I see a lot of people saying that iTunes is a terrible application and needs seriously revamped. I don't really understand why people feel this way. Yes iTunes on Windows is terrible but on the Mac it works pretty well, the interface is easy to use, it sorts and keeps track of music well and has all the features you could need from a music management program. So what are your reasons for disliking it?
I don't really dislike iTunes even now, as exasperated as I get with its loss of some features over time, and its eternal and infernal drift (in my opinion) towards a dumbed down version more compatible with the iOS app "Music".
I really really loved iTunes while there were some pretty fancy options for playlist content manipulation: for awhile there you could could get
visual rearrangements of successive option-shuffle commands applied to content of a playlist, tweak it a little more manually until it looked like how you figured you'd like to hear it, then freeze it by applying the "copy to play order" command (that step you can still do) and then finally port it to the iOS device "pre-shuffled" and ready to play straight through. I do really miss the visual presentations of serially reshuffled list content; it was great to see how it would play before I froze a pre-shuffled play order.
There was also a time you could specify
per playlist a default of shuffle-on or play-through order.
I do like still being able to create assorted smart playlists and sometimes use them to refresh content on iPods I sync manually via iTunes. And I like being able to folder playlists of a certain type together. I have some tracklists that are seasonal, some that are attuned to other sorts of themes, some that are just containers used to aggregate tracks I want to stick on a certain iPod or iOS device next time I refresh it, etc.
As far as editing the music files' metadata and forcing preferred ways of presenting info in iTunes, I got around some of the conflicts across different genres by just setting up separate iTunes libraries for certain categories of music.
That worked great until the iPhone turned up and demanded to be associated to only one iTunes library. Then I went nuts for awhile making a separate library for such devices, and having to drag duplicated files around and retag some of them to force a "my way or highway" situation for multiple-genred music on iPhones.
And then along came Apple music with its insistence on also having an iCloud Music Library if I wanted to be able to download rather than just stream AM Tracks, and to mix and match my own music and AM acquisitions in playlists on an iOS device. Another separate iTunes library then, since no way was I going to let that upload-redownload process of establishing an iCloud Music Library mess with my carefully tagged files in any of my other iTunes libraries.
Gratefully appreciated: Somewhere along the way Apple did reinstate ability to have multiple playlists open for editing at once, although now you have to right-click on a list to "open in new window" and I think originally you just double-clicked on the list name to get that to happen. Also I preferred having it open in list view but now it defaults to something with images of the album cover on each track which... sorry,,,, but that just takes up space, and is annoying if you're just making a fixed-play-order list of several classical works off the same album. It makes you scroll around checking out the thing if it's a big playlist, like all of Bach's cello suites or the Goldberg variations.
On balance I liked Tunes better when it did incorporate apps and stuff like ringtones and audiobooks as well. I understand why they did what they did with apps but it's still annoying if you have a few same-model mobile devices and now have to download their app versions and updates individually over WiFi or celllular.
I can still stick audio books in playlists in iTunes library and play them on non-iOS iPods, and I like that. But, they end up in Books app on iOS devices. It's sort of weird to me to have them residing in with ebooks on the iPads and iPhones. I don't think of reading books and listening to books as being the same thing at all.
Apple offers in Books a preset category of "Audiobooks" but they don't have "Not Audiobooks"... which I sometimes find exasperating when glancing over my Books library and running into a title and thinking "oh wow, I bought that in ebook format? I forgot about that, how cool, I'll read that next"... and then later realizing it's just the audiobook I got from Audible that has landed in Books on my XR or SE but that I only listen to upstairs on an old iPod's "Music" app and keep falling asleep while supposedly listening to it.
So I have my complaints about iTunes (and certainly about iOS Music app) but I'm not an iTunes hater. More like a grumbler and sometimes I have to apologize when realizing Apple have just tweaked "how" you get to deploy a feature rather than ditching it as I had feared after an iTunes upgrade. Somehow though it's not quite as much fun as an Easter egg hunt in a new app, this process of having to prowl around a post-upgrade iTunes to find out how to make this or that feature still make itself available,,, or how to get some player-window variant to show up or stretch out or disappear.
I'm still grateful to whoever at MacRumors here pointed out you can command-click in the little album cover icon in the main iTunes player window to fetch up the album cover as a resizable player unto itself (dintinct from the miniplayer) if you prefer it.
Shrug. The iTunes app is, amazingly, free. It's fairly well documented by a lot of power users if we care to look stuff up. And iTunes has cost Apple millions to maintain and expand and shrink it. So.... "if wishes were horses, beggars would ride." We get the ride free at least, which when you think about it, is pretty remarkable.
Plus... there's always Doug to the rescue:
https://dougscripts.com/itunes/index.php
EDIT: wow, Doug just recently put up a script that will visually represent a shuffled playlist's new order. It copies the list, adds "-Shuffled" to the name of it, and shuffles it and shows the new order. And if you click on it again, it will reshuffle it yet again and show that new order. Way to go. I know how I'm spending some of the rest of my weekend. I might have to kick in a donation to ol' Doug for that one.
