Should I Upgrade to iTunes 12.5.4?

Dooooonnnnt dooooo itttttt!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

It’s the equivalent of iOS 10: you lose the beautiful album view where the tracklast coordinates to the colors on the album cover

It doesn’t matter. Apple forces it down your throat anyway. That was the last straw for me… uninstalled iTurd and switched to Foobar with no regret.

But despite the hit to an aesthetic feature, would the average Mac user see any performance boost or advantageous structural improvements?

If You Don’t Have An Apple Device (Ipod/IPhone) Ect… Does Not Really Matter If You Don’t.

But despite the hit to an aesthetic feature, would the average Mac user see any performance boost or advantageous structural improvements?

Oh yeah. That was the only reason why I wanted to keep it. But chromatic display that I missed so much overruled it all.

Long Live the Aesthetically Beautiful Chromatically Coordinated Album Artwork View!!!

It would just be really nice if they brought back the color function, and made the cover art square again. Only then would I update.

MusicBee, ladies and gentleman. Has a feature like iTunes’ cover color thingie and even so much, much more. Try it out. You’re gonna love it. And leave iTunes.. only for Apple devices performances.

Fuck. Apple.

MusicBee, ladies and gentleman. Has a feature like iTunes’ cover color thingie and even so much, much more. Try it out. You’re gonna love it. And leave iTunes.. only for Apple devices performances.

Even though it was amazing how uncanny its similarity to iTunes can be made, there were those little itty bitty things or minor differences that couldn’t be changed that kept me from full-on switching.

You keep nasty windowzez…

How did you know!

Did my agent talk? Boy, I’ll have his ass for breakfast tomorrow morning.

It doesn’t matter. Apple forces it down your throat anyway. That was the last straw for me… uninstalled iTurd and switched to Foobar with no regret.

MusicBee, ladies and gentleman. Has a feature like iTunes’ cover color thingie and even so much, much more. Try it out. You’re gonna love it. And leave iTunes.. only for Apple devices performances.

Fuck. Apple.

But you see – guru, George and myself have iOS devices. And guru and I are Mac users. It doesn’t make sense to use anything other than iTunes. And while the beautiful, colorful album view is gone – I still prefer it over other music players. If we were to use something else – play count, rating and everything else would have to be started over. VLC is the only one that I know plays everything iTunes does (audio and video), don’t know about any others.

iOS devices are wonderful but Apple has seriously started to piss me off lately. In between their wonderful overpriced products and their.. just way of doing stuff.

But despite the hit to an aesthetic feature, would the average Mac user see any performance boost or advantageous structural improvements?

There’s been some improvements on performance, but Apple will never really talk about "how".
http://www.videohelp.com/software/iTunes/version-history#changelog

Their standpoint on the details is that "you’re not a programmer and it’s closed-source so we cannot tell you unless you work for Apple."

———- Post added at 06:11 PM ———- Previous post was at 06:05 PM ———-

For MAC users, iTunes is the best you’re going to get.

There’s not a lot of free, open-source development for software in the iOS environment.
The next best thing is anything from the Apple Store for an iOS app.
That’s the other biggest development-friendly environment.

Even if iTunes support is like asking George Lucas to not do the Special Editions of Star Wars, they still work to satisfy the lowest common denominator.

Googling about alternative media players for MAC, you find a lot of names for programs that you don’t see active today.

Development Status (Very Active):
iTunes
VLC Media Player

Development Status (Unknown; likely dead; likely abandoned):
Everything else

———- Post added at 06:13 PM ———- Previous post was at 06:11 PM ———-

Most developers are on either Unix-based systems or Windows.

C++ is still quite strong for a typical program even in 2016 and I bet will stay strong in the years to come.

Python, even though not that new, is likely to become more popular.

Over the years I’ve attempted using the free "competition" but they all failed to meet some very basic criteria. And it’s rather remarkable that after all these years no one has developed a viable alternative to iTunes.

Personally, given the cosmetic vanities over the older iTunes, I’d wait until iTunes forces you to actually update (else any purchases and/or entire library will be void).

Such milestones are rare when they change the entire structure that you need to update to keep using the features and access your own library.

Given I’m still working on "legacy" hardware, and contentedly so, I’ve already reached the proverbial sunset. Yet despite supposed gains in performance over the past 5 years I’m extremely leery of buying into a hardware architecture design, the sole purpose of which seems to be to paint the consumer into an inescapable corner.

Aside from the glitter of a new case and "gaming" specs, the outstanding features to warrant an upgrade would be just sufficient enough to watch movies in pretty 1080p. AMD has done nicely to support movie watching in recent years.

If the minimal approach, with veritable safety margins included, is more preferrable, you can always upgrade to a Solid State Drive and live off external HDD’s for the extra space.

An SSD alone would speed up things on older hardware.
If only to start and close apps, reboot times, internet browsing, etc.

No real impact on downloading. Except if it’s segmented downloading (Internet Downlaod Manager, lftp-based clients, etc), then the reassembling is faster on SSD.

My old lappy is too old for a new graphics card or any major upgrade.
I’ve only done two things to it and am happy to take it with me everywhere:
1) RAM upgrade to max (8GB)
2) SSD upgrade (far less space but it’s only for browsing and minimal movie watching)

And, jeepers, that’s not even the oldest piece I have.
I have a red laptop somewhere that could use a RAM upgrade and an SSD.

Which I’ll probably do sometime this year after I get a new monitor. :ashine: Which I hope can do at least 75Hz.
I want to keep the monitor hacked to run at 71.928Hz for movie watching.

If I can get my hands on a nice 144, I’d be set for life. :love:

I’m maxed on RAM. Made the move to SSD 3 years ago.

My old lappy is too old for a new graphics card or any major upgrade.
I’ve only done two things to it and am happy to take it with me everywhere:
1) RAM upgrade to max (8GB)
2) SSD upgrade (far less space but it’s only for browsing and minimal movie watching)

I’ve done the same to my 10y old PC and it’s still slow as fuck. Especially iTunes… it takes, I shit you not, over 1 minute until I can actually start playing a song.

VLC is the only one that I know plays everything iTunes does (audio and video), don’t know about any others.

What I’Tunes CAN PLAY?
Man you are greatly mistaken, I-Tunes is nothing but shit. If you want to know what player mean read text bellow!!!

For MAC users, iTunes is the best you’re going to get.

It’s not true. You can run foobar on a Mac (or any other windows software) if you install some virtual machine.

Use Foobar/MusicBee my dude

iStill use iTunes 8.xx and iAm perfectly fine with it. 🙂

Use Foobar/MusicBee my dude

Dude! I don’t do Windoze. 😉 (And ain’t gonna run virtual just for playing music).

"You keep nasty Windowzez…" made me crack up.

Hmmm… So iTunes 12.6 brings back multiple playlist windows.

Tempting.