iTunes Rage (split from Venting)

[Vendetta]

But Stark, you know it's better to have three seperate applications rather than having all the functions under one integrated one, which I hear is called bloat or something.

[Dominus Atheos]

What the hell? I'm looking at getting a new MP3 player to replace the one I have now (it's 7 years old), and the only choices are the iPod Touch, the iPod Classic and the Archos 5. The Archos seems to have a lot of problems and the Classic isn't able to open PDFs (not to mention I hate the frigging wheel)...which leaves the Touch - or nothing

When looking up devices as old as the Archos 5 it's important to check the firmware update logs since a lot of the issues it had at launch may have been resolved. Also important is to look up the latest news since it may talk about even more features and fixes, such as one by an enterprising group of an Archos fan forum members that adds support for the Android Market...

[Dominus Atheos]

Why would anyone want

-genius mixes
-genius playlists

I have never gotten that to work. I tell it to make a Genius playlist around one of my favorite songs and it seems to just collect random songs that I don't necessarily like as much.

-store integration

On noes, poor Apple fanboy has to open Safari before he can go to Amazon's mp3 store!

-attractive user interface

It never seemed all that attractive to me. It's just grey boxes.

-organised folders
-search
-right click integrated ID3 editing

Every modern media player has those things. Or at least Windows Media Player and JetAudio (the program I use) has them.

-high level of UI customization

It does? How do you do that?

WHY

I don't know, it does seem very strange though doesn't it?

[Dominus Atheos]

But Stark, you know it's better to have three seperate applications rather than having all the functions under one integrated one, which I hear is called bloat or something.

Impressive. In a discussion about Apple, iPods, and iTunes you manage to make to most retarded comment out of all of them.

Yes, it's called bloat. 3 system daemons/services, 2 background programs, and some retarded piece of helper software that randomly causes your CD drives to disappear is bloated. It should only need maybe one background program that checks for when an iPod is plugged in and checks for updates.

Although I'd prefer to just use the built in OS features like Autoplay and Task Scheduler to do those things.

[Twigler]

You mean they don't sell Philips, Creative, Sony, Samsung and whatnot brand MP3 players were you live?

Nothing with more than 16GB of storage, which is what I'm looking for. It's either the iPod Touch, the Classic or Archos 5.

The CL Zen X-Fi ones come in 32 and 64Gb versions. Might be worth importing them if you don't want to go with an Apple product.

[Stark]

Impressive. In a discussion about Apple, iPods, and iTunes you manage to make to most retarded comment out of all of them.

Yes, it's called bloat. 3 system daemons/services, 2 background programs, and some retarded piece of helper software that randomly causes your CD drives to disappear is bloated. It should only need maybe one background program that checks for when an iPod is plugged in and checks for updates.

Although I'd prefer to just use the built in OS features like Autoplay and Task Scheduler to do those things.

i guess here you mean 2 services and 1 program

but maybe you're just making things up

do we all make media player decisions based on services

i mean shit my mouse has a service WHY NOT USE HID OMG i ban my mouse from working

oh shit chrome has 20 services

WHAT BLOAT

hey imagine if we assessed bloat by actual impact an not how manynames were in a list

and then pretended system service 99% of nobody sees = product is bad
that'd be sweet

[General Zod]

Funny how I can run iTunes in the background while playing process intensive games like Arkham Asylum and DoW 2 and not experience any drop in system performance at all.

Then again I have hardware that isn't ten years old.

[charlemagne]

By now, the only two reasons why I use Winamp + Media Library instead of iTunes are that there's no "remove missing files from library" and no "rescan watch folders and add new files to library" functions in iTunes. (That and I don't own an iPod )

[General Zod]

By now, the only two reasons why I use Winamp + Media Library instead of iTunes are that there's no "remove missing files from library" and no "rescan watch folders and add new files to library" functions in iTunes. (That and I don't own an iPod )

A well organized music folder means you should never have to worry about removing missing files.

[Vendetta]

Also, iTunes can automatically manage your music folder, so just by dragging and dropping the files into the application they automatically get moved into a folder under their artist/album anyway, so unless you sort your music collection according to some kind of personal moon logic (and I bet some people here do), and you can delete them from there by deleting them from the application.

[charlemagne]

Well in my case files aren't missing because my music folder isn't organized, but because I sometimes just go through it and delete stuff I actually never listen to, or CDs I intend to rip again because I only ripped one or two songs before.

I realize there's propably a "remove and delete" option in iTunes, but that won't delete the folder the files were in, and I hate leaving empty folders around. It won't be neatly organized then anymore

It's just a minor nitpick overall, really.

edit: @ Vendetta - ah, didn't know about that option. Or maybe forgot about it.

[General Zod]

Well in my case files aren't missing because my music folder isn't organized, but because I sometimes just go through it and delete stuff I actually never listen to, or CDs I intend to rip again because I only ripped one or two songs before.

I realize there's propably a "remove and delete" option in iTunes, but that won't delete the folder the files were in, and I hate leaving empty folders around. It won't be neatly organized then anymore

It's just a minor nitpick overall, really.

I don't generally bother deleting unless it's an entire CD because I'm ocd about archiving shit. (And because hdd space is cheap).

[Einhander Sn0m4n]

Funny how I can run iTunes in the background while playing process intensive games like Arkham Asylum and DoW 2 and not experience any drop in system performance at all.

Then again I have hardware that isn't ten years old.

I'm running an overgunned new rig I built by myself around five months ago with money I filled lots of propane jugs and threw lots of concrete sacks half my weight to earn. I still optimize the crap out of this thing like it's that rickety old Frankensteined rustbucket piece of shit Pentium from New Orleans eight years ago. Result: my gaming is slick and smooth as diamond-coated glass. I'll be damned to Hell if I ever let any Apple software on it because of its habit of stealing CPU and RAM I paid for and spamming Quicktime or iTunes updates every fucking day for months, then using *ONE* missed unchecking of a checked-by-default install-something-unrelated box as an excuse to metastasize all over the machine with the entire catalog of Apple bloatware!

I use QT Alternative and CCCP for my quicktime fix, and I'm never using Safari, iTunes, or anything else that dictatorial turtlenecked twat wants to infect my box with. I've already vowed to pawn off every last iAnything I get gifted with, too. Fuck Steve Jobs!

for the kids these days m$ is less evil than EVPPLE

And Apple is just a cunt-hair less evil than Facebook, to say nothing of monsters like BP, Halliburton, Blackwater, and Goldman Sachs. Feel free to call me a Fucking Hipster (except I still haven't figured out how to integrate my wallet with the Batbelt™ solution to tight skinny jeans, and I won't wear a fedora or that silly asymmetrical hairstyle), but I never had or even started to get a FB account; sorry Talen. Blame Koobface and Zuckerberg's war on privacy for that. I'm waiting for FB's replacement to come along. Diaspora, maybe?

[Bounty]

I'll be damned to Hell if I ever let any Apple software on it because of its habit of stealing CPU and RAM I paid for and spamming Quicktime or iTunes updates every fucking day for months, then using *ONE* missed unchecking of a checked-by-default install-something-unrelated box as an excuse to metastasize all over the machine with the entire catalog of Apple bloatware!

Oooor you can outgrow that phase we all had when we thought going through services.msc with a fine comb mattered one damn bit and just tell iTunes not to start at boot. Not that on a modern computer it matters anyway.

I like to keep my PC nice and tidy too, but right now I have Adobe updaters and Security Essentials and some ATI stuff and a program to adjust brightness according to time of day running (OMG BLOAT!) and the impact it has had it... zero. Ish.

I guess you're lucky pot doesn't make you paranoid eh?

[Phantasee]

So the tl;dr version of Einy's post is: "I'm a paranoid nerd." Good to know!

[Stark]

No, it's 'due to that period in the past where it was relevant, I ignorantly believe running services will 'steal' my 'RAM' and impact gaming performance'. It's not an uncommon attitude at all; when I was in highschool you had to stack upper memory manually with crazy offsets in config.sys to get decent conventional. Do you have to do that now? Of course not, it's totally irrelevant. But people can't let go; they see something in task manager 'using up' 60 meg of 'RAM' and think OMG COMPUTAH IS GOIN SLOWWWWW. It's actually pretty sad. REAL bloat, like giant software that does nothing and silently installs stuff or ties up your processor or drive (like, say, any Symantec product) gets ignored because someone used a preloader to reduce startup times for no measurable performance impact.

Remember kids; background apps impact your 'gaming performance' even if they don't touch the processor, drives or anything just by being in a list. That's how multitasking works!

[phongn]

Oooor you can outgrow that phase we all had when we thought going through services.msc with a fine comb mattered one damn bit and just tell iTunes not to start at boot. Not that on a modern computer it matters anyway.

It didn't matter in the NT4 days, it doesn't matter now.

[I'm running an overgunned new rig I built by myself around five months ago with money I filled lots of propane jugs and threw lots of concrete sacks half my weight to earn. I still optimize the crap out of this thing like it's that rickety old Frankensteined rustbucket piece of shit Pentium from New Orleans eight years ago.

By "optimize" you mean fiddle with settings that need no fiddling?

Result: my gaming is slick and smooth as diamond-coated glass. I'll be damned to Hell if I ever let any Apple software on it because of its habit of stealing CPU and RAM I paid for and spamming Quicktime or iTunes updates every fucking day for months, then using *ONE* missed unchecking of a checked-by-default install-something-unrelated box as an excuse to metastasize all over the machine with the entire catalog of Apple bloatware!

Hyperbole. And if you run a modern operating system that does things like paging and prioritization then it won't matter (hint: if an iTunes background process is loaded it does not mean it is in RAM).

And Apple is just a cunt-hair less evil than Facebook, to say nothing of monsters like BP, Halliburton, Blackwater, and Goldman Sachs.

Patently untrue.

Feel free to call me a Fucking Hipster (except I still haven't figured out how to integrate my wallet with the Batbelt™ solution to tight skinny jeans, and I won't wear a fedora or that silly asymmetrical hairstyle), but I never had or even started to get a FB account; sorry Talen. Blame Koobface and Zuckerberg's war on privacy for that. I'm waiting for FB's replacement to come along. Diaspora, maybe?

Diaspora won't do it. Facebook is easy to use, centralized and provides compelling features for average computer users. You think open-source guys will concentrate on important bits like marketing and user-interface/user-experience?

[Marcus Aurelius]

Oooor you can outgrow that phase we all had when we thought going through services.msc with a fine comb mattered one damn bit and just tell iTunes not to start at boot. Not that on a modern computer it matters anyway.

It didn't matter in the NT4 days, it doesn't matter now.

Except that of course, if we get real, it did matter. When NT4 came out in 1996 your typical reasonably well equipped PC had 64 MiB of main memory. A high end system might have 128 MiB. By the end of the NT era these had more than doubled, but still memory was pretty tight in those days. I should not have to tell what happens during the system startup with tight memory resources, especially whe we remember that hard disks is those days were slow as hell and paging anything out to HD was correspondingly slow. When we add this the fact that NTFS is an easily fragmenting POS, HDs were small and therefore usually filled close to capacity even on business systems and most people did not defragment their FS as regularly as they should have...

To summarize, in those days and even during the early W2k era it was generally a good idea not to start everything at boot unless you really wanted to have that mega-sized mug of coffee while waiting the system to boot. NT4 did not have proper support for power saving, so unless you wanted to keep the system fully on all the time, you were doing a lot of booting for your pleasure. Of course if you had a super high end engineering workstation with two or more SCSI disks and 256 MiB or more memory, it did not matter, but must people and organizations did not have those.

Furthermore, if we talk about Windows 9x, which most home users and even many organizations used those days, we enter the area of not so modern memory management and to that we add the 'convenience' of FAT as filesystem, which worked so nicely with those small hard disks. Strangely though people seem to have forgotten what it all meant in practice, but of course since MS even in those days did concentrate a lot on marketing and UI, I guess it did not really matter how much the underlying tech sucked

Diaspora won't do it. Facebook is easy to use, centralized and provides compelling features for average computer users. You think open-source guys will concentrate on important bits like marketing and user-interface/user-experience?

Even more strange, people still seem to think that open-source guys care nothing about the UI like it was still 1995. There are admittedly many reasons why the FOSS crowd have troubles making highly centralized systems with an appealing user-experience, but not caring about the UI is generally no longer the number one reason. As for marketing... well, traditional marketing on the internet is not quite as important as it used to be, because new ideas can spread even without active marketing with relative ease. Many of the marketing methods used on the internet are actually based on 'natural' social behavior and merely exploited for marketing. Of course marketing still helps, but it's not quite as all-important for internet software products as it is for physical products, which were and still are marketed mostly on passive media such as TV, radio or even print.

[phongn]

Except that of course, if we get real, it did matter. When NT4 came out in 1996 your typical reasonably well equipped PC had 64 MiB of main memory. A high end system might have 128 MiB. By the end of the NT era these had more than doubled, but still memory was pretty tight in those days. I should not have to tell what happens during the system startup with tight memory resources, especially whe we remember that hard disks is those days were slow as hell and paging anything out to HD was correspondingly slow. When we add this the fact that NTFS is an easily fragmenting POS, HDs were small and therefore usually filled close to capacity even on business systems and most people did not defragment their FS as regularly as they should have...

I sure as hell didn't fuck around with services with 64MB of RAM (or 32MB, or any arbitrary amount I've ever used). Also, NTFS is hardly a "POS" - it's a fairly competent filesystem that does its job solidly and well. Fragmentation? Yeah, if you have small hard drives near capacity it's unavoidable (and the performance problems with fragmentation is vastly overrated: most I/O is random read/write anyways).

To summarize, in those days and even during the early W2k era it was generally a good idea not to start everything at boot unless you really wanted to have that mega-sized mug of coffee while waiting the system to boot. NT4 did not have proper support for power saving, so unless you wanted to keep the system fully on all the time, you were doing a lot of booting for your pleasure. Of course if you had a super high end engineering workstation with two or more SCSI disks and 256 MiB or more memory, it did not matter, but must people and organizations did not have those.

I was careful not to load a dozen little applications at boot - but that's different than mucking with services.

Furthermore, if we talk about Windows 9x, which most home users and even many organizations used those days, we enter the area of not so modern memory management and to that we add the 'convenience' of FAT as filesystem, which worked so nicely with those small hard disks. Strangely though people seem to have forgotten what it all meant in practice, but of course since MS even in those days did concentrate a lot on marketing and UI, I guess it did not really matter how much the underlying tech sucked

I did use Windows 95/98 extensively as well. Sure, by modern standards it's technically deficient but at the time it was a significant leap for a consumer operating system. And 9X had far fewer services to load than its NT cousins.

Even more strange, people still seem to think that open-source guys care nothing about the UI like it was still 1995. There are admittedly many reasons why the FOSS crowd have troubles making highly centralized systems with an appealing user-experience, but not caring about the UI is generally no longer the number one reason.

Sorry, I was imprecise. The FOSS guys realize they should care and put effort into UI. But they're not doing the hard slog of UI/UX testing like Apple and Microsoft do, whether due to lack of time and resources, lack of training or lack of competence. Sure, they want it to have nice artwork, to look "slick" and not look like CDE, but there's a lot of devil in the details.

As for marketing... well, traditional marketing on the internet is not quite as important as it used to be, because new ideas can spread even without active marketing with relative ease. Many of the marketing methods used on the internet are actually based on 'natural' social behavior and merely exploited for marketing. Of course marketing still helps, but it's not quite as all-important for internet software products as it is for physical products, which were and still are marketed mostly on passive media such as TV, radio or even print.

It could go viral. But they have a long, hard slog ahead of them - and it sounds like the Disapora guys are more interested in the technical issues behind a distributed social networking platform. That is all well and good, but if they want to fight Facebook they need a lot more than that.

[Marcus Aurelius]

I sure as hell didn't fuck around with services with 64MB of RAM (or 32MB, or any arbitrary amount I've ever used). Also, NTFS is hardly a "POS" - it's a fairly competent filesystem that does its job solidly and well. Fragmentation? Yeah, if you have small hard drives near capacity it's unavoidable (and the performance problems with fragmentation is vastly overrated: most I/O is random read/write anyways).

If you used NT4 with 32 MiB you must have been really patient in any case. 32 MiB was barely enough to run NT 3.51 with anything resembling adequate responsiveness. Removing services of course wasn't something you had to do, but it did help with those tight memory resources. Especially if your system was not in NT domain, you did not need many of those services for absolutely anything. In any case, I was referring mostly to Bounty's practice of not starting useless shit at startup, but in all fairness some of those services clearly belonged to that category.

You are wrong about disk I/O access being random on desktop systems, by the way. It is in fact highly localized, which is why adding hardware hard disk cache helps performance so much even if you have a modern OS with large main memory disk cache. Therefore FS fragmentation is a very real performance problem, but nowadays you rarely encounter serious fragmentation. The POS referred to the fact that NTFS is more prone to fragmentation than other FS of similar vintage (ext2, UFS etc.), even if still much less than FAT, and like you said it is unavoidable with nearly full partitions regardless of FS.

I did use Windows 95/98 extensively as well. Sure, by modern standards it's technically deficient but at the time it was a significant leap for a consumer operating system. And 9X had far fewer services to load than its NT cousins.

Yes, leap over Windows 3.x. OS/2 3.0, which came out in 1994, was better in practically every respect technically while it still maintained a high level of compatibility with Windows 3.x and PC-DOS. It did not have quite as appealing UI though, even if the actual functionality of the UI was much better than Windows 95, which was about the only point where it failed to match or surpass Windows 95. Now, IBM dropped the ball on developer relations and so there were not enough native applications, which ultimately doomed OS/2 to obscurity, but hell all the years using Windows 9x I wished it had been OS/2 3.0 or later 4.0 instead. 4.0 added eye candy and rectified the only significant design failure of 3.0. Windows did not have as good UI until Windows XP and even that is debatable.

Sorry, I was imprecise. The FOSS guys realize they should care and put effort into UI. But they're not doing the hard slog of UI/UX testing like Apple and Microsoft do, whether due to lack of time and resources, lack of training or lack of competence. Sure, they want it to have nice artwork, to look "slick" and not look like CDE, but there's a lot of devil in the details.

Ironically, CDE was a closed source project...it did have some of the weaknesses of many FOSS projects like lack of good leadership and strong vision. I am also not at all convinced about Microsoft's extensive UX testing considering how mediocre their UIs have been on the whole. Apple is of course different and besides clever marketing the UI has always been their main strength.

It could go viral. But they have a long, hard slog ahead of them - and it sounds like the Disapora guys are more interested in the technical issues behind a distributed social networking platform. That is all well and good, but if they want to fight Facebook they need a lot more than that.

Sure, that goes without saying. I don't use Facebook much myself, since I find more traditional Web applications like forums a lot more appealing even from the social point of view, but on the other hand I must admit that I'm no longer 18 and I may not "get" all this young people stuff

[Stark]

Whoa wait are you seriously claiming that FOSS software does not, generally, have horrible UI?

[phongn]

If you used NT4 with 32 MiB you must have been really patient in any case. 32 MiB was barely enough to run NT 3.51 with anything resembling adequate responsiveness. Removing services of course wasn't something you had to do, but it did help with those tight memory resources. Especially if your system was not in NT domain, you did not need many of those services for absolutely anything. In any case, I was referring mostly to Bounty's practice of not starting useless shit at startup, but in all fairness some of those services clearly belonged to that category.

Yes, I used NT4 with 32MB of RAM (now, if you want to know pain, my high school had NT4 machines with 16MB of RAM until replaced with W2K machines with 128MB).

You are wrong about disk I/O access being random on desktop systems, by the way. It is in fact highly localized, which is why adding hardware hard disk cache helps performance so much even if you have a modern OS with large main memory disk cache. Therefore FS fragmentation is a very real performance problem, but nowadays you rarely encounter serious fragmentation. The POS referred to the fact that NTFS is more prone to fragmentation than other FS of similar vintage (ext2, UFS etc.), even if still much less than FAT, and like you said it is unavoidable with nearly full partitions regardless of FS.

For smaller apps that are not media heavy, is it localized? Applications, libraries and documents are going to be scattered everywhere around the system anyways even if the file itself is defragmented. Back then I don't think I ever saw any numbers indicating real performance gains from defragmentation except in certain cases (large media files or pathologically fragmented systems).

Yes, leap over Windows 3.x. OS/2 3.0, which came out in 1994, was better in practically every respect technically while it still maintained a high level of compatibility with Windows 3.x and PC-DOS. It did not have quite as appealing UI though, even if the actual functionality of the UI was much better than Windows 95, which was about the only point where it failed to match or surpass Windows 95. Now, IBM dropped the ball on developer relations and so there were not enough native applications, which ultimately doomed OS/2 to obscurity, but hell all the years using Windows 9x I wished it had been OS/2 3.0 or later 4.0 instead. 4.0 added eye candy and rectified the only significant design failure of 3.0. Windows did not have as good UI until Windows XP and even that is debatable.

OS/2 by that point really was more of a business OS, wasn't it? And I was more comparing Windows 95 to Windows 3.1 or System 7.

Ironically, CDE was a closed source project...it did have some of the weaknesses of many FOSS projects like lack of good leadership and strong vision. I am also not at all convinced about Microsoft's extensive UX testing considering how mediocre their UIs have been on the whole. Apple is of course different and besides clever marketing the UI has always been their main strength.

Microsoft's extensive UI testing seems to have been something more recent; their whole Customer Experience Improvement Program more or less tells them what people actually do (as opposed to what they say they do) and finally with Windows 7 understand the requirements of "fit and finish". No more Windows 3.1 font interface!

Whoa wait are you seriously claiming that FOSS software does not, generally, have horrible UI?

I think he says that some projects care about UI/UX nowadays. Whether they actually can execute is a totally different story