At the start of the millennium, Apple famously set out to upend the music business by dragging it into the digital realm. The iTunes store provided an easy way of finding and buying music, and iTunes provided an elegant way of managing it. By 2008, Apple was the biggest music vendor in the US. But with its recent shift toward streaming media, Apple risks losing its most music-obsessed users: the collectors. Most of iTunes' latest enhancements exist solely to promote the recommendation-driven Apple Music, app downloads, and iCloud. Users interested only in iTunes' media management features—people with terabytes of MP3s who want a solid app to catalog and organize their libraries—feel abandoned as Apple moves away from local file storage in favor of cloud-based services. These music fans (rechristened 'power users' in the most recent lingo) are looking for alternatives to Apple's market-dominating media management software, and yearn for a time when listening to music didn't require being quite so connected. So Long, and Thanks for All the Rips For longtime customers, threats of 'I'm quitting Apple' are the digital equivalent of the eternal promise to ditch Manhattan, San Francisco, or fill-in-the-blank for someplace more affordable and tolerable. Apple iTunes lets you organize and stream Apple Music, download and watch video and listen to Podcasts. It can automatically download new music, app, and book purchases across all your devices and computers. And it's a store that has everything you need to be entertained. But unlike moving out of town, moving out of iTunes is feasible. TJ Connelly—a DJ for the Boston Red Sox, the New England Patriots, WZBC, and elsewhere—wrote the impassioned step-by-step manual ' When iTunes, started, he says, it was essentially a music player. That changed with iTunes 4.0 in 2003. Mozilla firefox 52 for mac. 'You got the music store, and that was awesome,' he says. But the iTunes Store introduced a new set of concerns and UI decisions. To prevent piracy, Apple made it impossible to move music from an iPod or iPhones or iPad back to a computer. More controversially, the iTunes Store locked all files with DRM from 2003 until 2007, when Steve Jobs personally lobbied for its removal. Apple's frequent function-shuffling in iTunes has long been an irritation. But Connelly, who's been an Apple user since the 1980s, understands all that. Where it started to go wrong was with the extras no one asked for, and few used. ITunes University. Epson l360 driver for macos high sierra. 'They just kept adding more crap into the app,' he says. 'I don't even know how many things just showed up in the task bar that I had to turn off. Then [with an iPhone] mobile apps also end up in the music player to control your phone.' (Apple declined to comment in any way for this story.). Alex Washburn/WIRED For music collectors looking for an effective tool to play and manage audio files, Apple's mission creep has long been an irritation, and random burps like cross-branded mandatory downloads by a certain stadium rock band given to bouts of self-importance have been easy to LOL away. But Apple's latest attempts to back up users' libraries to iCloud proved outright dangerous. Some users who checked the wrong boxes found their or with (Apple forgot to use iTunes Match, according to Connelly). At least one saw his entire collection copied over with. Others found themselves to their MP3s on their iPhones until they docked the phone to their computer and renewed the license agreements—even if they hadn't purchased a single track through the iTunes Store. Many waited for the bugs to work themselves out, blinked at the EULA, sighed, and carried on with the updates. Others are taking more drastic action. IAlternatives Connelly's escape route led him to, one of the many music players available for the Mac. Many iTunes alternatives work fine as music players, but few are built for long-term file management. ![]() ![]() The offers a PC-like interface for audio organization that can be awkward for Mac users. In a move that sounds familiar, the latest update to OS X no longer supports, a popular PC alternative to iTunes. There are some, but for a Mac user seeking a fully operational iTunes-like app that will manage files with the same ease, Swinsian leads the pack. It aims to replicate iTunes' most elegant functions, strip away the bloat, and add some extra tools.
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