Things that still annoy me about iTunes

• January 13, 2011
• 3 notes
• #apple
• #itunes
• #rubbish

iTunes turned a whole decade old four days ago. During that time, I don’t think there’s been any program I’ve shouted at more. For all of its handy features, it’s one of the most infuriatingly annoying, buggy, clunky programs that Apple have ever made. Even today it’s packed fit to bursting with features that don’t quite work, or hang, or crash your computer. Here are a few particular annoyances of mine:

• Playlist Syncing - for years the only way to edit a playlist when out and about was to use the ‘On The Go’ playlists that created a new playlist called ‘On The Go 1’ or ‘On The Go 2’ each time you synced. For a time, if you created a playlist with both podcasts and music, when you synced it would strip out all the podcasts. Now, ostensibly, you can edit any playlist on your iPhone and it will sync back to the computer. Except it doesn’t. At least on my machine, playlists no longer sync at all, whatever settings you choose. In the last iTunes build I used, they briefly, oh so briefly, worked as you’d expect, and as they’re supposed to, syncing merrily away with gay abandon. Those were happy, happy days I look back on fondly. But no longer.
• Photo Sharing - with the previous Apple TV, you could choose an album, or a few albums from iPhoto, and your Apple TV would automatically sync all the photos to your machine, updating the album whenever you changed it in iPhoto. With the new Apple TV, this feature is there in iTunes, under Advanced > Choose photos to share. Except once you’ve synced the album once, it never appears to check if there have been any changes. Indeed, it seems nigh on impossible to even force it to notice any changes.
• Search Box - in the search box you can type anything from a title, or a band name, and it will find all of those tracks. But you can’t, for some reason, search for a year. If you want to see what tracks you have from 1960, you have to order your tracks by year and then scroll through them.
• Genius - I rather liked the genius feature. I think it made some pretty passable playlists from one ‘seed’ track, and I liked the genre lists it would make too. The only thing I wasn’t so keen on was the fact that every week or two it would set about updating its database and cause iTunes to hang or crash entirely.
• Multiple Downloads - on a similar note, often when downloading many tracks iTunes will hang when it comes to the end of a couple of downloads at the same time. To be fair, this used to not only cause iTunes to hang or crash (which it still often does), but also used to mean that you’d have to contact Apple to persuade them to let you have another go at downloading them. Of course, you can turn simultaneous downloads off, which broadly solves this problem. There are two things that are annoying with this though - it massively slows down how long it takes to download an album, and you can only change the setting when something is downloading, meaning it’s often too late. The ‘Downloads’ section contains this tickbox, and it’s not there unless you’re actually downloading something.
• App Updates - you go to ‘Apps’ section, and you ask it to ‘Check for Updates’, which it does, showing you a selection of apps that need updating. ‘Great’ you think and click on ‘Download All Free Updates’ at which point it tells you the ‘information on this page is out of date’. What? Five damn seconds out of date? How quick do I have to be?
• Adding Artwork - when you add artwork to a track, or video, it takes forever. You change the settings, add the artwork, press OK, and what happens? Nothing. I’ve learnt that if you leave it for a couple of minutes, it will eventually carry on with its business, but does it really have to be that way?
• Filling you iPhone - a while back, Apple created a feature that would fill any free space with spare music. Nice. Except when I used it, it would fill my iPhone so full of music that iTunes would tell me that there was no space for Podcasts or Photos any more. That wasn’t quite what I had in mind, thanks.
• AirTunes/AirPlay on Multiple Speakers - I like to have my iTunes playing out to two AirTunes speakers. Every third or fourth time I launch iTunes it loses a connection with one or other of these, and tries to put music through my computer speakers before I change it back.

There are just a few of the things that Apple are yet to sort out. I do have a library that’s bigger than most, it’s true, and I know that many of these things stem from new features, but I’d much prefer an iTunes that did fewer things well, than many, many things really badly. Maybe in 10 more years time, that’s what we’ll get. In the meantime, is it really too much to ask for Apple to spend a bit more time making iTunes actually work properly?