t recognize them any way. What the hell this products is garbage.
Thank God I’m not alone! iTunes absolutely SUCKS at handling streaming audio/video. NO I DON’T WANT EVERYTHING I PLAY ADDED TO MY LIBRARY!!!!
Why dont you disable simultanious downloads from within the store->downloads item? visible during downloads. Then you have one problem less…