Austin360 blogs > Digital Savant > Archives > 2005 > September > 12 > Entry
Sour notes
Lest you think this blog’s sole purpose is to kiss Apple’s shiny, white plastic exterior, I’ll tell you about a huge, huge blunder Apple made last week that could taint its reputation among a very large group of people in a way that even shiny new products won’t fix.
The latest version of iTunes, 5.0, which features a handful of new features and a slightly modified interface, is causing huge problems among Windows XP users.
I’m one of them. I installed the new version Sunday, thinking it would copy right over my 4.9 version of iTunes seamlessly, just as past upgrades have, keeping my music library intact and starting up without incident.
Instead, the software update crashed my computer, then would not start after I rebooted.
For those of us who made the leap to iTunes before buying an iPod, it was a huge leap of faith. Like a lot of Windows users, I was perfectly happy to listen to music with a combination of XP’s built in Windows Media Player and the infinitely skinnable Winamp.
Migrating all my music over to iTunes was a testament to how good Apple’s interface was and how much faith I put into the stability of the software. I transferred about 6 or 7 hundred MP3s and started the laborious process of ripping CDs into iTunes. I subscribed to Podcasts with the last version and made it my only music player after I got an iPod.
Now, it wouldn’t work. I couldn’t listen to music. And I couldn’t go back to Winamp or Windows Media Player because most of my music was now encoded in Apple’s proprietary AAC format, which won’t play in other music programs without some serious fiddling.
I hunted online and saw that I was far from the only person having installation problems with iTunes in Windows. (The upgrade on my iBook was fine, by the way. This seems to be a Windows/iTunes problem for the most part, although some Mac users are not without upgrade headaches.)
One of the suggestions on the Apple forums was to revert back to iTunes 4.9 until the dust settles and a more stable version of iTunes 5 is released. But it’s not easy finding a copy of 4.9, which has been cleared off of Apple’s and most downloading Web sites.
I did find 4.9 somewhere, though, and went through the process of uninstalling iTunes and re-installing the older version. Unlike some users, this solution worked for me.
What didn’t work so well was keeping my music library intact. iTunes couldn’t find my music. I re-directed it to the right directory, but my list of podcasts, playlists and information for at least 100 songs that I’d entered manually was now completely gone. I searched for a back-up. There was none.
Of course, it’s my own fault for not creating a copy of my library information before uninstalling iTunes 5.0. And I know that.
But for many people who have experienced this installation nightmare (and many of those people are novice users who chose iTunes and the iPod for their simplicity), iTunes 5.0 is not going to be remembered kindly for the foreseeable future.
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