Apple Is Finally Killing iTunes

Apple Is Finally Killing iTunes

Farewell to a clunky but world-shattering icon

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It’s the end of a music era. Nearly two decades after launching iTunes and ripping up the retail-store model of album purchases, Apple is ready to retire the iconic product, according to Bloomberg. During the software keynote at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference in San Jose, California next Monday, the tech giant is set to replace iTunes with standalone music, television and podcast apps.

The move, which has been rumored for years now, will align Apple’s media strategy across the board: iPhones and iPads already offer separate Music, TV and Podcast apps in lieu of the centralized iTunes app that lives on Macs and Macbooks. Users can expect the new Music app to offer some of the same functionalities that iTunes currently does — such as purchasing songs and syncing phones — just with a sleeker interface that’s free of the outdated and oft-bemoaned features of the heritage product, and more closely bundled with streaming service Apple Music.

But the scrapping of iTunes’ brand symbolizes a lot, too. By portioning out its music, television and podcast offerings into three separate platforms, Apple will pointedly draw attention to itself as a multifaceted entertainment services provider, no longer as a hardware company that happens to sell entertainment through one of its many apps. That’s crucial for Apple’s future, as the company combats sluggish phone sales with aggressive growth in its services division. At WWDC this year, according to various reports, Apple is planning to buff up other apps including Books, Messages and Mail; it also announced ambitious plans for original video programming featuring the likes of Reese Witherspoon and Steve Carell just a few months ago, in another bid to grow its content presence in entertainment industries.

Welcome as the death of iTunes may be to frustrated users, the software will forever deserve credit for the revolution it engineered in the early 2000s. Before iTunes debuted, the music industry was tearing its hair out trying to combat illegal file-sharing on Napster; Jobs’ new product presented the digital era’s first sustainable, user-friendly way to listen to music. Other firms like Sony and Microsoft had toyed with the idea of digital record stores, yet they “were technology companies that knew how to build disc players and hardware, but they weren’t companies that had demonstrated Apple’s sophistication with regard to software,” Warner Music’s vice president Paul Vidich recalled toRolling Stone in 2013, on the iTunes Store’s 10th anniversary. “It really took a company that was able to bridge those two things and come up with an attractive consumer product.”

I completely forgot iTunes was a thing until I saw this article, so I don't really care

 

[ToroidalBoat]

I remember back when iTunes was first introduced. It was promoted as such a marvel.

"Now you can download music online legally!"

 

[DK 900]

RIP iTunes. You will be mourned, but not missed.

Only based Winamp is worth your time

Has Winamp been updated? I traded it for AIMP a year or two ago. Winamp would take over an hour to initialize my entire library, but AIMP takes about 5 seconds.

 

[Absolutego]

winamp and/or foobar is all anyone could ever want in a music management app.

Dopamine's also a good player if one looks fondly on Zune Software back in the day, though it's not a very good manager. I do most of the metadata tagging/formatting in foobar and then use Dopamine for when I'm actually playing music.

 

[queue-anon]

My main concern is how much of a pain in the ass it's going to be to import all my music into whatever Apple coughs up, because I have serious doubts it'll be in any way better than iTunes. Most of the "helpful" fixes Apple has made since Steve Jobs died were things no one asked for and often made things more difficult to use.

 

[Club Sandwich]

metadata tagging/formatting in foobar

i use mp3tag for metadata. CDDB, gracenote support, and you can do thing programmatically to entire folders and stuff.

 

[Gordon Cole]

I kept getting iTunes gift cards from my cousin for Christmas even after I switched to MusicBee. Wonder what he's gonna get me now.

Also fuck their DRM.

 

[Enthusiast]

It would be nice to simplify the offerings. Hopefully the Music app still has the phone reset/update/etc. options and you don't need to download more bloatware for that.

 

[MediocreMilt]

Good. Last time I tried running iTunes, it started trying to delete my (fortunately backed up) music library without my consent. Based Rhythmbox all the way.

 

[sasazuka]

It doesn't affect me personally because I never stopped buying music on CD but I hope the demise of iTunes isn't a sign that people are giving up buying music entirely in favour of streaming services.

Even if I wasn't a physical media die-hard and wanted to buy music solely via digital distribution, I'd still want to own it instead of paying a monthly fee to stream it. (Yeah, I read the article and know people will still be able to buy music via a separate Apple Music store, it's the symbolism of shutting iTunes down as a brand that I find a bit disconcerting, as though it's a harbinger of things to come.)

 

[Wake me up]

winamp and/or foobar is all anyone could ever want in a music management app.

Unless integrated data collection is a major necessity for you, in which case the loss of iTunes is going to be a major bummer. I guess that only applies to Apple fanboys though, how else is the Apple marketing team supposed to cross-reference your iTunes, iPhone and Macbook data to keep up-to-date with all of your private information??

 

[Racist Trash]

Good itunes was one of the shittiest pieces of software I have ever had to use it was so fucking annoying and invasive.
"HEY I NOTICED YOU WANTED TO MOVE A SINGLE SONG? NOPE YOU HAVE TO SYNC THE ENTIRE FUCKING THING OVER OLD GEN USB WAIT A COUPLE OF HOURS."

Good. Last time I tried running iTunes, it started trying to delete my (fortunately backed up) music library without my consent.

Wait I think I actually had a repressed memory, I had just finished copying my mothers massive CD collection over to the HDD to add it to her Ipod and then when I plugged the ipod in it wiped the entire thing apparently it had decided to sync the HDD files to the Ipod rather than the other way around.

I had never felt so angry at a piece of software before or since it made me lose hope with how shit it was and yet people praised it like the second coming of Christ.

 

[Wake me up]

I hope the demise of iTunes isn't a sign that people are giving up buying music entirely

People definitely are flocking en masse to streaming services like Spotify. The reason why buying music will always be a thing for the foreseeable future is not the popularity of streaming but the fact that it pays jackshit to actual musicians, even less than CDs and stuff, which is already pretty fucking low, even laughably so.

So if streaming became the only way to consume music by tomorrow, musicians would literally stop making any money at all and it would be the final nail in the coffin of an industry where you already have to draw blood from a stone to survive (except if you're lucky enough to be a Top 100 Billboard artist or something, in which case you're a millionaire now, congrats).

 

[Megaroad]

Can I get my money back for all those songs, movies and apps I bought 8 years ago?

 

[Xarpho]

I remember back when iTunes was first introduced. It was promoted as such a marvel.

"Now you can download music online legally!"

It's way older than that. It was originally an independent piece of software called SoundJam MP released in the late 1990s. Then Apple bought it and rereleased it as iTunes (with a new interface to boot), then it became integrated with the iPod when Apple released it in 2001 (and using iTunes with a Mac was the ONLY way to use it in the first year or so), and only then did they integrate a store into it.

Killing iTunes is another sign of how Apple seems to want to make iOS and macOS the same thing.

 

[Kari Kamiya]

I've never went through the store to buy shit anyway, everything on my playlist is 90% pirated, 10% ripped from CDs. All I care about is whether-or-not it'll stay on my desktop even after it dies until I get myself a new way to store my playlist, but given this is Apple, I'm expecting to boot up this old laptop one day to find it gone.

 

[GrungyLawnChlorinate]

Only based Winamp is worth your time

There is only Musicbee. Best on any platform for local music catalog, nothing else even comes close.

 

[Recoil]

There is only Musicbee.

>using russki audio libraries

I kid, I kid. This is the first I've heard of it. Looks sleeker than iTunes by a mile, tho.

 

[MarvinTheParanoidAndroid]

just with a sleeker interface that’s free of the outdated and oft-bemoaned features of the heritage product, and more closely bundled with streaming service Apple Music.

In other words, a stripped down, worthless version of the original.

Glad I never backed the Apple horse.

 

[Absolutego]

i use mp3tag for metadata. CDDB, gracenote support, and you can do thing programmatically to entire folders and stuff.

I'm too autistic about my music classification to trust proper categorization to a 3rd party database, hence using Foobar to do everything manually. Most of those plebs keep the featuring artists in hip hop track titles, the barbarians!

 

[Wraith]

Good riddance to bad rubbish. I had to install this in order to help an associate a couple of years ago. What a nightmare. I hate this frickin' company.