Hatred of Itunes

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.