Somebody Has To Say It: It’s Time For iTunes Lite

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/09/somebody-has-to-say-it-its-time-for-itunes-lite/

by jasonlbaptiste • 17 years ago

71 95 17 years ago

sharpn2• 17 years ago

I don't usually like techcrunch but this hit the spot for me. Itunes is broken for my (simple) needs. A 'lite' option that is basically a file manager would be very welcome.

joubert14• 17 years ago

You can always double click on your .mp3 in your file system browser, no?

zaius• 17 years ago

Nope - it will copy them to an iTunes music folder and play them from there. Then it will continue playing in alphabetical order from that song on.

unalone7• 17 years ago

That's far less convenient than a searchable bank of music that plays consecutively.

mcantelon• 17 years ago

VLC?

I've never liked iTunes.

sharpn2• 17 years ago

Thanks for the tip - I'll check VLC out.

ptomato• 17 years ago

Install mpd & theremin (https://theremin.sigterm.eu/)

(I'm sure there's a similar windows client if that's your thing.)

edit: alternatively, picoplay (http://www.kronenberg.org/picoplay/)

arithmetic• 17 years ago

Try winamp. Loved it. Still do so. It's simple and the search feature is good (and fast)!

sohooo• 17 years ago

Take a look at Ecoute[1], a minimalistic player which uses your iTunes library as a source. It's a lightweight iTunes replacement for me.

[1] http://www.ecouteapp.com/

tfh• 17 years ago

thx! I was looking for something like that. I don't like to open iTunes everytime I want to listen to 3 songs.

jrwoodruff• 17 years ago

Honestly, the 'genius' sidebar was one step over the boundary. It bogs down iTunes everytime it opens.

Now Facebook Integration? I just want to listen to music, and rip any cds I have left.

hexley• 17 years ago

Uhh, close it? You'll never see it again.

ROFISH• 17 years ago

The "Facebook Integration" is literally nothing but a URL to Facebook's share page that's not unlike those copy/paste "Share on Facebook!" you see on practically every blog. And it's only for the App Store. It's nothing special really.

pohl• 17 years ago

I can't believe people are acting like the facebook/Twitter integration is such a big deal. It constructs a URL to the iTunes store and opens a browser window to a form. The implementation can't be more than a dozen new functions, can it?

chasingsparks• 17 years ago

I still use Winamp. iTunes only gets some CPU time when I need to sync my IPod.

sarvesh• 17 years ago

You can sync your iPod, unless it is iPod touch or an iPhone, using Winamp (http://blog.winamp.com/2009/03/11/how-to-manage-music-in-ipo...)

jac_no_k• 17 years ago

Agreed that iTunes is tries to do too much of everything and what I’ve noticed from Apple is that there is only the Apple way.

I do really like one feature in iTunes, the Genius playlist is great for people with very large libraries.

And now I have a dedicated device (iPhone) to play music. I only use iTunes to sync.

alecthomas• 17 years ago

> And now I have a dedicated device (iPhone) to play music. I only use iTunes to sync.

Same here, but I consider that a failing of iTunes, because I'd prefer to play music on my iPhone rather than deal with iTunes shitty interface.

mrshoe• 17 years ago

I'm sorry, but you're going to have to provide a compelling reason why those features shouldn't be in iTunes if you want to make this argument. "I don't need them" isn't good enough.

Is 88MB too much for you to download? Is it too much to store on your hard disk? Is that "Burn Disk" button in the bottom right when you're viewing a playlist too distracting? Is the UI hard to navigate now with all these features? Is the "Share on Facebook" contextual menu item getting in your way when you're trying to listen to music?

All of those things (and more) could be potential arguments against adding those features to iTunes. However, I'm pretty sure that the vast majority of iTunes users would answer "no" to every one of those questions. Apple has done a great job of adding features to iTunes without sacrificing much usability at all. If you click the button that hides the Genius bar, then the main screen is still just a list of playlists on the left, and your music library in the main pane. Pretty simple.

Thousands of other people use and love those features. People love Macs because they don't need a separate application to burn CDs. Have you forgotten what a refreshing experience it is for a PC user to use a Mac for the first time and realize that it does everything they want out of the box?

Presenting users with a set of checkboxes during install is one of the worst things you could possibly do. That's a usability nightmare. It's like setting a trap for your users. How do they know which components they need? How can they be sure it will work if they don't install all the components? What if they choose incorrectly and want to install more components later? Is that possible? The lack of these types of installers is yet another breath of fresh air when you switch to Mac OS X. In most cases you just drag the app into your Applications folder.

Apple's applications need to work for ordinary people, not just techies. If you're going to accuse Apple of getting usability wrong, you better be a legitimate expert and have a compelling argument.

al3x• 17 years ago

There are some good points in this comment. Still, have you watched over the shoulder of a non-techie trying to use a recent version of iTunes? Accomplishing many goals, like configuring what content ends up on your iPod, is remarkably confusing for several people I've observed (and then helped).

I'd just suggest that the number of installs of iTunes doesn't necessarily correlate to user satisfaction. If you own an iPod or iPhone, you have essentially no choice but to use iTunes, particularly if you're not technically inclined enough to investigate alternatives. Apple has a captive audience for iTunes.

Perceval• 17 years ago

I think you're right. Apple is daisy-chaining each one of its products to get more and more users. The iPod/iPhone requires iTunes, which requires Quicktime and Webkit, and which (on one occasion) was bundled with Safari.

Because Apple has a captive audience, their usual aesthetic of hiding everything complex and letter the power user discover things has given over to the profit motive. Apple has an incentive to showcase features like the Genius Sidebar right off the bat, because Genius links into the iTunes Music Store.

I read an interesting article on Steve Jobs and the original design of the iDVD application: http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/09/01/28/idvd_hung_out_...

The key bit for me was in this quote:

Evangelist and a group of Astarte developers described pitching the simplified app concept to Steve Jobs. "Jobs never glanced at their presentation," the article noted. "Instead, he walked up to a whiteboard and drew a square. This is the program, he said. Users will drag their movies here to create DVD menus. Then they'll click 'burn.' That's it. 'I don't want to hear anything about drawers or pop-out' windows, he said."

Seems like Steve needs to take his own hypercritical hatchet to iTunes. (http://arstechnica.com/staff/fatbits/2009/05/hypercritical.a...). It would be just in time for iTunes X (pron. iTunes ten).

ironkeith• 17 years ago

It honestly took me 10 minutes to figure out how to create a "Genius Mix" yesterday. Somehow I don't feel that going "Store > Update Genius" is the most usable way to activate a new feature... I really doubt my Mom would have ever figured that one out.

zaphar2• 17 years ago

I have a mac but don't use ITunes because the playlist management is so poor. I use the mac port of Amarok instead. It's playlist management is way better for my needs.

I don't use the ITunes store, don't have an IPhone, and want to play my music in formats that ITunes doesn't support. So for me when it comes to playing Music the Mac most emphatically doesnt do what I want out of the box. Granted I'm not the average user but still there's nothing wrong with wanting a music player that is just a music player.

For people like me ITunes is just wasted Disk space since it has so few features I want and doesn't support many of the ones I do like.

derefr3• 17 years ago

I used to create playlists for everything, but I realized that I was compensating with synthetic metadata for the lack of natural metadata attached to my files. By actually making use of the secondary ID3 tags (Genre, Rating, Kind, Play Count, Skip Count, Compilation?, Disc Number, and other such fields), and making sure they all have correct values, I find that I never have to make playlists, only fulltext-search-then-sort (which iTunes is very good at.) I say this as someone with 28000 listened songs :)

shoesfullofdust• 17 years ago

Most of the software I run on my Mac is not from Apple. While I consider myself as a techie/nerd/geek, most of my friends who are on Macs are not. And yet, most of them are running non-Apple software on their Macs.

Sorry to hear that you're stuck on Apple usability, but we've moved on.

jpwagner• 17 years ago

Let's just clarify...

So your argument is:

  "Apple did all the research and has been successful in design before, 
  so you must be wrong if you dislike it."

And your suggestions are:

  1. people should just live without the 88MB
  even if they don't use it.

  2. visually ignore pieces of the ui 
  if you don't use them.

  3. configure your view to be simpler (as 
  opposed to starting simple and configuring 
  your view to be complex)

I think if I stick your response in the un-jerk-ificatilator, the tranlation is:

  "I like those extra features and I bet 
  you could configure your view to be more simple.  
  Maybe Apple could add an easier way than the 
  checkboxes Winamp had.  Have a good day."

Ah, much better.

joubert14• 17 years ago

I never use the Help menu item / feature in any app. But I don't demand that it be removed because of the tyranny of the creator's design decisions which they deem correct for their overall audience.

tolmasky• 17 years ago

I think we're actually approaching the problem from the wrong direction. For me, I don't want those features in iTunes because I feel that those features are hindered by being shoved into iTunes, not necessarily the other way around.

Examples:

* (As I stated in another thread): I wish the iTunes store was just on the web. Being inside of iTunes, I get a "web like" experience that is encumbered. I can't open multiple tabs, and this often drives me crazy. On Amazon.com, or any online store, I'm often given lots of suggestions, good suggestions. I like to open them up in lots of tabs and then read them one by one, or just keep them around until later. Can't do it on the iTunes store! Also, it is often difficult to get links to items. ALSO, why should I only be allowed to see the store essentially when at home on my iTunes? If it was on the web, I could browser, get the link, email it to myself, and make the purchase when I get home. If they want to force you to buy through iTunes, they could still make a custom URL that popped iTunes open just for the downloading portion.

* Movies and TV Shows. The management of these just kind of sucks on iTunes, and the reason is because this is MUSIC player, and music organization is very different to video organization. They are forced into this music metaphor which works well for songs, but not at all for videos. Had Apple integrated this into Quicktime or something else, it may have been much better.

More importantly, it sucks for playing videos. With other video players, I can full screen and not have my other screens go black. Can't do it on iTunes. Again, I believe this is a function of being a jack of all trades and a master of none.

* Preferences for EVERYTHING. There's all sorts of different preferences and options in iTunes and they're confusing because you're actually managing 7 programs, not 1. And even still, some prefs are left out (like the movie ones for example) because then it would be even more overwhelming.

I don't even want to get into the fact that iTunes even talks to xcode (!!!!) to do all the iPhone SDK stuff and all the headaches that brings.

Let's not kid ourselves, adding all this stuff into iTunes was not some sort of "design decision". Apple got iTunes onto enough computers, so now if they want them to see new Apple stuff they are going to put it in iTunes. Logical enough from a business perspective, but it sucks from a program perspective.

allenbrunson• 17 years ago

i think a better approach would be to split it into separate apps: one for syncing with ipods and iphones, one for listening to music, one for browsing the itunes music store, and so on. all of them could use the same backend data store and xml description files.

joubert14• 17 years ago

That'd be crazy. I want to manage all my media from one spot. Think iTunes == media management.

prawn• 17 years ago

You could use the full version of iTunes and leave a lite version to those who wanted that. FWIW, I'd use a lite version - the full thing is a bit of a slug.

tjstankus2• 17 years ago

Amen. I've moved to Songbird for playing music on my Mac. It's not perfect, but I prefer it to iTunes. And there's nothing out there that's more compelling. I still use iTunes to sync my phone, but that's what I've come to see iTunes as - a store + a syncing platform, not a music player. There's a real market opportunity sitting there for a slim, slick music player on the Mac.

unalone7• 17 years ago

Does Songbird still stop playing music when you X out of it? Because that was disgraceful.

Radix• 17 years ago

I tried it recently and [it looks like you need an add on.] But I didn't like that it didn't recognize the group by artist flag iTunes uses. And I couldn't set up album-by-artist. And it seemed to use more ram. But, it looks a lot nicer to me.

[edit]

tjstankus2• 17 years ago

A comment in the techcrunch post tipped me off to http://ecouteapp.com/ Liking it so far.

puffythefish• 17 years ago

Wow, that's a very nice app.

shiranaihito• 17 years ago

Me too, although I never really used iTunes along the way. I tried to live with Cog, and Play, but both sucked.

Songbird still needs ReplayGain support, and global hotkeys. Then it will be a tolerable alternative for foobar2000.

reedlaw4• 17 years ago

This is exactly why I run Rockbox on my iPod. I can now use simple folder-organization to sort my music and have it show up exactly the same way on my iPod! I hated having one organizational structure on the disk and an entirely different one when I opened iTunes. Who knows if the ID3 tags in all my various mp3s are correct, standardized, or contain the information I would need to find them? In iTunes, I'd often have to go back to my folders to find a file, figure out how that file was tagged, then go back to iTunes and find it again!

When I find mp3s online or get them from friends, I never bother to edit their ID3 tags, but I often sort them using a simple tree-structure that's built into almost every device called a file system. I'm used to storing documents, photos, and source code this way. Why should I learn a new way just for one app? If my files' ID3 tags were entered correctly or can be downloaded automatically, I'm happy of course, but when I make my own mp3's or find ones with empty tags I hardly ever bother to fix them. What's the use?

mattmaroon• 17 years ago

I didn't know there was such a thing. Maybe I'll bring my Nano out of retirement. I've owned more mp3 players than I can count, and the only iPod I'v ever liked was the Nano but I gave up on it because iTunes was just so unusable.

reedlaw4• 17 years ago

Rockbox is an awesome open source firmware for mp3 players. I run it on my 1st gen Nano.

http://www.rockbox.org/

joubert14• 17 years ago

Isn't the whole premise of the iTunes approach that you shouldn't have to bother with folder structures? I mean, really, what's the advantage of doing that?

Isn't it better that you can literally just type in a keyword and the system shows you the matching music?

randallsquared2• 17 years ago

No. When I want a playlist, it's often not easy or not possible to find a search term that includes just the album I want, so I have to drag the album into a new playlist, which creates clutter. Playlist searching is great for finding a song but terrible for building a playlist.

reedlaw4• 17 years ago

The advantage of a folder structure is that I know where my files are all the time. If I use another OS or copy files to another device, I can just browse through my files just like I'm on my own desktop. Rockbox also allows you to browse by ID3 tags, but I rarely use this. I have my own classification scheme that doesn't exactly fit with iTunes' artist/genre/album scheme. For example, in my spoken audio tree, I have two folders, one called "en", another called "ch". These are for English and Chinese respectively. Sometime, I have an file with Chinese audio, but an English filename. What could be easier than to have a folder for Chinese audio? There's only one thing that I can think of that could improve it, and that would be tagging. Sometimes I have a file that falls under more than one classification. If I could tag it with both that would be great. But this doesn't bother me enough to start using iTunes, which has too many annoyances.

riffic3• 17 years ago

Here's just a small example of the daily pain I face when I use itunes:

I recently ripped both the mono and stereo box sets of 2009 Beatles remasters. These are all in a proper hierarchical file structure, properly tagged with musicbrainz picard yet iTunes insists on merging both versions of each album and I get something like this:

  1. Taxman
  1. Taxman
  2. Eleanor Rigby
  2. Eleanor Rigby
  3. I'm Only Sleeping
  3. I'm Only Sleeping
  4. Love You To
  4. Love You To
  5. Here, There and Everywhere
  5. Here, There and Everywhere
  6. Yellow Submarine
  6. Yellow Submarine
  7. She Said She Said
  7. She Said She Said
  8. Good Day Sunshine
  8. Good Day Sunshine
  9. And Your Bird Can Sing
  9. And Your Bird Can Sing
  10. For No One
  10. For No One
  11. Doctor Robert
  11. Doctor Robert
  12. I Want to Tell You
  13. Got to Get You into My Life
  13. Got to Get You into My Life
  14. Tomorrow Never Knows
  14. Tomorrow Never Knows

igorgue• 17 years ago

I like what Banshee is heading, pretty cool!, no mac love yet though (yes there is a experimental version, I don't care I use Ubuntu anyways).

In other words you don't need another iTunes you need iTunes mini-mode.

jhancock• 17 years ago

its time for my current selected item to scroll into view when I re-sort by a different column. or maybe I'm just being unreasonable, asking for too much?

rufo• 17 years ago

I agree that iTunes needs reworking, but I don't believe a Lite version is the answer.

I'd rather see Apple rethink the entire iTunes interface and try to rebuild it while making it simpler - think iMovie '09 or the iPhone. Asking for a Lite version sounds similar to Henry Ford's customers wanting a faster horse - it doesn't fix the underlying problems.

nuweborder5• 17 years ago

Apple has been forcefeeding music lovers for years, but have never been able to give any true nourishment to the unsigned independent musician. Its like eating candy, fried foods, bacon, and soda for the rest of your life. Sounds fun on the surface, and might be a good idea and exciting for a while But if you keep it up, you will die. Or at least end up with a heart attack or other serious illness. Try some vegetables, fish, and water for a change. Or at least another, more nourishing music service. By offering what of what musicians and music lovers want, you actually offer them more "meat" in your service. Makes for more satisfied consumers, and greater brand loyalty.

joubert14• 17 years ago

Uhm, right after installing iTunes 9, I got a free 20-pack indy music collection. That's kinda nice.

nuweborder5• 17 years ago

And in comparison to the major label artists such as U2, Kanye West, and Amy Winehouse, how much do you think those indie artists from that free 20 pack are actually earning? Not much. The guidelines are not the same for all musicians.

unalone7• 17 years ago

Are you kidding? Apple promotes indie artists excessively.

nuweborder5• 17 years ago

Really? They're promoting indie artists as much as they are the major label artists? That news to me. Especially when the company has an application process for indie artists that is not required of major label artists. And most of them get rejected. The bottom line, is that via Itunes, the playing field is not level, as it is with sites like Digg and YouTube. I guarantee you that Johnny Random Band is not getting as many downloads and sales per track as Maroon 5 or Daughtry. Next time you see an indie artist who's on Itunes, see if they are wheeling the same Aston Martin DB9 that Kanye has been spotted in these days. I bet you it will be more like a Honda Civic instead.

bbsabelli• 17 years ago

Slightly off topic, but I'd like to know how Apple managed to remove physical media whilst keeping the same pricing.

I'm no economist, but shouldnt the massive iTunes media surplus supply reduce the prices significantly?

whatusername• 17 years ago

because the physical inventory was only a small part of the cost. recording costs, promotion, etc haven't gone down. plus you are paying for convenience.

and as is pointed out here often -- price!=cost , price==value

Readmore• 17 years ago

I'm so sick of TC whining about every freaking thing! If you want a dead simple music player for OS X then freaking write it!

Maybe it will work about better than that 'dead simple web tablet' we're still waiting for.

endtime3• 17 years ago

I'd be happy with a version doesn't randomly delete a song file (not just a library entry, but the actual file) every few months and doesn't make my X4 940 feel like a Celeron.

joubert14• 17 years ago

So if you didn't add new music, over time you'd have nothing left?

endtime3• 17 years ago

I suppose I might, given a few centuries...

e40• 17 years ago

I have a lot of complaints of iTunes, but that (file deletion) has never happened to me and I've never heard that complaint.

endtime3• 17 years ago

When I felt like complaining to reddit about it I went and found several forum threads of people with the same problem: http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/9catv/ask_reddit...

bena• 17 years ago

Personally, I'd be happy with an iTunes that worked well, was more intuitive, and more responsive.

I like my iPhone. I think the MacBook I use for work is swell. However, iTunes remains one of the most horrible applications that I've ever been forced to use.

msie• 17 years ago

Need one say it in so many words?

jsz0• 17 years ago

This guy is certainly entitled to his own opinion but I wonder why he's even using iTunes in the first place. Obviously it doesn't meet his needs or desires. He seems to be having some sort of mental breakdown over iTunes 9 specifically but he's choosing to use any of the alternatives. Why not use VLC? If you can't be bothered to download something new just use QuickTime. Better yet how about Cog? It's open source and 3.8MB. I bet he could dig into the source and slim it down to a cool 3.0MB on the dot.

Just for fun I decided to see how minimal I could make the iTunes GUI: http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2594/3906199116_89fecdd502_o....

Took me about 2 minutes and these are all permanent settings. Change it once, forget about it. Or just be a normal, emotionally stable, human being and make choices that suit your own personal needs.

junklight• 17 years ago

yes for all the grumbling - there things like Cog that seem to do exactly what he is asking for.

I have to say I'm on the opposite end of the spectrum - I use a great deal of the features in iTunes - I keep video in it, I keep TV in it , I have a massive music library , I have several machines round the house that I and the family use to listen/watch stuff. I have an iphone. I buy things in the store.

In all I love the fact it is all integrated and works together without me having to think about it (apart it, must be said, for stupid DRM on video which is a pain). When I used to run winamp on a PC back in the day I used to need a collection of perl scripts to manage the library...

derefr3• 17 years ago

iTunes has basically become "Stuff-that-can-be-synched-to-an-iPhone Manager." It could be broken down with little effort—Quicktime Player would get the movie/TV store; iPhoto would get the menu for synching photos; Software Update would get the App Store (and hopefully make it a Mac App Store in the process, because that's really not that much more work), and a new "iDentity" app would be created to handle all the other crap (because I use Gmail's web interface, not Mail.app, but want my Notes synced anyway, goshdarnit. Or they could just make a free reduced-capability version of MobileMe.)

The only thing that's stopping them from doing this is that, right now, you only need to download one thing in order to use an iPod or iPhone on Windows, and that one thing is completely owned as part of the Apple experience. After the conversion, you'd need quite a few more apps, some of which, due to just working through APIs, could usurped by badly-written, no-UX-consideration-given preinstallware that would give Apple a bad name (I can just imagine the "Dell App Store client"—oh, how Apple would rage at that.)

ZeroGravitas• 17 years ago

What he said.

Apple would not design iTunes like this, if not for the need to deliver it on Windows. It breaks many of its own design rules.

The saddest part for me is seeing the open source desktops head down the same path when this could be a key differentiator for them. Like Apple they bundle a full working desktop with apps that can work together and build on the same libraries. But they don't.

Instead the future appears to be continuing with the totally inappropriate iTunes clone but switching to one that comes with it's on Mono VM and is becoming an independent development platform. It's latest feature is built in photo management! When I read that it was one of those satire is dead moments.

CrazedGeek2• 17 years ago

What app are you talking about in your last paragraph?

ghshephard• 17 years ago

Switch to Mini-Player? (Cmd+Shift+M)

moe• 17 years ago

Analyzing gapless playback information...

lurkinggrue• 17 years ago

iTunes was painful to me the first time I installed it on windows and it got worse over time.

I never picked up the iTunes habit.

derekj• 17 years ago

It amazes me that I read through all of these comments and didn't see one mention of the Zune software. Yes, it's Windows only. Yes, it only syncs with Zunes. BUT, it offers a far better music-playing and music-finding experience. It's laid out better, looks better, is easier to use, has folder monitoring (I can't believe that's still not in itunes), doesn't try to move or edit any of your files or metadata, and overall just performs better.

I actually have a virtual machine of XP just so I don't have to install iTunes on my host Win7 box. I only open it maybe once a month to check out new podcasts that aren't in the Zune marketplace yet. Because of this, I don't want ituneshelper, quicktime, safarai, bonjour, etc etc. installed on my system and put in my Startup group just so I can open iTunes. It's just unnecessary. I cringe every time I see someone struggling with iTunes.

Somebody Has To Say It: It’s Time For iTunes Lite

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