Hatred of Itunes

"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.