Hatred of Itunes

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?