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One Week without iTunes: the results
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NewsPoster
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May 25, 2016, 07:11 AM
 
Okay, let's not even try to contrive some drama. Last week, I was challenged to quit iTunes -- and this week I'm back, having done so and realized that technically, it's quite easy. Yet I'm also back in the sense of using iTunes again: there were problems, there were lots of recommendations, there are many people who loathe iTunes, but one week ago, I wasn't fussed: and this week, I am glad to be using it again.

There were some matters arising from last week's challenge: specifically MacNN Managing Editor Mike Wuerthele disagreed with my decision to also ditch Apple Music. Yet you have to use iTunes to listen to Apple Music, and the service has its fingers into so many of my playlists that if I allowed that, I'd doubtlessly end up listening to some music of my own along the way. So Apple Music was out -- and to me that meant doing it completely. No Apple Music on iOS either.

Recommendations

If you read a lot of Apple-related news and articles, you'll have picked up that the prevailing wisdom is that iTunes is terrible. That it is so bloated with options for music, video, books, apps, and so on that it is confusing. It is. The general consensus about the solution is that Apple should split it off into separate apps, the way it has on iOS. It could be.



However, people recommended various alternatives to me, and most of them do concentrate on one thing, yet without giving me this miraculous advantage. It wasn't a comprehensive list of every option available to me by any means, but it was reasonably wide-ranging -- and included Vox, which I've previously reviewed. Vox is radically improved since I looked at it last, and I had none of the aggravating crashing that I did before. Only, its design has you using a kind of mini-player, and I just got weary of struggling to find the music I was looking for.

Plus, my press subscription expired during the week, and so Vox won't play any of my music. I get why you pay for its streaming to other devices, but there's my music, right there in the app, not available to me any more.

Things were easier with Clementine, though the look of it feels a bit 1980s to me. I did have to load in my iTunes library, so in a way it felt like cheating, like I was just using a different direction to the same music, but I stuck with Clementine longer than most. Except it's supposed to be easier to use than iTunes, yet it took me a beat to figure out how to listen to an album. Here's the album, click, nothing. Double click, nothing.

Instead, you have to drag the album onto a kind of playlist area and okay, it works, but I just wanted to play Dar Williams's The Beauty of the Rain, and I was looking at it, it was right there. Having to drag it off somewhere to listen to it isn't hard, but it isn't clear, and iTunes just has the album and a big play button. I did like that Clementine responded to the iTunes media keys on my keyboard, but with iTunes, when you reach the end of an album, you can tap play again and it restarts. Not with Clementine.



I spent a little while letting YouTube play in the background on a tab in Safari. I quite often use YouTube on my Apple TV to watch music -- there is a great full-length Lilith Fair concert, for instance -- and on the TV you can just set it running on mixes of videos. On my Mac, I could find those same YouTube mixes, but after a while I'd realize everything had gone quiet while it waited for me to skip a video that didn't happen to be available in my region.

Last, I was strongly recommended on Twitter to try Younity, but it isn't an iTunes replacement. It takes your music, photos, and videos, and lets you stream them to your other devices -- but for sitting at your Mac listening to music, not so much. If you get it knowing that, fine, but when you believe it's a music player, it's frustrating. I found it also tricky to quit, or rather to convince it that I had quit and unregistered it: Younity popped back into life unbeckoned, and at a truly inconvenient moment.

I turn out to need music

The lack of Apple Music was a big problem for me this week. Not only the service itself and its For You feature, where it recommends music, but also how integrated I have it with my favorite playlist. I have one called Discoveries, wherein for years now I've only put in tracks that obsessed me to the point where I listened to them over and over. If I listen enough that I eventually got sick of them, they go into this Discoveries playlist.



I've been doing this for a long time, and last year there were some 120 tracks in there. Now it's got 167, and the rest are all new obsessions from Apple Music. These days I have to think which is from Apple Music and which I own, but I don't have to think about using this playlist. Whenever I need to hunker down and get some serious writing work done, that is what I start up.

Consequently, yes, I think my writing work slowed down this week. I think I had a harder time concentrating, and I know I kept thinking oooh, I'll just listen to this -- d'oh. It was in the worst of these times that I would try each of the alternatives, but when you need to concentrate on your work, the fiddling to get those working felt more irritating.

You could say all of this is a first-world problem, and I would disagree with you -- but only to the extent that I can't truly call it a problem. It was a first-world irritation, at best. There were times when irritation became full-on itches, though.

Built-in issues

Since iTunes is the default music player on OS X, it tends to start itself up quite a lot. Each week when I produce the MacNN: One More Thing podcast, for instance, iTunes notices that my co-presenter Malcolm Owen has delivered the audio recording from his side, and up it pops. I've had to race to Force Quit it when that happens, or when a link I'm researching leads to something else that iTunes wants to help me about.

Last week David Sparks's Hazel Video Field Guide came out, and normally I'd have bought it on my Mac, dragged it to iTunes, and known that it was on all my devices. As I couldn't do that, I had to think what to do, and felt a bit lucky that my first guess worked. I bought the video on my iPad, saved it to Dropbox, and watched it from there; but that was on my iPad, and while the very fact that it was in Dropbox meant it was available to my other devices, that isn't the same as it being available on them. I'd have to open my iPhone, for instance, and either stream it or wait a long time to download it again.

On the road

There was one circumstance where I was glad to find I had problems. Some weeks I drive a lot, and I rely on Siri and Apple Music piped through my car's radio. Since I couldn't have Apple Music, and I couldn't play any of my iOS music, I tried listening to the real radio.



That was great: I am this longstanding radio fan -- I've written radio drama, I've worked in BBC Radio, but still I've been listening to music a lot instead -- and, oh, that's why. I listened because I wanted to hear Siri's directions. That meant I had to listen to something via my iPhone, in order for Siri's voice to appear. The search for something else for these long drives led me back to the deeply superb BBC Radio iPlayer app. I rediscovered BBC comedies I've not heard in years, and I'll continue doing that.

You'd think I'd try more podcasts, and I did. What I learned there was that MacNN needs to do more hours of podcast per week, because I raced through those. Also, skipped episodes of shows are skipped for a reason. I tried two editions I'd skipped in two completely different podcasts, and both turned out to be about freelancing. I am freelance, I have been since 1995, so this should be interesting, but it was just aggravating as these people talked about their first months as if no one else had ever done it.

I skipped them both again, and needed the calming voice of Roman Mars, presenter of the design history show 99% Invisible. That podcast is BBC Radio standard, it is a pleasure to hear how well made it is -- and thinking that of the latest edition got me back onto the BBC Radio iPlayer, and now dramas.

Except, when I'm driving I also use Siri a great deal for reminders and for texts. Last Saturday, when I was driving home from a workshop I'd run, my wife Angela texted me to suggest a meal out. Somehow, and I truly don't know how, Siri picked up something from the BBC Radio iPlayer and added it to my reply. I'd said something like yes, thanks, I'd enjoy that, and what Angela received was "Yes, thanks, I'd enjoy that, sorry, sorry." She didn't understand what that "sorry, sorry" could mean, but it actually worried her. She thought I was deeply tense about something. If she'd chosen someone else to go to the meal with, I'd be having a bigger discussion with Mike about now.

Shrug

I do still object on principle to how he recommended I quit iTunes for a week, while he bravely put himself through wearing an Apple Watch, but this wasn't an arduous test. It just didn't give me the Damascus-like realization that iTunes is a terrible thing to be avoided and abandoned.



There are these alternatives, but I'm not persuaded. I was going to say that I wasn't persuaded enough but, no, I'm just not persuaded at all. I can well see an argument that iTunes wins for me because I'm so familiar with it, but I could get familiar with any of these other ways of listening to music, and so what? If you have to get familiar with their foibles in order to use them, I need something more persuasive than a different set of foibles. I need some actual advantages, and all that this week has done has made me sure that I'm right to subscribe to Apple Music.

Full disclosure: I was challenged to do this for a week, and I fell short by about 10 hours. I needed to see how the latest iTunes 12.4 deals with a certain thing (see Friday's Pointers tutorial column) and while it was open for that, I looked at the screen for a while before deciding ah, nuts to it. I'd plugged my iPhone in to copy some documents over, and iTunes has begun automatically backing it up. You should do this, and you should do it regularly: yes, it's one of iTunes's bloated non-music features, but it's quicker than iCloud.

So I let it carry on backing up while I popped on my headphones. Apple Music playing Cyndi Lauper's new album. That Dar Williams album again. Suzanne Vega's Songs in Red and Grey, the album I keep accidentally re-discovering every six months or so and becoming enthralled by again.

You can tell me that iTunes is bloated and I couldn't disagree with a straight face. You can tell me that it's confusing, and I'd agree but already be moving away from you: it's not dramatically more confusing than anything else I've tried. I just had a moderately bad week without it, and a very good time since I switched iTunes back on.

-- William Gallagher (@WGallagher)
( Last edited by NewsPoster; May 26, 2016 at 12:47 AM. )
     
Spheric Harlot
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May 25, 2016, 09:51 AM
 
I'd like to write an article entitled "three years without Spotify: a personal experiment". I could post a follow-up article as well detailing the process.

I'm sure it would be really interesting and helpful.

MacNN, will you take me up on it?
     
pottymouth
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May 25, 2016, 10:58 AM
 
"You can tell me that iTunes is bloated and I couldn't disagree with a straight face. You can tell me that it's confusing and I'd agree but already be moving away from you: it's not dramatically more confusing than anything else I've tried."

That about sums up my feelings on the matter, too.

But usually "bloated" means slow and cumbersome to use. I've never found that to be the case with iTunes. I think it's the nature of the various media it covers. If I were trying to listen to an album, watch a movie, and read a book at the same time, I'd likely find iTunes limiting. But since I would never try to do that, having all of those features in one app means fewer apps to keep open. I just have to click once for the media I want and iTunes hands me back the results.

I've got iTunes set to open automatically on all of my Macs and I'm satisfied. My only real complaint is that iTunes seems to fight the column browser. I only ever want to see my music listed in the column browser sorted by Album by Artist/Year, but every time I do a search it seems to come back in Artist or Album view.

Oh, that and I don't want to see Beats One anywhere ever. I am just not interested in any of that crap and there doesn't seem to be any way to make it go away. :/
     
MisterKrill
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May 25, 2016, 03:45 PM
 
I begrudgingly use iTunes because it is the only platform that works for everything I need. I grew sick of music from Spotify or Rdio there one day and gone the next. However, I will say that the web interface for Rdio was great and easy to use. I really liked what they did. I wish Apple had bought them instead and used the interface for what Apple Music really should be, and that is a web based music service as well as an app in iOS. iTunes should be laid to rest to make way for the future.
     
Mike Wuerthele
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May 25, 2016, 04:23 PM
 
Originally Posted by Spheric Harlot View Post
I'd like to write an article entitled "three years without Spotify: a personal experiment". I could post a follow-up article as well detailing the process.

I'm sure it would be really interesting and helpful.

MacNN, will you take me up on it?
No, because everybody on staff could write that one.

BOOM. Here all week, try the veal.
     
Spheric Harlot
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May 25, 2016, 04:31 PM
 
Yeah, but you'd *never* let one of your staff write such a pointless piece, right?
     
   
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