Break

I’m guessing the engineers at Apple do not have the same experience with Windows development as they do with Cocoa development. If they do, they sure are hiding it well. I’m talking about iTunes under Windows, which has to be one of the worst Windows applications by a major software developer.

Something happened to my iTunes setup and I can no longer reliable launch the application. Most of the time I launch the application I get an Application Exception in qttask. I tried reinstalling iTunes, didn’t work. I tried removing and reinstalling iTunes, still broken.After doing a bit of Googling, I noticed that others were having the same problem. One suggestion was to remove and reinstall Quicktime. I tried this and guess what, still doesn’t work. In fact I when I told some co-workers about this problem one of them sympathized with my plight. He had to install iTunes on another PC because he couldn’t get iTunes to work again on his primary system.
Why am I particular annoyed enough by this to post a blog entry? Well, it gives me something to write about. Actually, it creates a rather interesting problem for me. You see, I’ve purchased songs via iTunes Music Store. Apple locks me into using their software/hardware to access songs purchased via iTMS and now, I can no longer listen to them or sync them to my iPod.

This is akin to having a CD collection that only works in one player and having that CD player break. Read that again.

If a CD player was released that tied songs to the player the entire format would be DOA. However, Apple is getting away with this, I think, because there is already a built in tollerance for crappy software. Everyone knows that Windows programs crashes, it’s an accepted and inevitable part of everyone’s day. However, in this case, if someone has a huge investment in iTMS purchases and iTunes breaks than they are in a word, screwed.

I luckily have not made this huge investment. I have a dozen or so songs that I would rather give up than face the alternative - a complete resintall of the OS. For now, my bigger problem is finding software that can sync my iPod. Once I found something that works, I’ll post it here. For now, I’m stuck with the songs already on the iPod.