Hatred of Itunes

correct

So, short of going around to every Apple Music exec's house and threatening to stab their faces off until they improve basic functionality of their computers (which will probably be quicker), I've tentatively tried uploading part of my HD to the library. I'm hoping and praying it's not trying to copy all these files to the computer in the process. Annoyingly, Music has started playing music while it does this but the dialogue window won't let me hit Stop. Thanks Apple.

Wait, but this will only organise music on my HD... What about music in my downloads folder which I will later want to copy to my HD and then delete? I still won't be able to see track info in there unless I add it all to the library again? GAAHHHHHH!! FFS APPLE

Basically if you use iTunes, iTunes is your library. You can have music anywhere on your computer, neatly organized folders and subfolders or a complete mess (as I do), it doesn't matter, you import it into iTunes, you access it from iTunes, make playlists there and play everything from there. I have my issues with iTunes but I don't see anything bad with the way it's supposed to work. As both a Mac and Windows user I prefer the iTunes way by a long shot.

i get it. the problem is it would take me months to re-tag everything so it's in some working order. the idea of not having my music in folders gives me anxiety - what about duplicates and mis-tags? it would be fine if i were starting from scratch but there's almost 20 years of music on here

Just make sure the "organize my iTunes library" option is unchecked and it won't touch anything.

I mean yeah iTunes is annoying sometimes but it does what it does quite well. No need for irrational fear of a music player.

https://iina.io

― Canon in Deez (silby)

Just to say, thank you so much for this - just downloaded and it's exactly what I was looking for (I'm a "big hard drive with folders and lots of FLACs" guy, so iTunes/Music.app requires way too much cultivation). All the superficial niceties of using a Mac, but simple drag-drop-play operation.

ah missed this - will check it out!

All that and it embeds youtube-dl too

the idea of not having my music in folders gives me anxiety

I guess it depends on what you're used to, but my library is about 40,000 tracks and probably around 15 years old and I've never really had a problem with it. There are the occasional annoying quirks (the one that's enraging me now is having to toggle "Show filter field" every time I open the app -- why would I ever want that field hidden??) but for the most part it works fine for me. I like that it copies files to its own folder system and keeps them organized -- talk about anxiety, I can't imagine having to maintain that structure myself (if it's not something I've ripped from CD directly, I delete the original files as soon as the import is done so no duplicates, and I tag everything/correct cover art issues/etc immediately on import). And I definitely prefer seeing things organized like a library. Looking at my music as a list of files in the Finder (or Windows Explorer) feels too abstract; I don't want to look at songs the same way I look at other data. I've never owned a PC though so the whole idea of thinking of music files in that way is just totally foreign to me. I don't think it's so much an issue of the Mac people you've been talking to not using music the same way you do, it's that they (we?) are just more familiar with a completely different way of storing/organizing/viewing/playing the files.

I suppose it's different when you're switching to a whole new system with a huge existing library though. I didn't have a digital library when I started ripping CDs and importing downloads way back when, so it was easy enough to keep everything organized and tagged from day 1 and it's the only system I've ever known. Digging through folders to find the music I want to play seems like a really weird system to me.

I use iTunes for one task only, and that is to auto-organize my new music files on my PC

Yeah, like with photos, as soon as your collection grows beyond a certain size, basic folder organising doesn’t cut it anymore. I’m fairly happy with Music (the iTunes successor on macOS) because it’s still pretty fast even with 200,000+ songs and it’s quite powerful in terms of scripting, all the ways to slice and dice the library views and the smart playlisting.

My biggest gripe is that Apple’s music ecosystem still can’t handle multiple artists per song or multiple genres per song - there’s a couple of players/library managers that do support this, but they all have various other downsides.

Oh, and it also appears that my library size is now too big for the Genius playlists feature - it times out every time it tries to upload the Genius analysis results to the Apple servers. I’ve understood that this starts happening somewhere beyond 50-100k songs.

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.

The universal talking-to-Apple-fans experience! Just wait until you find a bug and they tell you all the ways that it's All Your Fault, Actually. Avoid discussions.apple.com at all costs and go straight to apple.stackexchange.com when you have a problem.

This is good advice, speaking as a Mac user and broad fan. The 'advice' at discussions.apple.com is comically bad and usually consists of completely ignoring what the original poster asks.

Look, it’s simple: there is no problem that cannot be solved by resetting the NVRAM and SMC. And if that doesn’t work, go buy a new Mac. Obviously.

Desktop Windows iTunes:

In Artists view (and Composers and Compilations) I am shown the complete tracklisting of every album. Is there any way to change it to a grid of album covers, as in Albums or Recently Added? I can't find a way and it's annoying.

I think the best you can do is view Albums and order by artists. Which sucks of course.

Ah this is the doglatin thread, I’d forgotten. dl, you might consider Plex as a media server. it keeps everything organised the way you have it, and you can use Plexamp on your phone to stream from your computer if you’re out and about. it doesn’t have as powerful smart playlist features as Apple Music and i’m still not sure what the solution is for wanting to have columns in the Finder for bit rate and what have you. but you might want to check it out.

So this week I went to backup my iTunes files to an external HD, as I do periodically with never a problem, the only difference this time being a new HD. This time however something went terribly terribly wrong. Result: no files show up on the HD, and in iTunes about 15% of all of my songs will not play bc the files cannot be located. "The original file could not be found" is exactly what it says. I'm mystified as to where these files could have gone.

A tech guy looked at this for about an hour and could not figure it out. I told him I happen to have every file in my iPod Classic as well, which led to downloading an app that can transfer iPod files back to iTunes. This *seemed* to be working but after it was done I opened up iTunes and found the problem the same as before. Again no idea of where these files went when they were supposedly transferring.

So now I'm desperately clinging to my iPod Classic hoping it lives as long as possible, bc when it dies there goes 15% of my collection.

that's terrible. there does exist software I think to get the music off of your phone and onto your computer though—or at least there used to

I have most of these files on my phone too, but my phone is confusing me at the moment too, because there songs show up (and play) from my playlists but the same songs don't appear in the main list of songs, or in the list of artists. Admittedly I very rarely play music thru my phone so maybe I'm overlooking something obvious.

Have you tried using that app to transfer the iPod files to a fresh iTunes library rather than the old ones that sounds like it’s corrupt?

Good question, I think that was an idea that came up but it seemed so simple just to transfer back to the original iTunes. The app reads what's already in your iTunes so that it only transfers back the files that aren't already there, and the total number of files the app said were missing was roughly the number I expected, so I thought OK the app is smart. But as you suggest, something seems wrong with the iTunes library itself, so making a new library could be an option.

just moved to Music from iTunes

"Recently Played" is worse now. click an album and:

- where iTunes had a double-column list of songs, we're now at single-column, track name and track length are basically on separate continents.

- for SOME REASON, the keyboard focus is on the song rating when you get into this view. (see the little outline box around the star rating.) so hitting space to play/pause does nothing until you ... click something outside the song rating? NOPE. you gotta hit tab twice.

holy shit do i hate Music dot app mostly for not letting me change how things appear on the screen

" "The original file could not be found" is exactly what it says. " I don't know if your problem ever got solved, but I've def had weird situations with songs that I uploaded to iCloud that weren't matched with something in their catalog; and then, months later, for whatever reason, i can no longer play them. "no longer available'. Where the fuck did it go? Not sure if it's an icloud storage space issue where it purges files after a certain amount of time (I have a terrible feeling it did this with photos too, but I'm frankly too scared to actually investigate).

I have one artist that shows up twice in the Artists list. There is an extremely annoying-looking fix that involves adding an X to the end of every field that should be the same, then removing it ... it just seems there should be a script that does this automatically.

removing and adding files back usually fixes bugs like that for me.

Select everything by that artist (from both lists), right click, "Get Info", delete and retype the artist name in the proper field.

Or look at metadata for both lists... maybe one of the artist fields has a space at the end of it. I've had that issue.

Thanks both. The X thing was actually quite easy, just had to select all the tracks, changed the artist name to AutechreX, and then back to Autechre. Merged.

When you open the Get Info window, it grays out all the icons in the main window, so if you're wondering why you're not hearing audio and glance over to the AirPlay icon, iTunes might just be lying to you.

piece of shit

i'm givin it all i got, captain

f’in thing sucks

i'd still love a good alternative. Siegbran has talked about navidrome and Plexamp but neither one really did what I want which is basically just be a sturdy list of songs that allows me to search, create playlists and stream to my phone as long as my computer's on and running it

i’m cool with whatever iteration of music i have rn, except for the one time it deleted my entire library lol

(it wasn’t a permanent deletion, but i am still correcting album art and tagging errors from when i reconstructed my library … 1.5ish years ago)

oh, one forever beef: album artist tagging dividing an album into two albums sometimes has been a recurring issue in this fucking program since i was in college

i know how to fix it but it’s still incredibly stupid

iTunes is nearing its end, it’s already long gone on the Mac and the new Apple Music app is now downloadable as a beta on the Microsoft Store.

oh, one forever beef: album artist tagging dividing an album into two albums sometimes has been a recurring issue in this fucking program since i was in college

DIEMOTHERFUCKINGMusic Library.musiclibraryDIE..... it's bullshit how much is offloaded to this stupid file.

I don’t use “album artist” and just stick with “artist” field.

I've used itunes forever only as a way to organize mp3s on my computer, I haven't updated to a new version in years, hopefully I'm not going to run into issues if it goes away