An Error Occurred ⇥ allenpike.com

Allen Pike (via Michael Tsai):

But if the rumour and leak mill is to be believed, iTunes’ end is finally nigh. In macOS 10.15 we will finally see a Music.app for Mac. Surprisingly, this new app is said to be based not on the iOS app or a new codebase, but on the venerable iTunes itself.

There will surely be naysayers that claim iTunes should have been tossed entirely. And admittely, if the new Music app ditches iTunes’ interface but can’t cure its deep and baffling love for obtuse modal error dialogs, I too will bemoan its preservation. But arguing for code to be rewritten just because it’s old has never been the right way to build systems that work.

As infuriating as iTunes has become over the years, it remains among the most dependable pieces of software I use. I have seen all of the error messages in Pike’s piece — I laughed pretty hard as I read this one — and preorders are still unreliable, and there’s a dozen other problems that I could list off which you’ve undoubtedly heard of, if not personally experienced. Apple Music support, in particular, is awful. It’s so transparently a webpage that it feels like using an Electron app.

But, even so, I still use iTunes: I still listen to a local library, I still buy music, and I still sync music to my phone with a physical cable like our ancestors once did. I have already expressed my reservations about migrating to anything that is not iTunes; I’m encouraged by the latest rumours that Music for Mac may simply be a re-skinned iTunes without support for non-music things and, hopefully, way better integration of Apple Music.

And if they can clean up the code base at the same time, that would be appreciated, too.