Goodbye iPod, and Thanks for All the Tunes

Re:Goodbye iPod, and Thanks for All the Tunes by qubex on Monday January 08, 2018 @03:17PM (#16100008)

I vaguely remember that when my sister installed iTunes on her Windows XP machine, she also found herself lumbered with QuickTime... whether that was a sly bundling move by Apple or an actual dependency I cannot recall (or perhaps never really knew), but what does stick with me is how much regular grief it caused her.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Goodbye iPod, and Thanks for All the Tunes by SllX on Monday January 08, 2018 @04:53PM (#16101015)

Actual dependency. Mac or Windows, QuickTime was the mechanism by which iTunes performed any playback at all whether audio or video. Anything that ran in QuickTime could theoretically also run in iTunes though if I recall correctly though, iTunes would still limit the file-types you could import into your library.

Even today, iTunes still depends on QuickTime, but given I haven't used Windows in almost ten years or seriously used iTunes in almost 8 years, I couldn't tell you whether that dependency is the old QuickTime 7 API or if Apple ported a subset of the newer QuickTime APIs over I also couldn't really tell you which they use on Macs* anymore either given I prefer to avoid launching iTunes whenever possible.

That said, iTunes up to about version 6 point whatever the last point update was, was genuinely a really great jukebox on Windows. It was easy to use, loaded fast, ran fast and I ran it nearly 24/7 on my old XP machine. iTunes 7 ruined all of that, and my first indication would have been when it took over an hour to complete the install process and the first run was dog slow.

* Apple did deprecate and remove QuickTime 7 from Mac OS X, that said, I wouldn't put it past them to maintain an API in maintenance mode exclusively for their own use, particularly when it comes to maintaining the many-heads of the beast that is iTunes.

[ Parent | on HN ]