I don't think I'd agree with that dire an appraisal. iTunes was a good music app for a fair number of years, particularly on the Mac. It started to lose its way as it was asked to do more and more things, but I don't really think it fell off the cliff until they started integrating Beats Music into it. (IIRC, a lot of Apple Music's crazier UX ideas were present in some form in the pre-Apple Beats service, and subsequent iterations have just been different flavors of crazy. The metadata handling/matching, which has come up in this thread given how important that is for classical music, also got a lot worse post-Beats.)
Personally, I hope the Primephonic developers don't just develop a new classical app for Apple, I hope they work on the Music app, too.
In the beginning, iTunes never worked well once you had 10k+ songs. The user flows weren't designed to navigate large libraries, and it also slowed to a crawl.
And it always felt like straight up malware on Windows with all the QuickTime update prompts.
My library was never that big, but I knew people who had ones at least that size and didn't have any complaints, although given your last sentence it may be relevant to note they were all Mac users. The three-column browser view seemed to work very well for "drilling down" in collections, at least for me. (That browser's actually still in Music, even though it's unnecessarily hidden under the Songs view.)
> It always felt like straight up malware on Windows with all the QuickTime update prompts.
I'm not positive QuickTime was the source of an awful lot of Windows iTunes' badness, but I have strong suspicions. :)
The three pane view was pretty good for my large-ish library (~15k songs) and I didn’t have stability issues. But I wasn‘t there in the beginning. I guess it had at least a good stretch somewhere in the middle.
swinsian is what itunes should have been from the start. after it became the homescreen for all the i-devices it never had a chance to be a usable music player...
Personally, I hope the Primephonic developers don't just develop a new classical app for Apple, I hope they work on the Music app, too.