Tiny Player - a music player for iPhone at http://www.catnapgames.com/tiny-player/ (free). Got tired of using iTunes to "sync" mp3s and watching it fail. Took about 2 months' worth of weekends and evenings, now I use it every day.
It must be really hard to maintain and add features to such a huge old application. Platforms have changed underneath it, the devices and services it connects to have come and gone, Objective C has changed a lot as well. And then there's the Windows version...
Still, iTunes is crap. I hated it so much that I wrote my own music player for iOS, just to avoid using iTunes for putting music on my phone [1].
My guess is that sooner or later, iTunes will be dismantled and the features will be split into multiple smaller apps. There will be a music app that JUST plays music from the Apple Music account, a podcast app that JUST plays podcasts, a sync app that JUST helps you manage stuff on your phone etc. Some features will be removed (Internet radio, ripping & burning CDs). And of those that remain, only a few will need to keep a Windows counterpart. That way, things will be easier to maintain.
(My Opinion): This is a business decision. The user is a captive audience (no alternatives available), so Apple has a disincentive to optimize anything other than profit generators.
And it's not just Apple. In Google Play, try housekeeping your app collection, or re-install a specific app on a new device. It's technically possible, but the more apps you have installed in the past, the harder it gets.
Apple is the company that forced every major label that wanted to have its music on iTunes to abandon DRM, what possible motivation would they have for wanting to bring it back?
All Non-Apple Lighting Cables require a official chip from Apple. So Tim Cook might say that DRM is wild speculation it is actually happening now with all their cables.
So in order to buy a adapter I MUST buy a cable with a chip from Apple that makes it authorized.
EDIT : I guess EFF are wild speculators?
"To its credit, Apple has been adamant it won’t use the new design to restrict your listening experience. But therein lies the problem: you shouldn’t have to depend on a manufacturer’s permission to use its hardware however you like (or, for that matter, to build your own peripherals and accessories for it)."
Currently "it’s impossible to connect a speaker or other audio device to an iPhone without Apple software governing it"
Yea, I do think that they are wild speculators. Just because I believe in some of their causes doesn't mean they can do no wrong. I think that they tend to go to more of an extreme than I'm comfortable with. But I think it's understandable because when they fight for freedom and what have you, they face opposition from people and businesses that shapes their opinion of them. This means that they become more partisan and fight against these 'rivals' instead - which is not wrong - but it's too political for me.
Your ears don't listen to digital signals or encrypted sound waves (they can't decrypt it). So, how do you go from digital signal on a Lightning cable to actual sound waves for the human ear? They convert the signal, obviously, somewhere along the line. The DAC is in the headphones now, instead (presumably, similar to every other bluetooth headset since forever, I suppose.)
The analog output can never be removed from the chain, so to speak. This is the "analog gap", and also why it's not really sensible or possible to "encrypt" physical audio signals in a manner to prevent people from copying them, when the copying-person is also the intended recipient of the end-result.
If the analog gap is reduced to holding a microphone up to your headphones, or doing fiddly soldering and destroying the headphones in the process, then that's probably good enough to stop >95% of the current use of said analog gap.
I think Apple would have split up iTunes long ago if it were only a Mac application, but they don't want to distribute a bunch of smaller Windows apps.
Sure. Hopefuly "a bunch" could be reduced to just two: Apple Music client and iPhone sync app. The rest would be removed without a replacement (on Windows). The headphone jack removal shows that Apple is willing to make people angry about some things for a long term benefit and iTunes is imho a good candidate for the next "act of courage", heh.
Maybe, but I think there's still some value to a controlled management application for either a large volume or to at least ensure that it's not a faulty wireless connection. It's a lot easier to move a few hundred gig over lightning than it is over wifi, and that first impression is probably going to be the biggest.
Then again, if they do go towards a totally wireless phone, I guess it would only be sensible to just ditch the lightning port entirely. and have a fully sealed case.
Still, I'd be pretty happy to have a stand-alone sync/management app; right now I use iTunes as an staging ground just to make sure that whatever goes on the phone looks right in iTunes first (correct tagging, correct album artwork). I don't mind it in this function, but if I could I would do away with it.
Well, I was more meaning like moving 20+ gig of music or other data, not for managing devices. As far as I know, the apple configurator is more of a management tool not an individual device tool (for sending media)
isn't itunes still needed in some "recovery" situations? Like fixing a bad update, backing up/restoring a phone, and (not quite along the same lines, but important to me) allowing install of in-dev applications.
I guess some of those could be handled by going into an apple store, but I'd still be a bit peeved if they removed the lifeline to my phone as a cost cutting measure.
a dedicated "update/restore" client makes more sense, in that case. Not saying it can't also be bundled in itunes, but something with, say, a bit more diagnostic view when run separately would be nice/useful, and not stop the general purpose use cases in iTunes.
> These days the iPhone should be able to do all the syncing it needs directly against the internet.
If Apple provided a documented set of APIs to allow me to setup my own server then this would make sense. As it is, I see no reason why apple should hold my backups on their systems, why they should have any involvement with my syncing of data to my phone.
Maybe I'm in the minority but I still use it to sync a bunch of stuff off my NAS to my devices. I wish there was a better way to do it, but the wifi sync at home is about as good as I can get given the restrictions.
I really don't think they would. iTunes has been awful for pretty much the entirety of it's existence. It's not Windows stopping it being magically wonderful.
Is that so? Some years ago I remember some rando's blog post that seemed to completely invent this narrative from thin air, and it got repeated a lot by Apple fans who have never built Windows applications and probably grossly overestimate its cost. This seems like a pretty lame excuse for one of the world's most powerful companies to not do something it would otherwise want to do.
I don't guess it's a cost issue. iTunes is the Apple trojan horse into the Windows platform. They know that they can get anything onto a Windows desktop by crammng it into this one application. My guess is that strategically they don't want to give this up.
> My guess is that sooner or later, iTunes will be dismantled and the features will be split into multiple smaller apps
I've been hoping for this for ages, but looking at the new Music app on iOS I guess I should be careful what I wish for. At least iTunes isn't that bad.
I've been listening to music by artists, playing albums in whatever random order iTunes/music deigned to give them in. It's not perfect as I'd like them to be in release order, but never mind.
Updated to ios 10, that feature no longer exists. I can "shuffle" an artists songs, or listen to them in alphabetical order. That seems to be it. Thanks so much.
You need to be on WiFi. Open a desktop browser and point it to the URL that the app gives you in the Upload tab or get the Tiny Loader Mac app (http://www.catnapgames.com/tiny-loader/) to just drag & drop files and folders - it finds your phone automatically using Bonjour.
If you still have problems please msg me directly or tweet @catnapgames, thanks.
Ah, no real playlists, it's really just folders. You can swipe left on library items to "enqueue", that's about it. As for loading music you could try dragging the contents of ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Media/Music onto the Loader.. I've tested with quite large folders. Moving from the iPhone Music app is not supported, I might look into that later.
Thanks for the correction. I wrote the original title based on the warning on their homepage: "Critical security notice to users who downloaded Transmission 2.92 for Mac on August 28th or 29th".
Nice, I have found some hard to reproduce bugs using tools like this.
On Mac OS X and iOS, there's the Network Link Conditioner which is built into iOS and part of the developer tools package on MAC OS X I believe (installed as a Preference pane).
Yep, although it is quite a bit simpler: NLC does bandwidth, delay and drop (which clumsy calls throttle, lag and drop), it does not reorder, duplicate or tamper with packets.
It also applies to all network communications, it can't be applied to specific links or connections. On the other hand it's very, very easy to use.
Nice to see some Swift wrappers. I don't like Core Data so this looks like an option when writing iOS apps. For more portable code, here is my C++ wrapper for SQLite: https://github.com/catnapgames/NLDatabase
