I was so fed up of iTunes that finally I had to download a thirdparty program,it’s called iMazing and it’s actually amazing.
It’s dead, Jim:
Notably absent from any of the articles I found was discussion about what would replace it on, you know, Windows desktops like the one I fucking use it on. sigh
Already being discussed in the WWDC thread.
Nothing is happening to it. For now.
Yeah, well. I don’t follow that thread, because 95% of what Apple announces I don’t give a shit about.
Thanks. I wish that had been made more clear in the original announcement.
FUCK YOU APPLE.
The most recent iTunes update defaulted podcasts to limited to the most recent 3 episodes. which meant it erased literally thousands of back episodes without asking me. Many of which are now irrecoverable, either because the podcast is defunct, the feed doesn’t go back far enough, or the archives are paywalled. What a colossally fucking stupid, hateful decision. Jesus.
Time Machine?
Yep. And then archive them somewhere external to the app.
Restore from your backups. You do have backups, right?
No, I don’t back up the 30+ terabytes of files I have, it would be prohibitively expensive. Or even the 500+ GB of podcast files I had. I did look at recovering the deleted files but some had already been overwritten and I didn’t have enough free space on another drive. But jesus, Apple. What the fuck were you thinking?
On the plus side, that is more than enough reason for me to finally stop using iTunes. I still don’t think there’s another application that does everything it did the ways I want and with an easy transition, but hell, I’ll take maybe being a little clunky and having to redownload some stuff that’s gone now anyway over arbitrarily deleting my shit.
Obviously none of it is that important then. You can tell Time Machine what to back up, so you can back up only the important stuff. Agreed, horrible move by Apple, but you have no excuse not to do backups, especially when doing updates. That’s just asking for trouble. If it wasn’t a system update a hardware failure would eventually get you anyway.
Well it doesn’t exist anymore anyway, at least on updated Macs. :-)
That’s truly amazing. I can’t even imagine what 500gb of podcast must look like. That must be tens of thousands.
None of it is mission critical, no. Combine that with the very large amount of data and the very low incidence of any sort of data loss event, and there’s simply no point in me trying. I would need either hundreds of dollars worth of additional hard drives that aren’t really any safer or more reliable than the first set, or magic levels of cloud backup and internet service that may not even exist, much less be affordable. Backing up only specific targetted stuff would not have saved me from something like this because I had no reason to expect those specific files to be at special risk.
Also, I have no idea what Time Machine is, and I think you may be making assumptions about what sort of system or device I am using that are incorrect.
Nah. A few thousand tops. I had a lot of backlog of RPG actual play podcasts that average between 150 and 500 MB an episode.
Ah you must be a PC user. People use iTunes on PCs still? :-P Time Machine is backup software that comes with Macs.
Up to you on the backups, obviously, but one last thing: Backblaze is $60 a year for unlimited backups. Including attached drives, but not NAS.
Geez that sux @malkav11, doesn’t surprise me though with Apple generally trying to take control away from users.
Since we’re on the topic, I use iTunes for PC, what are some good alternatives that do everything iTunes do? I don’t use the iTunes store and only use it to listen to audio files (often lossless formats).
This is a really good choice if you have files that are not downloadable from the source. For instance, even though I use Backblaze, I don’t back up my Steam games or iTunes movies since I can redownload them from the stores.
(although I learned it the hard way one time, when I lost my Spelunky save games because the game saved the progress in its games directory, not My Documents)… anyway, +1 for Backblaze!
Just to be clear, you can still download as many episodes as you want, it just defaults to 3. Must have been a bug that reset his preferences in this case.
Apple is ditching the Windows version (it hasn’t been updated in months) and moving to a web app for Windows, so even if you do want to use it, it’s going away.
The point isn’t that your backups are magically more reliable than the first set. The point is that you have two copies, so the bar for total data loss is raised higher (has to damage/wipe both sets of data/drives) Bayes’ law is your friend here (obviously lightning strike/fire destruction of property still gets you)
I didn’t backup for ages due to tho additional hardware cost, and then I sucked it up and realised I needed to be a little more responsible with this shit, so I now have a 6TB USB drive which does incremental backups nightly on a schedule using Macrium Reflect.
Obviously 30TB is a higher cost, but it’s not unattainable. And you can always exclude large redownloadable items like games if you want.
The moral of the story is - backups good, do them if you can. My wake up call was luckily on somebody else’s data rather than my own.
I use(d) iTunes on an updated Mac and with Catalina it’s almost impossible to manually add music to my iPhone. Most of the time new music simply refuses to transfer to the phone when dragged and dropped.
I’m seriously thinking of installing iTunes on a spare Windows PC (I refuse to install it and the bundle of associated applications on my main gaming PC) just so I can actually add music to my phone again but that would mean starting from scratch and it’s taken me months to get my music on my phone. Prior to Catalina I faced a persistent bug where ~50% of the time it would break up a single album and place each track on a separate album on the phone. I’d have to manually remove it from the phone and re-add it which would usually, but not always, add it correctly. If not I’d have to repeat the process.
iTunes (and now the Music app/ iPhone sync in Finder) is so aggressively terrible it’s almost enough to drive me to Android. And i HATE Android phones.
Use iMazing.