Receive texts from iTunes? Man, people make some weird-ass linkages in their minds sometimes.
Just to add to the pile I have been Itunes free for a while but somethings were missing that I had to do manually, but now I have automatic photo backup to Skydrive, others also do it like Dropbox but I have more space on Skydrive, and music syncing with Google Music that syncs your music library for free, for those of us that don’t want to have a music subscription service. So the only thing that I can think of that requires iTunes is adding ringtones but is such an hassle to do it that i just use the default ones, funny how a thing that was super easy to do on my feature phone, use just a random mp3 as a ringtone is such an hassle on the iphone.
The only feature I really want from iTunes is a local backup of all my apps & media, plus convenient transfer to a new iPa/od. Apple can kill the rest for all I care.
I like the new iTunes radio. It’s easy to block the ads.
All my music’s missing. All of it, that isn’t stored locally. All of it on my home server. Everything that was added to iTunes. Anything NOT added to iTunes, like the goofy music Sony includes on its MP3 players, is still there.
To preface this, a few years ago i got an HP Homeserver EX490, since it was purported to work with Mac as a Time Machine backup. Well it did but only just, and it was nearly impossible to recover from. It also used proprietary software to comb through my computers and pull any music that it saw onto itself. I also set iTunes to use the server as its default directory. I also set my PC with the Zune account to use it as well.
The result of that was that every single song got mirrored over and over again. My iTunes playlist was made up of each song copied something like 8 times, in every way identical. Obviously this isn’t going to work, but it took me awhile to get around to fixing it. I should note that i’m not a “music guy”, i mean, i’m a human being, i like music, but it’s not a part of my identity or interests in any significant way. It took me about a year after shutting off this service to get around to deleting all of the copies from iTunes. At this point my server sat “out there”, increasingly unnecessary. However it did still contain most of my copies of archival music, stuff i don’t listen to very often, old stuff, ect. I also just dropped buying music online and went back to CDs, ripping any music i wanted digitally from that. At least mostly, you know, i might have made a few exceptions.
So, over the last month, it’s come to my attention that all of the music on the home server is GONE. Physically gone, no files remain. The directories are still there, but they are empty. Just… gone. Except it’s only music that was linked to iTunes. Was it iTunes? Was it this goofy Flip4Mac Quicktime plugin from years ago, was it that TuneUp program i linked to iTunes years ago to clean out the spare files? Was it the forlorn Zune software on my laptop logging in and going postal? Was it the shit HP software on the server? Was it Microsoft reminding me why they discontinued their Home Server software suite? Bleh. Since i had a wacky combination of music services - including that crap from Sony years ago i had to use with their MP3 players - i had a motley collection of music, most of which was DRM free, that i picked up bits and pieces of music from over the years. But like, that Sigur Ros album that i got from Zune music free on my $20 subscription? Gone. That stuff i ripped from a game soundtrack, 8 years ago? Gone.
Fuck. Stupid digital music. Back to CDs forever now :/. Because digital music is way in the background of interests for me i don’t spend much time managing it. And i guess i can’t trust it not to get wiped, randomly, for no apparent reason? I’m taking my baby steps towards being that cane-shaking old man.
So almost all of my music on my Homeserver was deleted, for no apparent reason. All the directories for the albums and artists still exist but they are empty. Then, on vacation (and on the treadmill no less), i noticed almost all of my music on my iPhone has dissapeared as well. I mean, this is music purchased through iTunes. So i’m back home, and i noticed that iTunes is wirelessly syncing with my iPad… and it’s putting apps which i deleted during the vacation back onto it. So with a bit of intuition i looked under the Music program in the iPad… and there are all my missing tracks from the iPhone.
So how much does a Moto G cost again?
$150 no contract in Canada. I’m using both Google Play Music locker (through US VPN) to upload 20GB/5000+ songs and iTunes Match. My WHS died in 2011.
I don’t like apple but I did get a nano for christmas, I needed a decent bluetooth mp3 player for the gym. I just used mediamonkey to load it up with mp3’s, evil somewhat averted.
Looks like I’m in the minority camp of loving iTunes. I like how it managed my library and I love iTunes Match! Besides, it’s the only legit way to buy legit music in Malaysia, where I live.
For me it was the size of my library that killed it. Once I went above 100+ videos (tv and movies), it started crashing about once a day. Which sucks because the main thing we use iTunes for is Apple TVs.
Jebus I hate iTunes.
My wife wanted new wallpaper on her iPad, and was having trouble because it insisted on zooming really far in on the image she selected. Another example of how Apple software often “Just Doesn’t Work,” even turning off parallax didn’t adjust this behavior. The only real fix was to find and/or re-size an image on my computer and transfer it to the iPad.
Which meant iTunes. And oh man, does iTunes want to waste enormous amounts of time, doing who-knows-what.
Then, as long as I was there, I thought I’d use the PC version of iTunes to grab a wallpaper app that would avoid this issue in the future. I clicked on “download.” No response. Try again. No Response. Wait several minutes, no response. Cancel the current activity, “checking downloads.” Now it asks for my iTunes password. And then asks for it again. And then tells me I’m already downloading the app. And then tells me the download failed. And now the download button is grayed out.
Eff you, iTunes.
Apple always Just Works. If it doesn’t work it’s because you’re doing something that you as the consumer have no right to be doing.
Use DropBox. No reason to suffer with iTunes just to upload a few images to your device.
That crossed my mind, but I foolishly thought a direct USB connection would be a lot faster than uploading and downloading the images. Particularly since some would make a round trip - from her iPad to my computer, edited, and then back.
Its bad because they probably hate to write native windows app enough to try to pass some non-native code as native. The result monstruosity only half-work.
Ugh, so today the latest iteration of iTunes for Windows decides that it has to crash whenever I try to update podcasts, and while it’s not responding, it’s using 25% of the CPU. Is it a real pain to uninstall/reinstall? Maybe my installation’s just corrupted. Or maybe it’s suddenly got a problem with the latest Nvidia graphics driver.
Don’t worry I’m sure they’ll update the program so that it will utilize and max out all four CPU cores the next time it crashes.
I’ve been having issues with 11.3 updating podcasts, too. It doesn’t crash, but it uses a shitload of CPU and memory, and takes forever to actually update the podcasts. This was not an issue with 11.2 (that was just shitty, awkward software – this is buggy, shitty, awkward software).
iTunes would be my last choice for podcasts. I currently use Overcast on iOS. When I want to listen to podcasts on my desktop PC, I log into overcast.fm.