MattMaroon.com

Recently I installed iTunes, because someone I know is doing pretty well with an app and I wanted to check out the app store, and wow. I mean, just wow. Next time I hear someone tell me about how Apple has such great design sense and makes products that just work, I’m just going to respond with "iTunes".

I’ve never had this painful of an experience with software before. I’m pretty sure that using this software for 10 minutes constitutes a violation of the Geneva Conventions. I have a quad core machine on an 8 mbps internet connection, yet I click app store and count off over 20 seconds before it loads.

And then, when it finally does, I get this:

(click to enlarge)

After the instant migraine subsided, I decided to try it out as, you know, a media player. I’ve used it before (though that was a couple versions ago) to load iPods. That was exceptionally brutal, because I had a Nano, and iTunes just wasn’t built to sync collections to devices that don’t have enough storage capacity, it was built to sell your grandma a few songs and put them on the player. But I’d never used it to just play.

Well, I still haven’t, because for some reason, it decided it needed to convert most of my files (which are in FLAC or WMA lossless, because I started encoding music long before there was an iTunes) to AAC, pretty much rendering the program unusable, and the rest of my OS nearly so. I had to kill it with Task Manager, but I’m ordering a silver stake off of Amazon just in case this unholy beast comes back from the dead.

I guess I’m just more of an old school Winamp type guy. I don’t need my player to do a bunch of fancy organizing for me, that’s why I have folders. I don’t want it to convert them all to some other format for no apparent reason (which would take days for me) especially when I already have the codecs installed. I thought I disliked the latest version of Windows Media Player, but after iTunes I’m thinking about marrying it.

I really don’t understand why Apple doesn’t do a better job with this. The iPod is still most people’s only contact with Apple products. It’s what draws them into iPhones and, Apple hopes, computers. Why ship this bloated monstrosity to every new customer?

This entry was posted on January 29, 2009 at 11:28 am and is filed under Computers . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.