iTunes or how to mess up something really good
When I first ran into iTunes I thought it was amazing. I mean really, so you can download all these songs, for a relatively small price and it’s all legal? Whoa, awesome! Last year, about this time, I downloaded an album from iTunes. It was all good, cheaper than buying the disk on Amazon so I was happy. Then slowly things started turning sour.
First of all, the quality is good, but it’s not what I’m used to. Maybe it’s just for this specific album, but anyway it’s not that “you can’t tell the difference between this and an audio CD” thing, like most of my music library. Second, some of the songs weren’t cut off correctly. So, the beginning of track 3 will be actually on the end of track 2 and so on. Not a big issue unless you’re a fan of shuffling.. but I am. (Note: emailing them about the issue didn’t merit a response)
But it really really started sucking when I realized the only way I can listen to this stuff is WITH iTunes (and more on that in a minute). I can’t play it in my normal music player where all my other thousands of tracks are, I can’t burn a CD with it (so no listening to this in the car) and at that time I was playing music from my phone so no iPod meaning I couldn’t take my music with me. Well thank you iTunes, for saving me $3 and taking all the fun out of digital music! I actually have to buy the album AGAIN from somewhere else if I want to be able to ever really listen to it. So, instead of saving me $3 you cost me $10. Great!
While we’re at it, let’s talk about the software iTunes. First off, I admire Apple for their good software. No really. The only thing that makes Macs good is Mac OS X. Not the hardware, definitely not the price. Just the OS. Also, Safari is a good browser (at least on Mac OS, I had no experience with it on Windows) and I had no complains about it. Also some of the photo/video software I ran into from Apple was quite good. So yeah, I like Apple software. Generally good quality stuff.
But then there’s iTunes. iTunes takes more resources than anything else I’ve ever seen. It takes about the same time to launch on my laptop as Adobe Photoshop and that’s known to be a beast. If they implemented any multithreading in it, they did it badly, nearly any operation freezes the whole thing until it completes (and it takes its time to complete ANYTHING). I hate having to open it and I try and keep the time it’s open to a minimum, because it simply destroys my multitasking. When iTunes is doing something, everything else needs to stand down. Including my brain, because I’m just stuck waiting for it to do something.
Apple, face it, iTunes is your MOST used software. If this is the way you advertise your software division, don’t be surprised that many people won’t pay the extra bucks for your Mac OS. Maybe it’s time you fix this fail boat of a program. And your DRM policies, before everyone switches to something better and you lose all the market share in the music industry you worked so hard to get.
Buy DRM-free .mp3 music from amazon.com and listen to it on winamp.
Also, even if you have an iPod, you can use third party software, like… winamp (but i haven’t tried it actually) or floola. It’s even better as it doesn’t “sync” (read “locks”) your iPod with only that computer.
Bad part with third-party software? Some bugs here and there and they don’t have finesse.
Sorry, I have Apple-phobia!
PS: Safari? Remember Firefox? Or my high-school attempts to convert you from Opera? Seems I must try some more – this time from Safari.
Actually I don’t use Safari because I don’t have a Mac
But I used it over the summer and it was good. No complains there.
Nonetheless, your attempts have clearly failed as not only am I still using Opera but I am arguing that it’s considerably better than Firefox at everything that’s important to me except one issue (albeit a very important one): some pages don’t show correctly on Opera, but do show well on FF. This is why I use both. But my main browser is still Opera. Just way plain better
Oh and I have bought stuff from Amazon and Winamp has been my one and only player since about version 2. This is a complain about iTunes, not a cry for help
Damn, guess they won’t hire me as a Firefox promoter.
Opera is really cool, I like it too, but it doesn’t have features like the ones found in Firefox plugins. I am referring here to Firebug (I use it a lot), NoScript and IE Tab.
Btw, if tou buy something from iTunes, you can still transfer it on your iPod, right?
So if you used only Apple stuff and only one of each, you would be fine
I’ll give you that those plugins you mentioned are cool. It’s just general functionality that I love in Opera (like navigation). Also, memory/load management. I run with MANY tabs open (I have at least 10 open by default when I start it up). Firefox has acted very very poorly with [very] many tabs. Not all the time, but it did quite often.
I was having big hopes for Chrome but I haven’t followed its evolution lately.
Yes, iTunes and iPods work decently together. BUT, back when the stuff I talk about in my post happened, I didn’t have an iPod
Also, you don’t need to sync your iPod to a library, so it’s ok even if you have more than one. But it is a stupid system nonetheless, which is the point of this post 