iTunes 8 sucks
iTunes is the only software I know of that progressively gives you less options with each release. Things that I’m already missing are:
- Ability to turn off the iTunes Store links on all tracks now. Boy don’t I love it when a company rams their nasty shopping website down your throat. Since when has taking away peoples freedom to choose been a god idea?
- The Genius. Its real genius when a company encourages you to send them a list of all your music and I guess all your listening habits and song ratings. I guess so their nasty shop can send you tailor made spam. Marketing Genius! (at least you can turn this nasty off!)
- OH, and as an added bonus, being an iPod Touch owner, I really love how every time I plugin my iPod iPhoto launches even after turning off photo sync’n. What a boon to have to wait 2 minutes for it to become responsive again because iTunes as also booted at the same time and started syncing. Oh joy!
- Control over encoding settings. I guess you have to use the m4a format now whether you like it or not and you don’t have any control over the quality of the encoding.
When will they stop with the lie and start to call it officially ‘iTunes Store’ instead of just ‘iTunes’. Fortunately there are some alternatives to iTunes on their way, hopefully encouraged by Apples comitment to squeeze as many pennies out of their users as possible. They are:
Songbird, which is built on FireFox technology, so its PC & Mac firendly, and is a full iTunes replacement and more! It has a full media library manager very similar to iTunes but offers a hundreds of add-on to change the way it looks and behaves (ahh “control”, something iTunes will never offer). One of these add-ons is Last.fm integration, a ‘must-have’ in my book. If you spend any mount of time playing with your music collection, or just don’t want to feel Apples iStore market department rubbing its hands together every time you are forced to stare are the iSore icon in iTunes, then you should defiantly check out Songbird.
Cog, for a no frills audio player, its solid and fast but only a basic media management (i.e. keeps a list) but it does have Last.fm integration! It also handle a much wider range of audio formats than iTunes including some of the stranger loss-less audio compression formats (*.flac, *.wv) rearing their heads these days, which not even VLC can understand…
VLC, also a good Audio/Video player. Its notorious in the torrent scene as being able to play nearly any type of video format. Also doesn’t have a media manager nor Last.fm integration. It is a solid player and I recommend having it for when all other media players fail (Mac or PC).
Its nice to have options, and as soon as another touch screen device comes out, I’m jumping the Apple ship for good. The moral of this ugly story: Monopolies suck.
Update
I came across an article about reverting back to iTunes 6 from 7 but I assume it still works for 8. If your really fed up backward might be the way forward!
I’m not impressed either – disabling Genius Bar doesn’t, erm, disable it.
The encoding thing is still there though, they just moved it to the “Import Settings” button on the General tab of the preferences.
To disable the links to the iTunes store, there’s a secret preference. I use Secrets (http://secrets.blacktree.com/) to change it. Under iTunes, there’s a “Show links to the iTunes store” checkbox that I’ve unchecked.
Hi,
I am a user of WindowsXP, I use iTunes since version 4! And until now I tried every one that has been out. This v8, is peace of crap.
It has few more problems, like the commands are not in the same place (mini iTunes is now under View), or like the problem of resizing mini player.
iTunes v8 is not finished product. Jobs change this! Fire the idiot who made this! Do something!
btw
iTunes now uses over 150mb of RAM. Nice huh? Winamp 2.91 (I like that version) uses around 2mb. I love iTunes, but it needs to be redone for Windows platform.
Well said and good points, especially regarding the store.
It’s nice to see some criticism of 8.
The web is full of articles that read like Apple press releases.
as for the suck aspect….I agree. The one feature that I used a lot was the encoding feature and I did find it when they moved it. But they actually took out the feature that would allow you to not have the song play. I encode when I am in bed and this was a handy feature. I guess I am going back to an earlier one.
Yeah this sux. Everytime I plug in my shuffle I have to reformat it. It is real slow and I can not add anything to it. I just had 7 working like I wanted it and look what happens. Itunes 8 really suckx. Get your heads out of eachothers asses and get this itunes thing the way it used to be
Don’t forget that it’ll now automatically add track and disc numbers to your song titles. Have to hit the command line to turn that one off, too.
Songbird looks better every day.
Yeah I just got songbird up and going. What a relief. I suggest this little program over itunes any day of the week. This songbird thing works like a charm.
this new version makes the sound awful. i hate this version.
v8 does suck – big time. anyone have any idea how to change that ugly pink background? or just get a list of music in the library that we used to have?
Time to rip everything to mp3 and find something else, imho
LCL
I’m going back to version 7. It seems with Apple’s gaining popularity, which I have championed for years, comes a dumbing down on their software. I don’t need a “genius” to put songs together in a somewhat related fashion. Classical music is really virtually unsupported as far as cataloging goes, and now I have to go deep into buttons and menus to do formerly one-click actions.
*sigh*
Here’s a site that will put some life back into itunes..
http://dougscripts.com/itunes/
Downgrade to itunes 4, iReally liked the brushed metal look and the 15 to 30MB of ram at maxium…
I agree. Progressively less options, unnecessary artwork, less control over encoding, etc. I will be uninstalling the iTunes v8.
ipod players are great, but iTunes has always been awful. I use WMP 11 for listening and use iTunes 7.6 only when needed. It’s such an ugly interface and wastes so many resources needlessly. It’s two new features are pointless and waste even ore resources. 512mb ram for a media player? Genius is a waste of time and grid view their other big feature is what WMP 11 has had this whole time. Lucky for me the Nano V4 is the worst nano to date and I can just calmly stick with my nano v3. itunes 8 a a requirement alone makes me stay away fro new iPods.
And I really hate the way they got rid of the ability to group songs by albums, artists, and genres, and replaced with a total crap “grid view”. Itunes 8 is doomed!
Tell me about it. WTF?
They’ve eliminated the option to turn off file names with numbers before the name. That just drives me off the wall when I have to go through all my mp3s and rename them or at least take out the track numbers. What a pain.
Something else I just found out – exporting playlists as a txt file I was able to open up in Excel but unfortunately with version 8.1 (works with 8.02) it wont. It just does not work. Track names, artists names album names are not in columns anymore – they are in one line.
Pain in the butt!
What’s next? i hope they don’s start charging for it?
Pissed off!