Yes, I am speaking "blasphemy". I am sick of iTunes and am seriously considering going back to using Windows Media Player as my default player, regardless that I regularly purchase music from Apple and have an iPod. The usability sucks. For a company that’s supposedly all about elegance, usability and ‘thinking different’, iTunes is, umm, not there.
First of all, do I really need to update my software every week? Can they not bundle the updates and release when there really is something that needs upgrading, vs. a cool little feature that helps their sales? Inevitably this "upgrade" also means re-installing the entire platform, finding it on my system again, and losing access to it from my toolbar. Nice.
Of course, since I’m on a PC, they aren’t "integrated" (supposedly) with my desktop environment and "lose" songs from the player whenever they feel like it. No rhyme or reason to it, I haven’t moved the albums from the same folder they’ve been in since I started using iTunes, but for some reason iTunes "can’t locate that file". As of right now, after having done absolutely nothing to any of my music files (except for purchase a new song via iTunes), I have 86 missing songs that were perfectly fine yesterday.
Is iTunes sophisticated (designed well) enough to recognize that if an entire album is missing and I click that little "find on your hard drive" button and go through the motions to find the first song, they could actually scan that same folder for the remaining songs from that album? Of course not, why do with software that I could do manually and take an hour of my time to do so?
It’s interesting that they never "lose" the songs I purchased from them vs. burned onto my system from a purchased CD.
I used to love the Apple TV spots and think they were genius. The wonderful pokes at how slow and cumbersome, and corporate MSFT is. How they make you jump through hoops to get your system working. Now? Guess what? I may be one of those folks "downgrading" from Vista to XP… whoops, I mean "downgrading" from iTunes to WMP.
</rant>
[photo credit: tantek via Flickr]