Hatred of Itunes

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!

whatever the view is called when you click on the artwork in the title bar (when iTunes transforms into just the cover art and queue) - if you want to select something else in your library, click apple-1 and the two views will co-exist

If you hold cmd-opt while clicking the artwork it pops out as a single artwork-only window which can me made any size. I run my library off an iMac in the stereo cabinet (USB into a nice DAC even) and I just maximise this as the view with a black desktop and do all the controlling from my phone etc. So you just get the album sleeve on the screen.

And just like that... we're back to audio/video management.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208075

Have they also removed Photos sharing from iTunes? It made absolutely zero sense to put that in iTunes instead of Photos.

I like mp3s, I like being able to edit them in Adobe audition, I like being able to tag them however I like, I like that they will remain there whatever stupid licensing bullshit goes on in the real world, I like chopping them up and making mixes with them. If having an mp3 is like having a pet, and streaming services are like going to the zoo, then iTunes is like paying someone $1000 to put your pets in the shiniest, worst managed zoo of all time.

Not that I chop up and mix my actual pets

that is otm. I avoid Apple like the plague now and it's almost entirely down to iTunes. I was trying to play some FLACs the other day and wondering what was going on until I realised that iTunes Doesnt. Support. FLAC. fuuuuu---

ALAC w/e, swift conversions.

"Books on Windows: Books on iTunes for Windows are managed in iBooks for iOS."

well, that's clear.

good luck, apple

Trying to figure out when I gave anybody one thousand dollars for iTunes

That's the price of the new iPhone

anyone ever had the following problem with iTunes & iOS Music

drag album of mp3 onto iphone in iTunes
each song on album shows up in 'Recently Added' as if on separate albums (even if they're all by same artist)
songs appear if you search for them but not in artist/song/album

just started happening the other day. absolutely infuriating but i don't know how to fix, or if switching to something else would even help

I would never dream of dragging albums or songs directly onto the phone. My phone syncs to a smart playlist

don't know what a smart playlist, do you think it would solve my problem? seems to have to do with metadata not getting linked or something. my music management is awful but my phone has a billion gigs of memory and i still download mp3s on soulseek

Here's how to make one.

https://support.apple.com/kb/PH19487?locale=en_US

Are you using an iphone or an android?

iphone

i don't think that would help me tbh. my workflow is to add the music i download every week not construct rules. and i'm not space constrained

but you could make a rule that adds music added to itunes in the last week

yeah that's totally one of the rules in mine

it's like everything with 5 stars + everything added in the last X months, up to 100 GB or whatever

ok i don't think this would solve my problem though

each song on album shows up in 'Recently Added' as if on separate albums (even if they're all by same artist)
songs appear if you search for them but not in artist/song/album

can u ignore that i drag files onto my phone like a philistine and address these parts

i uninstalled & reinstalled itunes and it didnt solve problem, considering doing same for iOS music but worried i will lose everything on there now

that seems like it may require some metadata fiddling in itunes, if the duplicate "album" shows up there

can you just delete those songs from your phone

this happens to any new music i add

Dragging and dropping caused me all kinds of grief, but your issue does sound like it could be metadata related. I always have to clean up stuff I've gotten from Soulseek. Select all the songs from the album at once and "show info" and at the very least make sure the album title and artist are there. I've had to paste album art with all songs selected to get them to appear as one album on occasion.

I would recommend giving up on drag and drop -- you DON'T need a smart playlist to do it, you just need a regular playlist if you don't want to mess with rules. Call the playlist iPhone, drag and drop whatever you want on your phone into the playlist, and tell iTunes to only sync that playlist to your phone. Syncing will take a bit longer since it'll do a backup every time, but it really solved so many issues for me.

Just saw your last post -- if it's happening with everything you add, I bet it's the drag and drop. Try the playlist sync.

ugh the backup takes so long tho :(((

thx tho i will try

Excitedly bought a 256GB iPhone 8 in anticipation of never having to worry about room for all the music I wanted to listen to on my phone. Excitement became irritation, rage and despair as I could no longer drag and drop music to the phone, then created a playlist to sync music to it, only to run into this tracks-become-untitled-albums problem. I know that as a person who owns, maintains, and manually copies a large music library, I am no longer Apple's typical use case, but my GOD this is frustrating.

Interestingly it doesn't seem to be a problem with the files themselves; if you view the contents of the phone within iTunes (now my most feared and loathed piece of software) all the metadata is correct. Also if you use an app to view and play music on the phone that's not the standard Music app (say Ecoute), the metadata is screwed up the same as it is inside Music. So there's a filesystem problem here. Given the fact that iTunes deliberately obfuscates the files on your phone, to prevent you from copying music off of it, it was probably inevitable given Apple's decline in software quality that this would happen. I filed bugs on it, but I'm not sure how fast they'll move on it. 11.1 public beta doesn't address this.

Hm, maybe 'registry problem' is a better way to put it than 'filesystem problem', since it seems to be about how iOS11 at the OS-level reads and locates the music files, not the files themselves or how macOS or iOS apps read the files. Thinking about it that way maybe there's hope, since they just need to do a better job of authoring the file that iOS reads to find music.

iOS11 has syncing bugs I can confirm. In the Music library on the phone, one album (and only that album) has all the track names replaced by what's in the Grouping tag. But when I play the song, the correct info is shown on the Now Playing screen.

Eh, they'll figure it out sooner or later.

I doubt it's filesystem-related, it looks like the music library database gets screwed up on sync with certain data written to the wrong fields. When the file is actually played, the Music app rereads the actual tag info, and all is well again.

Yeah, that's what I was trying to get at with 'registry', realized belatedly that 'filesystem' wasn't the word - my bad

In my case Music app never reads the metadata correctly, it still thinks the track has no album information when played. The info is there; iTunes can read it just fine

But yep hoping for a before-11.1 solution, cos that's a long time to wait

FWIW, Plex has its own database structure, and keeps its synced music completely separate from other apps. Not ideal, but at least you're free of Apple's sync bugs.

The problem is, Plex's sync is just shit - transfers are super slow, and the sync process frequently stops without ever resuming. And almost ten years in, it still doesn't handle compilations/'album artist' correctly.

I've definitely been shopping around for alternatives - there are decent clients on macOS (Swinsian) and on iOS, the missing piece is transferring the files smoothly to the phone, all the things I've looked at (latest being MediaTrans) are pretty sketched out. If anyone solves that, I would gladly part with substantial $$$. It may be the magic client is already out there and I just haven't found it ...

Coworker just told me that Spotify used to recognize files that you dragged to your phone, which I had no idea about. Looks like that option's been removed, though

Thanks for the heads up on Plex, I thought they were just a desktop or Apple TV thing; I wouldn't mind trying this out ....

These guys are intriguing https://roonlabs.com/howroonworks.html - but sounds like mobile sync is a long way off, still https://community.roonlabs.com/t/mobile-music-sync-and-streaming-on-roadmap/15249/3