iTunes on Vista still not up to par

Aug 31st, 2007 by Jared Schwager ,

I’ve been using Windows Vista since it was first released and have enjoyed using it much more than XP. Almost all the applications I use daily work on Vista without many problems. But there’s one exception, and it’s iTunes. Even after the many updates Apple has released since February, nothing has seemed to fix the constant problems I have with iTunes. The best way to describe the problems I am having is with pictures.

This is what I am greeted with every time I launch iTunes. I have to resize the window to get the interface to show up correctly.
iTunes, now in black

Then after I have been listening to music for around half an hour and I go back to the iTunes window to change the song the interface goes completely whack and is sometimes even unresponsive to me clicking the close button.
iTunes, all new OS 9 interface

Now I know it’s a bad idea to even be using Vista. But I got the Vista Business Edition for free from a campaign Microsoft ran. I’m getting really fed up with the crappy Vista support in iTunes and hope my experience is better on my Macbook once I purchase it.

So Apple, when are you going to fix iTunes for Vista? It’s been out for half a year already. It takes that long to fix a few bugs?

13 reader comments

  1. September 1st, 2007 at 1:05 pm Robbie P. says:
    Robbie P.'s Gravatar

    “So Apple, when are you going to fix iTunes for Vista? It’s been out for half a year already. It takes that long to fix a few bugs?”

    Heck, no. It doesn’t take that long to fix a bug in Vista,
    unless you’re Microsoft. Microsoft is probably blaming Apple, but they purposely mess up iTunes.

    Both companies are wack. MS says,”No piracy of our OS!”
    But they really don’t mind, as long as they’re the top dog.

    Apple says,”We’re better than Windows!” True to the end, but they pulled the prices out of the great trash-can in the sky.
    They’re outrageous. Apple can look down on bulky PC setups all they want, but PC’s are way cheaper, and easier to mod.

    I seriously would like Apple to dominate, but they need to come off their high horse and show everyday-Joe that you don’t need to pay Staples $50 to ‘Analyze PC security” and get used to a crash per-day.

    This is why Ubuntu will rule.


    I use Ubuntu, because hardware is only as good as the software that utilizes it.
    (and Compiz Fusion kicks Aero where it hurts)

  2. September 1st, 2007 at 1:08 pm Robbie P. says:
    Robbie P.'s Gravatar

    Sorry about the above topic being a bit off subject. :P

    Love the new layout, man.

  3. September 9th, 2007 at 8:46 pm Ryan says:
    Ryan's Gravatar

    I have been having similar problems with iTunes and vista for a while now, too.

  4. September 16th, 2007 at 1:33 am Peter says:
    Peter's Gravatar

    I’m with you. I’ve downloaded every update of iTunes so far and still iTunes is unresponsive under Vista. It freezes up during downloading podcast, it freezes up if you try and add an file cover to a song, it just sucks. Can’t believe that Apple have not managed to sort it out after all this time.

  5. September 16th, 2007 at 12:52 pm Robbie P. says:
    Robbie P.'s Gravatar

    Did anybody try running iTunes in compatibility mode for XP?

  6. September 16th, 2007 at 8:53 pm Jared Schwager says:
    Jared Schwager's Gravatar

    Robbie, I have tried that multiple times and it doesn’t help me with any of the issues I’m having.

    My guess is that it’s related to my NVIDIA video card. The driver for my card is utter crap.

  7. October 5th, 2007 at 1:14 pm HR says:
    HR's Gravatar

    I’m not so sure it is Apple who you should blame.

    MS has already done this kind of trick to get rid of software from competitors. They make the software run so slowly or buggy that it forces you to stop using it.

    I think it was in the first versions of Windows where they explictly generated random errors when you were using something different than MS-DOS (I can’t remember if the problem was with DR-DOS or something else). This is documented and got public in some trial against Microsoft.

  8. October 15th, 2007 at 12:23 pm WIll Turner says:
    WIll Turner's Gravatar

    hey guys i have this problem all the time.. just click full screen and its fine after that..

  9. October 16th, 2007 at 8:53 am Jared Schwager says:
    Jared Schwager's Gravatar

    Will, I have to resize the iTunes window every time I launch iTunes to get it to show the interface properly. And even then, after about half an hour the interface starts getting screwy.

  10. October 26th, 2007 at 4:16 pm soulrebeljc says:
    soulrebeljc's Gravatar

    I just got a new laptop, and you can’t get anything new without Vista. My itunes was running fine (Ok its still a crappy program) on XP, but I can’t even get itunes on my Vista to accept new files into the library. I’ll do the “add folder” and it indicates that its processing the artwork, but does none of the AAC conversion and the songs do not end up in My Library. Also, when I try to choose a different folder within My Music to transfer more music, it won’t let me out of the previous folder - as if that were the only folder in My Music. What is up with all of this - is this still bugs? Are they ever going to get fixed? I feel like I’ve been screwed with all of this incompatibility - I mean, I’m not a programmer, but how hard can it be?? Anybody have any answers for these problems I’m having?

  11. February 17th, 2008 at 8:35 pm Elena Munoz says:
    Elena Munoz's Gravatar

    Hi
    I had the same problem with Vista and Itunes.It turned out that the tablet Pc that I had installed was what was causing the problem. I uninstalled it and now I can finally see the itunes.
    This is the way we pinpointed what the issue was: there is an option in Windows configuration where you can disable everything that is not Windows based. We disabled half of them, tried the itunes it worked. From the half that we had left, disabled the other half, tried itunes and it worked. Did it again with the next half and this time itunes didn’t work. After that we eliminated until finding what was causing the issue.
    I hope this helps.

  12. May 6th, 2008 at 11:57 pm Arrm says:
    Arrm's Gravatar

    I can’t solve your problem for getting iTunes to work on Vista OS but you could download Winamp 5.531 with iTunes plug-in, a least you would be able to upload tunes on your iPod.

  13. May 28th, 2008 at 4:13 am Aaron Clausen says:
    Aaron Clausen's Gravatar

    I’m running the latest itunes in Vista Ultimate 32bit and still to this day I’m getting the ugly black screen when itunes first loads up. Pretty pathetic!

    Its also pretty lame performance. All my songs are on a NAS drive, and I’m on a wireless lan, but my laptop is right near the wireless router. Searching and updating the File Info for any song has pathetic performance.

    Its like the whole thing was directly ported and remains bloated and not optimised. Its as if it needs to be fully re-written in c++ to get some decent performance out of it.

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