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The Wall Street Journal reports that Apple will finally release iTunes 11, after a myriad of manufacturing delays, today. Yep, that’s right, today, finally. Considering it was meant to be released way back in October, it’s better late than never, I guess.
I just hope it doesn’t end up as massive and bloated as the current iteration, because even on a Mac, that thing is infuriating to use. Apparently the delays were due to parts of it having to be re-written, which makes me hope iTunes 11 will finally be as fast and slick as it bloody-well should be.
WSJ has a decent profile on Eddy Cue too, Apple’s new ‘Mr. Fixit’, although I’m pretty sure that has very different connotations here than it does in the US. [WSJ via 9to5Mac]
5 Features iTunes 11 Still Needs
iTunes 11 Arrives With a New Look and New Features
What's New in iTunes 11, and Does it Still Suck?
The previous builds have all been infuriating but there are no alternatives! For me nothing works as well as iTunes
I hope this latest version is a significant improvement!
I hope he isn’t affiliated with Obamacare in any way.
Hopefully this’ll help fix Home Sharing issues (unless iOS is at fault too)
Let’s aim for a sub 10 second initiation.
Or even twenty seconds would be better, its so infuriating when you start it up and then have to wait ages for it to do all its stupid ‘sending information’ rubbish
“Manufacturing delays?” Makes it sound like iTunes is an actual physical piece of hardware…
I agree. How can you manufacture an intangible product? Lunacy, I tell you…
Okay, what exactly are people having problems with when using iTunes?
I can find, buy, listen, watch, share, and sync to iPhone and iPad with zero problems.
Am I missing something, or is there something else people are doing — or expecting of — iTunes that I’m not aware of?
People have 80,000+ songs, and sometimes iTunes slows down! and sometimes even crashes. TBH I have never had any problems with iTunes for PC or Mac, I personally don’t know what people are complaining about.
Before I bought an SSD for my macbook pro, iTunes would often take a minute or more to load. On a 2011 Macbook Pro. It’s bloated, full of features that a lot of people don’t use and should be optional (Ping, Radio, iTunes U etc.) and it uploads a ton of information every time you start it up. The interface is ugly and dated by about 10 years and to be honest, it’s just nowhere near as clean and responsive as a modern piece of music software should be.
It’s cool to bash iTunes.
Ergo, bash iTunes.
Sure, it could stand to be improved, but many people seem to tar it with the kind of hatred usually reserved for serial killers, infectious diseases or Justin Bieber.
I bet it still isn’t released today, even after this. Apple are very close to missing their second, considerably later, self-imposed deadline. It had better be good…
I scrolled down to read the comments in my relentless addiction to apple-hating-mouth-breathers, but was surprised to read mainly balanced commentary from largely satisfied iTunes users.
Like them, I’d like something light, zippy and nimble, but with 90gb of content that seems unlikely. My experience of it is that it’s definitely not perfect, but it downloads and stores podcasts, music and other stuff perfectly well and sync and recgonises numerous (very) old and new iDevices without issue.
I see iTunes as a means to an end, ie: loading up my iPod touch. That said, every time I load it, it rebuilds its library file, spends ages whirring away exchanging data with Apple and it generally quite slow. I would say that 20GB of mp3 content is not as much as other users’ libraries so what’s holding it up?
I also dislike the fact that iTunes on Windows comes with all these other useless unwanted programs such as:
iCloud control panel (which I don’t use)
Bonjour
AppleDeviceManager
Apple Software Updater
There’s another issue in that iTunes’ audio output cannot work with my outboard sound card when I have any other audio programs (VLC, Ableton Live etc) are running, which I think a little strange. The only solution is to completely restart iTunes to reset the audio driver.
It’s not perfect but then again, with the bar set so high after the Jobsian era of Apple, I have come to expect better from them and that is the issue.
I don’t know what all the fuss is about. I spent a couple of hundred quid on an SSD drive, spent a couple of hours with my MacBook in bits fitting it, rebuilt the entire operating system and restored my substantial Time Machine backup and iTunes runs fine now.
Er…