Hatred of Itunes

Curious on the feedback here as I have yet to be forced to upgrade to Music from iTunes myself so the good to know the quirks and workarounds upfront.

Mod request: change thread title to “Hatred of Music”

Accessorily the title of an excellent essay by Pascal Quignard:

https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300211382/hatred-music

Apologies as it's probably been asked and answered before, but what are some good windows replacements for this sordid, bloated piece of shit itunes? I took my time, I realise, but it's become wholle unusable for me. What's good?

*wholly

https://i.warosu.org/data/g/img/0659/06/1526132562411.png

Considered it! But I'd like something a bit more robust (without all the negatives of itunes).

Foobar, Winamp, VLC all pretty lightweight

Thx, am going to try Foobar, MediaMonkey and MusicBee and see which one comes on top.

I use MusicBee and have no complaints

Same, so far!

Also using MusicBee and no complaints. I suppose I find it a bit ugly and the sheer scope of granularity is vertiginous rather than exciting but it's quick and light and easy to use out of the box.

Just FYI to LBI, deviantart and other places have a bunch of foobar skins you can just plug right in (so you don’t have to make it look “good” from scratch)

Thank you! I'd prefer faffing about with skins etc as little as possible, the auto-skin of MusicBee does the trick (after some minor tweaks)

Updated my Mac for the first time in years and forgot that Itunes was going to be replaced by Music. I have a large digital library and I don't stream, so it's not really optimized for me. Took a while to figure out how to get the view back to my preference: songs listed, no images, sorting windows at the top and a proper search field. For about an hour I was ready to throw the computer in the front yard.

yeah and there's still some stuff that will just never let you default to songs, very annoying

The search function is what was really freaking me out. The search field gives stupid ass results. Turns out you have to enable something called filter field or some crap. Very non-intuitive, but I guess they’re not really making this product for people like me.

I've used MediaMonkey for years for mp3 organization and playlist creation. It's extremely feature rich, and I can't think of a single "power user" functionality that it doesn't have. If all you want to do is play music, then Winamp!

So explain to me why, if I have a soundfile playing in iTunes, and then I update the soundfile, iTunes plays the original one? I have to do this all the time for work, often having to go through multiple iterations of a sound file with lots of back and forward with clients and producers. But Apple (most amazing, user friendly comapny in the world) could never have conceived of this happening. FUCK THEM THE UTTER FUCKING WANKERS

I expect it will have to do with the setting that tells iTunes to copy music files to the iTunes library.

stupid iTunes library. I don't want an iTunes library.

You can just turn this off.

Do you happen to know how?
I often find the preferences sections of Apple software bewildering. There'll be a tick box and a description of what it does, but rarely explains what it means or what the alternative to ticking it is. Adn so often the options are just scattered randomly around. It's not designed for simple people like me.

I found a tickbox that says 'Copy files to iTunes Media folder when adding to library', which I don't really understand and feel makes a lot of passive assumptions aobut the idea that I want a media folder or a library in the first place. Is this it?

(Sorry, Apple really brings out the crotchety in me)

Yeah that’s it.

Are you using iTunes to keep track of client files? Because it’s not really an editing/work storage tool.

why are play counts only recorded when I listen on my mac? I listen on my stupid phone all the time but iTunes doesn't record the plays. sigh

mh - so basically for work I have to be the go between from the client to the audio producer. I work with short sound files, but I don't really edit them myself. I just pull these files off the system or get them sent to me. sometimes, and for reasons I can't explain, I'll ask the producer to make edits to a sound file and send it back to me. But iTunes (being the default player) decides it's going to play the old file, even if I've saved the new one to a different folder or directory.

Yesterday I was trying to get Music to play the new Autechre album on my new Mac. My God. I don't know if I'm missing some part of my brain that should make this obvious, but nothing I did seemed to work. I was trying to drag and drop the files into Apple Music and it didn't work. I tried creating a playlist called Autechre - PLUS, then dragging and dropping into that. It didn't work.
At one point, I don't know how but I accidentally dragged an entire directory into it and it started trying to compile a library which I immediately stopped it doing, but the Ae album still wouldn't play.
I think after wrestling with the fuckers for 20 minutes, I eventually got it to play but the track sequence was in the wrong order.

I miss Winamp. You could drag and drop albums into Winamp, they'd appear in order, you could change the order, you could remove tracks from the order, and if you wanted you could save that order as a playlist. iTunes and Music are so pernickety and prescriptive in the way they insist you do things, I don't know how mere mortals are meant to use them

(being the default player)

this is the bit that mh was questioning

Vox might be a better fit for this, I think.

For what it’s worth, on a Mac if you right-click on a file of a type (mp3 for example) hit “Get Info” then expand “Open With” you can select an app and then hit “Change All”. This should change the system default.

If you’re dragging to an open Music app window, you have to drop on the “Library” bit on the sidebar. This is messy and a kind of bad behavior. If you drop files or a folder on to the app icon on the Dock, it should just work.

If, for work, you just need to listen to individual files, even something like VLC is sufficient and does no library management by default.

alternatively, you can always have QuickTime be the default for single audio files iirc, assuming you are on a mac

If the task you’re doing at your job is just proofing an audio file and then sending it on, using a Music library management application to do it is like pounding in a nail using the handle end of a screwdriver

thanks mh. I think maybe that's my beef with iTunes. it's too managey. I just want a player. that said, I'm yet to find a player that works brilliantly for this new Mac I have.

another thought, iTunes / Music will not play FLAC files, you need to transcode to ALAC using something like XLD.

if you miss winamp why not just use winamp?

(VLC seems likely better for your purposes, but if you're more comfortable with the llama's ass...)

Or Vox, like stet has already mentioned. I think I needed to add a plugin to get it to play flac or ogg files but since then it's been 0 trouble.

why are play counts only recorded when I listen on my mac? I listen on my stupid phone all the time but iTunes doesn't record the plays. sigh

― calstars

Nope

In 'song view' is there a way to always view small artwork on the left hand side? This used to be available but now I can't find the option

Ctrl+J and show artwork?

thanks, but there's no check box for artwork (I'm on Mac Catalina if that matters)

seems apple has removed this option in catalina but reinstated it in bug sir *sigh

bug sir

I'm really stuck with my new Mac.

I'm really more of a Windows user and have never used iTunes beyond just playing the odd thing. I find it really annoying to use, but maybe I am not using it properly?

In Windows Explorer, I used to be able to organise columns by ID3 tags, for example bitrate etc. Looks like Finder (for reasons beyond my comprehension) doesn't let you do this (thanks Apple). I'm told the solution is to use iTunes/Music but I'm scared it will start rooting through my HD and reorganising everything.

I just found a random folder full of duplicate files which I'd played in iTunes taking up space on my internal HD (thanks again Apple). If I hadn't discovered this folder, my internal drive would have filled up very quickly. I unticked the option that makes it do this, but it filled me with rage. Why would anyone in their right mind want this to happen?

For context, I have a two-decade old music library, 2TB big, on an external HD which I have curated in folders, sorted in alphabetical order, and then artist, and then album. That's how I find my music. I also use Serato, so music from around the HD is in various crates. Serato is very picky about indexing. If you even change the capitalisation on a track filename, Serato won't see it.

So I'm not really sure how I'm meant to use iTunes/Music to continue to curate my music. How do normal people with large libraries do it?

i’d say forget itunes and use something like vlc.

https://iina.io

the option to copy the files when you add them to itunes is what forces the organization of the files. You don't need to do that if you prefer to keep things organized yourself.

I've actually stopped using Music app (what was itunes) for playing files for the most part, I'm just using it for streaming. If you have a large collection of mp3s, particularly that large, it's worth just using something else. I use plex, personally.

If you're a folder person simply don't fuck w iTunes

then how do i see information like bitrate, album, artist, length etc of my files?

it just confounds me that something i've always taken for gratned in Windows is literally impossible on a Mac. When I speak to Mac users, they don't seem to understand what the issue is, and just keep telling me to use iTunes/Music. But I assume they don't really use music in the same way I do?