22 Sep 2012
Software “upgrades” — And the hits keep coming!
God help us and save us, readers: the hits keep coming!
I put a blog post here on Tuesday, complaining about a couple of software “upgrades” that actually broke stuff. It keeps getting worse! To wit:
The latest version of iTunes (10.7.0.21) has broken my music library. For no apparent reason, iTunes has decided that hundreds of my music files “cannot be located.” I tried following the instructions that someone helpfully put in a YouTube video, but it didn’t fix the problem, and it actually made the problem worse — now my iTunes folder was all at sixes and sevens, with a bunch of new duplicate XML config files appearing and a bunch of music folders disappearing.
So I uninstalled iTunes, completely deleted my entire music folder, reinstalled iTunes, factory-reset my iPod, then restored all my music files from backup and re-synced everything back into my iPod. This took over three hours, as I have about 42 GB of music on my computer.
And the end result? I’m right back where I started. Hundreds of music files “cannot be located.”
The problem? There are major bugs in iTunes 10.7.0.21 for 64-bit Windows 7. That’s right, the latest version of iTunes broke my music library. All I can do is hope that the next release will fix the problem.
This, on top of the iOS 6 upgrade on iPad, which famously replaced Google Maps with Apple’s own sloppy, broken Maps app, and took away YouTube (replacing it with… NOTHING — iPad users are reduced to using the crappy mobile version of the YouTube website), is making me wonder if Apple’s salad days are over.
So, this week’s electronic wrecking crews:
- The Bitly Chrome extension: they f*ed this one up so bad that I uninstalled it, and now I just compose all my tweets in the TweetDeck desktop application.
- The latest iPad Twitter app, which made Lists harder to navigate to and made the embedded Web browser full-screen (if you’re going to do that, why not just have Web pages open in Mobile Safari, guys?).
- The latest iTunes, which badly broke my music library on Windows 7.
- iOS 6, which took away two great apps and replaced them with one broken app and one big bag of Screw You.