iTunes: a mutual hatred

Posted on 17 Sep 2010 at 11:06

 

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During my first week in the Shopper labs I did my best to defend Apple's iTunes software to the team, who all had at least one horror story about disappearing music or corrupted devices. I was the exception, as I more than happy with the program; it worked well for me every day without any problems. Notice the use of past tense there - I've now discovered the truth behind iTunes. It hates you, and doesn't care if you know it.

The way iTunes refuses to list music compilations as one album, bundles identically named albums from different artists together, and occasionally loses a random song here or there are only small hints at the level of contempt it holds you in. Even those issues are minor compared to the power iTunes holds over you when it comes to updating an iPod or iPhone though. This weekend I hoped to update my iPhone to firmware 4.1. Cue a series of failures and problems that has pretty much destroyed my faith in iTunes altogether.

When I first connected the iPhone to my PC, I was unceremoniously informed that the iPod service had mysteriously vanished from Windows after I'd updated iTunes to its latest version. The very promising dialog box that appeared offering to fix the problem only got my hopes up before swiftly crushing them - after barely five seconds it cheerfully informed me the problem was un-repairable.

Thinking that syncing my phone would force the service to reinstall was a big mistake. Without fixing the iPod service, iTunes instead happily downloaded the new firmware update and put my phone into recovery mode, rendering it useless until I could manually repair the software. Rather than get my hands dirty and extract the iPod service files from the main iTunes program, I decided that wiping the slate clean and reinstalling the whole suite would be the best course of action.

Uninstalling iTunes is no mean feat, however. Using the Windows add/remove programs list, it required removing five separate programs and services, in a specific order to ensure all traces of the program have been purged from the system. God help me had I uninstalled QuickTime before iTunes, apparently. To be sure I'd cleaned Windows of all things Apple I ran a sweep of the very useful CCleaner, which deleted all manner of system files the various uninstallers had failed to remove. Apple seems to be aware its software is slightly resilient to being removed on Windows, as their support site lists no less than twenty folders to check to ensure iTunes has been properly removed.

After another reboot and waiting for the program to reinstall, I'd finally jumped through enough hoops to get everything running again. I didn't even have to manually locate my music library - all seemed well. But of course, iTunes wasn't going to let me do anything as simple as updating my phone, oh no. Having been forced into recovery mode, I could only restore it to a previous backup before the update would apply, losing all my media in the process. As I don't automatically sync my music (my eclectic music collection currently sits at over 50GB, and isn't going to fit on my 16GB iPhone 4) it meant manually dragging over a thousand music files back onto the iPhone. Add in the fact that all the progress in my games had been wiped, and I was not pleased to say the least.

By the time I was finished, a simple update had taken almost a whole weekend and all my patience in iTunes. While my phone is up and running again, I'm now coexisting with iTunes through necessity rather than choice: We have a mutual hatred for each other, I'm just not sure whether I hate it more than it hates me.