(Migrated weblog post from LSR)
A couple of days ago there was one article in CNET that really grabbed my attention as it was covering one of the applications I have been using quite often ever since I received my iPod. The article in question is titled iTunes upgrade has users griping and it comes to share some interesting views from end-users who have upgraded their iTunes to the latest version, iTunes 5. I must say that I got to read the article myself because I, too, upgraded to the latest version and although so far I haven’t encountered any of the problems described in it I still wasn’t 100% content with the upgrade. And I will explain why,
While I was going through the article I was hoping that someone would mention the main issue I have been experiencing since the upgrade; and that is the language iTunes uses after installation. Apparently with this new version it is supposed to pick up the language settings specified under Regional and Language Options, for XP, that is. So what happens when you do not want to use that language? Easy answer … You are in trouble.
I have got two different laptops, one whose language is Dutch and the other Spanish, yet I always want my iTunes to run in English, so I ended up having a look and see if there would be any option to be tweaked and bring me back to where I was before. No, there isn’t. Call it lazy design and development, call it no, we didn’t want to add the menu option since it is not necessary, call it we don’t want to give people such kind of functionality, whatever, the thing is that iTunes does not have any menu option to tweak the language settings.
And looking around on the Web it looks like I was not the only one that was complaining about this same problem, but nobody has offered so far to improve that user experience, which I must say I find it a bit irritating. I want to have control over my applications and not let it up to the operating system to regulate that. Yet, the change was done and nobody noticed till it was a bit too late. Luckily, smart end-users are always there for the rescue and they have figured out how to fix this issue, and although it may be a bypass or a workaround, it certainly fixes the problem and puts you back in business.
The actual workaround can be found by clicking on this URL and I thought I would share it over here so that other folks who may not like this new feature would be able to fix it in no time as opposed to have to spend several hours searching for it, like it happened to me. So here it goes. In order to fix this you will need to go to the X:\Program Files\iTunes\iTunes.Resources directory and then rename / remove the specific language files / folders. In my case I renamed my nl.proj folder to NoThanksnl.proj. Obviously iTunes needs to be closed during this process, but after doing that, and restarting it up it will come back with the default English language and you are back in business. At least, I was.
I am not sure what is going to happen with the next upgrade, that was announced, that would fix some other issues, but I do seriously hope that in that upgrade they give me back the control over the application(s) I run and do not let them depend on the operating system itself as that is not the best user experience you can think of. End-users should always be in control, not the other way around. Let’s see what happens then with the next release.
