Hatred of Itunes

dummy

twat.

I keep it checked and then periodically delete the original mp3s from my downloads folder. I like that iTunes keeps the them organised in one place automatically.

I also wonder whether it slows things down if it has to catalogue mp3s that are spread all over your hard drive . Does anyone know?

iTunes: DO IT OUR WAY OR FUCK U

AND THERE'S NO STOP BUTTON

Press the space bar and then hit the left arrow. Magic!

The first time a song loads into iTunes, iTunes "optimizes its volume" or something, which stops playback for a second or two. Wow, thanks, Apple. Everything's so seamless now.

iTunes can't do a 0-second gap between songs if you're burning a CD.

The fastest it can burn a disc on The Lovely Emma B's iBook is 4x speed, which was the norm in what, 1996?

What do people use instead? I'd love to ditch it.

I've never thought that iTunes was TEH GRATEST or anything like that, but I do think that overall, it handles everything together better than most other programs. It's certainly not flawless, though, but to get everything I need at a perfect level (for me) in a music/ripping/encoding/purchasing/burning package, it takes at least six different programs. Luckily, I don't usually need anything that precision, though, so iTunes handles most everything else just fine.

her iBook is two years old. The file renaming thing happens on my machine though, which is a relatevely ancient 1st gen silver Powerbook with a paltry 284M RAM, so maybe it's the RAM that's doing it.

I've actually just tried burning a CD on her iBook with Toast, and it fucks up the gap between songs, too, so iTunes is off the hook for that.

I'll check out Musicmatch.

It's four programs, but two of them are free legally (as long as you stick to Winamp 2.9 or no later), the other two are cheap.

For winXPers, it's a way of life, but it works well.

T, which Candi have you been downloading?

you shouldn't be futzing with your id tags during a party, you should be partying!

s1ocki the party is often only in my head.

I think it was "Do Your Duty," Porkpie.

Just occasionally, a track (downloaded ones it seems - never ripped ones) will not let me change the tags on it. It looks like it's changed, but as soon as I play it again, it reverts to the old data. Looked elsewhere on net for an answer, but no one seems to have worked out why it sometimes does it. The only solution I've found: using (the free) MP3 Rage to retag these rogue tracks.

The itunes version of this (aside from the slightly clunkier hands-on interface after you load it) is to take your entire mp3 folder and, based on what might be incorrect tags, just put them into the folders it deems best in an automatic process that you have no control over. Have a compilation folder with a bunch of different' artist's tracks? It'll create a folder for each individual song. That gets really tiring after you get more than a few gigs of mp3s downloaded or ripped.

What I still don't understand about all this is why it matters to you what folders the mp3s are in. I hardly ever even look at the file directories for mp3s. I just use the Library. If you retag the tracks correctly then it will put them in right artist folder. I'm not sure why you are having that problem with compilations - the V/A compilations I have all seem to go in a folder called 'Compilations' and then in subfolders named after the title of the compilation. It doesn't create a separate folder for each song at all. I don't know if this is caused by checking that 'part of a compilation' check box. As I say, I never really look at the folder structure when it comes to my mp3s.

Anyway, if it's working properly then you should just be able to uncheck 'keep organised' and 'copy to itunes music folder' in Advanced Prefs, to stop it doing all the auto organising, should you wish. I don't know why this wasn't working for Jay. I wish one could do the same in iPhoto.

Well, do you mean manually? Because that seems to make itunes' first-time-run "we'll organize your files for you" function irrelevant. I care about what folders my mp3s are in because I use different programs for burning them than playing them...either musicmatch or nero, and usually browse my music folder and click 'n drag the files into those programs. Also, I've mostly used winamp to play mp3s so I queue them up from folders as well. I'm just used to dealing with folders so it's much more of a psychological thing.

I'm not sure what you mean either! Manually, or by using the Gracenote CCDB tool, yeah. As soon as you retag it, the mp3 will be moved to the relevant artist - album folder. Anyway, I sort of understand this folder interest as a 'that's what I'm used to' thing.

The Doug's iTunes AppleScripts page is hella useful for managing tracks

I use:

1) Exact Audio Copy w/ LAME set to www.bestmp3guide.com specs for ripping & encoding

2) Musicbrainz for tagging if I haven't been able to find the disc on the freedb

3) Nero for burning

4) WinAmp for playing, and the IPod plugin for WinAmp to manage my IPod. It is the shit.

5) SharePod to backup my IPod / transmit mp3 files from my IPod to my hard drive.

I used ITunes for about half a day before I junked it. It became completely superfluous when I got the new free WinAmp IPod plugin, which seems to have faster transfer rates and a more intuitive interface for PC users. Plus, configurable.

couldn't they just install whatever quicktime uses to decode the music without making you download the video player part of it? i don't want itunes to be a video player (or a music store, or a podcast player).

NO IT WAS! QUICKTIME +ITUNES TOTAL IS LESS THAN 100 MEGABYTES (I'm using that as an upper bound ;) ... probably like ~25 iirc)

MAYBE YOU SHOULD GIVE UP ON COMPUTERS IF YOUR COMPUTER DOESN'T HAVE THE GONADS TO HANDLE ITUNES, MAN!

Macintosh Minimum Requirements
400 MHz G3 processor or faster
At least 128 MB of RAM
Mac OS X v10.3.9 or later
Windows Minimum Requirements
A Pentium processor-based PC or compatible computer
At least 128MB of RAM
Windows 2000/XP

alba: thx, will try it out later.

Do you have a DELL?

http://www.tadpolecomputer.com/html/products/mobile/bullfrog-dual/

500MHz Pentium III or comparable
64MB RAM
15MB Hard Disk Space
16bit Sound Card
Windows 98 SE, Windows ME, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows 2003
1x speed or greater CD Burner (Required for Burning)
2x speed or greater CDROM (Required for Ripping)
Recommended system requirements
1.5 GHz Pentium IV or comparable
128MB RAM
30MB Hard Disk Space
32bit Sound Card
Windows 2000, Windows XP
8x speed or greater CD Burner (Required for Burning)
16x speed or greater CDROM (Required for Ripping)

http://www.foobar2000.org/

TURN THAT OPTION OFF THEN.

Winamp interface is fine. Foobar2000 has a silly name and smells of wee.

NEVERMIND THE AWFUL SKINS D00DZ MAKE EVEN

xpost

WHAT IF I WANT IT ON NORMALLY?

I use WinAmp at work still because I can't install anything else.

HOPE YOU DON'T HAVE A WOBBLY MOUSE OR YOU WON'T BE ABLE TO STAY ON THOSE TINY BUTTONS

!

ihttp://download.nullsoft.com/customize/component/2004/6/3/S/large_image/The_Oddsocks_Skin.jpg

well if you want it BOTH ways, you can hold down apple key to temporarily over-ride that setting :-)

YOU ARE ALL LIBERAL ARTS MAJOR MORONS. METADATA SMART PLAYLISTS ARE YOUR FRIENDS

I WISH I HAD FRIENDS :(

indie. dance. chill. eyeball-bleeding followed by a degustatory self-immolation if you ever heard me using these fucking words near my music.

i may have to try browser view. the irksome thing about it, from my extremely limited trial runs, is that i don't want to remember that Pop Single #89 is from some random compilation, click on the compilation, etc.

tracer i use a smart playlist with songs that i haven't played and another with songs i've played but not rated and i have them randomized.

then another with songs rated four or five, again randomized.

i never use genre for anything.

THERE IS A SEARCH BUTTON

or just shuffle the main Library directory.

in the unlikely (unless it's 'Silent Shout' it seems) event of wanting to hear several tracks from the same album lately I just locate it in the main Library directory by listing by artist, then toggle off shuffle.

WOO ROCKET SCIENCE

is that last one the genre for james blunt?

you could do a smart playlist version of this using "any of" play "count > x" and "comments contains 'fave'" then you can put in that keyword in the comments to nudge it into the playlist if it's play count ain't high enough

now star ratings is something i never got into for some reason.

i thought that might be it - my library is on my mac and i manually admin my mini, so i don't think i get the advantage of star rating /syncing or whatevah proper ipod stuff gives you.

no, manual admin'ing is not tedious. not with "recently added" smart lists. so ner.

so the ipod plugin for winamp is flawless then? the idea of itunes ws really putting me off getting one

i'm not into itunes.

no folder monitoring = fuck that

i mean it all seems a bit foolish and long way round especially when the actual song files in the folder have track numbers prepended to their filenames already, but iTunes either diregards this or can't figure it out.

Dude, do you want it freaking out every time you download an mp3 automatically?

FOR FUCK'S SAKE DO YOU PEOPLE NOT GET THE IDEA OF METADATA?

TO MY ADVANTAGE

xpost

I meant that it tags things properly when it rips them. It isn't iTunes fault if other programs produce bad unicode tags that it eats. It even provides options for unwrangling them.

xpost

I've solved the problem by not bothering and being like "Haha suckas who download my shit can figure that out."

xpost I get annoyed when it turns up the ones that are like half in Japanese and half in English but neither in a manner that helps you figure out wtf it is!

My problem with fixing the tags is that if I rip the album before fixing it manually in the uh rip screen it refuses to let me change the tags later. Like, it'll change it and then when I click to play the song, poof back to gobbledy-gook.

i think the way they sort it is hiragana/katakana a-i-u-e-o-ka-ki-ku-ke-ko etc, then by radical; so, you know, unless you happen to know the order of radicals in both languages back-to-front...

Get better music!

xpost

Don't use retarded computers!

i don't know if there's a silent add trick other than dragging and dropping to the library but in any case you can just make a watch folder that does whatever magic is possible with totally minimal applescripting.

Question: I want to show the various metadata screens for a project I am doing. Is there any way to select these and print them out? When I call them up I couldn't find a way to print them out.

Look at all the hassle and BS people go through with iTunes and ipods, and the entire appeal of a mac is that it's user-friendly even to "liberal arts idiots," who by the way are typically the only people to defend macs.

No possible defense can be made for iTunes run on a PC, it is so shitty that it must be a deliberate attempt to sabotage the PC experience. That attempt, that Ned linked to above, to keep Apple from forcing ipod users to install TEH HATED ITUNES and KEEP THE ENTIRE HUGE IPOD PLAYLIST STORED ON THE HD EXACTLY AS IS is amazing. If it ever comes to it, though, I think Apple would rather lose the entire European market than give consumers any kind of freedom.

Basically when you install iTune+quicktime, you are installing a large chunk of OS X lots of the Carbon and Cocoa APIs), every update includes any updates and bugfixes to these chunks of OS X, I guess they figure it is better to reinstall from scratch every time than to patch.

It is a bugger though.

FOR FUCK'S SAKE DO YOU PEOPLE NOT GET THE IDEA OF METADATA?

folder monitoring doesn't have to be instantaneous! DO YOU NOT GET THE IDEA OF SCHEDULED TASKS

http://www.dougscripts.com/itunes/itinfo/folderaction01.php

Try using the Mac version of Windows Media player! That may be the worst "media" software ever.

That attempt, that Ned linked to above, to keep Apple from forcing ipod users to install TEH HATED ITUNES and KEEP THE ENTIRE HUGE IPOD PLAYLIST STORED ON THE HD EXACTLY AS IS is amazing.

Uh, you can manually move stuff to the iPod inside iTunes. USE 1 BRANE MORAN

If it ever comes to it, though, I think Apple would rather lose the entire European market than give consumers any kind of freedom.

Dude, you can still do whatever you want with all your DRM-free music. Do you really think the DRM music from anyone else is any better? At least Apple Music Store works on more than one platform!

Yeah really, this is total delusional talk. There are programs that fix your filenames for you, ie FileRenamer. Tagging is no more reliable than filenaming, and just confuses things when it comes to filesharing.

Did you read what I wrote upthread?
ARTIST: At the Drive
SONG: In-One Armed Scissor

BAD BAD BAD SOLUTION.

iTunes will rename the filenames and manage the folder hierarchy to keep it in line with the metadata store if you let it. There is no problem.

You know, they ARE programmers. If this were to be integrated into iTunes, they could make it do it right :)

folder monitoring doesn't have to be instantaneous! DO YOU NOT GET THE IDEA OF SCHEDULED TASKS

That isn't folder monitoring. Monitoring is either instantaneous or happens over a very short cycle time via something like Linux's FAM. If you want the batch task sort of behavior, there's all kinds of applications to let you do that. Now, sometimes I am actually doing something intensive on my computer and I wouldn't want iTunes import to take up any memory or cpu (unlike you sad people who spend your lives in Word and complaining that iTunes is too hard) so I wouldn't want this kind of thing.

FOLDER ACTIONS!!!!

The problem with Folder actions is that the actions only register from Finder actions IIRC. This means that file transfer programs will not register events upon download completetion.

haha jon that's not true at all! neither winamp nor foobar define folder monitoring as instantaneous or short-cycled; they're totally customizable. hence my point uptop that if you wanted to curtail the computer hiccuping every five minutes, you could set it to monitor every 24 hours so it functions more like a scheduled task.

i'm sorry that you don't think that's what folder monitoring is, but each program i mentioned calls that customizable feature "folder monitoring", as do most of these people.

yes you are, you're talking about UI design, on which you're a completely incomprehensible and reactionary fanboy dimbulb for whatever program you're using that week.

come on, even you can see the futility of that statement.

Maybe my brain is like a relational database.

-- Tracer Hand

ha its not like i have something virtuoso crazy going or anything, like for the strays its

2006 >
+ random rnb
+ random rap
+ dancehall, riddim subsets, soca, oldskool
+ random grime > radio rips, sets, shop clips, rng
+ random random

big deal. if u listen to new music all day ur not fucking with well tagged business, and nor would i be able to work with searching for stray nobody artists i never heard of and might never remember again; alba likes to bust the pretence of being an organic feely starchild all about the music maaan but really itunes is far more set up for bitter shopkeeper learned id3 scholarship than winamp, which is a bit clunkier i suppose but still has a way more colloqial relation to the way ppl listen to music cos it bloody well reminds u ur listening to fucking mp3s on a fucking computer, whats that got to do with real life! like ooh, u can add poxy *starzz* to remember if u like something, how human! (this sort of totally fake 'feature' is 100000x gayer than any wonky ashley simpson skin on a winamp btw)

god, this new little update is stupid. when browsing, i'm used to having artist names and album names that start with numbers or special characters at the top. i dislike change.

dislike change? steer clear of updates

Easy to say when you're sleepy and it says "hey, want to install this update?" and you click Yes Please instead of Leave Me Alone.

How are they ordered now?

it just ordered me to reinstall :(:(:(:(

will my playlists still exist?

it's a crapshoot.

what happened? just crashed?

it said like "itunes can not run, plz reinstall itunes"

!

Tried something like gtkpod? I don't know what kind of computer you're using.

my itunes crashed and i lost all my playlists. does anyone know how to get the itunes preset playlists back? i'm talking like "top 25 most played" and "recently added". is it in preferences or something??

Are they bringing out a new version of this piece of shit soon or what?

my itunes crashed and i lost all my playlists. does anyone know how to get the itunes preset playlists back? i'm talking like "top 25 most played" and "recently added". is it in preferences or something??

-- J0rdan S., Thursday, 13 December 2007 05:25 (5 minutes ago) Link

they're smart playlists. you can make 'em yourself, using whatever criteria you want.

oy thx b nard.

meh still can't figure this out.

file -> "new smart playlist", then just pick the criteria you want to use for including songs on the playlist. for "top 25 most played", it's "limit to 25 items selected by most often played"; "recently added" is "date added is in the last 3 months" (live updating on for both, of course).

still got em, whew!

i still use Cog and i still love it -

http://cogx.org

for special playlists i make smart folders right in the Finder.

Cog also has a cousin, called "Play", which uses iTunes' "media library" approach to music organisation if that's what you prefer -

http://sbooth.org/Play

iTunes demanded that I reinstall it and I said no. Now Quicktime is screwing up, possibly due to its unholy alliance with iTunes updates.

you said no!

nice

you tell that application, curtis

don't take no guff

Why aren't the !!! tunes all grouped together when I sort by artist?

http://img392.imageshack.us/img392/2862/picture2kr5.png

I've tried erasing the ID3 tag bit for artist and recreating it, as well as letting Picard relabel them and erasing the artist portion of the un-ID'd trax. No luck.

Get Info for the tracks, click the Sorting tab, and see if they have different entries. It's probably best to enter "Chk Chk Chk" for both of them, so they sort alphabetically with the rest of your tunes.

The idea being that you want to edit the tracks' Sort Name, over on the right-hand side of the dialogue box.

I kinda like keeping the right name, though. What's the purpose in supporting UTF-8 if you can't use it? I just want all the !!! trax to be together. (xp)

You mean "Artist", right? I have reset that a few times.

Nah, keep the Artist field just as it was, with "!!!". Only change what's in the sorting fields, as you don't see them in normal usage; iTunes just uses the info internally for sorting purposes. Anything you type in them overrides the regular tags just for sorting. Like this:

http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y6/akadaver/Picture1.png

These fields allow iTunes to sort bands like "The ____" by the first letter in the second word, rather than lumping them all together in the T section. It happens automatically.

(Not saying this is how you've got to do things, but it might explain why your songs aren't listed together despite having outwardly similar artist tags.)

I hadn't ever opened that tab, I don't think. I usually edit multiple files at once, and that doesn't show up when you do a multi-edit. I wish I could keep !!! even for sorting, but this solution will do. Thanks.

You can still keep "!!!" for sorting, but if you do, make sure that all of your files are doing the same thing.

problem is having any !!! on yr hard drive in the first place

zing

quite good that i thought

Highly novel zing there I'll be writing that one down.

http://msnbcmedia1.msn.com/j/ap/f2e0b2ee-aa36-4bed-a290-f35545d04ded.widec.jpg

i'd like to thank you all so much

i just bought an ipod, and was gonna use ilx for general remedial itunes questions, but i can narrow it down to this: is itunes going to annoy the fuck out of me? given that my computer is too shitty to hold any of the music on there permanently, is it going to require complicated syncing, and occasionally delete huge chunks of music, and stubbornly refuse to upload a christine carter record, and loads of other things? it's all more complicated than i thought.

1. Don't set it to "sync": Turn off that in prefs and drag music onto iPod.
2. If you are some weirdo FLAC/Ogger, then yes, you will be annoyed.

sync off and not a flac-er, thank you x

i never have any problems with it. get an external drive to hold all your music though.

^^ this

iTunes has a piss-poor user interface so I haven't bothered using it enough to notice bugs

I think iTunes is the best music app today. Why are there so many haters?

A friend of mine likes to complain about iTunes a lot, but he swears by Foobar2000, which is like the most godawful UI ever in the history of UIs so it's like he's a a martian trying to convince me that I'd feel a lot better w/o all this useless "oxygen" in my atmosphere.

iTunes is fantastic. It's also very basic. The UI is mostly fine, and it doesn't delete anything you don't want it to. Myths abound.

I'm trying to burn an MP3 CD from Itunes. The music was uploaded from a CD, but it still won't do it: 'Only files that are already in MP3 format may be burned to an MP3 CD' ...

Sounds as though you're ripping songs from the CD in AAC—or some other—format, the iTunes default. It won't let you burn them to an MP3 CD because they probably aren't MP3s.

i.e. There is no mystical, DRM, iTunes-is-evil issue going on here. Probably.

damn, you're right, I think I did upload some of those in AAC. I'd forgotten :-( But yay no itunes issue.

the only reason I hate itunes is because it takes so much memory to run. Firefox + iTunes = :- ( computer

Argh I just got a new Ipod Classic and Anapod doesn't recognise it :( Now I have to use this horrible piece of crap again.

Is Songbird any good? One of my workmates said he uses that instead.

iTunes has a piss-poor user interface

What's wrong with it? I suppose, more specifically, what would you like it to do?

the main thing missing from itunes IMO is the ability to "watch" a folder; this would enable you to just drop your mp3s into a folder and have them show up in the library without having to "add" them manually.

I basically just like to be able to drop mp3 folders/files from explorer straight onto my Ipod which I don't think is very easy to do on Itunes. Found something called YamiPod which seems to work so far. Fuck a library.

mediamonkey lets you drag and drop to ipod from windows explorer as well as library/sync options (including podcasts now, they were kinda late on that). i don't bother hating itunes anymore. i only keep it around in case the ipod needs reformatting, and on the rare occasion MM can't read a disc itunes seems to always comes through like a champ(a very slow-ripping champ, and i can probably find a way better alternative but i like that itunes does something for me every once in a while)

I think iTunes is the best music app today

lunacy tho

"I basically just like to be able to drop mp3 folders/files from explorer straight onto my Ipod which I don't think is very easy to do on Itunes."

it depends on yr setup - if like me you manually manage yr ipod, then it is that simple. the ipod and it's content appears in the itunes interface, and you can drag files straight into that list. big fat deal. (OTOH if yr synced, then dragging it to itunes library will sync it to yr ipod anyway??)

when a file manager can cope with music metadata the way itunes can then i'll be half-annoyed that i have to drag into one rather than the other. otherwise, bothered.

Fair enough didn't know you could do that. Still prefer not to use if I don't have to cos it's so amazingly slow. When I first started it up this morning it rendered my laptop almost useless while it pissed about trying to get album art (even thought that option is unticked in preferences, wtf?)

the main thing missing from itunes IMO is the ability to "watch" a folder; this would enable you to just drop your mp3s into a folder and have them show up in the library without having to "add" them manually.

If you are on Mac, this is probably a 5-line applescript.

By that I mean, on the iPod. iTunes can keep its library automatically organized.

The biggest mistake people make with iTunes/iPod is leaving "sync" on. Turn it off and 90% of complaints go away.

I think that folks' biggest problem with iTunes is that they don't bother to sort out the prefs before hooking up an iPod.

If you don't sync what's the point of using iTunes?

Playing music?

There's this new thing called "computers" where people can listen to music without using a turntable. You should try it!

If you don't sync

having an ipod that's smaller than your music collection. sometimes i just move albums on and take em off, other times i use a smart folder of 'new stuff' to update against.

Is Songbird any good? One of my workmates said he uses that instead.

― I KNOW WHAT YOU'RE UP TO (Colonel Poo), Monday, 10 November 2008 13:43

i too would like to know about this. i downloaded it ages ago with a view towards taking a look, but haven't yet got around to it. any cop?

yeah i have to manually do all of this, I have 500GB of music and an 80GB HD,syncing would be impossible.

80GB ipod, I meant

I checked out the latest Songbird release last week, but didn't see the appeal. It's open source, so I guess that matters to some people.

I have an old iPod Touch. Is there any way to send mp3s to it without using iTunes? I was able to do it with my old Nano with ml_ipod or whatever, but does anything similar exist for the Touch? Loading up iTunes takes about a day.

Time for a new computers burty.

If you don't sync what's the point of using iTunes?

Is there some other easy way of throwing things on my iPod? Because I'd be more than happy to stop using the program entirely.

I mean, it's a lot of resources for something I use solely as an iPod interface and occasional mp3 converter

Put iPod on floor, pick up objects, stand a few feet away from iPod, hold the object above your head. Thrust your arms downward while releasing objects, attempting to aim their trajectory so they will land on the iPod.

Compatible with all software & hardware.

YAHHH TRICK YAHHH

Is mediamonkey any good?

I've used Media Monkey exclusively for 2 years.

MediaMonkey is not terribly resource intensive, and I found it intuitive for uniformly organizing files from tags, tags from filenames, with scripts for correcting case & track numbering. Those organizational facilities come in very handy if you opted for one of the iPod competitors that don't support full cataloging by id3 tags: one ends up organizing the music library in a fairly deep nested folder hierarchy to speed access. Between MediaMonkey and the very useful Bulk Rename Utility (win only), it wasn't too much of a chore to whip a large collection from multiple sources (my rips, emusic, some slsk & torrent) music into coherence within either the software jukebox or in folder view.

(I find a deep folder hierarchy is faster than any other option for quickly finding the .

What else. I have no idea how well it works with iPods, as I've always used iriver or Cowan mp3 portables. Syncing for iPhone/iPod, WMDM (iRiver, Creative Labs, Sony, Sandisk), and USB MSD (Cowan) is standard, with some scripting available. Bare MM does do most of things I found useful with WinAmp: continuous play, crossfade play, removing silent mp3 frames. It looks like it supports WinAmp plug-in standards for DSP and visualizations, but the MM site only confirms a handful of DSPs and a dozen vis plug-ins.

I think the last time I touched iTunes was several years ago, and my recollection is that it was resource intensive and attempted to reorganize my collection following some Apple voodoo preference defaults I lacked the patience to correct.

Yeah, I just got an ipod and while I'm very happy with the ipod itself, I quickly found that itunes is one of the worst programs I've ever seen.

songbird is pretty nifty but I admit that I used it for like, two days and then went back to itunes for no particular reason.

Okay, I seem to have gotten mediamonkey going. Thanks, derelict.

Songbird is like 98% there, plays .flac while having the really nice iTunes-ish layout and embedded scrobbling, but unreliable gapless playback and the GOT DAMN GENRE PANE send me back to converting to Apple Lossless + iTunes everytime

how do i turn off genius? it's useless for me and i couldn't find a turn-off switch.

On a mac: Preferences> General > Uncheck Genius

PC: Not sure, but probably View> Options> General > Uncheck Genius

der. thanks. i really dont want my library to be read.

i got a new ipod for xmas too. FUCK itunes is annoying. i've just burned up an entire afternoon downloading (what felt like) 101 updates. thankfully i'm nearly done.

Media Monkey has been so much easier.

I just downloaded the latest update for this piece of garbage and it has randomly decided to reset all the genre meta-tags and re-populate my iPod for me, even though the fucking thing is not supposed to auto-sync. AAAHHHHHHH!!

mediamonkey, holmes

(sorry for broken record-ness. didn't see my post above)

So, is there anything MediaMonkey does worse than iTunes? I'm not hearing anything in that dept.

I heard MediaMonkey doesn't support playlist syncing like iTunes does, but I'm not sure this is true or not.

I'm sure there are things it does worse, but I haven't really tested everything either can do. As far as playlists go, I seem to recall that it doesn't LOOK like it works, but it actually does, ie. you can't see that it worked in the program but the playlist does appear on the ipod.

What's the embedded album-art pic support for tagging Mp3s in MediaMonkey like? the pic support in iTunes is TER.RIB.BUL. You could accidentally embedded 20 pics in an mp3 and iTunes won't let you know because only the last one embedded appears.

I have no idea, I've never bothered myself with such things

it does album art tagging well, it supports playlist syncing

I used to didn't like iTunes, but once I got everything tagged properly, it's pretty OK. It took me hundreds of hours but I finally got all my tags set up properly so ongoing maintenance is easy.

ok i just counted and mm natively supports 17 different image fields, from front and back cover to 'lyricist' to recording location
dunno what kind of weirdo uses more than 15

ok, I'm basically sold on MediaMonkey bigtime now... does it come with iTunes Store per chance? :)

Oh yeah, if you have to migrate to a new computer, how easy it is to do with MediaMonkey vs. iTunes.

With iTunes, you have to go to weird folders, purposely make some large database file empty, do a search/replace on your media file paths in a parallel library XML file, then force iTunes to think its broken and regenerate your database file based on the XML file on the new machine. iTunes doesn't really have a native way to help people migrate from one computer to another on Windows at least. (You can deauth your iTunes, but that's about it)

Are any of you iTunes haterz Mac users? Just curious.

xp doesn't seem any easier:
http://www.mediamonkey.com/wiki/index.php/Moving_MM_to_a_new_computer

i've only done it the quick and dirty way, with the knowledge i was only losing some playlists

not a mac user

I haven't used iTunes much on PC and never with an iPod, so I don't know how bad it gets. But judging by QuickTime/PC, which is a horrible virus that infects everything in reach, I can just imagine. On Mac, QuickTime isn't obnoxious at all; perhaps the same logic applies to iTunes with regard to how it treats the platform.

not really a hater, as i said upthread, itunes just isn't as flexible as it should be, and i'm not like a super power user (not interested in foobar, for instance, on the other end of the spectrum, i have a day job). mm is pretty much ready for primetime out of the box + it lets you go nuts with scripts etc. if that's your thing

Mac user here, so hearing a lot of these Windows horror stories surprises me (though not too much, since QT on Windows has always been kinda terrible).

Why wouldn't library migration on Windows be just as easy as it is on OS X? I've moved my library to a few new computers over the years, and all it involves is dragging + dropping my iTunes folder (containing iTunes Library file and all my sorted music) to the new computer. File paths on both machines are pretty much identical, but I think it's worked even when my user name (i.e., HD/Users/Username/Music/) changed.

fuck this stupid shit of a programme imo. or windows xp, whichever. fuck them both, in fact.

'accessing itunes store' for the past 3 hours.

You'd think iTunes would be able to import a CD while playing another album, but apparently not.

Of course it can! It can even import a CD while playing that same CD, which I don't quite understand and is probably not something I'd recommend.

When it does that, I think it's actually playing the imported files, no?

I dunno, it seems able to access the CD audio files for playback and ripping simultaneously. Modern technology!

On mine, it stops importing when it's finished the current track, and continues playing the chosen MP3. Probably something to do with my settings then...

iTunes has completely stopped opening for me. Just endless beachball everytime.

I had no idea how much i depended on iTunes before it stopped working. I want to smash my computer to little bits

have you tried downloading an update?

how do you do that w/o opening iTunes?

oh wait. i figured it out. lets see if it doesn't crash my whole computer like it did last time

I would love itunes if it didn't crash ALL THE FUCKING TIME. Sometimes it seems like it puts a heavier load on my system than Crysis, which is just fucking ridiculous.

Nope, still beachballin'

brb, tantrum

they just released a new version. haven't downloaded it yet.

http://sbooth.org/Play/

Florence & The Machine crashed my iTunes 4 times this morning.

don't know about Play but I'm a big fan of their other app Max. I used it last night to take 198 mp3s with meaningless file names but good tags and various rates and VBR and with one drag and drop converted them all to 192 bitrate CBR and named them all "artist"-"name".mp3 so they could be read by my DJ CD player properly.

yeah Max is the bomb

copied from another thread so WGW knows he is not suffering alone:

oh yeah also your CD(s) have been delayed by my shitbag computer deciding to unrecognize my itunes library. i am going to fix this bullshit, and then once the CD(ok not to ruin the surprise but you will be getting um, many CDs, perhaps thematically worked out)s are done i am going to replace this gentrified piece of shit and bash it to pieces w/a hammer.

oh man it has been a long week

oh yeah after i got it to recognize my library again it erased 6 years of playlists, most of which were used to keep track of the gems that came up on random play that i had never listened to before (i have 35000 songs so redoing this is fucking impossible).

"You must eject before disconnecting"

lol

http://sbooth.org/Play/

― Tracer Hand, Thursday, 16 July 2009 10:41

This looks good. I've long avoided iTunes but am slowly weakening on account of, er, something I'm not sure of. The relentless marching of time, perhaps.

Anyway, is this Play thing any good? I'm bored of never being able to source any of my mp3s but I'm concerned that since all my music is on an external hard drive, it won't work/sync reliably (the external drive isn't always plugged in).

Or should I just get iTunes anyway and quit my whingeing? NB I don't own an iPod of any flavour obv.

Oh shit, it looks like Play is Mac-only. Any PC tips?

foobar 2000 is pretty good

Why use iTunes at all if you're on PC and don't own an iPod? I was a big fan of MediaMonkey before I switched to Mac. Not the most clean interface, but really powerful and adaptable, especially good for if you have to do a lot of cleanup on your ID3 tags on music files spread out in a lot of different directories, adding album art, and other junk. Also try old standby Winamp which, though more bloated than it used to be, is still decent.

Foobar's great as a very simple no-frills player, but the options are kind of crazy and not user-friendly if you want to change how it looks, having to install plugins or write cfgs and whatnot. Also I hated the file/album browser, but if you're using Explorer anyway it won't matter.

(Note that I totally have gotten used to iTunes after a while, partially becuase it started and feeds an addiction to high-res album art)

Why use iTunes at all if you're on PC and don't own an iPod?

Two main reasons:

1. I'd like to be able to search my whole (hovering around 1tb) collection using instant filter words
2. I'd like not to have to duplicate mp3s in a new folder every time I want to make a compilation, ie. I need a playlist function

Foobar seems to be serving my purposes very well so far (half an hour in), and seemingly without resorting to iTunes' off-putting insistence on actually reorganising where all my music can be found.

you dont have to have itunes reorganise yr music

I quite liked Songbird's library interface, though the Linux version I was using was a little wobbly, maybe it's fixed now or the Windows version is better. But in the end I gave up on having a "library" of all my stuff and retreated to old-fashioned Winamp with no media library.

Why use iTunes at all if you're on PC and don't own an iPod?
This would be me, and I have so far resisted installing iTunes, but hate the way that you can't even look at the iTunes website if you don't have the software installed.

Like, I just want to see what you've got, maybe get or even read about a free podcast that happens to be hosted there, use one of those "free music download" offers... and if I could see what I was missing, maybe I really would want to have your software shit up my music filing* and god knows what else**. But until then I don't really plan to install it just because it's become the default for interfacing with hardware which I don't even have.

* compilations scattered across 12 different artist directories? uh, no thanks
** maybe iTunes is OK on this front, but since Windows QuickTime routinely steals all yr file associations in some weird way that bypasses the normal file association system so you can't put them back, I am not too inspired at the idea of touching any other Windows software by Apple

compilations scattered across 12 different artist directories? uh, no thanks

you can fix that. there's a checkbox. i can't remember what it's called.

What I really want is a magic app that'll sift through my entire collection, deleting all duplicate files and somehow converting all compilations into playlists using the one copy of the relevant track that remains. I'm dreaming, aren't I?

"Part of a Compilation"

Akkkkkk Foobar seems to split my compilations into separate tracks, one per folder! There's no way to listen to them all in a row, as far as I can tell. What am I doing wrong? It's almost enough to make me bin the whole idea.

itunes' saving grace is this wonderful site:

http://dougscripts.com/itunes/

despise compilations...I want "artists" to show up as "artist" not "compilation". maybe doug's got a script to do that, because if you select multiple tracks, you can't unclick the "part of a compilation"

this one might do it -

http://dougscripts.com/itunes/scripts/ss.php?sp=notpartofacompilation

although this is a v good program for dealing with ID3 tags in general -

http://www.chaoticsoftware.com/ProductPages/MediaRage.html

Media Rage is amazing. I remember using it way back when OS 9 was around, so I'm glad to see it's still alive and kicking.

I'm on a PC...

oh yeah sry - i'm sure there are even better ID3 programs for the PC

Mediamonkey will be able to do pretty much everything said above. Search is great, you can browse by file directory, artist, year, whatever you want. Convert filenames from tag information. You can make a playlist with your duplicates. There's a lot of playlist stuff you can do. And it is free, though there is a commercial version with bells and whistles. Seriously, try this.

Winamp can do a lot of it too with its library, but not so much the file changing level.

Mp3tag is a great free dedicated program for tag cleanup and sorting, also does the fancy filename from tag stuff.

This update is taking the piss. JUST WANNA PLAY WITH NU ILX IPOD APP!

Status: copying old files
Status: validating install
Status: checking component registration
Status: validating install
Status: chillin with sum hos
Ststus: hold on imma thinka sumfing

....

Haha yeah I got that when I did the upgrade dance cos I had to u/g the ipod to v3, which meant downloading it, which meant upgrading iTunes, which meant all the above. It seemed like it took 20 mins to install.

I only use itunes to copy shit over to my tooch tho - winamp rules all.

about once a week, iTunes stops recognizing my iPhone and i have to reinstall it.

AWESOME! THE FUTURE!

last night i installed my iPhone into the pavement. after i deinstalled i noticed that it had been "cracked" as the young programmers say.

The Comedy Podcasts: your suggestions please has given me the first occasion to think about podcasts since 2007 or so, but itunes is giving me shit for it.

For some reason, none of the podcasts I download will sync to my ipod. I checked out some forums and the advice I found most often was to set my ipod to be synced manually. I tried that out and it worked, but from the standpoint of someone who acquires large amounts of music on a regular basis, it has been an unwelcome change.

Does anyone else have this problem? Does anyone have a solution?

Thanks.

Nevermind, I just found the solution.

http://www.podcastpickle.com/forums/lofiversion/index.php/t8808.html

Neeeeevermind.

So, I'm an IT manager and my department just bought twenty iPads. Apparently I cant just set them all up on the same iTunes account; I need 20 different credit cards and 20 different iTunes accounts and 20 iTunes installations on 20 different boxes. And if there's an OS update or an app I want my people to buy, I need to purchase and download it 20 times.

This is the worst computer application ever written by anybody.

http://www.apple.com/iphone/business/integration/mdm/

I dunno. I use iTunes and it does quite well. The only real problem I have is that it seems to randomly convert my MP3s to some weird format that won't play on my iPod unless I hit "Convert ID3 tags" on them. I really have no idea why it does that. Other than that I don't have any real complaints. Every software has its problems.

dont get itunes hate, i mean you should see the state of winamp

I'm pretty sure you can have an itunes account set up with a limited amount of computers? Years ago when I ran into that problem it gave me a no more than three to an account limit or something, maybe five. That could have been the case 6 years ago though.

hey here is an iTunes problem.

If I click Pop as genre then it accepts it, then actually labels the track as

[Rock-Pop] Indie Pop

I cannot find a solution to this.
Any advice welcome.

Only listen to indie pop?

Every time I load a CD, it labels it "indie rock", like this is still 1993 or something.

I need 20 different credit cards

Haven't investigated Joe's link yet, but when I had this problem in the past I found that you could 'gift' apps from one account to another.

Barbara Brotman on her war itunes Genius.

Here is the article. Sorry for the typo.

It was a victory for Hoku!

I ponied up for a song by heroin poster child Nico. "The Acid Queen" by The Who, the aural equivalent of 200 micrograms of blotter. Ten Years After's "Love Like a Man," a misogynist classic beloved by 14-year-old boys in 1970 and also, for some reason, a middle-aged mom in 2011.

You download Herman's Hermits but are offended by Britney Spears and the Cowsills.

"The Acid Queen" by The Who, the aural equivalent of 200 micrograms of blotter.

She's got some cold, hard truths to face up to about the "acid" she was taking.

This article is an ad for itunes, which I chucked in favor of Spotify (which doesn't have these stupid analyzers).

Can anyone help me with this shitty iTunes issue?

I load music on my iPhone. When I connect my phone to my computer at work, I can browse and play the songs on my phone, but I can't arrange them any way I like - including by track number so I can, say, play an album from start to finish. iTunes only lets me play the tracks as they were uploaded to the phone, in a random, haphazard manner. One solution for this is to make playlists, but I can't be bothered to make playlists for every album I put on my phone. Is there a setting I need to change/unlock so I can find an album, arrange it from first track to last and play like that?

no, sorry. i dunno what's up w that. my tale of hatred and woe:

i wiped and restored my hard drive last year. when i did this, i had to reinstall itunes. okay fine, but i foolishly allowed it to "keep itunes media folder organized" (the default setting). holy fuck! it went through my folder of miscellaneous single tracks, many hundreds of them, and created a new artist and album folder for each one. it also created a new folder for each full album and moved all tracks into it, leaving only the cover art jpegs in the original folders. way too big a hassle to fix, so i just left it.

oh yes- what a PITA. This thread title is beyond accurate.

so i made this smart playlist then put it on my ipad, but its rules only applied to the songs ON MY IPAD! i wanted it to grab a bunch of stuff off my computer and stick it on the padski. so how do i make it send over the right stuff, not just sort what's already there?

You could create a regular playlist on your computer and drag the songs from the smart playlist into the regular one, them sync the regular one to your iPad.

it seems to have worked when i tried it again? but the "randomness" is very weird. i have it choose 75 songs at random from songs that haven't been played in the last day. but it tends to select them in clusters of a few songs from the same albums.

Cool-looking audio player for OS X. Plays a bunch of formats and it's free: http://coppertino.com/vox/

Is there a damn reason why all the songs in my playlists are invisible? They're there. If I add them to my ipod, I get the whole playlist, but I can't seen any of the info.

jesus fucking christ I was with itunes until this 12 update. the UI is inscrutable. sidebar is now completely removed, not just hidden; if you select playlists it shows up but I can't even figure out how to make a new playlist.

never mind I figured out how to make a playlist. but why does it default to album view? who fucking looks at shit not in artist view? WHO?

my mom came to me the other day saying she couldn't figure out how to load songs onto her ipod anymore, and I was very condescending about it until she gave me her laptop and I was like "wait, where the fuck is the sidebar?"

i try to avoid hooking my iphone up to my computer because every time i do, no matter what, it tries to install a 3.5 GB game that can only be played on an iPad onto my phone.

12 is total garbage. can't drag album art in anymore either.

Itunes has always been garbagey bloatware. I consider it a necessary evil for syncing audiobooks/lectures to my phone, but do all my music library management in MediaMonkey.

anyway there really isn't a better alternative for mac out there is there. i want metadata sorting capabilities beyond my wildest dreams, sorts within sorts to infinity.

I reverted to v10 and turned off updates. Aside from some recurring registry error that prevents me from burning CDs, it's right where I want it.

so has itunes gotten progressively shittier at obtaining album art for imported cds? it's always been shit for maybe more obscure music but like kendrick lamar? kamasi washington? miguel? grimes? i've had to manually find jpgs on the web for these albums

the fact that you can't copy/paste art is kind of maddening

you... can?

oh wait, they kind of screwed that up now, you have to save the image then select it, noticed it yesterday

lame move

You can drag and drop though? Straight from a browser window.

yea you can drag and drop but it's like really itunes can't find artwork for some high profile major label new releases?

I'm with you there!

However I was responding to mh- no need to save a bunch of images then attach from file.

I think I had trouble drag/dropping yesterday but in retrospect it was due to me grabbing an image from a PDF and it copying as the wrong format

does iTunes still replace your album art files with its own choices?

My experience transferring things on and off my iphone has been bad. I like having control over everything but itunes is all "do it my way bitch".

The first thing is that if you don't turn off auto-sync right away itunes will take everything on and off itself... most importantly your huge collection of phone apps will slowly be transferred to your computer. For what reason? I dunno; to take up space I guess. Now if you didn't realize that itunes was putting all those apps on your computer, wait for next time you plug your phone in (I'll get to icloud later) and see all those games you've already deleted magically reappear back on your phone. Deleting app backups off your computer is just a temporary fix if you don't turn off app sync all together.

Now if you've realized its best to turn off all those auto-sync categories then you're ready to put some songs on your phone. If you turn back on music-sync only, Itunes will want to transfer your entire music collection to your phone unless you are prepared to go through your collection with a fine tooth comb checking each and every thing you want. Be prepared to recheck all the music you already have on your phone if you want to keep it on there. That's because itunes has to transfer everything at once or nothing at all - meaning drag and drop one song at a time is just a fantasy too ridiculous for the current generation of apple.

What else can I say? Good luck adjusting the EQ any way you want. I hope you like those presets.

I would mention more things but I haven't read this entire thread to see what has already been mentioned and I'm not entirely sure if itunes has changed since the last time I used it.

"The first thing is that if you don't turn off auto-sync right away itunes will take everything on and off itself... most importantly your huge collection of phone apps will slowly be transferred to your computer. For what reason? I dunno; to take up space I guess. Now if you didn't realize that itunes was putting all those apps on your computer, wait for next time you plug your phone in (I'll get to icloud later) and see all those games you've already deleted magically reappear back on your phone. Deleting app backups off your computer is just a temporary fix if you don't turn off app sync all together."

Annoying, but after unchecking a box the first time it's really not much of a hassle.

"Now if you've realized its best to turn off all those auto-sync categories then you're ready to put some songs on your phone. If you turn back on music-sync only, Itunes will want to transfer your entire music collection to your phone unless you are prepared to go through your collection with a fine tooth comb checking each and every thing you want. Be prepared to recheck all the music you already have on your phone if you want to keep it on there. That's because itunes has to transfer everything at once or nothing at all - meaning drag and drop one song at a time is just a fantasy too ridiculous for the current generation of apple."

My suggestion here (this is what I do) would be to tell itunes to upload nothing but a specific playlist that you create (called "iphone music" if you'd like). That way you can curate the music you want by dragging and dropping into that playlist rather than checking tons of individual albums or songs. Whenever you've updated the playlist, just hit "sync" to tell the iphone to reflect those changes.

Hopefully that helps!

These little work arounds are a hassle iirc.
If I'm listening to music on my computer I never open iTunes. My customized winamp pro is boss.

Another thing that has happened to me was that my movies with subtitles displayed correctly in iTunes but when I put them on my phone all the subtitles disappeared. I didn't like having to go an extra mile just to get the subtitles working (I can't remember how I did it anymore).

IDK, it may take the most work to set up the playlist in the first place I guess but once established you can literally drag and drop like you said you preferred.

It's like micromanaging a library in your library. Itunes has multitudes of stupidness wrapped up in it. The UI, search engine/categories has always been weak compared to just about everything else.

For me, it's a pretty simple loophole around checking and unchecking tons of albums across thousands of artists. I can even toggle sub categories with other playlists like "new music" "summer" "eccentric soul" etc.

I just don't get it.
Yesterday I updated itunes and loaded it for the first time in a long while.
One of the first things I saw was a bunch of squares. Not a bunch of songs neatly categorized. A bunch of squares.
It took me a good while to see the "correct" layout. That's because clicking all the shit on the lefthand navigation bar and the '...' next to the music note over there wasn't helping. Apparently the navigation bar I was supposed to be using was in the top center of the screen and clicking 'My Music' there is different than clicking 'Music' on the lefthand navigation bar.

I said "this is fucking terrible" and I closed itunes after quickly clicking looking through all the categories in the top center nav bar. (5 out of 7 I would never use).

....

Today, I reopened itunes.

Join me now for part 2 of Once-ler discovers itunes and live-blogs the results!

I'm in the 'My Music' itunes section. I have one screen with a list that can be sorted alphabetically by name, time, album and artist (and genre if I actually gave a shit to label my music that way. even if everything was categorized by genre, who really gives a shit).

Great, I'm playing music now. YAY BEACH BOYS MIX

Now I open winamp to compare the main itunes library screen with winamps.

Winamp is split into 4 windows that let you quickly jump from one spot to another. I can't really compare the practicality and functionality of this layout with itunes layout without having yall here to see what I'm talking about. Suffice to say the speed and ease of jumping anywhere in my library and the ability to quickly pull up every album for an artist in one concise space makes itunes look like a big floppy turd.

Also, why can't I choose which folders itunes uses for my library?

How the fuck does itunes know which music and videos to pull off my computer and put in its' library?

I'm going to get to the bottom of this cesspool if it kills me.

Join me tomorrow as I look at itunes 'My Playlist' section!

oh, one last thing. I just maximized itunes to see what songs were on the Beach Boys mix playlist. The playlist isn't there! I had to click the the weird ._ symbol next to the heart on the itunes player and even then it only shows what's songs are coming up next. I can't see any songs I just played WTF. Also this upcoming songs list is bulky as fuck and I have to use the scroll bar. Where the fuck is a normal playlist screen!?!?

okay somehow I minimized itunes into a little player box. Like a tiny player window screen. There is no maximize button.

I repeat THERE IS NO MAXIMIZE BUTTON. The rest of itunes disappeared. I'm fucked. YOu cant get BACK INTO FULL ITUNES>FDSFKS

this must be what its like to use an apple computer

whoa check it out it's the internet
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203128

and?

...if you are defending itunes by linking to the itunes help page then I think you are missing the point

Right now I'm listening to Bee Thousand and each track is playing twice in a row because I have two copies of Bee Thousand. I don't really mind because this album is great but I decided to try to change to just one album. This is proving to be difficult. Actually, nope it's impossible. I just have to delete one of the albums off of itunes I guess.

wooooooosh

yep, separating two identically labelled albums in itunes is impossible

I jumped the gun.
Confirmed impossible in Winamp also.
Although I don't normally stick both of those in my winamp library. With itunes I don't have seem to have much of a choice.

that help page shows you how to do the shit you don't know how to do, but it sounds like you just want to throw a public tantrum or something so farewell, have a blessed day

lol
i'm pointing out stuff that is bad about about the interface etc. stuff that a help page won't fix you fucking maroon

sorry, language

i think you're just not very good at using computers. it's ok ;-)

Right now I'm listening to Bee Thousand and each track is playing twice in a row because I have two copies of Bee Thousand. I don't really mind because this album is great but I decided to try to change to just one album. This is proving to be difficult. Actually, nope it's impossible. I just have to delete one of the albums off of itunes I guess.

wooooooosh

― The Once-ler, Tuesday, September 1, 2015 7:05 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Unless you have a super huge number of songs on there, can't you sort by date added and delete one of them? Unless you downloaded them at the EXACT same time?

uncheck one of them

'date modified' worked after I found out had to add it to the column categories. but really that was a stupid issue to pick on. I think I got carried away by all the other legitimate issues, including the ones I was having from just having to put up with it.

itunes never fails to irk me. kind of like how windows 8 had me face-palming before I added a 'start is back' app. there are still other windows 8 things that bug me though

if you're in artist mode and you choose "sort albums by year, descending", and you play a specific track on an album, it'll play the album backwards (play track 5, next will be 4, then 3 ...)

cool

fucking piece of shit ipod touch killed itself because I hadn't updated to iOS 9. Updated and it tried to install my entire app library on the fucking thing, plus turn on iMessage and News, and all the other shit. All technology is shit

Seriously every device in the modern world drives me into apoplectic rage any time I have to commit an act of maintenance - and about 10% of the time just when I'm trying to use it for its intended purpose. How did we get here?

good god iTunes is a mess if you want it to handle a library of any reasonable size.

Inexplicably, you cannot go "back" from one view to another, which is a total fucking nightmare if you are searching for anything and want to return to where you were.

If you make a change in an info file while in My Music, it will reset your place back to the beginning of the alphabet.

It's buggy as shit when syncing over wifi.

It's dog slow with tens of thousands of files.

Try deleting a song from your library while in Playlist view and watch the system drag to a crawl.

You have to use Doug's iTunes Scripts to get any meaningful batch processing.

Can't meaningfully display lyrics without a 3rd party. Finding lyrics requires a third party, too.

Still won't play FLAC.

I've actually come around to iTunes, I agree the useful functionality isn't always easy to find at first but once you get to know where to get all the functionality it's incredibly powerful. It's one of the few libraries that works correctly with compilations too, and one of the very few that handles a 100.000+ library without slowing down to a crawl.

Anybody know a way to always show the "track number" column by default when creating a new playlist?

It does with me - playlists seem to 'inherit' the columns from the general Music view.

I wish you could edit Smart Playlists better.

I'll do this thing where I'll come up with some combination like "Name Must Have 'Sexy'" and get the list. However, there will be one or two songs in that Smart list that I don't want. So instead of just being able to delete them from the list - like you can in a regular list or even on Spotify - I have to actually select the other 99 songs and then "Create a Playlist from Selection".

Not that I really have 100 songs with sexy in the title. Some of them are sexxy.

You could do that - make a playlist called "Shit Songs", move those two songs in there (and others you want to be excluded from other playlists), and add the line "does not contain songs from playlist Shit Songs" in your smart playlists.

Ha, yeah that would work.

Still, creating a playlist you don't even want in order to delete songs from one that you do....

^ that used to be called a kludge

Seriously every device in the modern world drives me into apoplectic rage any time I have to commit an act of maintenance - and about 10% of the time just when I'm trying to use it for its intended purpose. How did we get here?

Ditto. I seriously need to lo-fi-ify my life because everything new sucks. My iPod Classic is pretty much the only one of my varied electronic devices that doesn't require multiple hours of upkeep. Everything else is about to get dropkicked into a well.

On topic, though: my gf was trying to make a playlist in my iTunes this weekend and, after dealing with the extended freeze-ups every couple of minutes, I think she finally understands what all of the swearing is about.

If you make a change in an info file while in My Music, it will reset your place back to the beginning of the alphabet.

the resetting/the strange, suddenly shitty memory for what you were just doing is what's really killing me on the later updates of this thing

and i never really complained about itunes before!

I've found that if I edit track tags, add new files, delete files, etc while in the main My Music view iTunes as a whole just freezes up for a couple of minutes since upgrading to the latest version. Doesn't happen if I make the changes within a playlist, or when I've searched for a specific artist/title, minimising the files on display. Frustrating if I forget. 6 years of playlists plus iDevices leave me reluctant to move away from iTunes, plus I'm happy enough with the interface in general.

My >10 years worth of playlists is what keeps me shackled to this thing. Still, I had to revert to an older version that I never update in order to keep from losing my mind completely. Did they ever reinstate the users' ability to have more than one playlist open at a time? Someone should've gone to jail for that decision.

you can save playlists as files and import them with whatever new mp3 player you use

sorta offtopic and i mentioned elsewhere, but seriously, get Cesium for your iDevice. You can end the pain on iOS at least.

I've found that if I edit track tags, add new files, delete files, etc while in the main My Music view iTunes as a whole just freezes up for a couple of minutes since upgrading to the latest version. Doesn't happen if I make the changes within a playlist, or when I've searched for a specific artist/title, minimising the files on display. Frustrating if I forget. 6 years of playlists plus iDevices leave me reluctant to move away from iTunes, plus I'm happy enough with the interface in general.

I'd love to leave iTunes and would in a second if there was a great alternative but there's not. And yes, iTunes is ultimately pretty powerful and great but like Word it is now dragged down by uselessness (the whole multimedia and device management functionality) which adds to the complexity and creates nasty legacy issues.

In certain views, iTunes scrolls tens of thousands of files well but in other views it sputters along. But given Apple's drive to streaming, I do not think these issues will improve until I can roll my own streaming service.

I've actually been OK with iTunes lately. It's the airplay feature that drives me nuts. So temperamental, constantly dropping the signal.

thx lukas

I've been running into some really irritating shit- I have a large library, so of course I want to manage the stuff on my iphone manually, just dragging and dropping what I want (or, now that they've dropped the sidebar by default and I would have to keep turning it on every time I started itunes because it doesn't remember that setting, RGH, doing a group-select->right click->add to playlist->my iphone). Now they've added this fucking stupid thing where purchased music on my phone has both "delete" and "remove download" options if I'm managing it directly from the phone's Music app, and as far as I can tell, the difference is "remove download" takes it off the device (but still leaves a library entry for it on the phone's Music app because haha fuck you) and "delete" apparently deletes it FROM YOUR ITUNES LIBRARY. Like, all synced devices, and hides it in your itunes store account. Who wants that? Who thought that was a good idea?

I'm also finding that if I browse my iphone's library while it's connected via USB to itunes on my PC and delete stuff to make room for new music, about half the time it will delete it from that view- meaning I can't see it on my PC's itunes while the phone is connected- but the files will still be on the phone.

JESUS CHRIST APPLE GET YOUR/MY SHIT TOGETHER

Maybe the reason I'm not running into problems is that I don't have an iPhone and I'm never syncing stuff? Hmm ...

intelligently syncing media across multiple devices with vastly different storage capacities and use cases is admittedly difficult but apple has been hopeless at it (just try disentangling the photo sync options available for instance)

Syncing generally isn't a problem for me since I'm only syncing an iPod Classic via USB. I create On The Go playlists during the day as necessary and update stuff when I get home.

i get that it's difficult to create software that will sync media across multiple platforms/devices. i don't get why it keeps getting worse with every new version of itunes. or why itunes' most basic function (sorting/playing media) keeps getting more cumbersome and terrible to look at.

All of Apple's software has been steadily getting uglier, more bloated, more cumbersome and less useful, especially iTunes, iPhoto and iMovie. Waiting for them to introduce a talking paperclip that walks you through everything.

Photos is an improvement over iPhoto, for sure.

Scotch-taping a polaroid picture to your computer monitor would've been an improvement over iPhoto.

I'm getting a new computer today, looking forward to leaping up several generations of tech and software immediately, after the hassle of transferring everything over.

I love that feeling. Also the feeling of having a clean install

Pp, true true

The more Apple follows Google's horrible eyesore of a UX/UI, the worse it becomes. And iTunes is no different.

And yo Tracer, syncing media across multiple platforms (let alone dealing with all the charming legacy issues) is no easy trick but it's something Apple's been (trying) doing since the iPod. Am kind of expecting it to really just work at some point.

yes cosine

I guess we're supposed to sit back and assume that STREAMING WILL SOLVE EVERYTHING.

yep

files on your own computer are so 2011

I finally abandoned iTunes and having files on my computer. Since I haven't had a real desktop in years, the hard drives have too small for my iTunes library, so I use Spotify and then records when I really want to listen to music.

I miss having some not-officially-released tracks that were in my library but Spotify handles 99% of it without issue.

you are freaking me out

i couldn't see an album in the Music app on my iPhone that i knew i had, had to use search to find it

album displays fine in cesium - that was crashing for a while but seems fixed, so goodbye Music

had to use apple music again today and the UI is just spectacularly, hallucinatorily bad, it is crazy

even if it were the nutz though, the fact that it forgets what what point you were in the song you were listening to (like, ahem dj mixes), if it has to unload itself from your iphone's memory, is unforgiveable

iTunes' flakiness had been getting so bad for me that last night I deleted all playlists, music, everything and reimported my files. I hadn't reset my iTunes library in close to 10 years so who knows what the library files were looking like.

So much better now!

Not being able to edit stream URLs in the info box anymore really pisses me off. My WFMU stream's playcount was at 4500+ until they changed the stream address the other day.

iTunes has crashed and deleted my entire library twice in the last couple of months.

I really can't be bothered to reinstall it all this time, I'm just streaming shit for the time being.

itunes now won't add new podcasts, synch with my ipad or let me access my old purchases. nice work, apple.

For some reason starting today, whenever I manually copy music from my library to my iPhone, it doesn't copy the artwork- each track I copy to my phone has its artwork replaced with a seemingly random other track's. I've updated iTunes and my phone but I can't find any way around it.

lolll forever at this piece of shit program, it's really quite something

the 'rack of guitars' icon for the "genres" column label is nice though

just had to use it this week. ipod no longer has any menus associated with it. you need to click on a tiny icon to access it.

I thought this retrohack was pretty clever, though I doubt I'd ever commit to such a project:
http://imgur.com/a/VmT9e

Does anybody use Roon?

kudos to dude for having ifixit's guide that also shows pictures and steps to do exactly what he's doing open in the background.

i don't think i've updated iTunes in years

I desperately want to buy something off iTunes Japan, is this easy to do or do I have to jump through a shit ton of hoops

The purchase of digital media from countries other than your own almost always involves a piracy-promotingly high level of hoop jumping.

and likely you can "find" it online somewhere

I wish - there's a few things that haven't appeared in the usual spots yet

Was hoping someone developed a more streamlined process where you could just PayPal and get the MP3s, but I guess not - everything involves buying weird gift cards and changing a bunch of iTunes settings

Depends on how obscure your needs are, I suppose. Depending on the genre, there are lots of forums/message boards where I've found a request will go a long ways. Too bad we can't have a request thread for that kind of thing around here or ILM, but the mods don't like it.

slsk

yw

otm

(hi tracer!)

hello dandy don :)

yeah no luck there either

is it in japanese?

one of them is - I've searched for both the English and Japanese titles

have you ever seen them posted online in a search? Like, you located what you were looking for but the link to the file(s) was dead?

nah haven't seen anything like that either. just links to purchase really expensive copies.

Not much help, I know!

Ehh yes I'd think you could find some japanese forums where things might be shared but since I don't know japanese...haha.

You could make friends with a person in Japan (via forum or whatever) and have them purchase the files on iTunes then have your new friend export them to MP3 then send the files your way. I did that about 10 years ago but I lost track of her so I can't hook you up.

Holy shit WinAmp is back!

that hasn't been updated in a few years iirc?

Yeah that's about right. Seems like there's a big reboot on the way now though.

well I bit the bullet and jumped through the hoops

actually isn't too hard, just find the address of a Japanese hotel and make a dummy account. the store is nearly entirely translated to English so it's not too difficult to find stuff

only complaint is how weirdly expensive it is, albums are about $18 apiece and individual songs are about $2.50

still better than $25 + shipping per CD though

Too bad we can't have a request thread for that kind of thing around here or ILM, but the mods don't like it

Well, there's this one:

A thread for hooking people up with stuff that's out of print.

anyone ever used Roon (https://roonlabs.com/index.html) to replace itunes?

It's a good idea. There's an add-on to iTunes, or there used to be, that did something similar. Not quite sold on those screenshots tho I will try it.

Now if someone made an iTunes script that could load up the relevant ILX threads in a floating window....

that looks pretty cool! the emphasis on portability is nice

lol wait they want $10/month for aggregating songkick info etc? nnnno

Am gonna use it for a couple of weeks and honestly it's what iTunes should be...the metadata is appreciated (yes Songkick or whomever they are licensing to). Here are early thoughts:

- The default setting is auto shuffle and there seems to be some sort of algo as a basis e.g. Sloan-->Beulah--Warm Soda-->Weezer-->Andrew...yet on shuffle it doesn't play any of the bands that were stated as "influences" in the algo. So, weird.

- There's loads information displayed, that's for sure...

- There's also some weird GUI issues...two clicks to play a track is odd. It doesn't pull lyrics from ID3, it tries to look them up and thus if it can't find them on lookup it thinks it doesn't have the lyrics. In fact, can only summon lyrics if in Album mode. Doesn't connect to last.fm. Connects to TIDAL but not Spotify.

Not worth $114.

I will add that the sound is better through my DAC. Or, at least EQd with stronger bass or something.

I held off updating iTunes for several months due to a growing conviction that iTunes updates generally do more harm than good. Finally gave in a few days ago, to discover that the new version takes away all cover art in the "Artists" sidebar and removes the option to refresh a non-subscribed podcast, while providing no discernible benefits. Why do they do this.

Well one good thing is that they finally fixed the long standing bug where iTunes would rescan thousands of tracks for gapless audio over and over again.

AAAAARRRRRRGGGGGHH!H!HH!H!

I will never understand this shit.

With my Samsung phone I can just drag and drop stuff like photos from my phone onto my PC in seconds. Why is this so difficult from iPhone to Mac? I've asked colleagues and they're saying 'Airdrop it', 'Try syncing it in iTunes'... I mean FFS...

I don't want to sync stuff.. I don't know what that even means?!!

managed to do it using random guesswork, but there is nothing intuitive about the way Apple and iTunes works. Anyone who says so is fronting

choose which photo albums to keep on your phone via..... iTunes!! of course!