By John Dodge
Among Sun Microsystems (now Oracle something or other) founder Scott NcNealy’s favorite potshots at Microsoft was calling Windows a “hairball.” Know what? iTunes is a bigger hairball.
That a company hasn’t come along and blown the iTunes music jail out of the water is mind blowing.
iTunes is highly restrictive and unintuitive. Maybe I am unintuitive. It’s me or iTunes, but I have loathed it for some time.
Here’s what I want: to login into the cloud and access my music (photos, videos, books..you name it) no matter what device I am using or where I am.
What I get from iTunes is music that disappears, music that won’t easily move from device to device and an interface that is hard to use.
Beware, getting a new computer risks rocking your music world and not in a good way.
The most recent saga included acquiring new desktop and an iPhone. Let me start with the desktop, which happened first and around Christmas time. I had already experienced problems with iTunes on my an iPad acquired in the middle of last year. Sometimes, the music store would not download. The menus confused me. I couldn’t easily find stuff.
So moving my 2,600 song-strong music library on iTunes from my old desktop to the new unit scared me. It turned out not to be so bad. I authorized the new desktop as one of my five allowed iTunes repositories and bingo, all my purchased music magically showed up.
That provided a new home base for all my tunes for downloading to iPad, iPod and iPhone. All the music CDs I had transferred from CDs were gone, but I could, over time, download it again.
Just as magically, all that music vanished about a month later. It wasn’t in a folders on my PC. It simply vanished. Poof. Gone.
I was perplexed. Where was it? Was changing my e-mail login responsible for my loss? How did this happen? Who could I call? I have no idea. My purchase records were all there, but the music was gone.
