{"id":98,"date":"2008-02-01T07:00:34","date_gmt":"2008-02-01T13:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/?p=98"},"modified":"2024-07-04T09:33:33","modified_gmt":"2024-07-04T15:33:33","slug":"itunes-what-a-crappy-bit-of-software","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/itunes-what-a-crappy-bit-of-software\/","title":{"rendered":"iTunes: What a crappy bit of software!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Fans of Apple tend to be pretty, well, fanatical<\/em>, hailing everything Apple Inc. do (at least with Steve Jobs at the helm) as the greatest thing since sliced white bread.\u00c2\u00a0 The Mac is better than the PC; the iPod is better than the Zune; apples are better than oranges; and so on, and so on, ad nauseam.\u00c2\u00a0 In some respects they’re right: certainly Apple’s designers have flair and their hardware products sure look good, but I’m not entirely convinced of their supremacy on the software side of things.\u00c2\u00a0 Specifically, iTunes (the software that ships with iPods) is just horrible<\/span>.<\/p>\n

I was quite happily using Windows Media Player (and MusicMatch before that), but when I got my iPod I switched over to the light side, working on the theory that Apple would do a better job of interfacing with their own hardware than anyone else.\u00c2\u00a0 For the most part it has worked reasonably well, and some of the functionality is great<\/em> (dynamic playlists, being able to ‘flip’ through your album covers) but there are a couple of bugs that just drive me nuts<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Firstly, iTunes has a nasty habit of ‘losing’ the artwork for some of my albums.\u00c2\u00a0 I’ve made a point of downloading (via iTunes) the artwork for all of my albums, and finding them from other sources (or as a last resort scanning them in) when iTunes can’t find the artwork (which is admittedly very rarely -\u00c2\u00a0but oddly, although I’d expect it to not have some free magazine-cover compilations, it couldn’t find a bunch of ‘mainstream’ stuff, such as Amnesiac <\/em>by Radiohead<\/strong>, or Astral Weeks<\/em> by Van Morrison<\/strong>, seminal works, both).\u00c2\u00a0 But every so often iTunes simply deletes the artwork for random albums.\u00c2\u00a0 Not all albums, and not always the same ones, but a good couple of dozen reasonably often.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 I’ve never managed to figure out quite on what basis it chooses the albums to screw with, either.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s not ones I have scanned in myself, or even ones from ‘obscure’ albums, but it’s really irritating to have to scroll through all of my albums to spot the ones now missing their artwork, and then download it again.<\/p>\n

Secondly, iTunes likes to mix up the songs on some albums.\u00c2\u00a0 (No<\/em>, not because I have it on shuffle…)\u00c2\u00a0 It took me a while to figure this one out, but for some reason, when ripping a CD, iTunes will set the number of tracks<\/em> on the album correctly for a couple of the tracks, but not for the rest of the tracks on the same album.\u00c2\u00a0 So I have (for example) “Track 3 of 10” and “Track 4 of 10”) but then just “Track 1”, “Track 2”, and so on for the rest, where the number of tracks is just blank.\u00c2\u00a0 When I play the album, both iTunes and my iPod (so at least they’re consistent…) will first play the tracks\u00c2\u00a0that have\u00c2\u00a0the number of tracks specified (in the correct order) and then play the remaining tracks in whatever order it feels like (alphabetic order, track number order, highest to lowest rating, I don’t know…).\u00c2\u00a0 To fix this, I have to go through every album and make sure that the number of tracks is specified correctly.\u00c2\u00a0 But then it occasionally throws this<\/span> information away, as well, so I’m back to square one.<\/p>\n

Also, for some reason iTunes likes to split off tracks from albums, so they appear as separate albums in the indexes.\u00c2\u00a0 Normally it’s just one track from an album (and not necessarily the first or last track), and try as I might I can’t find any attribute other than the track number that differs between the tracks included on the actual album, and the one track that now appears\u00c2\u00a0on a separate ‘album’ (called the same thing, and with the same artwork…).\u00c2\u00a0 It’s really annoying, because if I want to play this album, I’ll be missing the one track that iTunes has split out.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 I keep hoping that they’ll fix this in the next release of the software, but…<\/p>\n

…the software update functionality is also crap.\u00c2\u00a0 Sure, it prompts you when there is a new version to download, but it doesn’t tell you what<\/span> has changed in this new version (even on their website) so you have to install it and then <\/em>see if it fixes any of the many problems (see above) or offers any interesting new functionality.\u00c2\u00a0 And more often than not the installation fails.\u00c2\u00a0 Last time I ‘upgraded’, it\u00c2\u00a0 insisted that I reboot my PC.\u00c2\u00a0 I did this but the PC refused to restart.\u00c2\u00a0 I had to do a hard power down, and then uninstall and reinstall iTunes to get it working again.\u00c2\u00a0 A couple of upgrades ago it screwed up something with the interface to iSproggler and now every time iSproggler starts it tells me that iTunes isn’t installed correctly and I need to repair it (I did but it made no difference).\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0iSproggler still seems to work, scrobbling everything to Last FM correctly, but it’s a bit disconcerting.<\/p>\n

iTunes is also missing some key functionality.\u00c2\u00a0 The main thing I’d like to see is to be able to link a track to multiple albums.\u00c2\u00a0 Example: I bought The Smiths<\/strong>‘ Greatest Hits 1<\/em> and Greatest Hits 2<\/em> albums quite some time ago.\u00c2\u00a0 Since then I have bought all of their other albums, which between them contain all of the tracks on the Greatest Hits packages.\u00c2\u00a0 So now I have 2 copies of a lot of the tracks, which is a waste of iPod space.\u00c2\u00a0 The obvious answer is to just delete the Greatest Hits albums.\u00c2\u00a0 But sometimes I just want to listen to Greatest Hits (accepted, this is The Smiths and they’re all<\/span> great, but…).\u00c2\u00a0 I could<\/em> delete the Greatest Hits albums and then set up playlists with all of the tracks from those albums in them (as I did with Bob Dylan<\/strong>‘s last compilation, Dylan<\/em> [not to be confused with the sub-par 1973 album of the same name which has since been deleted], because I have all of those tracks already as well), but playlists are listed under a separate menu, and not the album menu (or Artist > Albums), which is annoying, as you have to remember that that’s what you’ve done.<\/p>\n

I’d also like to be able to configure the iPod playback\u00c2\u00a0screen.\u00c2\u00a0 I’m pretty obsessive about rating tracks – mainly because I have several dynamic playlists that use the rating.\u00c2\u00a0 So it would be really useful if I could see the rating right there on the main iPod screen, to see if I had rated the song or not (I’m not so anal that I’ve pre-rated every one of the 9,382 tracks I have on there…).\u00c2\u00a0 There’s enough space – right between the elapsed time and the remaining time.\u00c2\u00a0 Sure, I can click through a couple of screens to get to the rating, but why should I have to?\u00c2\u00a0 I accept that not everyone cares about their ratings, which is why I think the screen should be customizable<\/em> – maybe you want to see the genre, or year of release, or just the album art and nothing else.\u00c2\u00a0 Actually, I have the big iPod speaker docking station (whatever that’s called – i<\/em>something) at work, and that comes with the ability to show the ‘large album art’ (1.5″ vs the standard 1″ – whoop-dee-doo!) by default.\u00c2\u00a0 Which would be a nice option if iTunes didn’t keep deleting the artwork, leaving me staring at an all-black screen…<\/p>\n

I’m not quite ready to revert to Windows Media Player just yet, but I certainly don’t agree with the fanatics who insist that Apple can do no wrong.<\/p>\n

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