Tuesday, January 30, 2007

iTunes Sucks

Welcome back! Yeah, it's been a long time since I've posted and people have been nagging for me to post something people can relate to. Apparently "fail2ban, dovecot and brute force attacks" just wasn't something that most of my readers could relate to. Rant mode on!

I must be an idiot, but for something that is supposed to be easy to use, iTunes just sucks. The iPod itself is OK, but that damn twirly thing either doesn't spin at all for me, or spins around the world, so yeah, that's annoying, too.

Wen calls me up today and says: I bought some songs on iTunes and they're not showing up! They ripped me off! So I'm thinking well, OK, billions of people use iTunes every day and I've never heard anyone complain about their iPod, so it must be a simple problem of not clicking in the right spot.

So I get on the PC and start clicking. Yep, iTunes Purchase History says that 5 songs have been purchased, but no songs are showing up in the Purchased area or the Music Library. A quick Google search reveals horror stories of people losing their Music libraries when upgrading to iTunes 7, but nothing that seems quite relevant to this situation.

A quick peek in the "My Music" folder and I find some suspicious .tmp directories named after the songs that were purchased, and inside 2 files, download.m4p and Info.plist.

I can play those download.m4p files with iTunes and they appear to contain the entire song, but now I don't have any of the song info. Aaargh! I want my freakin' music that I paid for and I just want it to work, damn it!

From what I can tell, iTunes downloads everything OK, but then when it comes time to move the download from the temporary directory to wherever it's supposed to move and do whatever with it, it gets stuck. Yuck!

Not to mention that browsing the iTunes store is an exercise in futility! The servers appear to be slower than a dead cat and rarely respond if at all, and never respond in a timely manner. Ugh!

Finally, I gave up on getting iTunes to recognize those downloaded m4p files and renamed them manually and assigned them the proper attributes. It only took me 3 hours!

Rant mode off.

Thanks, I feel a bit better now.

17 comments:

Wendy said...

Stupid iTunes. I was thinking "If Joe Blow can freakin' download songs, how come I can't? I'm not an CS engineer, but come on!" Now I know why people just download free songs.

Raheleh said...

welcome back to the land of bloggers, dave! i haven't had any problems with iTunes, but i haven't used it in a few months to buy songs. that is pretty annoying. i suppose there is zero customer service if you have any problems?

Anonymous said...

Dave, you're posting again! Yay! Ranting is fun.

Unknown said...

I'm going to make another post to answer the comments, yay!

Pedram Keyani said...

Dude, I hear you about the stupid iTunes software. I am scared silly to even buy anything online in fear that my songs will go bye bye like my money.

Anonymous said...

Yes, that is exactly what has happened to me. I bought about twenty songs, and all was well. Then I bought a movie. There were some probs but I smoothed them out (or so I thought) and I proceeded to buy twenty more songs. By then it was really late so I figured I'd put them on my iPod the next day. Well, I get there and all of my songs were gone. Just, poof! And the weird thing was that there were about twelve songs in their place that I'd never even heard of, let alone bought, like classical pieces and whatnot. Yet my movie was still there and working. *sigh* Still waiting to hear from Apple. Will repost when I do.

Anonymous said...

----Rant Mode on-----
OK...GO...

Itunes sucks. It does nothing that I want to do. I went to college, studied "IT", can program... or should I say could program now. I can't get F&%$ all done with this pile of $hit itunes program. IT really blows my mind that I can hardly organize songs etc. I can't believe they get away with this.

----Rant Mode on stand by ---

Sean

sean@endurapaint.com

Anonymous said...

I just lost 17GB of my music library because iTunes can't handle relocating a library to an external drive. What a pile of shit!

Anonymous said...

totally agree with you guys here:
itunes & ipod both suck! I'm never going to buy any product from Apple again, this is a company that just doesn't inspire any confidence in me.

Tom said...

Well, to finish my "iTunes sucks" installment. I was finally able to get back all my songs due to a lucky extra backup, and somehow iTunes healed itself somewhat once I got the right xml file into the new location, and much to my surprise all the missing playlists and ratings reappeared! I also got the go ahead from Apple to re-download all my lost store purchases so everything's back to where it was now. Sorry I ranted prematurely, Apple! Whatever database magic you're doing behind the scenes, keep it up!

BogSpores said...

I guess this isn't a good thing to say, but at least its good to know I'm not the only one who has experienced the iTunes misery!...I just bought an iTouch, and was really excited about all the cool hardware features, until I installed iTunes, then the headaches started...what a piece of crap software!...I can't figure out how to simply "sync" my iTouch with my iTunes library?...And, because I downloaded iTunes to my desktop computer originally, and now on my Laptop, the laptop version wants to erase all previously synced content (which isn't much) before sync'ing with the iTunes on my laptop? WTF? I have 3 Zunes, and each time I sync them on different computers, the software ask if I'd like to join as a "Guest" and not erase my current content (SMART MOVE MICROSOFT!) The iTouch hardware and iPod are cool devices, but the Zune software BLOWS iTunes cleanly out of the park!....and, the 3 Zunes I have are darn near as intuitive as the iPod and iTouch...in fact, I prefer the Zunes to the iPod at this point...

Anonymous said...

dont buy from itunes it sounds sucky......... just buy cds then put the cds on itunes

BogSpores said...

Update to my previous post: Is it just me, or has the iTunes update and the iPod Touch firmware update now made it possible to sync with more than one computer without erasing all loaded content?...I noticed yesterday, when I connected my iPod Touch to the laptop to charge, iTunes asked me if I wanted to keep all my installed content, and simply ADD any NEW or DIFFERENT content from my laptop (similar to the ZUNE software)....

Is this a correct observation?

Unknown said...

Itunes is simply a bad program i have ran it on many machines and have had some sort of problems on all of them....

Anonymous said...

Couple of days ago I bought the new ipod touch 2G (2.1.1 firmware) and I'm already having problems with my nemesis itunes...so I need "professional" help with itunes(...or me..) before I go bananas and smash my ipod which will come to no good. Why couldn't they have just added "disc mode" to the thing…then I would NEVER have these problems!! If it's because they don't want some people to manipulate or for old grandpa to accidentally destroy those super important files to keep the operating system "OSX" running, then why not make those files unreadable for mortal people like us???? With an industry getting around 20 billion USD yearly I would say adding such a nice finess wouldn't be that difficult!..plus it would make some people actually happy not having to use itunes!!

First, why is itunes so slow to start up? I have a fast computer yet it resembles a slug. Is it going to get worse the more songs I add??? Can I speed things up?

Why do aaaall songs end up in music library? Can't I copy songs directly from my harddrive to my playlists in itunes? Or at least arrange songs in a time friendly way?? I hate when they all end up in "music library" like a total mess!!!!! Everything I've arranged in folders on my external harddrive are worth nothing in itunes!! I got 300Gb of music and I don't feel like picking thousands of songs one by one and add them to a specific playlist(though I've already started)...I'll be done when I'm frikkin 60!!
For example:
I add my whole trance collection("add folder to library" option) and they all end up in "music library"...then I add them all to my playlist "trance". But now I want to add my rock collection but I don't dare cause if I do, it will mix with all my frikkin trance songs in music library(I tried once) and the only way(in newbie point of view) to distinguish the rock songs from all trance songs is to uncheck the little box on the left side of all trance songs...but even so, I still have to go through the whooooole list to mark the rock songs with a checked box and add them to my "rock" playlist...by this time I'm 45 years old!!! And it doesn't work to sort them by genre cause many many many of my songs does not contain that information!! And then I still have 10 other genres like jazz, DnB, hiphop, opera etc. to add…aaaah BOB SAGET!!!

And somehow I can't mark more than 5 mp3s with "add file to library" function…why is that?? Something's jamming? Something I've misinterpreted?? Maybe cause it says "add file..." not "add files..."?

And now!!..my ipod isn't connecting with itunes...(just what I need!)...in the beginning it worked just fine!! But yesterday itunes complained about my ipod so I reinstalled it(no jailbreak's been on it)...fiiiiine no problem...but now, my itunes refuse to find my ipod touch..ah why? Does this mean I need to reinstall my itunes and will lose all frikkin job I've put down to sort all songs from music library to my playlists???!!!!

And what is this thing about duplicates? With so many songs and so many subfolders I have hard time tracking down all duplicates on my harddrive....isn't there a function/commando that prevents this in itunes?? If not, I once again have to go in and click...click...click..........click..."ok 4 songs marked.....2567 to go". And are they being arranged in a separate order?..noooooo...I'll have to click every second song to mark a duplicate....yippikayei....

Also I have to wait forever for itunes to go through my songs(album cover search etc) I can turn it off manually but can I turn it off automatically? Totally redundant feature for me…I watch movies, use apps and listen to music that's it!

I really need someone to help me out here(restraint jacket and soft walls??)...never have I gotten angry over such trivial things >:Y


best wishes

Anonymous said...

I knew better... years of experience was the little voice in my head that said, "Don't upgrade"... visions of Windows '98 FE and a host of other nightmares came to mind. So, I hadn't messed with it through the holidays. BUT, that annoying "Latest Version" kept popping up. What the hell... It's worked so far 1200 songs and pure enjoyment since Christmas plus I have a few songs I've gotten since, so "LET"S SYNC"... WTF!!!! where's my songs??? Now I have 112 on it. It says "some songs can't be found" B.S. I can play them all in Media/Real player... ON THE SAME DAMN MACHINE! They certainly are taking up space on my laptop.
7.0 Earased what I had... then left me with less than I have on my crappy little MP3 player. WTF!!! I F@@KING KNEW BETTER. After hours of frustration I'm not ready to sit down with "Tech Support" today. Maybe another day. 'Til then... F*CK YOU CRAPPLE!!! ---David W. Meeks (an idiot PC tech from wayback) that can't seem to work a digital device made for teenagers. I'm sure I suck a bit... But there's a few thousand more people who think Apple sucks more. "I miss my trusty Technics SL 1510 record player!"

Unknown said...

What I hate about iTunes is that is always wants to upgrade. It seems every week or two there is a huge file I need to download and install. Then Apple tries to sneak Safari onto my PC. Why would anybody running a PC want Safari? And as far as I know most of my Mac using friends use Firefox.

Why do I need to install such a large resource-hungry complicated program just to buy music from iTunes? Can I not have to choice of buying music without installing software? I use have been using Gmail for several years now and it has been updated many times, but I have never had to download software to use it. iTunes is a Web App, lets loose the bulky download.