Apple Getting Rid of iTunes on Apple Devices

[mank]

Do you have an opinion on Apple replacing iTunes with three new applications, Apple Music, Apple TV, and an Apple app for podcasts?

Personally, I have over 3600 songs now on my classic 160 GB iPod and theoretically iTunes will still exist on Windows computers. I hope it doesn't go away on the Windows PCs but I suspect it might. I would be willing to bet that there will be third party programs that will come out to enable users to transfer files from the Windows iTune to Apple Music for windows if it ever comes to that.

The other thing that scares me a little is I have over $200 sitting in my iTunes account to buy songs/albums. I wonder if that balance will transfer to Apple Music?

[graham]

I don't have iTunes, but I bet this will piss a lot of people off!

Gone are the days when you buy a recording (vinyl, CD etc) which you can sell or give to your children etc, this is pushing the model that you "buy" a licence to listen to music, but it's never actually yours!

More profit for them, of course...

[Stan]

Good riddence.

Itunes wanted to control everything music on my PC, most viruses are easier to get rid of.

My understanding is that the new Apple music app will seamlessly integrate if you are Apple inclined. I would expect a Windows version.

[Jim]

I lost over 750gb worth of music when my NAS and my backup were taken. Now, I no longer care about MP3. I Stream all my music now. Parts of my commute are cellular dead zones but YouTube allows me to download some tracks for offline listening.

I left the Apple Ecosystem a few years ago so whatever they do matters little to me these days.

[mank]

Stan,

I understand your frustration. I added an album, Molly Hatchet, that my son but me on Amazon Music and I had to jump through hoops to get it onto my iPod.

I do commend Apple for great customer service. Two years ago my iPod Classic just died. It would go on and off intermittently. I made an appointment at an Apple store and they told me my iPod, 160GB, was out of warranty. They could sell me a new one for $40 I believe. I bought it immediately. None of the other iPods, that really looked like phones, would have held my music. They also provided me the instructions on how to use a third party program to get my 3000 songs, about 2000 or so from CDs that I ripped, back onto my iPod. I like Apple products my iPhone and my iPod Classic. I still have the iPhone 6s 64GB model. I don't see a need to by a new phone at this point. I probably will when my iPhone 6s starts to behave strangely.

[Stan]

I wanted more control over my music than Itunes allowed. I also prefer the FLAC format over anything Apple supports. Not a big deal, except that Itunes is very aggressive about controlling everything audio or video. It took some internet searching and registry edits to make it go away. I got Itunes to support an Ipod Nano. Liked the Nano; but hated Itunes enough to dump it and go with a Fiio X3 player. The Fiio supports FLAC and my directory structure directly, so no conversion.

I had an Iphone and hated it. Same general issues, I prefer to do things my way and insist that I decide what gets shared. I get along with Android much better.

That said, my laptop is a 15" MacBook Pro and I love it. I had to use one for work and grew to like it. The laptop hardware itself is the nicest I've ever used, very sharp display that is the prettiest I've ever used, a keyboard that doesn't suck, good battery life, extremely thin, and all SSD with no hard drive (tolerates motorcycle rides). Obviously, MacOS has Itunes built in, but I do not use the Mac for music. A Chromebook would do 90% of what I need a laptop for, but the Mac does 100%. I use a Windows 10 desktop as my primary PC.

My music collection is sitting at 2200 full cds ripped into FLAC format (lossless compression, full CD quality). That works out to 25,000 songs and 700Gb. I presently use MediaMonkey; but am looking at JRiver and Roon.

[Juli]

The iTunes player destroyed most of my mp3 collection, and some files in other formats. If it couldn't figure out the artist and album for a title, it just replaced with a track with the same or a similar name. Sadly, some family oral stories were replaced with songs from artists I'd never heard of. There was a photo and video collection that was corrupted. So, I have no cares either way about this news.

[martycanuck]

Pretty sure everything will transfer over. Music and money on iTunes.

[mank]

Jun 5, 2019 10:26:07 GMT -5 Stan said:

I wanted more control over my music than Itunes allowed. I also prefer the FLAC format over anything Apple supports. Not a big deal, except that Itunes is very aggressive about controlling everything audio or video. It took some internet searching and registry edits to make it go away. I got Itunes to support an Ipod Nano. Liked the Nano; but hated Itunes enough to dump it and go with a Fiio X3 player. The Fiio supports FLAC and my directory structure directly, so no conversion.

I had an Iphone and hated it. Same general issues, I prefer to do things my way and insist that I decide what gets shared. I get along with Android much better.

That said, my laptop is a 15" MacBook Pro and I love it. I had to use one for work and grew to like it. The laptop hardware itself is the nicest I've ever used, very sharp display that is the prettiest I've ever used, a keyboard that doesn't suck, good battery life, extremely thin, and all SSD with no hard drive (tolerates motorcycle rides). Obviously, MacOS has Itunes built in, but I do not use the Mac for music. A Chromebook would do 90% of what I need a laptop for, but the Mac does 100%. I use a Windows 10 desktop as my primary PC.

My music collection is sitting at 2200 full cds ripped into FLAC format (lossless compression, full CD quality). That works out to 25,000 songs and 700Gb. I presently use MediaMonkey; but am looking at JRiver and Roon.

Stan,

I don't do anything with my music except listen to music. My iPod Classic has nothing but music on it and can't do video so I don't care about that at all. I like iTunes and I haven't had any problems. I tend to buy albums not individual songs (still old school I miss the record liners). I buy them put them on my iPod and away I go. I will say that I don't keep my music library on my PC. My library only exists on my iPod.

I work in the Cyber Security field and my degree is in forensics the Android is full of security problems, Apple not so much. Just an FYI. 

[martycanuck]

There’s an Apple support article that explains how the new set up will work on a Mac but haven’t seen the plans for Windows yet. Expect iTunes to hand around the Windoze environment for a while at least.

[mank]

Marty,

From everything I have read and in my daily How to Geek Newsletter, right now for Windows machines iTunes will still be working. Apple Music, Apple TV, and I think Apple Video are replacing iTunes on any Mac Platform or iPhone.

[Drea]

I have been using iPhones for many years, and an iPad as well. That said, I use a PC as my computer (also because my work is PC-based). I have had iTunes on my PC for more years than I can remember, and have never really figured out how it works or been fully comfortable with it. I'm still not sure if I am using it properly for backups for my devices, and have major confusion when it comes to trying to load/keep different things on different devices (i.e. a subset of tunes on my iPhone and books on my iPad). Michael has tried multiple times to help, but iTunes is set up differently on his Mac and it only baffles me more. I think I'm relatively intelligent, but I gave up and simply use the 'basics' of the program when I have to. Overall I very much like Apple programs... except iTunes. Maybe the new ones will be easier for me to understand.

[martycanuck]

When your iPhone or iPad are connected to the computer with iTunes you can set what syncs to where for each device. Haven’t used it on Windows for a long, long time though. If you don’t see the main inner window that shows your device look for a little icon of it and click that. Then you should see the device info and options. From there you can pick which media syncs to the device.

[marm]

I used itunes a couple times on my laptop. When finished with my laptop, I tended to close it and plop it on a pillow next to my bed. After the second or third time waking up to a scorching hot laptop, I finally figured out that itunes was waking up the closed machine for updates. I decided it wasn't worth setting my house on fire and uninstalled it.

[mank]

Jun 10, 2019 8:24:49 GMT -5 marm said:

I used itunes a couple times on my laptop. When finished with my laptop, I tended to close it and plop it on a pillow next to my bed. After the second or third time waking up to a scorching hot laptop, I finally figured out that itunes was waking up the closed machine for updates. I decided it wasn't worth setting my house on fire and uninstalled it.

Marm,

I would suggest it had nothing to do with iTunes but the fact you put your laptop on a pillow and did not have proper airflow. Or, most likely blocked the air intake and outtake vents.

[Ben]

Jun 10, 2019 12:21:22 GMT -5 mank said:

Jun 10, 2019 8:24:49 GMT -5 marm said:

I used itunes a couple times on my laptop. When finished with my laptop, I tended to close it and plop it on a pillow next to my bed. After the second or third time waking up to a scorching hot laptop, I finally figured out that itunes was waking up the closed machine for updates. I decided it wasn't worth setting my house on fire and uninstalled it.

Marm,

I would suggest it had nothing to do with iTunes but the fact you put your laptop on a pillow and did not have proper airflow. Or, most likely blocked the air intake and outtake vents.

The point is the laptop was off when it was set down. iTunes turned it on, causing said issues.

[marm]

What Ben said, yes. If I'd left it open without the airflow, yes, that would've been my fault, but a closed machine should stay cold because nothing should be running. Once I uninstalled itunes, I never had the issue again, in the several years I owned the laptop. I probably could've poked around in the settings, turn off auto-updating or some such, but the fact that it had installed with rights to wake a closed and sleeping machine unnerved me too much.

[Stan]

Jun 6, 2019 10:13:14 GMT -5 mank said:

Stan,

I don't do anything with my music except listen to music. My iPod Classic has nothing but music on it and can't do video so I don't care about that at all. I like iTunes and I haven't had any problems. I tend to buy albums not individual songs (still old school I miss the record liners). I buy them put them on my iPod and away I go. I will say that I don't keep my music library on my PC. My library only exists on my iPod.

I work in the Cyber Security field and my degree is in forensics the Android is full of security problems, Apple not so much. Just an FYI. 

Your use and mine are very different. My music collection sits on a NAS, is accessible from several devices, and can be played in multiple rooms, on different sets of equipment, at the same time (what you'd expect from a network nerd). This is independent of Itunes. All I wanted Itunes to do was access the files and load an Ipod. It just couldn't behave itself and crapped all over my files. At least I have good backups. FWIW, Itunes is innocuous on my MACbook Pro. It's there; but causes me no grief. It seems to be an Itunes on Windows thing.

If you miss album covers and record liners, you might look into Roon. It isn't free; but they do have a 2 week trial. I liked it, exactly for that reason (art, liner notes, recommendations, etc); but it wouldn't work with the directory structure on my Linux NAS. Roon has since fixed that (they say) and I need to try it again.

I'm fairly competent in network security. I've been doing networking for a long time. Any preference for Android over Apple is based on ease of use. Anyone hacking my cellphone will be seriously disappointed, there's very little there.

All that said, I like my MacBook Pro. It's a very nice piece of hardware with a reasonable OS. It's perfectly reasonable to like 1 Apple product and dislike others.

[mank]

Jun 11, 2019 7:42:29 GMT -5 marm said:

What Ben said, yes. If I'd left it open without the airflow, yes, that would've been my fault, but a closed machine should stay cold because nothing should be running. Once I uninstalled itunes, I never had the issue again, in the several years I owned the laptop. I probably could've poked around in the settings, turn off auto-updating or some such, but the fact that it had installed with rights to wake a closed and sleeping machine unnerved me too much.

I have iTunes on my laptop and it never wakes up my laptop. I don't allow anything to auto update. I would suspect that any program you have that auto updates would turn your laptop on not just iTunes.

[marm]

I'll clarify - it didn't fully auto-update, it checked for updates and when I opened the laptop, there was a popup telling me to click the button. I've never, in the 20ish years of owning laptops of various flavors, had any other program wake a sleeping machine to auto-update. I'm aware I was a weird edge case for some reason, as I did some searching to find out if it was a common issue with itunes, and came up empty, as far as I remember. I do allow some things to auto-update (Server, SQL, etc.), some things are allowed to check for updates and prompt me (keepass, java), and not some others at all (steam, ugh). But I also don't necessarily change those settings the minute I install, either. Things that do auto-update do so after I've awakened the laptop.

I only used itunes to set up a kid's ipod, and this was several years and at least one laptop ago. I installed it, did what I needed to do with it, and when it gave me issues, removed the problem product. Never had another issue. Like Stan, for my own music, I've always preferred to have standard file storage for my mp3s, since I tended to move them around frequently. Nowadays, I do that much less, since Pandora gives a fair amount of control and I can stream just about anywhere. Unlike Stan, I'm not as particular about quality, but I also don't have high-end equipment or anything.

I too prefer Android over Apple for phones, because I prefer the control offered by Android (give me a menu list, not blasted icons!) but I'm well aware of the risks that come along with it. Given that the only mac product I use is my work laptop which boots straight to windows via bootcamp, I've never had a burning need to manage music any other way than standard file manager.

[mank]

Stan,

Thanks for the tip. I listen to my music on my classic iPod. The rest of the time when I am in my car I listen to various channels on Sirius-XM; country, pop, 70s, 80s, classical, jazz, talk radio, etc., etc.

[Gimpy]