why do people dislike itunes? - Page 7

im telling you man, just try Play, its so much faster, no lag...period, no matter how long its open, and its still bit perfect

I recently switched to foobar and I really like it. The fact that you can add plugins is awesome. Having a 5.1 surround headphone simulation is incredible.

If I didn't have an iPod, there's no way in heck that I'd install this horrifically invasive software on my machine. Not only does it install it's own unnecessary services, it tries forcing Mobile Me, Safari (which actually isn't so bad, but it should be a choice), Bonjour, and Quicktime onto my machine without asking. It attempts to grab associations for anything even vaguely media related.
Overall, it's a genuine pain. Unfortunately if you use an Apple media player, it's pretty close to your only viable choice. I've tried the alternatives and none of them work terribly well.

Well, mediamonkey is working more than ok for me in win xp.

I love iTunes. Nice and simple.

-Chris-

I'm sorry but how is Microsoft less invasive? Unlike Microsoft, Apple actually asks every time it attempts to take information from you, which is rarely, and you have the option of declining and of making it ask you every time or dismissing subsequent requests for the same information. What information are you talking about? If it's Genius then that is optional, it's a recommendations service so of course it has to take the contents of your library to provide you with recommendations based on it and create custom playlists that work well together on the fly.

It doesn't install Safari in the iTunes package. There may be a combined iTunes/Safari installer but you don't have to download that! It asks if you want to install the other things like Software Update. It also asks if you want to associate iTunes compatible files with it. You're welcome to decline. I don't see anything that offensive with the Apple Software Updater for instance if all it does is chceck for new versions of iTunes and Safari and offer to download and install them for you. If you don't want it don't install it or delete it.

QuickTime is installed because it's required by iTunes (it uses QuickTime codecs).

In my experience, everything on PCs is far less courteous and open about what it's doing and what it's sending home, and Microsoft is the worst example. A lot of what people are saying is factually incorrect.

I like the iTunes store. I hardly ever buy from it (I'd prefer to buy real lossless CDs) but being able to browse samples of music quickly from a huge database is useful. It's also interesting and fun to read and contribute to the reviews of albums and movies.

I'm perfectly capable of acknowledging Apple's flaws. I have no doubt that iPods sound **** compared to some other portable music devices. But then short of a portable DAC and AMP, you're going to be trading quality anyway. I'd still like it if they could put a better DAC in the iPod though.

I also agree that iTunes is slow to load. But a tip is to have it start automatically when you log in and never quit it. On Macs you can close the window and the application stays open, ready to respond quickly when you need it. On Macs simple controls are also available by right-clicking the dock icon or there are plenty of other controllers available. This probably also doesn't exist on the PC. But the PC DOES have a small minimal window accessed by pressing the zoom/enlarge button that switches between minimal and full-window view.

I've just managed to get it to take 20% of my computer's load by scrolling a large list quickly in iTunes. This is disappointing, but when scrolling at readable speeds it was less (max 10% on a 2.8 C2D). I can see why this would be a problem for old PCs, however I've also seen huge processor loads when scrolling large lists in Windows Explorer in Windows 7 with Aero so Microsoft isn't exactly the golden child in this regard either.

iTunes is still using a lot of legacy code (kind of like Windows really ). I hope they manage to rewrite it in Cocoa soon, but given how long it took to get a Cocoa Finder I'm not holding my breath...see I can be critical of Apple too!

Not really sure what you're talking about Microsoft being more invasive. The first thing you have to do when you run Windows Media Player is set privacy settings. I honestly can't think of the last time I was even asked to install other software when installing Microsoft software (updates sure, but all software should do that). Why should you have to have it running all the time? That's a nice option but does not actually fix iTunes' performance (and can actually lead to a slower overall system). While I don't see Apple being worse than most others (including Microsoft itself), they're not really any better than most of the other software I've used either. They're par for the course, except for Quicktime (which is impossible to prevent from hijacking your browser playback, you have go and change it manually after Quicktime is installed, although it doesn't do it for all formats, its still annoying).

As for scrolling. The reason it'd be slow scrolling in Windows Explorer is that those are the actual files sitting there, whereas iTunes is just a database. It's not quite that simple, but you're talking about a huge difference in the way the computer is looking at them.

I still can't seem to get my standard 13" MacBook Pro to do anything slowly in iTunes. The worst seems to be start-up, about 3 seconds. Scrolling, playing songs...the first song after start up takes a couple of seconds, then the wait time is NOW.

Is this what you guys are calling slow? Maybe you have computer problems, not iTunes problems? Maybe iTunes is just slow on Windows machines? I don't know, but I'd still like to get an alternative recommendation for the Mac, just to see what's going on. Any suggestions?

P

Apple does use a creative make-up for their download page so that the first link you want to click on is the total package. I often made that mistake with my XP machine and ended up with all the stuff you don't need. You do get the option but it's not as clear as you'd hope (at least not if you're the 'I know how this works so I click through fast' type of guy ).

As hinted some pages back it seems like most of those disliking iTunes is running it on MS Windows.

It is no surprise or secret that Apple's applications run faster/smoother on their own OS (Mac OS X) than on MS Windows, just like Microsoft's applications run faster/smoother on their own OS (MS Windows) than on Mac OS X. No difference there...

Well, actually, I have a new HP here, and a new MacBook Pro, both running the latest versions of Office, and Word, Power Point and Excel all seem to run every bit as fast and smooth on the Mac as they do on the HP.

P

Which 5.1 pugin do you prefer? Will it work with a 5.1 surround music DVD?

I completely agree with you about itunes not running slowly on my MacBook or my Imac. Both of these machines run itunes perfectly, really no lag time whatsoever. Maybe it has to do with it running on Window's, because I've never had a problem with it running on a mac.

It's not a single plug in. Just follow this guide.
5.1 Headphone setup - Head-Fi: Covering Headphones, Earphones and Portable Audio

OK thanks. Hope it's not over my head. I get scared if it seems too complicated.

One more ? Once I get through the steps and everything is working, will I have the option to turn it off? Seems like a stupid question, but just need to know before going through all that.