iTunes - What's the point?

Now there’s a topic for discussing :wink:

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You can do backups with the free trial version of iMazing, so you don’t have to pay until you need to do a restore or use any of the other features.

iCloud doesn’t back everything up, which can be (at least, and probably only) annoying when restoring. (That doesn’t seem to be a really big deal for most people.)

The storage used isn’t a really big problem though: I have an older MBP as a home server that acts as my main iTunes machine and keeps the iOS backups on very large external drive. I clean out the iOS backups out once in a while.

On a couple of occasions I’ve also had to use iTunes to rescue badly ailing iOS devices.

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I still use iTunes to listen to music while I’m sitting at my desk, to manage playlists, to add new audio files to my iCloud Music Library, and to back up my iOS devices. I hear the complaints from all the people on all the podcasts, but for how I use it, iTunes is as necessary and useful as it has always been.

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iTunes is a very important part of my workflow. As a musicians and a fan of a very obscure genre of music, there are no musical service that supports my needs. There is no other tool to manage music like I have other than iTunes. I currently have almost 90,000 tracks in iTunes and if I did an analysis of Apple Music, I can guarantee you Apple Music only has <2000 of my tracks available.

So, it may not be for everyone, but without iTunes, I would be messed up!

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I got tired of iTunes screwing up my music collection and moved everything to my Plex server last year.

And, since my old Mac died this morning *, iTunes won’t be giving me any more problems for the foreseeable future.

*Services at 2PM tomorrow :wink:

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I use iTunes extensively. My entire music library is built on smart playlists. Smart playlists is the one reason why I didn’t jump over to Spotify. iTunes is also my home media library serving content to my Apple TVs. I don’t understand all the stick that iTunes get. People complain that it’s bloated and then complain again when functionality is taken away. There are still plenty of things that iTunes can do that the Music app can’t do on iOS. I’d love for there to be feature parity but until then I’ll still be using iTunes every day.

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Also - Applescript. Doug’s and others.

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I use iTunes to do the sync of my Mac Calendars and Contacts and music to my iOS devices. Always on manual and NO iCloud sync at all.

A number of years ago my husband ripped all of our CDs and I still add any new ones that way so my Mac is the source for music that we plan on old iPods in the car.

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I just want an Apple Music-only app!

I am not clear as to why can even be considered to be left out, it is so integrated into MacOS that your system wouldn’t run well without it.

I never use it, that’s the point… So not really true ah?!

But you can’t uninstall it, can you? It would ruin the OS.

I use iTunes because it it comes with macOS and cannot be removed without causing problems. I am a casual listener of music so it works fine. I like its Genius playlists. It is also the easiest way to watch my collection of movies on Apple TV

Is there any way, whatsoever, to add music to your library iTunes style ie. CD backup’ed MP3s through iOS?

I use iTunes every day, for hours, to listen to music. For the last many years I’ve almost never done any iOS device management or podcast listening.

I’m not crazy-attached to iTunes, so I’d welcome Apple replacing iTunes with some other stripped down music-only type application.

There is no way to write to your music library on iOS.

Feared that was/is the case.

That’s definitely a wish for iOS 13, but I’m not holding my breath, though

At this point in time, Apple expects you to either use a Mac or PC to upload music to your cloud account (if you don’t have a Mac, make a user account on a friend’s to upload). Or upload mp3s to Dropbox, Google Drive, Box.net, One Drive, Yandex. Disk, Web Dav., etc. (using a Lightning-to-USB drive, or a WiFi hard drive, or accessing a networked drive, or files on a website) and later streaming using one of the many cloud player apps.

With iOS 13’s expected updated file system advancements there’s always the possibility of Apple allowing better integration with external storage, but there are no reports or rumors of any Apple music app importing/syncing locally imported music.

I hear you, but from my point of view that goes against the notion that an iPad Pro can replace your MacBook, as Apple would like us to believe.

In my case it already has replaced my MacBook in every way - only this tiny use-case that’s impossible to overcome atm