I know this is killing some of you, but it's true...

Apple Is Finally Killing iTunes
Farewell to a clunky but world-shattering icon

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iTunes currently does — such as purchasing songs and syncing phones — just with a sleeker interface that’s free of the outdated and oft-bemoaned features of the heritage product, and more closely bundled with streaming service Apple Music.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 to Rolling 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.”

Amy X. Wang, provided by Rolling Stone

I already buy and rent different types of media through their individual apps on my Apple TV as well as my iPhone and iPads so I'm fine with that. The only problem I have with this is the problem of Apple creating separate applications for PC users such as myself. I remember how bad iTunes for PC was in the beginning and it's certainly had its issues with recent iterations. Now they're going to triple that experience with separate apps?

Seems like another life when I bought the 1st gen ipod and installed itunes on my Apple laptop. It was so amazing and exciting at the time, all 5 gigs of it. Years later, iTunes became a curse.

Oh thank god!

What?? Napster is gone???

I hope this means the end to some things I cannot do on my iPhone and have to get on my laptop to do it with iTunes. That aspect of the ecosystem has been antiquated and messed up for way too many years.

Great! When will it stop asking me to update it on my windows computers? How will I back up our iPad's though?

I back up my Ipads directly to the cloud. It is automatically synced to my Iphone. It is easy. I hated iTunes. It was a piece of crap, and did not work when I needed it to.

About time. I haven’t “bought” an album in probably 10 years. I discovered Slacker around 2009-2010 maybe.

quote:

Originally posted by dry-fly:
About time. I haven’t “bought” an album in probably 10 years. I discovered Slacker around 2009-2010 maybe.

I stream mostly myself but I also purchase the CD if there are four tracks on the album I highly enjoy.
Yup, I buy the CD not crappy quality digital downloads. I may have purchased 20 digital downloads over the years as the song was only available digitally or the rest of the album sucked.
I rip all my CDs to a lossless format and to mp3.

I’ve got a copy of SoundJam MP that runs on my old Mac Quadra 650. SJ was the product Apple purchased and turned into iTunes. It did one thing and did it well... ripping down CD’s into mp3s. It’s good to see Apple finally breaking up the mess that iTunes has become.

So tell me what to do about my audiobooks.

I currently download them to my PC in iTunes, then move whichever ones I am currently listening to onto my iPod. (Yes, I still have an iPod - I'm typically using my iPhone for other things. I like having all the books on my PC, even though I know they're all in my Audible library.

I have iTunes on my W10 box but haven't listened to it in years. I'm certainly no Apple fan but they do a lot of things right. iTunes was not one of them.

iTunes was once very good, as I understand it. But somewhere along the line Apple broke it and never managed to get it right again.

Never heard of it

quote:

Originally posted by murphman:
So tell me what to do about my audiobooks.

Audible has an app for PC.

My question is how do I transfer audio files to my iPhone without iTunes?

Hard to kill what's already dead - no matter how hard you flog it.

quote:

Originally posted by cheesegrits:
My question is how do I transfer audio files to my iPhone without iTunes?

Good question and one of my few beefs with Apple. Here I had this shiny new-to-me iPhone 6S. Now I was part of the vaunted Apple ecosystem. Apple: For the people that want to live the highly-portable, digital media life. Yay!

Only to find out that, with no Mac computer, or capable MS-Win PC, there was no way to get my own music library onto my iThings?

Just a little >< disillusioning.

From what I've found so far is that those who will run macOS Catalina (just announced) is that when their iDevice is connected to their Mac, they can sync from a sidebar in the Finder.
TechCrunch

As to those with an older OS, haven't seen anything yet.

Possibly the worst computer program I've seen in over 30 years of PC use and abuse.

Its logic it's foreign to me.

Good riddance.

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