Engadget Editorial: Hey Apple, why does it take an hour to put an album on my iPod?

[Zen0]

Zen0, could you try to be a little less condescending? I don't think the fact that you can cancel backups is common knowledge. In fact, I don't even think that hitting the "X" thing is at all intuitive that this would kill the back up and move on to the sync. I certainly don't think it's a "basic function" of iTunes.

I only found it out by accident when I - like the author at Engadget - was in a hurry to get my iPad to sync before a flight and saw it doing it's backup thing and out of frustration I hit the "X" next to the backup text near the top and to my surprise it stopped and just did the sync really quickly. Since then I use it all the time.

20GBs of my iPad and iPhone are "backed" up by iTunes everyday in about... 10 seconds...

So it never affected me in the first place.

Now, if I added a 800mb eBook or Zinio magazines, then the backup takes longer, and that happens because it's actually backing something up...

 

[runawayprisoner]

I think instead of worrying about Apple or iTunes, the author of that article should think about doing a computer upgrade or maintenance. An hour to put a new album sounds really tedious, and sounds a lot like the computer is in dire need of an upgrade.

My MacBook Pro only takes 10 minutes to copy over 50 songs, in comparison. Unless it's an album that has 300 songs...

The last time I was on my netbook, it took 30 minutes to do the same task and iTunes became unresponsive for 5 minutes but it did finish the job.

But I must admit I have seen computers that run iTunes like a Pentium 2 trying to do Aero Glass in Vista...

 

[Zen0]

I think instead of worrying about Apple or iTunes, the author of that article should think about doing a computer upgrade or maintenance. An hour to put a new album sounds really tedious, and sounds a lot like the computer is in dire need of an upgrade.

My MacBook Pro only takes 10 minutes to copy over 50 songs, in comparison. Unless it's an album that has 300 songs...

The last time I was on my netbook, it took 30 minutes to do the same task and iTunes became unresponsive for 5 minutes but it did finish the job.

But I must admit I have seen computers that run iTunes like a Pentium 2 trying to do Aero Glass in Vista...

10 minutes to copy 50 songs?

It should take 1 minute at most...

 

[runawayprisoner]

10 minutes to copy 50 songs?

It should take 1 minute at most...

It's 10 minutes with the backup process on top. I have quite a large list of contacts on my iPad for both work and personal reasons.

And I have quite a habit of purchasing random songs on iTunes as I find them on Pandora or downloading random small apps (sometimes big apps), so it also counts the purchase transfer process.

 

[pm]

I have been in the Engadget author's situation a couple of times. Once, we were driving to Montana for Christmas, I bought one movie on iTunes for the kids to watch in the car, I go to plug in my iPad which hasn't been backed up in literally months and instead of sync'ing the movie like I want, it proceeds to drop into back up mode and takes 40+ minutes to sync. Then when I look at it, it sync'ed the movie, but inexplicably removed a bunch of apps that I installed. So then I go back in, reselect the apps, and then resync and it does a backup again. Meanwhile my wife and kids are annoyed that I'm taking so long, and I'm annoyed that I can't get the thing to sync faster. Once I found that I could skip the backup, I became a bit more happy. And, yeah, if I sync'd my iPad more often this wouldn't be a problem... I agree. And if my iTunes folder wasn't on a shared network drive, that would help too.


I generally find that iTunes is ok. I like the iTunes store, I think it's easy to use, easy to buy stuff. I like the backups back up everything - that is really nice. I think the new Amazon app store is better for searching stuff than Apple's, but Apple works well enough. I think the song management solution is good enough - it's not the way that I'd prefer... I'm in the Explorer drag and drop camp with the majority of the forum... but dragging songs into playlists and then syncing the playlists works. I love the whole Podcast thing as well as iTunesU. But I have also had iTunes upgrade my device and brick it with completely unhelpful errors "an unknown error has occurred". It takes longer to sync things than I think it should. It backs up everything every time and there's no way to disable this. For some reason it made two copies of all of my songs and that took a while to clean up. It's not perfect. But in my opinion, it's not bad.

 

[Gigantopithecus]

You never learned how to drag and drop into iTunes did you?

Drag and drop > *
Where launching bloatware title + drag and drop into bloatware + sync is a subset of *

The bottom line is that iTunes is extraneous and inefficient and caters to people who don't/can't manage their media libraries without Apple's help.

 

[Zen0]

Drag and drop > *
Where launching bloatware title + drag and drop into bloatware + sync is a subset of *

The bottom line is that iTunes is extraneous and inefficient and caters to people who don't/can't manage their media libraries without Apple's help.

The bottom line is iTunes is a powerful media organizer that you have full control over.

If you have 10 songs and nothing worth organizing, Drag and Dropping into your device's memory directly will work just fine for you.

 

[JD50]

Can Zen0 be confined to the "All things Apple" forum please? This guy has to be a parody poster, I've never seen someone so condescending outside of P&N.

 

[zerocool84]

The bottom line is iTunes is a powerful media organizer that you have full control over.

If you have 10 songs and nothing worth organizing, Drag and Dropping into your device's memory directly will work just fine for you.

If you had full control over iTunes we wouldn't have people complaining or needing to write a whole article about it. Fact of the matter is that enough people don't like it that it becomes an issue.

 

[Gigantopithecus]

If you have 10 songs and nothing worth organizing, Drag and Dropping into your device's memory directly will work just fine for you.

I'll only add that all of that was acquired legally except for the OOP releases.

You were saying RBM?

 

[Zen0]

Can Zen0 be confined to the "All things Apple" forum please? This guy has to be a parody poster, I've never seen someone so condescending outside of P&N.

I apologizing for patronizing those who can't use Apple's simplistic software. ()

 

[Zen0]

If you had full control over iTunes we wouldn't have people complaining or needing to write a whole article about it. Fact of the matter is that enough people don't like it that it becomes an issue.

There's a checkbox for that.

It's called "Do not let iTunes manage, change, or add stuff to my library".

 

[Zen0]

I'll only add that all of that was acquired legally except for the OOP releases.

You were saying RBM?

Then I pity the caveman who drags his feet across the land when he is surrounded by wheels.

 

[zerocool84]

There's a checkbox for that.

It's called "Do not let iTunes manage, change, or add stuff to my library".

Since you didn't read the article obviously or even listen to people's complaints, there's more to iTunes then music management.

 

[Zen0]

Since you didn't read the article obviously or even listen to people's complaints, there's more to iTunes then music management.

I read the article, but that never happens to 99.999999% of people.

 

[zerocool84]

I read the article, but that never happens to 99.999999% of people.

Oh yea my mistake, you know 99.999999% people in the world.

 

[runawayprisoner]

...[snip, sorry, too long]

Well, if the problem is just with backups, then there is a way you can skip it altogether instead of having to click "x" all the time:

http://cnettv.cnet.com/skip-itunes-backup-process/9742-1_53-50003373.html?tag=mncol;txt

 

[akugami]

Can Zen0 be confined to the "All things Apple" forum please? This guy has to be a parody poster, I've never seen someone so condescending outside of P&N.

Only if we make an Android sub-forum and confine all the Apple haters to that forum. If you really don't like his message, you can always filter it out.

With that said, and with all due respect, Zen0 you need to learn some tact. Sometimes it's not the message but how it is delivered.

 

[zerocool84]

Well, if the problem is just with backups, then there is a way you can skip it altogether instead of having to click "x" all the time:

http://cnettv.cnet.com/skip-itunes-backup-process/9742-1_53-50003373.html?tag=mncol;txt

The fact that you have to make a video about it means it's unnecessarily complicated.

 

[AyashiKaibutsu]

Do a search for user Zen0 in gg&p get nothing but pages of one or two liners sounding like it's right from an apple commercial. It's pretty funny to read actually.

 

[cheezy321]

Only if we make an Android sub-forum and confine all the Apple haters to that forum. If you really don't like his message, you can always filter it out.

With that said, and with all due respect, Zen0 you need to learn some tact. Sometimes it's not the message but how it is delivered.

Word. The Phandroids on this forum are a pretty rabid bunch. We don't need someone to give more ammo for the frothing anger/nerd rage of the phandroids.

 

[zerocool84]

Word. The Phandroids on this forum are a pretty rabid bunch. We don't need someone to give more ammo for the frothing anger/nerd rage of the phandroids.

The iFans are just as bad and obviously some of you are worse then everyone put together.

 

[DivideBYZero]

Word. The Phandroids on this forum are a pretty rabid bunch. We don't need someone to give more ammo for the frothing anger/nerd rage of the phandroids.

If you really believed half of what you just wrote you would have phrased it in a much less inflammatory way.

 

[MrX8503]

For the most part I like iTunes, not sure what the problem is.

My only gripe with iTunes is not having control over your iPhone's backup files. There isn't an easy way to manage those back up files. I would say my biggest complaint would be that because its doing a lot in the background and you're not sure what its exactly doing.

 

[Zen0]

The fact that you have to make a video about it means it's unnecessarily complicated.

It's extremely complicated. Most Ivy Leagues don't even offer it as a Masters degree, only Doctorals.