Apple Updates iTunes To Version 9 - Still Crap

10:40 Thursday, 10 September 2009

Is iTunes the worst piece of software in the world today? Yes!

When Apple released iTunes 8 I dutifully upgraded… and it crashed. iTunes 9 (released 9/9/9 oh the irony) crashes. It’s something to do with “errors” in my library. I say “errors” in quotes because this is a library created and managed by the very apps that are crashing when using it. So it’s not really “errors” in my library - it’s errors in iCrapTunes. iTunes is a sorry sack of cobbled together old code that needs completely throwing away and writing again from the ground up.

During the process of “upgrading” the library iTunes crashes. I’ve no idea why. The crash reports are useless. There’s no debugging log I can look at. I think this can be fixed by removing the offending albums from iTunes before the upgrade. But the only way to find which albums are causing the issue is to do the upgrade and the only way to remove them is to downgrade. Classic. So we’d be in a loop of upgrade, crash, downgrade, upgrade, crash, downgrade.... until the upgrade finally completes. I’ve got thousands of albums. It could take weeks! Stuff that.

What’s needed is lint for iTunes libraries. Lint is a program which does static analysis on another program’s source code to look for potential errors. I’ve yet to find such a thing. Actually I doubt such a thing is possible to write outside of Apple since the only people that know what constitutes “correct” as far as iTunes is concerned are in Apple.

I give up.

Here’s my guide to saving yourself the pain:

  1. Before “upgrading” to the latest crash app known as iTunes: quit iTunes and make a copy of your iTunes folder (it’s in $HOME/Music) Just select the folder and hit Cmd-D (duplicate) and the Finder (also crap) will make a copy. There will now be a new folder called… “iTunes copy”

  2. Do the “upgrade”

  3. Launch imCrappyTunes

  4. Wait for the crash

  5. Give up

  6. Go back to the old version. Here’s how:

  7. Delete iTunes from the Applications folder

  8. Use Activity Monitor to kill “iTunes Helper” Helper ha!

  9. Delete the folder $HOME/Music/iTunes

  10. Rename the folder “iTunes copy” (in $HOME/Music) to “iTunes”. You made a back up right?

  11. Install iTunes 7.7.1

  12. Get back to enjoying your music

iTunes 7.7.1 can be downloaded here

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