Do you think iTunes is bloated?

[CarlJung]

It is with great amusement I read this thread

[kirkmc]

I don't know what I want to write; at least, I don't know what reasons people have for saying the program is bloated. If it's simply that they don't understand it - such as the gapless thing, or the file copying thing - that has nothing to do with some mythical "bloat" but rather with users not bothering to find out what the program is doing and how to change what they don't want.

I don't know what to write either. You've said, "if you don’t use certain features, why would they bother you?" and several people--including myself--have given concrete examples of why they bothered us. The fact that the features can be disabled or changed or modified doesn't alter the fact that they bother us. It seems like you're not validating our experiences.

Likewise, you've said, "if it has features you don't want, they don't slow things down." I've given you several examples of features slowing things down. The fact that you can disable those features or the fact that they only run once or the fact that if you have 4gb of RAM then the slowdown isn't noticeable doesn't change the fact that these examples directly contradict your statement.

All in all, I'd say your mind has already been made up--you're not interested in understanding why people think iTunes is bloated, you're interested in countering complaints with ad hoc explanations of why those things aren't so bad. As a software developer, I've found this sort of attitude to be endemic in the field. When users complain about some piece of software being difficult to use, even if hundreds of users have the same complaint, the developer's reaction is always, "Oh, that's in the help file," or "Oh, you're using it wrong," rather than admit their software has a flaw. That's not the way to produce quality software.

You're really not reading what I said. I explained about the gapless thing; you haven't replied that you understood what I said. It's not a "feature" that's slowing you down; it's the program scanning your files _once_. I am "validating" your experience; but I'm telling you that what your doing is wrong. Will you accept that, let the program scan your files once and for all, and move on?

I am very interested in why people think iTunes is bloated. As yet, I have found only one valid reason in the comments to my blog post: that on Windows, iTunes installs a lot of stuff. However, this stuff (such as QuickTime) is needed by iTunes, so calling it "bloated" doesn't really work. All the other reasons people have given are such things as "it shouldn't be called iTunes because it manages more than music" or "I want to drag and drop files on my iPhone", which have nothing to do with any mythical "bloat".

I totally understand that users may find something difficult to use; frankly, I make my living explaining things. But difficulty is not "bloat" any more than features that you don't use are "bloat".

And, once again, you've got an amount of RAM that is way too low. If you were working with a paid program, you probably would have not upgraded because you would have checked the specs. Since iTunes is free, you upgraded it, even though you don't have enough RAM to run anything more than Mac OS X. (BTW, you can't have only 512 MB RAM unless you removed some of your RAM; the Mac mini has never shipped with less than 1 GB.)

[imabuddha]

But difficulty is not "bloat" any more than features that you don't use are "bloat".

…

And, once again, you've got an amount of RAM that is way too low.

…

(BTW, you can't have only 512 MB RAM unless you removed some of your RAM; the Mac mini has never shipped with less than 1 GB.)

(bold emphasis by me)

Kirk, I've held off jumping into this thread up till now, but I can't let this "stuff" slide. The first two parts I quoted are indeed symptoms of bloated software. To insist otherwise is silly. See the very first sentence here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_bloat It's notable that iTunes is the first program mentioned in the Examples section of that article.

The last thing I quoted from your post is factually incorrect. The first mac mini models shipped with only 256MB of RAM: http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/m ... _1.25.html

[kirkmc]

But difficulty is not "bloat" any more than features that you don't use are "bloat".

…

And, once again, you've got an amount of RAM that is way too low.

…

(BTW, you can't have only 512 MB RAM unless you removed some of your RAM; the Mac mini has never shipped with less than 1 GB.)

(bold emphasis by me)

Kirk, I've held off jumping into this thread up till now, but I can let this "stuff" slide. The first two parts I quoted are indeed symptoms of bloated software. (the other main one being slow execution) To insist otherwise is silly. See the very first sentence here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_bloat

The last thing I quoted from your post is factually incorrect. The first mac mini models shipped with only 256MB of RAM: http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/m ... _1.25.html

For the first, I don't agree that features you don't use equal bloat. If that were the case, every software program (well, anything other than the simplest ones) would be bloated. Features you don't use don't get in your way, and their code doesn't slow anything down.

For the second, thanks for the correction. I have a program called MacTracker which claims to list every Mac model and it was not clear about the RAM (I found the correct numbers just now checking under the History section of the program).

But saying that you don't have enough RAM so the program is bloated is akin to one of my favorite Samuel Beckett quotes: "There's man all over for you, blaming on his boots the fault of his feet." Just this morning, I had to launch Windows in VMware Fusion. Man, was it slow. Is it because Windows XP is bloated? Or is it Fusion that's bloated? No, it's because I had a half-dozen other programs open, and Fusion needs a lot of RAM, and I've only got 4 GB RAM on this Mac. As I said above, if you can't run a new version of a program because of processor (not very common these days, though the difference between a PowerPC G4 processor and any Intel processor used in Macs since the beginning is quite large) or RAM, then don't upgrade. You can't blame a program from 2010 (assuming Ross is using the latest version of iTunes) for being "bloated" because it doesn't run well on a computer from 2005 (again, assuming that's the Mac mini that Ross has).

[imabuddha]

For the first, I don't agree that features you don't use equal bloat.

…

But saying that you don't have enough RAM so the program is bloated is akin to one of my favorite Samuel Beckett quotes:

So, what's your definition of software bloat then since it seems to differ from the commonly understood meaning?

[kirkmc]

For the first, I don't agree that features you don't use equal bloat.

…

But saying that you don't have enough RAM so the program is bloated is akin to one of my favorite Samuel Beckett quotes:

So, what's your definition of software bloat then since it seems to differ from the commonly understood meaning?

Bloat for me is features that get in your way; the kinds of features that slow you down because you can't ignore them or turn them off. Frankly, you could say that any "big" program, such as Photoshop or Word, is bloated, but I don't hear that criticism much any more, because the code has been streamlined and they really aren't that slow. (And fast processors all around keep them from being slow as well.)

[Tortue]

Maybe one problem here is that there are two kinds of music player :
1) Winamp like : user organise his files as he wishes at the folder/files level
2) iTunes like : the software manage the music files for you

I used to be a winamp user back in the days when me and all my friends would listen to the same 50 or so mp3 we managed to gather through LAN party. Encoding a CD would take 2 days on a pentium II ... My mp3 folder grew and grew through mp3 exchange, pirating etc ... and half of my 9087876987 mp3 would not be named/taged correctly.

Nowaday I have a job and I pay for my music instead of pirating it . I like my mp3 to have correct names etc .. but I hate to manage them myself. So I started to buy music on iTunes wich was the first convenient online music store and let it manage the files for me.
Now I use it out of habit. itunes is part of the app that are always on, so I don't care if it takes 15 sec to load (actually i don't know how fast it loads). I only use it to play music, I don't even do custom playlist.
Recently, my GF and I started to buy TV shows on itunes too. And we had a lot of problems while downloading the videos : slow download, server pretend that the file doesn't exists ... etc I would kill to have a good VoD service with tv shows and movies with subtitles and original soundtrack. (we can get some on itunes but not much - we are french)

One exemple of bloated software in the itune category is Amarok for linux.

[CarlJung]

Bloat for me is features that get in your way; the kinds of features that slow you down because you can't ignore them or turn them off. Frankly, you could say that any "big" program, such as Photoshop or Word, is bloated, but I don't hear that criticism much any more, because the code has been streamlined and they really aren't that slow. (And fast processors all around keep them from being slow as well.)

I see, bloat is a subset of bad usability.

[kirkmc]

Bloat for me is features that get in your way; the kinds of features that slow you down because you can't ignore them or turn them off. Frankly, you could say that any "big" program, such as Photoshop or Word, is bloated, but I don't hear that criticism much any more, because the code has been streamlined and they really aren't that slow. (And fast processors all around keep them from being slow as well.)

I see, bloat is a subset of bad usability.

Bad usability? You mean if the program is not easily usable? If that's what you mean, then, yes. I'm not bothered by the many features of Word that I don't use (but I'm happy to have some of the less common ones that are very useful to me).

[imabuddha]

Bloat for me is features that get in your way; the kinds of features that slow you down because you can't ignore them or turn them off.

I think CarlJung is saying that what you think of as bloat is actually a sign of bad usability.

I don't consider that the same thing as bloat. A program can be fast & use very few resources (not bloated) but have an awful UI. Many command line programs are examples of this.

[kirkmc]

Bloat for me is features that get in your way; the kinds of features that slow you down because you can't ignore them or turn them off.

I think CarlJung is saying that what you think of as bloat is actually a sign of bad usability.

I don't consider that the same thing as bloat. A program can be fast & use very few resources (not bloated) but have an awful UI. Many command line programs are examples of this.

I don't see a bad UI as bloat; that's just a bad UI. However, if features get in the way of features - for example, Windows constantly asking you if you're sure you really, truly want to do something - that's a kind of combination of bloat and bad usability.

So how do you define bloat? That's part of the point of my question. Lots of Windows users claim that iTunes is bloated (Mac users don't seem to say this). Many of them, as I see often on forums and mailing lists, toss around that word but it seems that many people see it as having different meanings. And, so far, on my blog post, with a few dozen comments, no one has been able to say what they mean by it. Several people have said, "Yea, it's bloated," but I expressly asked why they say this, and no one has answered. (The only reason that comes close to being valid is the size of the download; If it's really big, that can be an annoyance. However, on Windows, this is 93 MB, which, frankly, is no big deal.)

I won't deny that iTunes is complex, that it does a lot of stuff. But does that make a program "bloated"? Frankly, I'm not sure this word even has a good meaning (I think the Wikipedia article is outdated, frankly, because processor power is no longer an issue, and, for most users with recent computers, RAM is not an issue either.)

Trying to think of which programs I have that are bloated, the only candidates on my Mac are Microsoft Office and Adobe Creative Suite. But none of those programs have features that get in the way of others. I've never used mail merge in Word, but so what? Its existence doesn't bother me or slow me down. I only use Photoshop for a handful of actions, and couldn't care less about managing color profiles, for example, but that doesn't change the program.

So I'm still scratching my head here, trying to understand what people mean when they say this...

[HermanHiddema]

For the first, I don't agree that features you don't use equal bloat.

So, what's your definition of software bloat then since it seems to differ from the commonly understood meaning?

Bloat for me is features that get in your way; the kinds of features that slow you down because you can't ignore them or turn them off. Frankly, you could say that any "big" program, such as Photoshop or Word, is bloated, but I don't hear that criticism much any more, because the code has been streamlined and they really aren't that slow. (And fast processors all around keep them from being slow as well.)

Rather than use your own definition, I think it would be more useful to use a generally accepted definition.

Personally, I think that bloat is in the difference between what users expect and what they get. If a program has a million features you never use, you consider it bloated. So a program that is considered bloated by one user will not be considered bloated by another.

If you expect iTunes to be a simple music player (like Winamp), you consider it bloated. If you expect Photoshop to be a simple drawing program (like Paint), then you consider it bloated. If you expect Word to be a simple text editor (like Notepad), then you consider it bloated.

If you're writing an article about it, then you should probably consider what the average user expects. If the opinion is widely held that iTunes is bloated, then it probably has more features than the average user expects. It might be interesting to identify what those features are, and what people were expecting. I don't use it, so I wouldn't know.

[imabuddha]

So how do you define bloat? That's part of the point of my question. Lots of Windows users claim that iTunes is bloated (Mac users don't seem to say this).

…

I won't deny that iTunes is complex, that it does a lot of stuff. But does that make a program "bloated"? Frankly, I'm not sure this word even has a good meaning (I think the Wikipedia article is outdated, frankly, because processor power is no longer an issue, and, for most users with recent computers, RAM is not an issue either.)

I basically agree with the definition given in the Wikipedia article. Bloated software takes more resources than necessary (RAM, disk space, processor time), contains many features that aren't required for it's primary purpose and are unused by most people.

I think that for several major versions now iTunes certainly meets these criteria for bloat, especially on Windows.

* Even on the Mac OS it uses a large amount of RAM (real, not just virtual) just sitting idle in the background. Right now on my system (10.6.3) it's using nearly 300MB while doing nothing.

* In recent years more and more non-music functionality has been crammed into iTunes, mostly to support the iTMS & various iDevices.

For Apple, who often claim to be proud of simplifying systems, to do this is really sad. This trend began around the time they moved non-music data syncing from iSync into iTunes. Even the app's name "iTunes" makes no real sense anymore. If they want to keep all this stuff in one app it ought to be called something like "iMedia".

Software bloat often causes poor performance, but even when it doesn't (due to great HW) it's still bloated.

The bottom line is that even amongst Mac users iTunes isn't loved anymore, but tolerated as necessary to make full use of the various iDevices.

[kirkmc]

Personally, I think that bloat is in the difference between what users expect and what they get. If a program has a million features you never use, you consider it bloated. So a program that is considered bloated by one user will not be considered bloated by another.

If you expect iTunes to be a simple music player (like Winamp), you consider it bloated. If you expect Photoshop to be a simple drawing program (like Paint), then you consider it bloated. If you expect Word to be a simple text editor (like Notepad), then you consider it bloated.

If you're writing an article about it, then you should probably consider what the average user expects. If the opinion is widely held that iTunes is bloated, then it probably has more features than the average user expects. It might be interesting to identify what those features are, and what people were expecting. I don't use it, so I wouldn't know.

Yes, that's a good point. But what do users expect? In the case of iTunes, they know it manages music, provides access to a store, and manages other types of media, as well as syncing content to iPods and other devices. In my experience, most users don't know about many of the functions in iTunes, as they don't know about a lot of what's in other programs. So, again, the question is, why is that a big deal?

In any case, one of the main points of my article is to show users how to streamline the interface so they don't have to see the things that don't interest them. While that doesn't change what's under the hood, it can change user perception.

[kirkmc]

So how do you define bloat? That's part of the point of my question. Lots of Windows users claim that iTunes is bloated (Mac users don't seem to say this).

…

I won't deny that iTunes is complex, that it does a lot of stuff. But does that make a program "bloated"? Frankly, I'm not sure this word even has a good meaning (I think the Wikipedia article is outdated, frankly, because processor power is no longer an issue, and, for most users with recent computers, RAM is not an issue either.)

I basically agree with the definition given in the Wikipedia article. Bloated software takes more resources than necessary (RAM, disk space, processor time), contains many features that aren't required for it's primary purpose and are unused by most people.

I think that for several major versions now iTunes certainly meets these criteria for bloat, especially on Windows.

* Even on the Mac OS it uses a large amount of RAM (real, not just virtual) just sitting idle in the background. Right now on my system (10.6.3) it's using nearly 300MB while doing nothing.

* In recent years more and more non-music functionality has been crammed into iTunes, mostly to support the iTMS & various iDevices.

For Apple, who often claim to be proud of simplifying systems, to do this is really sad. This trend began around the time they moved non-music data syncing from iSync into iTunes. Even the app's name "iTunes" makes no real sense anymore. If they want to keep all this stuff in one app it ought to be called something like "iMedia".

Software bloat often causes poor performance, but even when it doesn't (due to great HW) it's still bloated.

The bottom line is that even amongst Mac users iTunes isn't loved anymore, but tolerated as necessary to make full use of the various iDevices.

Well, you say something interesting. Because you don't understand how the Mac OS uses RAM. When Activity Monitor shows you that a program is "using" a certain amount of Real Memory, that doesn't mean that memory is locked down. Mac OS X - and I'd guess recent versions of Windows - have dynamic memory usage that lets other programs access memory when needed. Those numbers, at least for Mac OS X, are generally considered by developers to be nothing more than indicative. You can see this by launching something that really uses a lot of RAM, right away. You'll see that the Real Mem column in Activity Monitor will change, and decrease a lot for the other programs. Granted, in years past, memory was locked, but this is no longer the case.

Processor time, however, would be a valid issue. And there's a bug in iTunes that's quite odd; if you play a song, it uses a small amount of processor time, depending on the file format, etc. But if you click the > icon in the display at the top of the window, to show the thing that looks a bit like an equalizer (I don't know what that's called, actually), CPU usage increases, and it seemingly depends on how many of the little bars are displayed. However, CPU time is not an all or nothing criterion; iTunes uses as much CPU time as it can on my Mac when I rip CDs; other music or video conversion programs do the same. Bloat for me, regarding CPU time, would be, say, if Microsoft Word used 75% of CPU time when, say, spell checking.

As for the question of name, it's become a brand, so that won't be changed, even if it starts offering a pizza delivery service. That's a non-issue in my opinion.

As to the increase in features, that's part of the growth of the program. Would you really rather have to use two programs to sync an iPod? I think the syncing is relatively streamlined; there's lots of tabs, and lots of options, but you generally only set them once. The thing is, again we come to the issue of, if you don't use these features, why do you care? If that's the criteria for "bloat" then it's an outdated concept, which really goes back to the days when software was totally resident in RAM, when there was no virtual memory, and when you would have to quit one program because you needed to free up RAM to use another. On the Mac, it's been ten years since these issues were valid; even on Windows XP, the version I use, I've only seen a low memory warning come up once in all the years I've used it (albeit rarely).

(I remember, back with OS 9 and earlier, you could choose how much RAM a program used, and when launched the program would access and lock all that RAM. And I recall that this was an issue back then, notably with Microsoft Word, which needed a lot of RAM to work with large documents.)