I hate iTunes

I have a small collection of albums on my computer that I put on iTunes.. until I realized that the iPhone 5 they (At&T) sold me is only 16GB (it's not their fault, when we moved to this town I told my wife, "everyone in this place is either going to or coming from a yard sale).... it's that sort of town, really. The largest iPad the local Walmart stocks is 16GB. I could have gotten something bigger but it was my first 'smartfone" and I dnt know eny bedded. Now I doo. (I'm getting a 128GB iPhone 6C Plus, in September when they come out of the worm hole in the Apple.
But, as usual... I digress...
Why can't I put move a dadgum album from that dadblamed iTunes without moving ALL my albums... (and then they don't play, they are "greyed out" unless I do something I haven't figured out how to do...
Why do they make is HARD difficult.
I want to move a few BEATLES albums to my fone, I want to move Uriah Heep Salisbury album to my fone... everything else I get a hankering to listen to is on Spotify.
What do I need to do? Should I just pay 4.99 (really? Why not just make it 5 bucks..) for the Dropbox player and just forget iTunes and use Dropbox. I like iPhones because usually everything just works but iTunes is an ass of a different color, it seems. I AM NOT going to use Apple Music. I pay for Spotify and Wolfgang's Vault.. I don't need Apple Music. I just want to move some albums that I BOUGHT and ripped to my computer... to my danged phone.
Why is it so difficult? Is it just me??  I spent about an hour on it yesterday evening and got nowhere.
Frustrated.
I read some post about similar complaints that I searched up on the Google... someone said that they want you to go through Apple Music to be sure you didn't borrow the album and rip it... well, I didn't and I do not intend to buy it from Apple for 12.99 when I can get the same CD from Amazon for 9.99.
 
What to do?? Heck, I'd use my old Sansa MP3 player but I like the convenience of Bluetooth and I have to plug it in... I could just play albums from my computer if I wanted to do dat.
 
J

Thanks... going there now!
 
J

Apple makes it easy to do things!
 
As long as, you know, you do things exactly the way they think you should. Otherwise it may be difficult or impossible - because you're a nonconformist troublemaker foolish enough to think you know what's best for yourself. 
 
 
Anyway, what you want to do - the Apple way is to use the cloud! (you have an unlimited data plan on your phone so you can stream stuff you already have right?) - is in iTunes for Windows don't select "entire music library" under the Music tab for your iPhone. Select "Selected...", and then you have the option of just checking the playlists/artists/albums/genres you want to sync.

I ditched iTunes for MediaMonkey a long time ago.  It does everything iTunes did and far more!
 
http://www.mediamonkey.com/
 
 

I feel your pain, Julien.
 
As you know, we're all set up on Apple here, from our phones to all our computers to Apple TV. And I must say that when I did make the switch from PC to Mac a few years back, it was almost like a revelation.
 
Then Steve Jobs died. And things started taking a strange turn. And not for the better.
 
At first I didn't really notice much, since I didn't upgrade to the newer OS versions Apple. There were minor but nevertheless very annoying changes to iTunes, like the removal of cover flow, which I loved and which helped make iTunes stand out of the crowd.
 
But then those changes for worst seemed to take place at a faster rate. And I can tell you that in the last few months, I've rarely spent more than 2 or 3 days without cursing Jobs successor, Tim Cooks. 
 
The latest versions of iTunes have even the biggest Apple fans pissed off.
 
Me, I can't seem to add an album to my iPhone w/o having 3/4 of the music that's already on my iPhone randomly deleted. I get error messages saying that the files cannot be played on this iPhone, which is ridiculous as they were playing fine 2 seconds earlier.
 
So every time I want to put new music on it I have to erase everything first and then re-add it. Which takes forever. And is so frustrating.
 
My iPhone is an older 32 GB model, meaning that I can't put my whole library on it. Nevertheless, for whatever reason, at random times, it will switch from listing the stuff that is actually on my iPhone to the content of my entire external iTune library. Not just what I bought in the iTune store, but every single CD that I've ripped and that sits on an external HD. So I end up having to navigate through hundreds of artists and albums, duplicates and all, on that tiny iPhone screen to get to the albums that are actually playable on the phone. And I have yet to find why this happens and how I can fix it. It seems to fix itself after a few days.
 
The latest version of iTunes also seems to have done away with a couple of options and changed the default settings - for exemple, iTunes now loops albums by default, which annoys me to no end. And I can't seem to find where they buried the option... The running time of the album also seems to have been removed - that's information I was actually using and that's often how I pick the albums I listen to in the gym, to time my workout.
 
All this for what? To get me to buy into streaming and connect with artists and socialize and rate albums and whatnot. I have to jump through hoops and click 3 times as many buttons to get access to a third of the functionality. Me I just want to playback albums I paid for.
 
I tell you - if I could, I'd buy a bunch go pre-2012 Mac running Snow Leopard and an older version of iTunes, store them somewhere, and those would be the computers I'd be using for the rest of my life.
 
At this time, I don't know what to do. I'm not moving back to PC - Microsoft does a fine job of following in Apple's footsteps, anyway, and there are still tons of things which I prefer on Mac, including Logic. 
 
I guess I'll simply have to learn and live with/manage my frustration.
 
But it's not just Apple, anyway. Even my bank's web site was recently re-designed and made more tablet friendly I suppose, trading functionality and readability for "modern design".
 
Lowest common denominator, always.
 
 
 
 
 

no apple anything for me.
 

Two better words (echoed from above):  MediaMonkey.
 
http://www.mediamonkey.com/
 
 

yorolpal
When the heck do folks find the time to listen to even a tiny fraction of these libraries of, quite often, thousands of songs? Actually curious.

As for me, I work from home and music is almost always playing in the background.  Even when I went into a corporate office, I tended to wear headphones and listen to music to tone others out (I was a programmer with ADHD so the fewer distractions the better - SQUIRREL!!!).
 
I also like a LOT of different genres of music so I would go into music stores and ask for a bulk discount.  They would think I'm talking about 10-15 albums, but I told them I was thinking of more and would normally get at least $5 off each album.  Then I'd buy 100 (or even far more).  Instead of buying onesy-twosy's I'd save up and then get the huge discount (plus I was making a very nice IT Consultant wage so I could afford to do this).  I used to have a bunch of Sony CD Jukeboxes (three 400's, two 300's and a 200) which could be used three jukeboxes  at a time from a single remote.  Now everything has been sucked into the PC (which took months) and I now only buy downloadable .mp3's (I did a test on a $5,000 stereo system and I can't tell ANY difference between 192kbps and anything above that - so my whole library is converted to 192kbps to save space).
 
I currently have over 98,000 songs loaded into MediaMonkey with about 200,000 more still to go.  This is over three years of music (if started and not stopped), but I've been listening to music for over 50 years now and intend to continue for another 50 so I don't feel like I'll miss any of it. 

jbow
Why the heck wouldn't Apple want to make iTunes simple??? I don't get it.

Because Apple is one of the worst and most invasive of all companies out there, but because things are so well hidden, no one talks about it. Plus Apple won't discuss it, but all it takes is a packet sniffer, and you will NEVER EVER again, touch Apple for anything!
 
iTunes, besides that, is crap, and the worst music place I have ever seen. I like Beethoven's 9th marked up as tunes and not in order! ... very smart! totally off base and just shows how stupid and maniacal they are!
 

I tunes?
Like I Me Me Mine?
Or I'd Love To Change The World?
Or I Started A Joke?

Moshkito

jbow
Why the heck wouldn't Apple want to make iTunes simple??? I don't get it.

iTunes, besides that, is crap, and the worst music place I have ever seen. I like Beethoven's 9th marked up as tunes and not in order! ... very smart! totally off base and just shows how stupid and maniacal they are!

They are called movements.... and some people prefer some movements over others and want the ability to not listen to the entire Symphony. If you want to hear them in order - just make sure iTunes is set to play by song order.... not on random, not alphabetical, etc... etc...
 
Now.... if a recording has the movements out of order, that is NOT iTunes (Apples) fault. The person/company that submits the recording sets that - not Apple/iTunes. Your blaming the messenger. As a POP reference.... If I re-recorded (covered) Supertramp's "Crime of the Century" and put "Bloody Well Right" before "School" music lovers from that era would be in an uproar, but would that be the fault of iTunes (Apple)?
 
I'm not arguing about iTunes being crap or not... I'm just pointing out that your comment makes no sense at all to this thread...

Plus it was never optimized (most say on purpose) to work with Windows.  It was a dog even when you only had a few thousand songs in it.

yorolpal
And if you try to both keep up with the new and still give equal time to the old...how much actual time can you devote to that effort before it impedes on your actual life?

Ah ha!  See?  There's the problem with your assertion.  When you don't have much of a life going, there's PLENTY of time to listen to all sorts of music! 
 
*Sigh...* 

OH, and what would happen if I completely removed iTunes from my computer and replaced it with Media Monkey. Would Apple bug me with popup messages every time I plug my phone in to USB to charge it?
Another gripe. My Pioneer in dash stereo has a USB hub for charging or connecting an idevice or I guess any USB device. If I have ANY music stored on my phone it will change from radio to iPod and begin to play whatever I have on my phone... that was the original reason I took ALL the music off my phone. It is a small inconvenience and all I have to do is hit the source button 5 times, but I have to do it EVERY time and it gets old. Maybe an iPod with Bluetooth is what I want. Then no iTunes if I have Media Monkey? Apple wont bug me about not having iTunes?
 
J