I still can't believe they killed iTunes. I used to have my entire digital music library in iTunes. Most of that was music I had ripped myself from CD, but I had a handful of albums I bought of iTunes and even some TV shows. When they wholesale abandoned iTunes and deleted from Mac OS in favor of...whatever Apple Music is, I knew I'd never trust them again.

I searched for some decent mp3 players for a while, and even used AIMP for a while, but nowadays I think I'll just vibe code my own with my own interface and rely on the local file system and folder mounts to do the job. I really love this new era where I can just use AI to build a custom thing for myself and forget about all the predatory crap out there, especially from the OS vendors. I don't need streaming, I don't want it. I would have kept buying albums off iTunes, but since it sucks so much I'll just buy it on CD, thanks.

You can turn off the cloud service in Apple Music and still use it with your local tracks and music downloaded from the iTunes Music Store (which still exists).

I did this for most of last year. I had all local music in Apple Music, disabled the cloud stuff, and synced it all to my iPhone by plugging it in with a cable, as if it was an old iPod. It all still worked.

The Music app reads the same library and has the same core music-oriented functions as iTunes. Is the interface what you're missing?

There's great hand crafted library managers/players out there like https://www.strawberrymusicplayer.org etc.

iTunes didn't go anywhere.

Just about everything I watch or listen to is served from the same iTunes Library I've had for over 20 years. It's more important to me now than it has ever been.

That's the difference? I still use the Music app and it still behaves exactly as it did before they renamed it. I do not subscrbe to Apple Music. I still have my entire digital music libray in iTunes/Music and it functions as it always did.

Why vibe code anything? VLC would fit the bill. Even quicktime.

I had an OO perl replacement for iTunes back in the day (to learn OO perl, mostly). It had a web frontend, and also handled ripping and cd metadata with “insert disk, up arrow enter”. It failed to eject the disk iff there was a problem with the rip / transcode / metadata. I had 3-4 CDROMs in a desktop for parallelism.

Maybe I should have an LLM port to rust. It was under a thousand lines of code.

The Music app IS iTunes. They just renamed it and continued from there. I have all of my ripped music in there just like before; in fact, that's the ONLY music I have in my library.

So don't worry! The same trash UI is available to you... except now even worse, thanks to "Liquid Glass" and brain-dead decisions like moving the playback controls from the empty area at the top of the screen into the content-browser area... where they reside on a "transparent" bubble that overlaps other graphics and text.

Even worse when you're on Windows. What's the point of the cloud if it only works halfway decently on Mac.

Makes me feel like an idiot for doing something as outlandish as paying artists for their music.

Yeah, the smart playlists were awesome ("play unrated tracks I haven't heard in over a year, from albums I gave at least 3 stars") for those of us who went deep into curation. I miss it.

iTunes and iPhoto both. Given how good the tools are getting, and how much existing sample code is available, it seems likely someone will do a good job of reincarnating them in the near future. Apple broke the apps I used most on the Mac and then they added the bubblicious design crime UI, no thanks.

Check out Swinsian.

It is basically old iTunes with some UI improvements and modern features built around somebody who has their own library to manage. Been around for a long time.

It’s great software that I’m willing to pay for in today’s world for sure.

vibe code your own, implement some kind of yt-downloader? torrent downloader,etc, maybe some album art. hm might make one myself.

The specification would matter more than the source it produces. Specify it right and share it with the world. Code is basically a winamp skin on the OS level.

iTunes is the single worst most rage inducing software I have ever experienced. It is the only software that has brought myself and numerous family members to literal tears. Its concept of “syncing libraries” in the early iPhone era was so unbelievably broken.

I wish I believed in software hell because then I would be happy knowing that’s where iTunes existed.