Chris Alexander

On Engineering

iTunes Sucks

3rd March, 2012

iTunes is the worst piece of software ever written (yes, worse than Windows ME).

It is slow. It is ugly. It is not fit for purpose. It makes it incomprehensibly complicated to anything other than the simplest possible action. It takes forever to start, forever to sync, forever to do anything.

I think the main problem is that iTunes was designed to be a music player. Over the years, the iTunes store, iPod syncing, iPad syncing, podcasts, books (Books?! In iTunes?!) apps, Genius, a social network (remember Ping? No, nobody else either), and various other things that should never have existed in a media player have been bolted on and it’s become a bloated steaming pile of shit.

If I copy a CD to my computer (as I do a lot, as I like buying CDs rather than digital downloads - but that’s another blog post entirely), to get it on my phone (Galaxy Nexus, ICS) I do the following:

Copy CD to computer
???
Music appears on phone

This is due to the wonder that is Google Music. Its uploader sits in the background on my PC, uploads it to the server, and as soon as it’s there it’s available to play on my phone straight away (or press the “Save for offline” button for use on a plane etc.).

To get it on to my iPad / iPod:

Copy CD to computer
Add the new folders to the library (even though I’ve told it where my music library is, because it’s not the default iTunes folder and iTunes did not rip the CD, it does not pick up new music automatically)
Wait for it to add the files, with a popup box containing an unending progess bar, which stops me using iTunes for anything else at the time
Dismiss all the duplicate notifications. Note there’s no skip all button if you accidentally try and replace in stuff you already have in the library - you have to click “Don’t replace” every single time.

Wait for it to load album artwork, which always ignores the existing downloaded album art and never seems to find the right album art.

Go through each album without album art. Right click to find album art. Mostly this works, when it doesn’t you have to find the art, copy it, right click on the album, hit Get Info, and then right click on the white square and paste the image in. Then press OK and wait for it to apply.

Wait for it to analyse all of the tracks for gapless playback information, which seems to take an eternity. Pretty sure I also have that feature off.

Plug in iPad / iPod. You can’t choose what music goes on to the device until it is plugged in (WTF?). Clear warning about not having enough space. Take stuff off. Have too much space. Add stuff on.
Try and sync. Sync fails, not enough space. A mysterious 1.5GB of “Other” has randomly appeared. Remove stuff. Sync.

Punch things.

This is very very broken. Something needs to be done about it.

While I admire Apple’s hardware, their software has always been absolutely terrible. Quicktime - I need say no more. OS X is basically unusable. iTunes isn’t fit for purpose. iOS is so slow it seems like it’s running on a steam engine.