[bryans]

To me, this makes it so much more obvious that the only innovation they were even aiming for was a scroll wheel. Everything else is just a Diamond Rio with a hard drive attached. That's not to diminish the effectiveness or novelty of the scroll wheel, but the larger capacity seems to be the only thing that actually mattered here.

[gwbas1c]

Syncing music with iTunes was so much easier than the junk sync apps that other players had.

[bryans]

You mean copying and pasting files that already contain metadeta? That was difficult? Because I'm pretty sure everyone universally hated the formats and auto-renamed files that iTunes forced.

[gwbas1c]

I plugged in my iPod to my computer and it just worked: New music was copied, and any cleanup that I made to metadata was applied automatically. The formats that iTunes used were some of the highest quality audio available at a bit rate that would fit onto my giant iPod.

Before I had an iPod I had a Creative MP3 player. The player itself was decent, but manually copying the files to it really was a pain in the rear end, especially when I updated metadata.

[egypturnash]

Everyone except people who had better things to do than to maintain a huge library of files downloaded from KaZaa with no metadata beyond vaguely-standardized file names.

[batmanthehorse]

yes everyone hated that. that's why itunes failed and we're still manually copying files to this day.

[bryans]

Sorry, but while Apple did succeed in manhandling the music industry, iTunes has never been a beloved piece of software. It has always been trash and barely worked. So to put it on some kind of pedestal is disingenuous, at best.

[gwbas1c]

I loved iTunes. To this day it was my favorite all-in-one player, metadata editor, and syncing tool.

(Granted, I don't use it anymore now that streaming services are so awesome. But I miss it like I miss the feeling of buying a CD and listening to it on the way home.)