Drag and drop versus iTunes
Charlie Brooker in The Guardian:
Here’s a familiar, mundane scenario: you’ve got an iPhone with loads of music on it. And you’ve got a laptop with a new album on it. You want to put the new album on your phone. But you can’t hook them up and simply drag-and-drop the files like you could with, ooh, almost any other device. Instead, Apple insists you go through iTunes.
This is a pretty common argument against iTunes, but one I’ve never fully understood. Yes, iTunes is sluggish and a pain in the arse sometimes, and, yes, Apple could do more to detach its iThings from the desktop using some kind of wireless sync (rumoured in an upcoming iOS update), but drag and drop? Really?
The thing is, music management is one of the few things iTunes remains really good at. When you rip a CD, it helpfully organises everything and shoves the digital files in a logical location (something you can stop it doing, if you’re, for some reason, turned on by the prospect of dragging folders around your OS’s file system). If you’ve a large collection, it’s easy to search, and you can rapidly create smart playlists, based on complex criteria (or, if you want more control and have loads of time to waste, you can revert to drag and drop, to standard playlists). These days, I use a combination of playlists to determine which music ends up on my devices, because it’s quicker and more efficient to do so when there’s 90 GB of music lurking on my Mac.
Without iTunes, I’d rarely—if ever—bother to update the music on my devices, because it’d be too much hassle. And without playlists that block recently played tracks, I’d likely end up playing the same old stuff all the time, rather than continually rediscovering old favourites.
So, yeah, iTunes is mostly a bit crap, and it could make things a whole lot easier in many ways, but it’s still a great means of managing your music and the music you shove on to your iThings.
iTunes isn’t the best software like you say but I have never seen the attraction of drag and drop. Why fart around with dragging files around when you can have software do it for you?
Charlie’s main complaint was that iTunes asked to wipe all the music on the phone as part of the sync operation – does the user really want that every time, or does it even make sense if you are just adding a few files? Yes, having files well organised makes sense. But making what should be a simple operation OVERCOMPLICATED is what Charlies was railing against.
“Why fart around with dragging files around when you can have software do it for you?”
Since when was opening a Windows Explorer window and dragging and dropping much more complicated than “Open iTunes, Import CD, Synchronise”.
All bugs aside, iTunes is good for managing music. But people mostly don’t want to mange music, they want to put music track A on player B. It is the difference between having a record collection and having a record collection sorted by order of artist name and then album name.
It is good to have all the additional stuff that iTunes can give you, but it does get in the way of simply putting the music on your MP3 player.
@merman I used his article as a hook for the drag and drop thing. However, I did note that Apple should do something to detach its devices from wired sync. (Brooker’s point about the wipe-threat is also something Apple needs to make clearer, because it’s a common complaint; most users don’t seem to realise iThings link to a single library.)
@Mike: The drag-and-drop thing mostly comes from tech-savvy Windows and Linux users, not “most people”. In reality, most people don’t understand a great deal about mounting volumes, dragging content and so on. I do get that a certain market segment would prefer an alternate solution to iTunes/wired, which is what I’m hoping Apple’s massive data-farm investment could help with.
Not so sure about this one.. can’t there be a best of both worlds, dragging and dropping which will be imported into the next proper sync.. sometimes i just want to add something for on the go, and not completely syncing stuff.. a quick sync, just music and not other stuff, or only progs or podcast.. and i want some syncing on the web, especially for podcasts..
to clarify: wireless websyncing, preferably not just over wifi, but also over the web.. and podcastst directly from the source..
Craig – “The drag-and-drop thing mostly comes from tech-savvy Windows and Linux users, not “most people”. ”
Not true. Most people are used to dragging and dropping files, especially photos from SD cards plugged into card readers. They know to copy files to USB keys or external drives or even their mobile phone. So why they can logically continue to do so for their MP3 player (when other MP3 players can…) is what is annoying.