“What’s happened to the song list?” Complaints of that sort have been loud and long since Apple updated iTunes in October. The new version is officially iTunes 12 – though there have been so many tenth-, hundredth- and thousandth-decimal releases since it was first officially unveiled in January 2001 that the real revision figure is probably in the hundreds.
In fact, iTunes began life as Soundjam MP in 1998, written by a trio of coders. Apple bought it in mid-2000, rejigged its appearance and steamrollered the paid-for MP3 app player market – including one called Audion. (The developers’ tale of how Audion missed out on becoming iTunes is a salutary lesson; they missed a meeting with Apple because they expected to be bought by AOL.)
Now, iTunes has come a long, long way since its first incarnation, when it basically played songs and did visualisations. As time progressed, it added syncing with iPods, then handling video and TV shows, then syncing with iPhones, then buying from the App Store, then syncing with iPads, until now it is a gigantic front for all sorts of content that struggles to coexist on a single desktop screen. It’s like a grocery store that has become a gigantic shopping mall, but never been able to stop to think about the best design for its current incarnation.
Compare that to the iPhone, where iTunes’s functions are split into five apps: Music (on-device music), iTunes Store (to buy music and video), App Store (for mobile apps), Videos (bought) and iBooks (for written content). Each can be updated separately; there’s no grand foofarah, unlike an iTunes desktop update. Splitting iTunes into separate apps is often mooted by pundits, but won’t happen; with more than 500 million users simply getting people to remember where to go for content would become a headache. Windows users might hate iTunes (and don’t we know it) but it’s monolithic for a reason.
And it’s not that necessary now; since 2011, iCloud has meant you can back up and restore from the cloud, though minimal storage on older iPhones makes iTunes necessary to install big operating system updates. Music is easily transferred in the cloud via iTunes Match or Google Music, or just streamed from Spotify, Deezer and the like.
Even so, look at how relentlessly iTunes gets updated, even when there’s no real change: nine updates in 2014. Support for operating systems, sure. Support for new devices, OK. But it often feels as though iTunes gets updated just because it needs to show some sort of forward motion.
Why Does It Take So Long To Download An Itunes Movie Rental
Something similar has happened with Sonos, whose software for controlling its music players has had a radical remake – darker, blockier – on mobile, but not (yet) on the desktop, though you can foresee the latter app suffering a gravitational attraction towards the more-used app. Why the update? So the desktop app doesn’t look out of date.
Why does iTunes take so long (and so many resources) to download a DRM-free file? 1 post 0megapart!cle. But the big deal is the 'processing' that iTunes does to the file, which takes at least. Nov 25, 2016 - So you've got a fresh install of Windows and your first stop is making sure your. Or iPad, it's possible to do so through iTunes on Windows quite easily. Of the music from the expansive iTunes catalog on-demand, so long as. Why does iTunes take so long to install on Windows? Doesn't seem to take too long for me. I guess it all depends too if you're installing onto a HDD or a SSD. Because iTunes is the everything program that does a million things. It syncs iPods, backs up iPhone data, has two separate music stores (Apple Music for streaming.
Look around, and the pattern repeats on so many apps, because updates give the appearance of momentum. Like sharks, they have to move forward or die.
But how often to update? This is the problem product managers wrestle with. Leave a product alone for a year, and people – even those who love it – assume it’s been forgotten. Keep updating it every month and people can’t cope with the change. Even companies such as Google and Facebook, which can update their products silently (Google updates its search algorithm more than once a day, on average), are cautious about making obvious changes. They tend to fiddle around the edges, which even then brings moans from people who do notice the differences.
This is the real question about software: what’s the perfect interval between updates? What’s the right trigger for a new version? Do you update to incorporate each new social network that springs up? Does the rise of mobile mean that desktop apps should mimic them?
There aren’t any obvious answers. But when you’re next cursing a snail-like update progress bar, remember: the idea is to make you think that the product hasn’t been forgotten. Updating is how programs show you they’re still alive – even if their purpose has been superseded.
Why Does Renting A Movie On Itunes Take So Long To Download
I am trying to sync my iTunes music to my iPhone. It takes a really long time (> 20 mins) when I try to do so.
a) Has anyone else run into this ? How did you fix it in that case?
b) Is there a way I can work around the iTunes sync process to copy media to my iPhone?
gprasantgprasant
1 Answer
Assuming there is nothing wrong with your setup and that there isn't anything causing additional delays to your sync, you might want to consider two things that impact the iTunes sync speed:
Encoding of audio files as they get loaded on to your iDevice.
Speed of USB 2.0 interface @ 480Mbit/sec.
The first one would only apply if you are syncing new audio files to your device and you have the option enabled for downsampling AAC/MP3 files. It is convenient if you want to minimize space, but you can tick a box that says any audio file you put on your iDevice will be adjusted down to a (say) 128Kbps bitrate to save space on the iDevice. If you have this, it does the encode single-threaded while you're syncing and thus adds time to the sync but for the obvious benefit of taking up far less space on the iDevice.
The second point is the far more likely culprit since you're probably moving megabytes or gigabytes of data around. Pictures on a recent iPhone take a few MB each, videos you captured can run into the hundreds of MB and naturally DVDs/iTunes movies probably take closer to a gigabyte. If iTunes is deciding to take a backup as it does periodically, that could be the size of your phone (16GB/64GB/128GB/etc.) Now pumping this through a 480Mbit/sec USB 2.0 interface would theoretically get a maximum of 48MB/sec, though USB overhead probably chops 20% off of that so maybe you're getting 40MB/sec so for a backup of 16GB of iDevice data it would take nearly 6 minutes.
Presumably the lightning interface can handle USB 3.0 speeds, but only the iPad Pro as of 2015 apparently has that capability, though I don't think Apple has officially enabled that yet (as of May 2016) so we don't know how fast it could go and I don't think Apple has published the specs. For all your other devices, you're at the speeds mentioned above.
iTunes is a bit of a dog and capping at USB 2.0 speeds isn't going to help things. The best I can suggest is to enable WiFi sync (if available) so that you can at least have your iDevice sync with your computer while not tethered with a Lightning cable.
bjbbjb
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Why Does Itunes Take So Long To Download Updates
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