Itunes now completely unusable for my setup

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Itunes now completely unusable for my setup

So, the new Itunes is here and the mad dash to suck subscribers to Apple Music clearly become the sole priority for Apple in the new era. For serious music lovers, Itunes has now become worthless as a tool.

I have a large(ish) music collection of around 110GB. I have a Macbook Air and I use an external hard drive for my Macbook Air to store my music (as the Macbook harddrive memory is too small) and to rip music CDs to. From here I run my Ipod classic, and upload to Itunes Match for my Iphone 6 and Ipad Air. It's fair to say I completely dependent on Apple products for my listening out of the home, and for quite a fair bit inside.

When Match first came along, I was able to overlook the very many teething troubles. As time went on, although it was always very glitchy in terms of metadata and artwork, generally it was a stable way of not needing to store music on either my Iphone or Ipad.

A few months ago It reached the stage a few months back where artwork started disappearing from Icloud and other glitches started ruining the experience. Even when the metadata was perfect on my macbook air using an external harddrive it simply refused to update to Icloud. I did the trick of completely tricking Itunes into "wiping" my Icloud by setting up an alternative and empty library, and then reuploaded everything again from my back up. This didn't solve most of the metadata problems for IMatch on IOS, and in fact made them worse. Inexplicably, multiple covers would appear, the wrong artists in the wrong metadata...it was like a dystopian **** for a music lover.

I hung on until the release of the new Itunes, in the naive hope that this would resolve the issues.

Today I have upgraded. Immediately Itunes on my Macbook Air now no longer recognises the external hard drive as being there, despite the settings in the preferences being exactly the same as it used to be. So it doesn't recognise any music as being in the hard drive, and thinks there is no music on the macbook air. I have spent most of today trying to resolve this, but it looks like this is a deliberate thing: Apple has deliberately stopped supporting users who store music on external hard drives.

To compound matters, the new Itunes on IOS which I have also upgraded is now STILL showing all of the screwed up metadata. Even if I could resolve this by reuploading my CDs from scratch on my Macbook, now Itunes doesn't recognise my external harddrive I do not have the space to redigitise my entire collection.

In total, and after some months of patiently trying to resolve these issues, I realise Apple now longer cares about supporting long term, serious music lovers with rare collections and is more interested in getting occasional music streamers to pay in to the new service. Itunes Match is effectively, and deliberately, broken and unfixable and the music collection I have stored on my exernal hard drive is entirely worthless.

Itunes is finished for me. What started out as the ONLY tool for digital music lovers to manage their vast collections has turned into a bug ridden, glitchy and broken service which is user unfriendly. I guess the first sign of this was the ditching of the Ipod Classic (where people could retain some ownership of their music away from the internet and separately from Apple servers) and has very quickly morphed into Apple focusing their attention to the throwaway generation of music streamers and youtubers.

My issues with Itunes and Itunes Match are now too numerous and serious to ever be fixed and I am looking at alternatives which may work across devices, although I have to say I am not holding my breath and believe I may be in the very serious situation of needing to entirely redigitise my collection. However, I have now bought a Windows PC (whereas my intention until recently was to buy a Mac Mini) and have put my Macbook and Ipad up for sale on Ebay with a view to getting something...ANYTHING else which does not tie me to a broken and unfixable service.

Apple is failing and that is sad, but I guess all good things do come to an end and I am not emotional about it, other than wistful for a time when serious users were catered for and listened to. At the end of day the customers will go where things work and serious music lovers who want to own their musix will be leaving Apple, ironically just as "Apple Music"

MacBook Air

Posted on Jul 4, 2015 8:33 AM

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Answer 1

mauro-c

Level 1

9 points

Jul 5, 2015 4:45 AM in response to hushmore

Sorry to hear of your situation, I only have iDevices, I don't own a Mac although I was contemplating buying one in the near future but am now seriously reconsidering. I have lots of music I have ripped sitting in iTunes. I have not upgraded to the latest version and probably will not, especially after all the confusion and in no small part to Apple's attitude to the people who actually buy their products, as well as this idea they have that they can tell you what you can and can't do with items you have paid for and are yours. Their aloof stance is outdated and frankly insulting. I won't subscribe to any Apple service, music or otherwise. Your post has sealed that for me. Thanks for sharing.

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Answer 2

Jul 5, 2015 7:33 AM in response to hushmore

This is a pretty horrifying story, hushmore -- I can easily see myself in your place. I've got 70,000 tracks in my music collection, and probably about one-third of them are unavailable through iTunes -- older, obscure, out-of-print or specialized stuff that I've spent many years collecting. It's passed (and grown) through a series of Macs but currently physically resides on a 1TB RAID array of external disks, so it's continually backed up.

I'm not ready to give up on iTunes yet, though I've become very cautious. I signed up for Match a few years ago, but created a new iTunes library to sync with it. This worked well, I was able to get higher-quality copies of stuff that I only had in lo-fi versions, and it was nice to have music accessible to other devices without having to manually sync them.

But then I turned Match off, and reverted to my original library. I've kept up my subscription over the years, partly out of inertia but also partly from the vague certainty that Apple will eventually get around to expanding Match to accommodate the full size of my music collection -- which I gather is going to happen finally with the release of iOS 9.

My experience with Apple (going back to 1984) is that in general, they get around to fixing things. The exceptions are stuff that they end up killing off. It doesn't look like iTunes Match is about to be killed off, with an expansion to 100K songs about to happen. Therefore I believe it will be made to work in the course of time. But I still plan to have a backup of everything.

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