There's some concern that custom ringtones (ones not purchased through iTunes) get broken with iTunes 10.
Does anyone here have experience of this?

Mark

No but I was looking at the idea of creating my own ringtones from my iTunes library at some point.

Well I have a custom ringtone on my 3G (not running iOS 4) - it is still there in my library, and it's still on my phone after I synced it this morning.

So it seems to be fine to me. I created mine in GarageBand.

That is on my list of things to do. At the moment I have too many tracks that I want as ring tones.

Could it be? Has iTunes FINALLY given up un-subscribing infrequently listened-to podcasts?

I have not noticed that for a while.

Paul Thurrott, on Windows Weekly 173:

Paul: From the perspective of a Windows user, and I really feel needs to be repeated again and again, if Apple were to look out at its user base and look at all the people who own iPods, iPhones, iPads, and Macs, right, that the biggest collection of those people also are running Windows either on PCs or even on their Macs. You know, Windows users actually represent the biggest number of Apple's users and why they would treat them (now, I am not saying they should treat them special), but I just feel we are being treated pretty badly. The problem is, when you look at the alternatives, there is no single alternative that makes a lot of sense.

Last year, when the Zune HD came out, I wrote an article, after having spent a lot of time with the device and the new services and everything, where I said, you know, it is really neat, but you know, it doesn't have this and doesn't have this and it doesn't have this and now. a year later, it is not so clear. There are comparisons you can make between iTunes and the Zune PC software, between the iTunes Store and the Zune Marketplace and so forth. And it's kind of plus and minus down the list, there are some things we need to see, before we can say, like the new Apple TV, it seems it is more of a Roku style box now and I am not so sure that is a good idea. I feel like something has been taken away there, I feel like Apple TV was underapreciated. It was an excellent device and an excellent product and now it is less, I think, I am going to have to see, I don't have one yet.

Leo: I think it could be a stealth product to. We don't know, for instance somebody said, there are no apps on the Apple TV, but what if you have an iPhone or you have an iPad and you have apps on that and he (Steve Jobs) did mention you could stream from them, but what is unknown is what you can stream. What if you could stream the content of those apps? Then you suddenly have Hulu on your Apple TV and maybe they did do it, maybe there is a back door. But we don't know, until it arrives.

Paul: We will have to wait and see.

Leo: Just to circle round to that iTunes thing, I am really with you, it is crazy for Apple not to pay more attention to the Windows side, which is the vast majority of iTunes users. But again, even on the Mac side, they really have dropped the ball and we have criticised them on MacBreak Weekly for this. This is not version 10.

Paul: No, it is like 9.2.3.

Leo: Right! What they did was monochrome icons, a new way of doing album art, which are awful, and you add Ping which is a which is a social network, which doesn't network with other networks.

Paul: Right, I was curious about this, when it launched. I looked at the numbers, it launched with less than 50 artists!

Leo: Oh, it was terrible, I couldn't find anybody I liked.

Paul: Are you kidding me?

Leo: Talk about a product as a hobby, obviously whoever did Ping didn't let the record labels know!

Paul: Yeah, I mean, given how important, you know iTunes is the centre of this entire teetering system that they have. The store is awesome, the content is amazing, the devices are fantastic and it all centres around this unbelievable piece of crap.

Leo: Yeah

Paul: It is just astonishing.

Leo: You'd think they'd put more into that eco system.

<Steve Jobs looks at balance sheet>
"Nah."

iTunes of itself makes Apple no money. Recent reports suggest both the App Store and iTunes Store run at a loss for Apple. Therefore it's in Apple's interest to do the absolute minimum amount of work to keep iTunes viable and, in essence, keep it just not bad enough to drive a large number of customers away from their hardware. While most customers are willing to either put up with iTunes or still buy the hardware and then find a software alternative, ITunes is going to remain pretty much as it is.

Apple may bleat on about having higher design standards and blah blah but in fact they're only really interested in profit. If improving something won't make them any profit, they aren't going to do it.

Jon

I fear you are correct. But iTunes really is a bad advertisment for Apple.

On the one hand, it is the most complete music management solution for Windows (Zune is similar, but the content isn't available outside of the USA - Windows Phone 7 will only sync with Zune, so expect it to appear soon though). There is no single other tool that provides the music management, music purchase, video purchase, device management, eBooks, apps etc. all under one hood.

On the other hand, it hasn't really been updated in a decade. It is bloated, laggy, buggy and generally poorly written - on a restricted Windows account, every time you move away from the "iPhone" section to another section, like Music or Podcasts, it says that the settings on the iPhone have been changed, do you want to apply them? That is every time you move away from the iPhone, whether you have changed it or not!

As Paul said, given how good the iTunes Store is and how good the hardware is, it is a crying shame that the thing that is supposed to hold the whole thing together is such a big PoS.

On my iMac and on my laptop (dual core and 4 core/8 threads respecitively), iTunes is laggy and takes a lot of time to move between sections, especially if you are playing something in the background. Given that Apple haven't shipped a sigle core device since early 2006, it is incredible that they don't make use of multi-threading, where possible.

That said, the latest update has vastly improved the synchronisation time - dropping an average sync, with no new media, from about a minute to around 10 seconds.

What I've never got with Zune is that it's a completely separate program to WMP. Why??? Why can't they have one program for managing music/podcasts/stuff and ship it with the OS (producing a media-player free variant for silly Europeans). As it is, most people have WMP installed on their Windows box, but have to install the Zune software as well.

I dunno - from a marketing point of view, there needs to be more to it than pure accountancy. It's evolving, certainly.



iTunes is multithreaded.
Aren't all Cocoa apps multithreaded?

iTunes is still largely Carbon. Apple are slowly getting there, with Finder being Cocoa-ified in Snow Leopard.

Yes I agree with Big_D iTunes is bloated and slow to change windows. I have a quad core i7 iMac and even that takes time switching from music to podcasts or something else. And that is with my processors running at about 5% much of the time. I think that the windows version is even worse. They really should clean it up a bit, as it is in many ways a first example of Apple software that many will experience and it is not a great advertisement for the company's software.

Microsoft's plan is to replace WMP with Zune, in the long run, but as they don't sell Zune hardware or support the Zune Pass outisde of America, it is taking a while to implement. The Windows Phone 7 is supposed to be the stealth world-wide release of Zune.

Bloomin' 'eck Apple... get on with it already.
iTunes still uses multithreading, doesn't it? Just stuck in a poor Carbon way.