iTunes ?

bought my eldest a cheap-n-cheerful laptop for crimbo/homework demands.
tonight he proudly told me that had installed iTunes on it.
10 minutes later that was no longer the case.
47Mb RAM useage as opposed to a much smaller memory footprint by the just as effective Media Player proved my case.
[1Gb RAM vs Vista = performance concerns]
not only that, but he hasn't got an iPod, so dont see the point when WMP will rip his 4 cds for him into mp3s for his phone.
someone convince me why he needs it ?
i suspect his reasoning is that classic case of 'everyone else has it'.
i feel like i am a bad bad dad for making his life iTunes free.

that's because it's a computer program, not a fucking mind-reading machine

― congratulations (n/a), Tuesday, January 6, 2009 1:31 PM (21 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

^^^ profoundops.

XP: Its a nice interface for accessing the iTunes store, and now that iTunes is going DRM free I guess that's something. As with their portable devices, I guess its fashionable, if you value that above other virtues. If the kid doesn't care about performance issues, I'd let him get fed up on his own first.

But for almost any other purpose there are better alternatives. I'm a fan of MediaMonkey, which helps me effectively manage about 35,000 mp3s in a my own file hierarchy. Apple has joined my short-list of developers I associate with bloated resource use. As with everything MS other than the OS, there are useful alternatives for QuickTime codecs (though not development, AFAIK) as well.

my gonad for an iTunes/Media Monkey merger, where MediaMonkey redoes the iTunes UI, while iTunes keeps its proprietary store services

what is your major malfunction n/a? computers are able to do lots of amazing things, like measure how long you've been listening to a track. on your ipod, it even prints this information out on a constantly updated basis. i'm pretty sure it doesn't need to read your mind to do this.

Returning a "percentage played" figure instead of a boolean "played/not played" figure is pretty low not only on the Features Users Want list, but also pretty useless from a business standpoint.

Keep in mind that I'm talking strictly UI here. iTunes DOES keep track of how much of a track you played, because there is resume functionality per media item. This may be turned on for video only for now, but it could be turned on for audio as well. It's just not that useful from a User Interface standpoint to provide it, not point out if a track was fully played or not.

And as someone else pointed out, last.fm has a compromise system. Who knows what Genius is doing in the background.

(besides probably making iTunes less robust. oh snap.)

my gonad for an iTunes/Media Monkey merger, where MediaMonkey redoes the iTunes UI, while iTunes keeps its proprietary store services

― 909090909 Rivethed Brikkchin Reverk now DANZ (Mackro Mackro), Tuesday, 6 January 2009 22:10 (1 hour ago)

OTMFM <3 MM UI (but don't forget the internal file management, all it lacks is a built in power tagger)

Don't all of the OCD folks scrobble on last.fm anyways? The last.fm client gives you a full song listening credit 1/2 way thru the song.

If the freaking click wheel worked better on my iPod, that clip might be exciting, derelict, but until then, fuck 'em.

iTunes increments play count when you play THE END of a song. Skip to -0.02 from the end and play.

I think last.fm scrobbler just picks up the ipod play count from iTunes rather than listening for two minutes or whatever.

Jazzbo- what you'll want to do is check the button in your CD burning options menu that says "use CD Text." This will let other computers and some stereos and car audio systems to load artist and track title info, even on custom mix CDs and not just copied discs.

This will let other computers and some stereos and car audio systems to load artist and track title info, even on custom mix CDs and not just copied discs.

iTunes in still not reading CD-TEXT shockah?

47Mb RAM useage as opposed to a much smaller memory footprint by the just as effective Media Player proved my case.

that's not very much RAM usage at all, how much does the machine have?

maybe i'll reinstall media monkey, didn't really like it on first use. plus points = being able to change almsot all id3 tags with 'f2' rename shortcut, rather than tedious 'right click-->info'. minus point (which i didn't investigate too much, just a first impression) was folder structure in the left-hand pane. am very happy to let itunes organise all my folders and files based on the tags.

You know that you can edit multiple ID3 tags at once, right?

what? yes? probably? i just meant e.g. 'f2' when the 'year' field is selected for a single song. no can do in itunes.

If I ever run into mass tagging jobs that iTunes can't handle, Media Rage always does the job. I guess it's Mac-only, though.

iTunes increments play count when you play THE END of a song. Skip to -0.02 from the end and play.

Haha and I actually DO THIS! Which is just retarded. I have no idea why you're all acting like I'm wishing for something MAGICAL and IMPOSSIBLE when all I want is for iTunes to be like "He listened to 2 minutes of that song, therefore he likes that song more than the song he skipped after hearing for one second".

Basically what I'm saying is that Apple needs to adjust to our CRAZY CUT UP CULTURE of BLIPVERTS and FASTVERTISING.

Tracer H, how come you keep skipping songs right at the end? That seems a bit odd to me.

I do this mainly on mixes and podcasts coz they often seem to have about thirty secs of silence at the end and I need the next banging hits straight away.

iTunes is dick though. It could easily be so much better.

Basically what I'm saying is that Apple needs to adjust to our CRAZY CUT UP CULTURE of BLIPVERTS and FASTVERTISING.

― Tracer Hand, Thursday, January 8, 2009 2:39 AM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

the crazy thing is that this seems so obvious.

i don't know shit about programming but isn't this like the kind of thing that would take an afternoon of code writing before the next version update?

so is everything pretty much DRM-free now, or has that not happened yet?

Prob. Apple needs to insert fuzzy logic into its song counter.

if you're having issues retagging in iTunes i suggest you go to dougs apple scripts and find the good ones there. i'm using 5 or 6 of them to make tagging much, much easier.

Jazzbo- what you'll want to do is check the button in your CD burning options menu that says "use CD Text." This will let other computers and some stereos and car audio systems to load artist and track title info, even on custom mix CDs and not just copied discs.
I did. Still no workie. The disc name and all the tracks are there after the CD is burned, but disappear when I pop the disc into a different computer.
It doesn't happen all the time. Most recently, the track names weren't retained for some Beatles comps that I made. I thought maybe it was because iTunes doesn't carry the Beatles, but it should use a larger internet database, right?
Very strange.

This happens to me as well but it doesn't surprise me, I figured that since CDs don't generally hold text data (that 'CD text' thing notwithstanding) that iTunes just manages to remember data for CDs you've burnt on that particular PC. Although it's odd you say it doesn't happen all the time, perhaps it's just for copies of commerical CDs that it works? Then the CD database thing would kick in.

iTunes in still not reading CD-TEXT shockah?

― ShamPowWow (libcrypt), Wednesday, January 7, 2009 3:11 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Only a few CD drives support reading CD-Text RW subcodes from the program area

Also kind of weird that iTunes doesn't support automatically removing silence from the beginning and end of tracks yet. This has been a configurable output plug-in option in WinAmp and MediaMonkey for about 3 years now.

Randomly tested 2 computers and 6 apps and none of them displayed the CD-TEXT I burned a disc with, so I'll buy it.

So this is more of an iPod question than iTunes, but maybe someone has had a similar problem. Lately my iPod (160 GB classic) has developed a twitch where, every so often, it will just pause during playback. Not pause the unit itself, but it'll be playing a song then seemingly freeze up for 4-5 seconds and continue with the song. Doesn't happen frequently, but its pretty annoying when it does. It feels like the hard drive is just struggling to keep up and getting kind of sluggish. I figured resetting the unit might help, and it might have, since the clickwheel response time vastly improved. But the weird pause issue seems to continue.

Mine does that too (also iPod classic 160 gb -- but only about 95 gbs on it so far)

In my case the pause is less severe, just a half second or so.

Does it pause on all types of files? E.g., MP3, AAC, ALC, FairPlay, etc.

common problem mine does that too maybe once per hour o use. no known fix for it unfortunately.

Smack the shit out of it. hold it with the buttons against your palm and smack it as hard as you can on your other hand or leg. Sometimes this works. Seriously. There's even a website called Spank My Pod or something.

I don't the the hard drive is the issue, since the iPod should be caching songs to memory before they're played.

How long are the tracks you're playing? I've heard of iPods having issues with very large files.

Beyond resetting the unit, try reformatting/restoring it as well. That should rule out any software problem.

i accidentally loaded some large wavs onto my ipod and if i try to play one it just turns off immediately

Smack the shit out of it. hold it with the buttons against your palm and smack it as hard as you can on your other hand or leg. Sometimes this works. Seriously. There's even a website called Spank My Pod or something.

If it's a disk-based iPod, then all this is going to do is cause the platter-reading head to crash. Talk about shortening the lifespan of yr iPod!

Yeah, I can't see the wisdom in smacking a tiny hard drive around...

Can't believe anyone would advise someone to smash an iPod, especially to fix an undiagnosed problem. What a stupid piece of advice.

Any other AVG users get slammed with the false Trojan warning upon opening iTunes today/tonight? If you do, DON'T remove the threat. Open AVG, go into the Exceptions Manager and add the path for "Program Files/iTunes" and close all the windows, iTunes should open just fine after that.

I think iTunes just broke my optical drive. I was using it to burn a CD, when all of a sudden it just stopped, gave the doodly-beep "all done" sound, and now Shit Is Fucked Up- I can open the disc in windows explorer (where I see it only burned the first track), but iTunes won't recognize that there's a disc in the drive at all, and I can't eject it, either with the actual button or through iTunes or explorer.

Has anyone tried out Mojo, the file sharing through iTunes program? Very curious about it.

I think iTunes just broke my optical drive. I was using it to burn a CD, when all of a sudden it just stopped, gave the doodly-beep "all done" sound, and now Shit Is Fucked Up- I can open the disc in windows explorer (where I see it only burned the first track), but iTunes won't recognize that there's a disc in the drive at all, and I can't eject it, either with the actual button or through iTunes or explorer.

― More Butty In Your Pants (Telephone thing), lundi 3 août 2009 05:52 (4 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

I had exactly the same situation last week. Eventually, I managed to eject the CD during booting.

I had to disconnect and reconnect my drive, which now seems to be working just fine.