Recently, Alex did a post on iTunes 9 being beaten with the ugly stick. While I can’t say I disagree, I will admit that he left one thing out; iTunes 9 is insanely slow! Clicking pause takes a couple seconds before it pauses the song, clicking play has the same issue, and iTunes takes longer to launch. Call me crazy, but I am not willing to give up speed and reliability for home sharing, iTunes LP, and a so-called “improved” iTunes store. Once I realized how god awful iTunes 9 was, I immediately tried to downgrade back to iTunes 8. Fortunately, this was easier than I thought it would be. To downgrade back down to iTunes 8:
1) Quit iTunes
2) Delete iTunes from your Applications folder
3) Go to your ~/Music/iTunes folder with ~ referring to your Home/User Folder. Delete or rename the “iTunes Library” file
4) Open the “Previous iTunes Libraries” folder and look for your iTunes 8 library. You’ll be able to tell by the date as it should be dated at about the time you first ran iTunes 9. Copy the most recent pre-9 file to ~/Music/iTunes and rename it to “iTunes Library”
5) Go to the /Library/Receipts folder and delete the iTunesX and iTunesAccess packages
6) Download iTunes 8.2.1 directly from Apple. The page says it’s for G3, but it’s actually the regular iTunes kept online for G3 users who can’t run iTunes 9. Launch the dmg and run the installer.
7) iTunes should now launch with all your Music, Video, Playlists, etc. already added. Any changes you made while running iTunes 9 will be lost, but it’s a small price to pay for reliability.
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November 18th, 2009 at 11:43 AM
My iTunes 9 can’t pause songs after changing the playlist. Who the hell thought it would be a good idea to remove the pause button from a multi-media player?
October 7th, 2009 at 7:13 AM
Music purchased in the iTunes music store is DRM-free.. is in a standard format… and will play on any device that will play .AAC files. Also, iTunes will convert your files to .mp3 if your player does not support multiple formats…. but you already knew that.. didn’t you..
October 7th, 2009 at 12:11 PM
Your point being… I don’t remember anyone complaining about the DRM in iTunes or the format of the music purchased.
October 3rd, 2009 at 1:59 AM
I’ve had no issues with the new iTunes running Leopard. While I find they’ve made it extremely glossy and gone a bit overboard, it’s still one of the best multimedia players out there for Mac and PC and I’ll continue to stick by it.
September 25th, 2009 at 7:34 PM
the other thing they changed in 8 to 9 was the key commands to convert to “micro” player. now its Shift+Apple+M