Ask HN: Who else hates iTunes?

[dzohrob]

Hi HN—

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?

[epistasis]

After 15 years on iTunes, and much devotion towards keeping a clean library of music that I ripped or purchased, Apple Music ruined it for me.

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.

[SnowingXIV]

Spotify has also made me completely abandoned any type of local music library (it even offers to save for offline use which I do often for road trips or flights). I do buy vinyl and spend money there but can't imagine ever going back to any other structure besides paying a streaming service for digital music. It's been great not having to constantly configure foobar or figure out syncing between devices.

[crankylinuxuser]

Everything you said also applies to closed source software, along with SaaS offerings.

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.

[akhatri_aus]

One thing very at odds with Apple's design etiquette with iTunes is there are a lot of message dialogs that block the whole ui. Typically a message dialog that blocked things underneath it would be a last resort, and of all things in a music player app.

One 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]

[dzohrob]

agree, the modals are insane! iOS does better, it's pretty crazy how poorly the desktop has kept up.

[astura]

It's pretty much universally accepted that iTunes is a giant bloated mess.

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.

[egze]

You probably meant it in a good way, but it is much better to say "Who knows a good alternative to iTunes?" or "How would you design a perfect music player?".

You wouldn't want to see a post "Who else hates dzohrob's music player?" would you?

[always_good]

Agreed. It also anchors all the comments in the same hostility instead of a more positive, collaborative frame of mind.

Pitchforks out.

It's also funny when software developers assume that other software is somehow the result of an organization's or developer's idea of perfection and immortality instead of the result of a long line of trade-offs and suboptimal resources.

We don't want anyone to assume that about our efforts but it seems to be the default assumption of HN comments.

[dzohrob]

Totally fair feedback, thanks. I thought about phrasing it in a different way, but ended up letting my emotions get the better of me.

[crankylinuxuser]

It would be different if Apple didn't chain their mobile computer (iPhone, iPad) to this horrendous piece of software.

MTP exists for a reason, as does USB storage. But "Think Different" means doing worse and nonstandard.

[hvass]

The only time I've felt a strong urge to write to Apple was in regards to iTunes and my complete disbelief that they still haven't figured it out decades in. It's shockingly bad.

[cletus]

I think hatred for iTunes is pretty much universal, particularly with tech-savvy folks. But... it just doesn't matter. It seems like one of those siren projects like online dating or a better travel site.

The real problem you have is that actually owning and having mp3s (or whatever lossless alternative grabs your fancy) is (IMHO) only going to decrease and become increasingly niche.

Streaming will be the majority solution. Combine this with offline playlists on Spotify (which I've been paying for for years) and I just don't have any need for the mp3s I spent years collecting and curating.

The only problem with Spotify and the like (including iTunes) is content that holds out on streaming (thankfully this is becoming less common) and content that simply isn't on any digital format whatsoever. Sadly this includes a lot of Australian music. Oh and you also have crappy remasters rather than the originals.

The other thing that happened is we stopped backing up our iPhones by opening up iTunes and connecting the phone to a computer via a cable. Well, most people did. It's all iCloud backups now.

So what exactly do we need iTunes for? That's your problem.

[beams_of_light]

My sentiments in a nutshell. Having the ability to stream any songs I want, anytime has led to discovering more genres and artists I like, but didn't have exposure to previously. My Spotify playlist doesn't have much on it that most people would have heard before, at this point, thanks to Discover Weekly. I would hate to have to go back to curating my own MP3 library again, and be limited to files on a device I carry around with me.

[psyc]

iTunes has the single worst UI of any app, of any kind, I have used in the last 20 years. The page flow makes no sense. I can never remember how to get to certain pages, or out of certain pages. There is no flow. Important functions are buried where I least expect. I can't use it without a search engine handy, and there is no excuse for this.

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.

[ibz]

It used to be OK but it's gotten worse and worse, to the point where it's hardly usable - both on OSX and on iOS. I miss the foobar2000 days on windows! One thing I do like about iTunes is the ability to browse music by artist, by album, etc.

[timrichard]

I've had a long aversion to iTunes, as well. I've been a happy Spotify subscriber for nearly 10 years now, but I've also been using Audirvana on the Mac recently to play FLAC files. It's a very lightweight player in comparison to iTunes, but still based around the album thumbnails you mention. Not stuffed with features, but a lot of attention is given to codec and playback options to get the best audio quality possible from your gear. Handles your material regardless of sample rate (44.1 to 192) and bit depth.

If you've got a collection of CDs, I'd recommend XLD [1] to rip them to FLAC.

I still use Spotify, mostly for discovery, but also have sessions with Audirvana where I listen to classic albums from beginning to end. Through some A/B testing, I noticed a modest improvement in depth and clarity over 320kbps MP3. The tradeoff is storage of course, and the growing album collection can start to take a chunk of your HD.

[1] https://sourceforge.net/projects/xld/

[chubot]

Wow I thought I was an outlier, because I've never been able to get the hang of iTunes. I occasionally touch it with a 10 foot pole when I have to get something off my phone.

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.

[spsrich]

When your ten year old kid tells you they hate a piece of software that should be all you need to know.

It's atrociously bad.

[barrowclift]

To offer another perspective, I prefer iTunes over the available alternatives on macOS simply because it's the only player out there that addresses my (admittedly niche) requirements:

* A nice grid view for albums, which is the only view I ever use (so the clunky UI that rightfully irritates users that need to switch views isn't a concern for me)

* A freely resizable album art player, which can still be launched by command+clicking the album art in the menu "display". Alternatively, I'd prefer something like the Apple TV's player view, but as far as I'm aware there's nothing on macOS like it.

For what it's worth, if your player supports even one of those points, it'd be an immediate purchase for me. :)

[dawnerd]

I just want them to fix bugs that have been outstanding for the last year plus. The one that gets me the most is the box that says something about folllowing friends. There’s a close button that closes it but as soon as you go back to the page it shows up again.

[Khoth]

I use iTunes 10. It's responsive, does everything I want and still has iTunes DJ which is the best method I've found for listening to random things from my music collection.

[cfadvan]

I admire your goal, but my first question is, have you tried Foobar2000? You could create a theme that has most of your features, and at heart it is nicely minimalist.

[dzohrob]

Never heard of it, but looks interesting - thanks for sharing. I probably should've been more clear that after decades of curating my MP3 collection, I've moved towards streaming and rarely dig deep into my library for the ripped tracks that aren't available to stream.

[NoahTheDuke]

Foobar for interface, beats[http://beets.io/] for library organization. It's the perfect combination for any tech-savvy Windows user.

[scandox]

The reason I use iTunes...have to use Itunes...is because:

* 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.

[Drakim]

I used to have an iPod too, but the hard-drive eventually gave out.

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.

[013a]

All signs point to Apple revamping iTunes in the coming year/s, likely by splitting out the Music and TV portions into their own apps. This could come as soon as WWDC with the expected announcement of the unified app development framework; I seem to remember there being evidence that Apple Music on iOS is already using some of this technology, though I can't find a source right off.

[rb808]

One thing I love about Apple Music are the Radio 1 shows - the back catalog of sessions are some of the most incredible sets of music ever. Finding them and playing is incredibly frustrating with iTunes - it sucks big time. Is the main reason I gave up on Apple Music. If you can improve this part it would be great.

[mayniac]

Spotify has quite a few of the features you're looking for already. Why reinvent the wheel? It costs about the same as Apple Music, and I have very few complaints with the apps and desktop client. There's also quite a bit of IFTTT compatibility and a (from what I've heard) decent API.