{"id":48738,"date":"2019-06-06T03:00:52","date_gmt":"2019-06-06T07:00:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=48738"},"modified":"2019-06-05T09:41:50","modified_gmt":"2019-06-05T13:41:50","slug":"itunes-is-dead-there-will-be-no-funeral-because-it-had-no-friends","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2019\/06\/06\/itunes-is-dead-there-will-be-no-funeral-because-it-had-no-friends\/","title":{"rendered":"iTunes is dead – “There will be no funeral, because it had no friends”"},"content":{"rendered":"

I use iTunes because I have to, not because I particularly want to. Apparently that’s not uncommon<\/a> among iPhone users:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

iTunes, Apple\u2019s Frankenstein\u2019s monster of an MP3-player-cum-record store-cum-video-store-cum-iPhone-updater-cum-random-task-performer, a piece of software which opens on your computer whenever it wants and which seems to require you to download an updated version every eight hours, was pronounced dead on Monday. It was 19 years old. There will be no funeral, because it had no friends.<\/p>\n

Apple CEO Tim Cook announced that in its future operating systems, iTunes will be replaced by three separate programs: One for music (Apple Music), one for podcasts (Apple Podcasts) and one for video (Apple TV). Updating your phone \u2014 which never had anything to do with music, podcasts or video \u2014 will now be a function of the operating system. This sounds promising. It sounds normal.<\/p>\n

But the mystery remains how Apple, of all companies, found itself sullying its machines for so long with iTunes\u2019 wretched presence. By the end iTunes wasn\u2019t just bad, it was fascinatingly bad \u2014 a \u201ctoxic hellstew,\u201d as programmer Marco Arment put it in 2015. It was a master class in bad user experience from a company whose brand is excellent user experience: Put your trust in Apple\u2019s machines and its native apps and everything will just work. There are no viruses, no blue screens of death, no pre-installed junkware popping up all over your brand-new desktop. Things just show up where they\u2019re supposed to be. Mac\u2019s user interface is so vastly superior to Windows\u2019 that it seems ridiculous even to compare them. They\u2019re both operating systems in the sense that the stick-shift on a Yugo and the flappy paddles on a Ferrari are both transmissions. Yet by 2015 one of Apple\u2019s essential apps wasn\u2019t just horrid to look at and baffling to use \u2014 it couldn\u2019t even store and play people\u2019s MP3s properly.<\/p>\n

I never experienced the horror stories myself; [lucky bastard!] the idea of buying music from Apple and, because of its aggressive digital rights management, not even getting an MP3 file with which I could do what I liked always struck me as daft. But the Internet is full of tales of woe from people who entrusted their music collections to Apple and got royally screwed. iTunes would make curatorial decisions all by itself: If you bought Neil Young\u2019s 1977 compilation album Decade, but already had On the Beach in your library, it might just decide not to include Walk On and Tired Eyes on your version of Decade. Or it might delete them from On the Beach, depending on its mood.<\/p>\n

This was presumptuous and annoying, but at least somewhat explicable: iTunes consumers were far more singles-focused than album-focused. (Indeed the app is widely credited with ending the \u201cage of the album.\u201d) Less explicable were reports of Apple Music replacing people\u2019s legacy music collections \u2014 songs they had ripped from CDs and entrusted to iTunes \u2014 with new downloads. People spoke of entire collections being corrupted or lost overnight. People reported that their libraries looked nothing alike on their various Apple devices. At one point, apparently under the impression that not many people loathe U2, Apple famously went ahead and beamed one of the band\u2019s new snorefests onto everyone\u2019s iTunes without asking.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

My experiences with iTunes have been mostly of the minor irritant variety: disappearing songs, paid-for tracks that refused to play on certain devices, and songs showing up in playlists that they don’t belong to<\/em>, for example. But at least — most of the time — the non-Apple songs were not randomly deleted from my library. Not too often, anyway.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I use iTunes because I have to, not because I particularly want to. Apparently that’s not uncommon among iPhone users: iTunes, Apple\u2019s Frankenstein\u2019s monster of an MP3-player-cum-record store-cum-video-store-cum-iPhone-updater-cum-random-task-performer, a piece of software which opens on your computer whenever it wants and which seems to require you to download an updated version every eight hours, was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[831,15],"tags":[160,156,27,200],"class_list":["post-48738","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-technology","tag-apple","tag-fail","tag-iphone","tag-music"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-cG6","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48738","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48738"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48738\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":48740,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48738\/revisions\/48740"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48738"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48738"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48738"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}