Take Control of Apple Media Apps
Take Control (via Kirk McElhearn):
Back in 2019, Apple replaced iTunes for Mac, iOS, and iPadOS with three apps—Music, TV, and Podcasts—with audiobooks handled by the Books app. Take Control of Apple Media Apps is your guide to this post-iTunes world. Covers macOS 15 Sequoia, iOS 18, and iPadOS 18 or later, plus Apple Watch, Apple TV, and HomePod.
Expanding on his earlier title Take Control of macOS Media Apps, Kirk McElhearn shows you how to manage your music, videos, podcasts, and audiobooks on all your Apple devices. Whether you just want to play your media, or you want to go deeper with special features like Apple Music, Genius, Shuffle, Playing Next, and iTunes Match, this comprehensive guide has the answers you need.
Kirk also looks at various ways of bringing audio and video into Apple’s media apps, tagging music and videos so you can find them more easily later, creating playlists, sharing your library over a home network, and accessing your media libraries on your iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Apple TV, or HomePod.
Apple started with a simple app, iTunes. You ripped CDs or bought songs on your Mac and synced them to your iPod. But now there are multiple media apps, devices, cloud services, formats, and rating systems. There are subscriptions, streaming, Siri, AirPlay, and families. I can think of no one better than McElhearn to make sense of it all.
Previously:
- Why Can’t iOS Have Smart Folders?
- Playing Purchased Music on HomePod
- Apple Music Classical
- Apple Music on the Web Beta
- How to Manage Audiobooks in a Post-iTunes World
- Music.app on macOS 10.15
- Why Doesn’t Apple Music Let Users Search for Composers?
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iTunes remains a great tech example of being careful what one wishes for. Many of us never thought we'd see a day when people said "I wish they'd just bring back iTunes" but here we are.
@Bri
Isn't Winamp still around? If not, there's still some clones lying around, right?
Audacious Music Player is one; however, the new interface apparently looks more like foobar2000, although it think the Winamp interface can still be enabled. It's been a while since I used Audacious to be fair.
@Nathan_RETRO Yes, actually, you can still run classic Winamp and Windows, and it still works pretty well! But these days it could really use some quality-of-life updates.
I forget exactly who owns it now -- it's changed hands a number of times -- but it doesn't look like they're going to do anything good with it.
That said, I still often run it in macOS using Wine! Not necessarily because it's the best tool for the job, but because it's the tool I enjoy.
@Bart Completely agree. This is what happens when tech journos set the narrative. The complete irony here is that iTunes *could* have been done better by splitting functionality out of it, but not for the UI: AirPlay receiving, device syncing, remote control and rendering, streaming, the stores—all of these could usefully have been put in different apps or the system, without completely breaking the power and efficiency of iTunes as a "Jukebox" for all your media management, with user-accessible and relocatable files backing it.
And, yes, more choice on how to import files and/or organise them without reliance on a central DB, which is why we love file-oriented players like WinAmp and friends, would have been nice too.
Damn the Apple commentariat.
