I hate iTunes.

Well, it turned out to be an early, iPod-laden anniversary. Sandy got me an iPod 60GB and I got her a 4GB Nano. So now we’re officially part of the cult followers er, group.

Of course, no iPod is complete without that freakin’ weird looking (from this Linux/Windows user’s perspective) music manager, iTunes. Appleganda says “iPod and iTunes work together! You will be assimilated! Buy overpriced music tracks from our store!” Neither of us have had a good experience with iTunes from the get-go. I’ve tried it in the past but always found it WAY too slow. Plus we’ve already manually and meticulously organized our total of 45GB of MP3 (and that’s a lowball count – I have over 100 CDs to re-rip).

For both of us…

  • iTunes is simply not intuitive, period. It gets dumped on you and that’s it. Apple is not gaining any Mac converts by dumping this on Windows users.
  • There are no tooltips, period, anywhere. I have to either guess at what the dozen-odd random icons scattered around the UI are, or read the entire help file from front to back.

From my perspective…

  • iTunes crashes on my PC all the time. No I’m not blaming Windows for that, because nothing else screws up so often.
  • It’s slow, so BLOODY SLOW at converting videos to iPod format – and then I just found out that most of the videos that I converted came out with no sound.
  • Did I mention that it crashed my PC while trying to convert videos like three or four times now? I finally had to get another video conversion program. A 3 minute music video that iTunes would take an hour on converted in 5 minutes.
  • It sucks for editing ID3 tags. I wish I could install KID3, the KDE ID3 tag editor on Windows. (Oh SNAP – turns out there’s a Windows version!)
  • iTunes tries to be Mac-like but breaks standard Windows behaviour. I can’t Ctrl-Shift click to select multiple groups. There aren’t very many context menus period.
  • How the HELL do I tell it that my videos are music videos, and not movies? It’s not right-click.
  • Most of the context menus that are there, don’t do anything that I want to do.
  • It doesn’t understand vCard files that contain more than one card.
 

29 replies


  1. I just read your post, and I too HATE Itunes. Computer crashes when converting video ALL THE TIME, ok, well not all the time I converted two successfully. The weird thing is, that I already converted them from Mpeg to Quicktime using Cyberlink Power Director, and I still have to convert the quicktime file I made for it to go in my Ipod (I’m guessing because MY converted file is WAY too big). DO you have any advice for me? or better still which program did you get to convert Mpeg’s to the Ipod format?

    Thanks.


  2. YES YES YES – I so strongly agree with this post. I too have just bought an iPod and started up iTunes and I hate it! hate it! hate it! Unintuitive is the word. I am a .NET programmer and if I made this kind of gui crap for my users they would shoot me!


  3. so far, one of the best id3 tag editors i’ve found for windows was tagscanner @ http://xdev.narod.ru/tagscan_e.htm

    the it takes awhile to get to the site/download, but there are also other download sources for this app. i don’t have any of my machines running windows now, both x86 desktop and notebook are running linux and i have a mac mini as well.

    little late to be adding this comment since you posted this in june, but hey 🙂


  4. ohh.. and instead of using itunes for ripping, i recommend EAC and LAME: http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=EACandLame


  5. iTunes rages me, just like most MAC stuff, it’s not useable. It’s not intuitive. I’m hardly surprised, the majority of Apple products personify form over function.

    Apple is just clever marketing, their products are disappointing in general. My mother is on her FIFTH iPod Nano as they keep breaking. A few people at the gym are on their 4th and 5th iterations also.

    Oh, and their ‘Power PCs’ are incredibly slow too.

    Oh yes, and they designed the Finder application so its absolutely terrible for developers. It doesn’t even tell you the parnent folder(s) (to a high level), so you have no idea where you are in your system (any web developer will know what I mean).

    NeXT Step > Mac OSX.

    Rant over.


  6. iTunes sucks! It makes me want to pull my hair out! It’s the most un-user-friendly piece of software I’ve come across. I am on the hunt for something better before I sell my ipod….which I really do love!

    Thanks for listening….just had to get that off my chest 😐


  7. I love all apple stuff exept iTunes. it makes me so mad. iTunes, msFrontpage and norton antivirus are the 3 most terrible programs ever to run on my cpu.
    I have a new macbookpro and i love it exept itunes 🙂


  8. Is it wrong to find solace in knowing that I am NOT alone? I HATE ITUNES, IPOD, AND THEIR LACK OF SUPPORT for computer inept people like myself-ggrrrrrr!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


  9. ok.
    thats clear. itunes is a load of xxxxxxxxx

    so brainies; what do we use insead. I cant find something to replace the damn thing.
    any suggestions would be most gratefully received


  10. oh and a suggestion for the programmers out there;
    no ipod interface might help; after all who wants an ipod messing with their management anyway?


  11. oh my god, thank you all for making it clear I’m not the only one. I love my new Mac, and I have had few problems with switching over (fewer than I usually do with a new Windows machine, that’s for sure…), but I HATE iTunes with a passion. It’s big, and slow, clunky and unintuitive, and I detest having to move all of my music into its own folder (why the hell can’t it recognize and play music elsewhere? every other player I’ve ever used played music from anywhere. w… t…f???). If not for iTunes, I would be totally thrilled with the Mac experience. It makes me want to scream, on a regular basis.


  12. I agree with all of you on hating iTunes. Mac is ok for me…I use it at work. But iTunes is absolutely horrible. All I want to do is copy movies, tv shows, and music to my iPod; which I successfully did with iTunes. Now I would like to delete some of the TV shows since I’ve already watched them. I’d also like to add some new movies. Seems easy? Nope, not even for a computer literate person. Instead when I hooked it up it deleted every movie and tv show, plus all my music off my iPod. WTF. I never hit the delete key, or selected yes to the warning (which doesn’t exist). Aparently since I have moved all my videos to an external drive, when iTunes couldn’t find the files that are already on my iPod, it just went ahead and deleted them. I just don’t understand the thought process of this. I’ve tried using other programs like Xplay, but they aren’t ready for the Video Ipods. You can’t make folders or place TV shows in the TV shows folder on your Ipod. Instead it puts all videos in your Movies folder. So I have tons of different episodes of shows all listed under my movies folder. Please someone write a program to take place of itunes.


  13. iTunes SUCKs so bad it’s had to keep from screaming everytime I use it. I had a Samsung MP3 player that was great, add music and organize files was a no brainer. iTunes makes life impossible, tried to add just 1 song today and all 40 Gigs of my music was erased!!! What a great way to start a week on the road, now I have no music and when I get home on Friday the real fun begins, hook up the pod to my network and start the 8 hour download to put the music back on. Is there any shareware replacement for iTuna?


  14. just repeating much of the same I suppose – I HATE ITUNES ABOUT AS MUCH AS I COULD EVER HAT ANYTHING. Spent a fortune on an 80gb ipod and various bits of kit – actually to be fair against the advice of my 16 year old daughter who is a creative fan. Somehow – looks like completely by accident I have managed to get some music and a couple of audio books onto the ipod – but with regard to movies – YOU MUST BE JOKING! it keeps denying i exist even though i’ve registered 3 times and worrying supplied debit card details. All I want to do at the mo is download the blues brothers from DVD onto the ipod – thought this would be easy. I would sell the whole lot on e bay if i could bear to put anybody else through the frustration and anger making experience i’ve been through – now there’s a a though a 1p auction start with a challenge to make the damn thing work. Feeling slighty better now after a rant but will never never never recommend that anybody bye an ipod while it depends on itunes which has apparently had no functionality or user testing whatsoever.


  15. I have to join in the rant, for my own sanity. I cant STAND iTunes. Heres a good one; why if youre searching the iTunes store and you search for Duran Duran or Madonna the results are returned immediately. But if you search for something obscure, like Panoptica, instead of telling you that they dont have anything by the artist, iTunes tells you that the Network Connection Timed Out and that you should Check your Internet Settings forcing you to check all of your security settings, virus protection programs and other apps. Of course I sent them a note regarding this, but expect the usual response: Its your fault, you have a crappy computer, this wouldnt happen if you had a Mac. This is a new, excruciatingly irritating flaw with 7.1 and seems to only haunt Windows users.


  16. I thought my husband and I were the only ones who positively detest iTunes — how affirming to see that we are NOT alone!!! Too many unintuitive icons and text, etc. Can ANYONE suggest a better and user friendly site? We’ll be forever grateful..


  17. Hello i would also like to state publically that I HATE ITUNES. mainly for its file management system, which is just horrible. Why do we have to ‘import’ music files? WMP just ‘knows’ that there on the pc which is great. So anyway, my massive headache of a problem. I emailed Apple bout it neway, i dont even know if it was the right email to send to as its like a detective journey to find out any emails for answers.
    Heres my email with my problm, if anyone know the answer, i would be so happy i will give you a present.
    ‘I Imported my music into itunes so i could use it to play and put music on my ipod. After doing this i found to my horror all my music in ‘My Music’ folder COMPLETELY moved about. itunes did not warn me of this or any other change that might occur, it just carried on without warning. I now have thousands of Mp3 files not in there proper folders along with album covers. Instead i have thousands of folders with the artists name on separated from thier original folder, and just files with album image files in. This has made finding my own music a complete mess.
    I want to know how i can put my music back in thier original folders without me goin through every file manually which would, to be honest, take way too long.
    I apologise if i sound angry, but so would you if your music folder, which we all cherish nowadays, became a massive bin.’

    massive rant i know, but i HATE ITUNES.


  18. Great to see there are so many of us “logical” users. The only thing I hate more than iTunes is iPhoto. I don’t need to rehash all the reasons, but the main thing is, it’s not intuitive. Seems strange since Mac users tout the simplicity of the system.

    Ok, so enough complaining. The question is, what software is better? Finding decent Mac software is a huge headache. Maybe I will just wait until the new Parallels comes out and start using Windows programs.


  19. I really hate iTunes. It just sucks in general. Stuff I don’t want gets on my iPod, stuff I want on my iPod gets erased every time I plug it in. The last straw was when I held ctrl-shift to shut off the auto syncing, which happens even though I have it set to manually update. I made sure my podcasts were not set to sync, but whoops, over 700 podcasts, some of which can no longer be downloaded, were wiped out. Thanks iPod. I think Apple got the idea for iTunes by copying the music software from the Borg.


  20. Cant help my self

    Itunes sucks , I hate it so much , I wish I had not purchased this player and gotten something else.

    My nano batery lasts 2 hours, then I have to run around looking for a system to plug into, this is the worst for international traveling, I want a battery I can just put another in.

    GOD why cant I just drag a song from the library directly onto the nano?? WHY GOD WHY must i have a “Playlist”? and then I can never tell if its just sittin in the playlist or if it got loaded onto the nano.

    I hate this POS. All apple does well is marketing, thats it, marketing. Most of there products have a useful life of 3 months. Its too bad so many fall for it and keep sending money to this crappy company


  21. I-tunes is hell. I was given an ipod for christmas. By the next day I was ill with stress at getting it to work. Over a week later I have music on my ipod. But I-tunes is the worst, worst, worst piece of sh*t, I have ever worked with. It crashes. It freezes. It does not add in music I’ve told it to. It’s slow and it’s user interface an absolute mess. Maybe in Mac land they see all this very different. But I regret now that I have an ipod which i think is great when I have to use that rubbish i-tunes. Jobs go look at this crap and then call Bill and get him to write you up a piece of software that does what it does, without the stress and sheer hell your rubbish thinks it can do.
    I hate i-tunes and it has made my use of my ipod a very real source of stress and disapointment that I have to deal with every time I go to use it. In fact I hate the program so much I get headaches just clicking it. I’m really not joking. I would love to sue apple for the stress I felt. I’m 38 and have used, taught and know windows based programs like photoshop, dreamweaver inside out. I have used computers for over 15 years and not ever in all my time have I used something so bad and rubbish as i-tunes.


  22. To add to comment above. If I’d knowen I-tunes was what it was I would have left it in the box and got my lovely wife to get her money back. Why can this software not work as simply as say something like Nero for burning cd’s dvd’s. I would love to start an online petition to get this trash trashed and really rewritten or some really cool hacker dudes to write up a program that overrides itunes and really let users use the product they paid for and paid alot of money to have use as their own. I know whay Apple did this with their precious itunes store and all that. But guess what Apple I will not ever ever use i-tunes store and what ever halo you think you have you really don’t deserve. Over priced, OverHyped, Welcome to crapland, sorry macland. I’m old enough now to really really know the old adage. Don’t read a book by it’s cover.


  23. I don’t mind having all the files in my iPod complete erased/overwritten by files I want to sync with it. I only have a 4 Gb iPod vs. a 14 Gb music file in my external HDD. What I hate about iTunes is that

    1) it takes ages and ages to transfer 4 Gb (in reality, less than 4 Gb) of files from my HDD to my iPod. I mean, when you’re transferring 4 Gb files from one folder to another, or one drive to another, it certainly doesn’t take more than an hour. Why is it then that iTunes takes hours and hours and hours to transfer files?

    2) second thing I hate about iTunes is the way it organizes files into iPod. What’s with the F01, F02 folders and 4-letter file names? Why can’t it just copy files the way that they’re usually logically organized in people’s drives – i.e., use the song title as the filename. Don’t replace them with a bunch of 4 letters!

    3) I can’t view the content of my iPod in iTunes. Or is there a way that I’m not aware of? All I know is that when I click on Device>Ipod on iTunes, I expect to be able to see what songs are in it – with the ability to click however I want them to be listed (by album, artist, song, etc.). If I’m able to view my iPod content, then I can choose to delete just one album or song, for example, and then replace it with one particular album/song from my HDD.


  24. I think it has to be clarified. The ipod is the best. Best value and the best of all of them in terms of function and style. Also per Gigabyte it is excellent value and with video as well it is hard to beat it. But, But It is an unforgiving beast if it’s stolen music your using on it or your own ripped music and not stuff you have just bought and downloaded from itunes. I figured it out this morning after understanding the Proprietary Tags and how important these are for the ipod to track, name and place music, this can be done by manually right clicking the track or multiple tracks and using the properties dialogue box, click on summary and there you can name the artist and album the music is from. If doing the tracks individually you can number them too. Two programs are available that can help with doing this. One you buy the other is free. The one you have to buy is Tag&Rename and the free one TagScanner. Haven’t tried them yet to know what they do or how but currently looking into it.
    Last piece of the jigsaw was Album Cover Art Downloader. This was free but an excellent easy to use drag and drop album cover finder. It adds the image to your album and all the tracks. Once they are uploaded into the ipod it just works a dream in the cover flow function in the ipod classic.
    The reason the ipod and itunes is so hard to work with is that it is designed to work almost exclusively with the itunes store where all this is taken care of and if your using it none of the above issues should ever happen to you. But if you have ripped a load of your own CD’s or have music you are only trying before you buy;-) then the ipod his going to have a fight with you. It costs too much to kick around a room so the next best target is itunes. But it all makes sense now and I can see why apple are protecting the need they have for people to buy music from their itunes store. I have my ipod working as it should be after two weeks, but it took two weeks to do it and a lot of stress and anger and angst.
    Ive switch off the auto sync and I am easily able to drag and drop from a folder the album or video into the ipod via the pane that is open that shows devices.
    All movies that are run on an ipod have to be MP4. So if they are dvds or you have dvixs it has to be converted to MP4 Im using a free converter called Videora by Red Kawa, which isnt much to look at as a program but it was easy enough to use and I now have 4 video files on the ipod. For such a small screen I found them very watchable.
    So hopefully this might be helpful to anyone who had difficulties with their ipod. Ive started to really warm to mine and feel good about it. Give it time as it can be understood and thats all that your really fighting with. After years of working with computers in a certain way it felt like hitting a brick wall head on. But its one you can get over and walk away from hopefully well able to get your ipod doing what you dreamed of it doing.
    D.


  25. I fucking hate iTunes, too. It places a totalitarianism state on your music collection and throws a giant wet-blanket on top of the listening process. The thing thats most frustrating about iTunes is all of the people that seem to fucking love it. For every logical, reasonably grounded person that expresses their hatred for iTunes, theres 3 apple fanboys singing the praises! its like being an atheist at a Christian athletes convention.


  26. I got sucked into the socialistic mindset of Itunes because I wanted a better MP3 player and bought an Ipod. So a war ensued on my computer where all my music (or allegedly all) was converted to Itunes proprietary format. Great, but when I look close, random songs from CD’s that I have purchased are missing. So I reinstalled some of the songs from the CD. That was the first time. Then over the course of a year or so, I notice that some of the tracks are missing again-not to be found on my computer!!! I know I put them on there but they vanished! And random ones. Additionally, there are tracks that I never owned or transferred in my Itunes library! Is this mind control or what?

    I DETEST ITUNES MORE THAN ANY OTHER PROGRAM


  27. hi
    i HATE itunes i am 17 years old and specialise in ICT & I cannot work this user-un-friendly software out!!!! all i want to do is delet a whole album and i cant even do that after 3 HOURS of searching the internet for help and still… NOTHING!!!!!! I MAY PROTEST! EXUSE MY LANGUAGE BUT ITS CRAP!!!! THANKS FOR LISTNING TO MY SLIGHTLY STRONG WORDE COMPLAINT.


  28. I F@CKIN HATE I TUNES, it would be cool if i could import a song without it duplicating itself either in my music folder or whereever.. such a pain in the @ss!!!!!i plan to fill up this ipod and uninstall itunes all together… mp3 players for now on with my good old SEAMLESS windows media player.. FUCK APPLE


  29. I also believe that iTunes does indeed suck.

    I want to shoot the Lead Developer of it in the giblets, why couldn’t they create a simple driver for Windows that allowed us to place music movies etc onto our iPhonesPods by highlighting our music, copying and pasting into the music folder on our iPhonePod. But nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo…Apple fails.

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