Amerika

I’ve been using iTunes for about 3 years, ever since I first had the (mis)fortune of receiving an iPod for a Christmas gift. At the time, and since, I was working out often enough and decided it would be nice to have. It’s also nice once you can get it working in a car built before 2003 or so. Speaking of that, let’s get right to the reasons I hate Apple and iTunes.

iPod:

• My car’s tape deck comes with a little flip top lid which has an exterior LCD display. People told me, “just get one of those radio transceiver thingies and you’ll be fine”. The quality is always terrible, especially in a place like Massachusetts where there are so many radio stations there’s hardly any bandwidth left to use for the broadcast of your iPod. I have an iPod; why would I want to broadcast it through the air so I can listen to something of less quality?
• Crashes a lot after 3 years of light use. I know, I know, which electronics out there last a while? Hm, let’s see – I’ve had the original hard drive in my PC for six solid years now, added components, taken some out, had wireless, had Norton on there (thankfully that’s gone), done ridiculous amounts of downloading, asked it to do more than I probably should…and it’s still kickin’. No problems…knock on wood. Even the power supply is original. I’ll be upgrading some components shortly, but if Dell can make a much more complicated piece of machinery and Windows can make an OS that doesn’t crash for six years, what is Apple doing wrong, and what’s with all the snooty commercials about how stable their products are?
• Recently, I had to make an appointment with an “Apple genius” at an Apple store so he could revive my iPod after it was “REALLY frozen”.  Not “kinda” frozen, but “REALLY” frozen. He had to do some weird mojo on it: toggle the “hold” switch (courtesy of Sony…had one of those on my MiniDisc player, which I actually preferred now that I think of it); plug it into a wall outlet, then do the “hold down menu and middle button” thing to restart it.
• Back to the car thing, I had to take out my tape deck, put a tape converter in, thread the wire around the back of the tape deck, and have the wire piece hanging out by the ash tray so I could use my iPod via my tape deck and get somewhat decent quality during car rides. I guess I’d have to do that with any car without an Aux In port, but it still pissed me off.

iTunes:

• Generally speaking, it’s a clunky program. Weird menus, iTunes store sucks and it’s difficult to find things…and they wonder why people illegally download music and movies. Search capability and user-specific sorting capability is sorely lacking. And therein lies the problem with Apple: its users just blindly accept whatever the programmers want them to do, instead of customizing for the benefit of the user.  Seems like a small thing until you’re trying to appeal to millions and millions of PC users and making annoying commercials.
• You go and download some album from some random source, and you instruct iTunes to “Add folder to your library”. Pretty simple, but if it’s not tagged using one of iTunes’ preferred methods, you have to search for your recently added music – which means if there’s no tag, you have to go through ALL of your music until you figure out how iTunes decided to label it, or maybe it was mislabeled in the first place. You can’t just scroll to the bottom of the list of all of your music.

I’m going back to WinAmp, where at least when you add something it goes to the bottom of the list and you have the option of relabeling and sorting easily. It’s been hours and I cannot find some music anywhere in iTunes even though I saw iTunes go through the process of adding the songs…no thanks to this program.