My 10-plus-year-old iPod is rock solid technology, hardware and software, just keeps on working. At this point it feels like some retro SF alternate vision of the future we could have had, with simple easy to use things that never broke.
I also replaced the rear panel since I didn't need the beefy 80gb version, and also the lock / headphone jack so they were both solid black.
Rockbox is excellent because it runs off of a basic folder structure, but also has a library option.
You can do the iFlash mod and still use iTunes / the original OS if you like, but Rockbox has proven to be superior in all ways.
If you're on a Mac, be sure to format the main card with a Windows box so its Fat32.
It's a shame what's become of iTunes though...just an awful app.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/05/remember-the-ipod-ap...
The reason I am asking is because I am surprised yours has lasted so long. I had two and they broke within two years due to the mechanical hdd inside. (the headphones also broke, within a month each time; really put me off buying Apple products again)
And what a long, slow, weird, decline it's been since then.
With iTunes you could have smart playlists like “create a list of all of the songs I haven’t played in X days”.
Normal people didn’t want to tag songs and use the filesystem.
Do I really need to bring up the “No Wireless. Less Space than a Nomad. Lame.” Meme and how geeks didn’t get the iPod?
https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-i...
People don't care about how the files are stored, and they shouldn't need to. We've seen this in everything from music catalogs to file sharing to productivity software. We want content organized logically with metadata, tags, folders, lists and search that's completely removed from the physical location. Let the computers do what they're good at while the software lets you consume it the way you want.
Personally, I'm in the camp who kept a manually-organized directory tree for music for years, and would still prefer that mode of working, but even among my technical friends I think I'm in the minority there. Presumably Apple was right that this is what most people prefer.
I'm not sure what you mean.
iTunes brought library management and meta data editing to the masses, which is a good thing. While Roon is my main player/management software I still use iTunes to sync to iOS devices. Of course I won’t let iTunes move any files - there’s an option that tells iTunes not to move anything. So you could actually have it both ways: Use your preferred file structure and benefit from proper library management software.
Several custom modular interfaces are a tab-switch away. Takes a while to get everything the way you like it but you've got modules for autotagging, working integration with Winamp's Milkdrop2 (and any other Winamp plugins one might have), youtube search & playback, lyric fetching, advanced playlist organization, direct playback from VGM music files, pop-up search, artist bio fetching, etc.
It's very easy to get exactly where you want to be with a custom queue within seconds.
I would also recommend Amarok, not sure how it performs on Windows, but there's a KDE build[0]. It comes a lot more configured out of the box, plus it's still fairly customizable and its playlist creation features surpass even fb2k's.
[0] https://community.kde.org/Amarok/GettingStarted/Download/Win...
I use Spotify on my phone but I’m someone who listens to pretty much all the same music that I always have, so Spotify is more replicating my mp3 collection due to a lack of being able to have Winamp on iOS. I’d love to have Winamp on mobile though, it’s still the easiest fastest and cleanest music player I’ve ever used.
(For instance, the ability in a shuffle to right click a song for it to play next in the queue, and then have it return to the shuffle. Or to shuffle entire albums, playing the albums in track order but shuffling which album is next.)
You might try VLC for a GUI.
It felt to me like too much style over some unstable software.
Two days ago I wanted to rent a movie for an airplane, so I opened up iTunes on my Mac. I'm not kidding, in order to rent this movie I had to type in my password 8 times and confirm so many dialogs I almost gave up. If your purchase flow is that bad, you just don't care anymore. So not surprised they're gonna end it.
How do you figure? Itunes is completely unaware of most qualities of music, in fact nearly everything unattested in metadata.
Save yourself some disk space my friend.
Admittedly I don't find iOS' Music app that much better, so I'm pretty wary of iTunes' upcoming replacement.
- I'm all-in the Apple ecosystem (iPhone, Watch, ATV4K, Airport Express). So are my family members.
- I'm on a family plan so $15/4 is a price that can't be beat. I do not live with the family members I share the plan with. This is relevant because:
- I actually had a friend share their Spotify Family plan with me and Spotify insisted I prove I lived in the same address! Apple doesn't ask for anything beyond linking Apple IDs to a family.
- The actual service/catalog provided by AM is fantastic, but overall I'm very unsatisfied with the UX of Apple's music apps.
Nice. It's always better to have multiple programs each dedicated to a specific task than one that tries to be everything.
Apple is very open about their long term plan to convert to a media and services company. Their business plan is to 1) get you to change over to these 3 new apps now when they are free, 2) convert each to a paid monthly subscription plan once enough people use them.
so soon you'll be paying for 3 things instead of being able to use iTunes like it is now.
- The new Music app will have the ability to play local music, so it won't need a subscription. (Conversely, you can get an Apple Music subscription with iTunes right now.)
- The TV app will likely function just like the iOS one: if you have videos in your library that are playable by it, it'll play them, no subscription. If you subscribe to a TV "channel," it'll show up there. (This presumably includes the forthcoming Apple TV+ service, but there are no details about its pricing model yet.)
- Again, the Podcasts app will likely function just like the iOS one, which means it's not something that Apple is making money from. You subscribe to podcast feeds in it the same way you do in any other podcast player.
To be clear, I'm not saying Apple doesn't actively have nefarious plans to make you pay more money -- I'm just saying this isn't one of them.
Does this also mean they are killing QuickTime?
iTunes is a library for music, tv shows, movies, podcasts, audiobooks, heck even home movies.
This saves bandwidth when managing multiple devices, makes setting up a new device a whole lot faster (than waiting for apps to download), offers control on the app versions and also helps in cases when some developer removes an app from the store because they want customers to buy another app or a differently named one.
That’s why I use an iOS 6 iPhone 5 with iTunes 11 on OS X Mavericks.
Presumably this will get moved into Music.
The need to store certain content under multiple horizontal categories (or folders.)
For example I will add the same song to multiple playlists, for different moods and activities, or a photo may have multiple elements that I might search for (e.g. "nature", "warm", "urban" etc.)
Symlinks/Aliases are too cumbersome. Tags help alleviate this a little, but they're still a tacked-on layer instead of a core FS feature in modern OSes (even macOS has inconsistent UI support for tags and becomes unwieldy if you have hundreds of tags.)
Playlist-like organization is useful for a lot of other types of content besides music, so why not bring those features back into the filesystem layer?
Good move as the thing went from doing x to doing a-z and being so bloated. I am happy to see it streamlined into a few apps again :)
I know this may alienate and confuse some iOS users, but I trust Apple can figure out some way for this to be intuitive for their users.
In conversation, the consensus among my peers was that the separation between iOS and OSX is destined to be impermanent. Phones are becoming more complex, and more integral to our every routine. But more significantly, they're raising a new generation of digital natives that have different expectations about UI and its scale, density, information architecture, onboarding, collaboration, and storage, to name a few.
These mobile-first expectations are flavoring desktop software, and smoothing over the once rough edges of highly-compact power user software. Gmail's redesign, and most redesigns really, demonstrate this. Less information, displayed in a more opinionated way, with whitespace and garnish and a focus on golden-path big-brother-knows-best presentation over configuration and optimization for power users.
Desktop and mobile trends are slowly converging, and I think that when it comes, that convergence from apple risks being abrupt and unapologetic. They're like that – with flash, the headphone jack, and the touch bar. They wait a long time, but when they make a move, they really rip the bandaid.
I find this future to be sad and scary, for the most part. But I agree that the icon grid home screen abstraction feels more like a "because it's always been that way" thing than anything else. It's a holdover from the blackberry days. Given how far mobile apps have come in the mean time, the mobile phone's desktop/start menu is ready for some new abstractions.
For iPhone, I'm certain there is a better way to discover and open apps than what was devised a decade ago. The current pull-down search is useful, but as a naive idea: some sort of search & auto-complete on the home screen would be great.
EDIT: Bonus - Trying to organize your apps is a nightmare. How do you organize a bunch of icons split across multiple screens?
The alphabetical list is my main criterion, I don't think anything beats it. The dock is just a handy shortcut to a few common things, but even the coach tracking app I use every working morning and most of those afternoons isn't in there (that's much more frequently than I use some that are) and it's fine.
Grid of all app icons was designed at a time when 'apps' were newNd nobody had many.
I don't have many, I only recently got 'smartphone' again, but still more than I care to spread over a grid.
(The only annoyance is some daftly named apps, like 'Credit Card' instead of '<Provider> Credit' or something.)
iTunes is the single worst piece of software I have ever used. It’s the only software I’ve seen bring someone to literal tears. And it’s done that to more than a couple of family members.
May it rot in hell forever.
I mean sure it's bad, but I find it hard to take this statement literally for any HN reader.
*Note that is not a comment about HN UX, just that anyone who uses software and technology extensively has to have used some pretty terrible software products in their lifetime.
Some software is broken. It doesn’t work. But iTunes is so bloated and janky I don’t think I could design something that bad if I tried. The concept of “syncing” is completely wrong in a multi-device context Venn diagram.
Plus iTunes has literally brought friends and family to tears. Actual tears. No other software has done that.
For a moment, I thought it sounded like a good plan.
As other HN users have noted in the past, until Apple gives me access to a terminal where I can run the command line tools required for my work, I have absolutely zero interest in replacing my laptop with an iPad.
On the one hand: if Apple really wants the iPad to be a laptop replacement, there needs to be a way to do everything that a laptop can do. It doesn't have to be the same way; it might be a new way that requires a learning curve. (A lot of the "iPads suck because I can't do my work" articles I've seen really mean "iPads suck because I can't do my work the way I expect to be able to do it.") But if I literally can't do my work on an iPad, it's not a laptop replacement.
On the other hand: while I can't open a terminal on the iPad, I can open Blink and open an effectively persistent mosh terminal on my Linode. I have a Git client that can make a repository a document provider, letting text editors work with it directly. It's possible that there may be some things that the iPad can never do locally that I can still technically do "on the iPad," and that this may be enough.
If the rumors are true and Apple is planning to abandon x86_64 for their machines to switch to the ARM cores for everything, I'm going to have to pry the mac pros running 10.6.8 from the cold dead hands of our users to get them over to Windows with modern hardware.
It's really only the memory capacity that the Mac Pro's have an undisputed advantage on (4-6GB vs up to 128GB). Memory bandwidth is way faster (33GB/s vs 19GB/s) on A12X owing to LPDDR4 vs DDR3.
The latest iPad Pros are beneficiaries of a decade of intense R&D from the most profitable product in the world (iPhone). Form-factor aside, the chips themselves are stupid fast.
You can certainly attach a bluetooth keyboard to an iPad (I did so yesterday) and then they are pretty good for writting emails, but they are annoying to carry and a thin laptop is much better.
Just sayin'
Hopefully any successor will be like Android.
"At this point, whatever the causes of the product problems with iTunes and related iOS apps — feature scope, management, team structure, etc. —we can be pretty sure that the only ‘solution’ will appear when this software achieves end-of-life, the same way that the mystery of how to set recording time on VCRs was finally solved by their obsolescence."
I'm sure people liked it in 2004 (although I never was blown away by it.) Also the fact that it was the #1 store can reflect music distribution agreements (and the success of iPod/iPhone) more than its prowess as a product.
