iTunes ?

guh, itunes 11, wtf : /

times a million -

beef with itunes:

itunes suddenly has no internet connection (help, checking for updates, store, etc), and also isn't recognizing my iphone. both problems started happening at the same time. wtf is going on

itunes 11.2.2.3
iphone 5, 7.1.2

I used to use Privatunes to scrub my iTunes store-purchased files of info, but it doesn't seem to work anymore. Anyone know of a utility that will do this?

finally, finally i can view a playlist as a list of albums

(view a playlist, select Albums in the top right, you'll see a bunch of album covers instead of a list of tracks)

hasn't that been in there since 10?

Well, no, because clearly I would have noticed it, QED

Yeah I think that's been a feature for awhile. You could do choose how any grouping of albums displayed, whether playlist or full library.

my old playlists look like this

http://i.imgur.com/JEWfPwJ.png

but when I make a new playlist, it looks like this

http://i.imgur.com/YiiyRFv.png

How do I turn this off?

At the top-right of the iTunes window (just under the search box), switch from "Playlist" to "Songs"

sick, thank you!!!!!

lol, I had to talk my daughter down from a conniption fit about that exact issue last night. It definitely isn't intuitive or particularly easy to find.

i ran into this issue too. it's so stupid. don't like what they've done on the phone side either.

I accidentally made the iTunes window full screen and it took essentially total keyboard button mashing to get it back to normal. I still don't know what key to press. iTunes is amazing in the way it gets worse with every new version.

command + control + f will get you out of full-screen mode on any app. Intuitive, right? Everyone got it?

I eventually had to brute-force that stupid key combo into my head because I kept invoking full-screen. Does anyone use full-screen?

iTunes UI is the worst case of "it was working so we fixed it" software development ever. At least it still supports AppleScript.

I actually thought iTunes 10 was pretty good. Album flip view or whatever was great. Everything after has been abysmal.

Cover Flow was great, then Apple decided it was a terrible idea for some reason?

They can keep adding things but I really don't think I wanna use any function that wasn't there in 2005.

I wish that Apple initially split out books, podcast, videos, and everything that isn't music into their own separate apps instead of shoehorning the whole works into iTunes and then trying to undo it all. (think this would have been around iTunes 8 or 9?)

At least they did that with Books, so far. problem is they will still want the iTunes store to sell everything, so all the capability needs to be to be in the same client, naturally..

I have a feeling there's a lot of accounting plumbing upstream that naturally just takes forever to change. I just noticed that my iTunes purchase receipts now say Apple, Inc instead of iTunes.

iTunes ?

OK, now where did this go?

Found it... It's in "View" now!

Still the worst computer application that has ever been written.

Roffle I loved iTunes (I love a lot of shitty things, go figure).

I wanted as long as possible to make the switch from iTunes to the newish Mac Music app cause I knew there would be issues. WOW are there issues, so so many issues. I’ll skim past the part where Apple told me the same lie in three different tech support sessions, moving past how there’s a bug that randomly causes major issues on all sound output — not just the usual annoying clicking and popping noises, the bug causes my entire sound output to slow down. So fucked up haha.

Anyway now I’ve spent oh three months rebuilding my music library that Apple destroyed and I keep finding new weird quirks. If ANYONE else still uses this crap does this make sense?

Sometimes when I’m listening to a song in the song list of Music, and I try to “go to current song” [command-L] it will only show me the album view. There’s no way to jump to the current song in the list, it will only show me shitty album view, like it’s forcing it on me. Is there any rhyme or reason to this??

*WAITED as long as possible, not “wanted”

Alternatively I’m open to suggestions for replacements for Music on Mac. (I’ve also been exploring Ubuntu some too.)

The changeover from iTunes to iTunes Match to Apple Music was . . . less than perfect. I've encountered numerous instances of lost tracks and missing cover art. And the way Apple Music handles smart playlists on mobile devices is unpredictable.

I'm still limping by with iTunes on my MacBook Pro, terrified to make the switch. Ostensibly my library is on an external hard drive and I'm told it's "pretty easy" to switch with this type of external drive library but... I have my doubts.

Your doubts are very valid. The specific issue that I feel like killed my library (of fifteen years ha) is with syncing my iPhone. I use USB to sync — don’t trust this “cloud” jibberjabber — and now when I sync it copies the entire music library selected for my phone over again. I usually keep thousands of songs on there and like to sync frequently so I regard that as a dealbreaker.

I’ve been able to rebuild the library from scratch and recover a lot of the data from my old library by exporting playlists. Still l very tedious, but I actually want all my data, that’s why I stuck with these senescent apps.

I am pretty expert at transferring music libraries and glad to offer advice if needed when you decide to make the fatal leap.

But Jimbeaux I don’t really have any issues with smart playlists.

Ha, I'm even more old fashioned in that I don't sync at all with my iPhone, especially since my library is larger than the space on my phone, I just manually add and remove songs from the iPhone via USB.

Yeah I think we’re basically the same unless by “manual” you mean one-by-one?

My library wouldn’t fit on my phone either, I sync selected playlists. I have a main phone playlist and also use the “grouping” field like hashtags so I have smart playlists like ‘Lounge’ etc.

But Jimbeaux I don’t really have any issues with smart playlists.

I see it mostly in classical playlists--I have one, for example, that is based on not having listened to an album in more than a year. The tracks often show up completely out of order, and a lot of times a particular track won't show up in the list, even though I haven't listened to that one any more recently than I have to the rest of the album.

xp - not one by one, but I'll just grab either a playlist or a bunch of albums to drag onto it

Like an old-school iPod.

xp

As for the smart playlists I don’t mess with the classical-specific fields and don’t doubt they could cause issues.

You know what really grinds my gears - that manual USB syncing doesn't really work anymore if you're on Apple Music. You still have to go to the phone make sure those files are downloaded in the app.

It’s working for me now since I rebuilt my library.

But FFS Apple:

"Podcasts are stored in a cache folder in ~/Library/Group Containers/243LU875E5.groups.com.apple.podcasts . This is not designed to be user accessible, and the podcast files do not display the original file names. You can, however, drag podcast files from the Podcasts app to the Desktop or to a folder."

Do these files actually exist? Who knows.

It’s a little weird that I’m so attached to my music that I had some little dissociative moments when I was feeling a little ‘tired and emotional’ and wasn’t sure whether my system was glitching or I was.

Well I broke it again. That’s at least 20 hours of work wasted since my last backup. Always Be baCking up! Wow this is frustrating.

My experience is that Music is just iTunes with podcasts and video stripped out, everything looks and works the same: tagging, playlists, syncing, scripting. Unfortunately, same limitations too (no multiple artists, multiple genres, etc).

I hate how the view changes on its own. I have to manually set the filter field to search my songs, and then it disappears and I have to bring it up again.

xp

Yes all my scripts etc from iTunes seem to work the same. It’s just that my library somehow got corrupted in the migration. (I have been told that skipping major upgrades can cause issues so that may be part of it.)

If you’re on Mac or Linux do you like any non-cloud alternatives?

I'm on Mac - I've got Plex/Plexamp/Prism and Navidrome/Substreamer as additional servers/clients for streaming/syncing outside the house but neither are fully equivalent. Swinsian is OK for local playback but no sync-to-iPhone/iPad so I don't really see why I should switch.

It's all very frustrating since you can see what Apple Music *could* be with only a little bit of effort from the Apple devs: some additional support for tags like release type (album/single/live/etc), language, multiple artists/genres. Support for streaming/sync outside the local network (iCloud Relay looks ideal for that). Allow building smart playlists on the mobile app. Not really rocket science, but it's clear there's been zero investment in local music.

Smart playlists don’t even update on the mobile app (they used to.)

I kept my old iPod and upgraded both the battery and the hard drive. (The hard drive is basically an SD adapter with two SD card slots. The SD cards I use are pretty standard and inexpensive - put together they can hold over 500 GB.)

My phone gets used for too many things - I don't always have the opportunity to recharge the battery, I don't have steady internet access if I'm taking a long subway ride, and it doesn't even have a headphone jack anymore (I don't like ear pods, my headphones and ear monitors are much better), so I generally keep my music on my iPod, not my phone.

I have an old Macbook that got upgraded to the last iteration of iTunes before Music, so it can only synch, not drag and drop, but that's fine - I basically have two complete copies of my iTunes library, one on an external drive and one on my iPod, and going along with syncing at least means I don't have to worry about backing shit up because it's built into the setup. I haven't moved to Music yet, but will probably have to eventually. The OS on the old Macbook is getting less and less functional as it supports less and less software.

Just caught that sorry. A few issues — I wouldn’t really count your iPod library as a backup sorry. There’s no guarantee you’ll be able to recover that if need be. I have my phone library, my MacBook library, and and a backup on a hard drive. (I don’t fw Time Machine.) That’s one point in iTunes favor — if you get your libraries straight it does handle switching between them fairly painlessly.

My phone gets used for too many things - I don't always have the opportunity to recharge the battery, I don't have steady internet access if I'm taking a long subway ride, and it doesn't even have a headphone jack anymore (I don't like ear pods, my headphones and ear monitors are much better), so I generally keep my music on my iPod, not my phone.

Assuming you aren’t philosophically opposed to having an iPhone it will serve your purposes. I often go to airplane mode on transit to save my battery but just playing music offline doesn’t eat up much charge generally. Not entirely clear on your headphone preferred there tho. Clearly iPhone phased out headphone jacks which turned into a positive for me cause I terminated wired headphones very regularly. Bluetooth earbuds work for me, these Belkins seem nigh indestructible.

Actually just realized you said the iPod library is stored on SD cards (very clever). So that does serve as a dependable backup, my bad.

It just gets worse and worse from my POV. I had to replace my old phone and didn’t realize the new one had home sharing enabled which caused most of my library on the phone to appear as “not available in your country or region”. That was a nice scare.

They’re trying to rid of ratings in favor of ‘loves’, ratings aren’t marketable enough. Every update is in the direction of making it more crappy. Can I just have iTunes back?