Hatred of Itunes

Florence & The Machine crashed my iTunes 4 times this morning.

don't know about Play but I'm a big fan of their other app Max. I used it last night to take 198 mp3s with meaningless file names but good tags and various rates and VBR and with one drag and drop converted them all to 192 bitrate CBR and named them all "artist"-"name".mp3 so they could be read by my DJ CD player properly.

yeah Max is the bomb

copied from another thread so WGW knows he is not suffering alone:

oh yeah also your CD(s) have been delayed by my shitbag computer deciding to unrecognize my itunes library. i am going to fix this bullshit, and then once the CD(ok not to ruin the surprise but you will be getting um, many CDs, perhaps thematically worked out)s are done i am going to replace this gentrified piece of shit and bash it to pieces w/a hammer.

oh man it has been a long week

oh yeah after i got it to recognize my library again it erased 6 years of playlists, most of which were used to keep track of the gems that came up on random play that i had never listened to before (i have 35000 songs so redoing this is fucking impossible).

"You must eject before disconnecting"

lol

http://sbooth.org/Play/

― Tracer Hand, Thursday, 16 July 2009 10:41

This looks good. I've long avoided iTunes but am slowly weakening on account of, er, something I'm not sure of. The relentless marching of time, perhaps.

Anyway, is this Play thing any good? I'm bored of never being able to source any of my mp3s but I'm concerned that since all my music is on an external hard drive, it won't work/sync reliably (the external drive isn't always plugged in).

Or should I just get iTunes anyway and quit my whingeing? NB I don't own an iPod of any flavour obv.

Oh shit, it looks like Play is Mac-only. Any PC tips?

foobar 2000 is pretty good

Why use iTunes at all if you're on PC and don't own an iPod? I was a big fan of MediaMonkey before I switched to Mac. Not the most clean interface, but really powerful and adaptable, especially good for if you have to do a lot of cleanup on your ID3 tags on music files spread out in a lot of different directories, adding album art, and other junk. Also try old standby Winamp which, though more bloated than it used to be, is still decent.

Foobar's great as a very simple no-frills player, but the options are kind of crazy and not user-friendly if you want to change how it looks, having to install plugins or write cfgs and whatnot. Also I hated the file/album browser, but if you're using Explorer anyway it won't matter.

(Note that I totally have gotten used to iTunes after a while, partially becuase it started and feeds an addiction to high-res album art)

Why use iTunes at all if you're on PC and don't own an iPod?

Two main reasons:

1. I'd like to be able to search my whole (hovering around 1tb) collection using instant filter words
2. I'd like not to have to duplicate mp3s in a new folder every time I want to make a compilation, ie. I need a playlist function

Foobar seems to be serving my purposes very well so far (half an hour in), and seemingly without resorting to iTunes' off-putting insistence on actually reorganising where all my music can be found.

you dont have to have itunes reorganise yr music

I quite liked Songbird's library interface, though the Linux version I was using was a little wobbly, maybe it's fixed now or the Windows version is better. But in the end I gave up on having a "library" of all my stuff and retreated to old-fashioned Winamp with no media library.

Why use iTunes at all if you're on PC and don't own an iPod?
This would be me, and I have so far resisted installing iTunes, but hate the way that you can't even look at the iTunes website if you don't have the software installed.

Like, I just want to see what you've got, maybe get or even read about a free podcast that happens to be hosted there, use one of those "free music download" offers... and if I could see what I was missing, maybe I really would want to have your software shit up my music filing* and god knows what else**. But until then I don't really plan to install it just because it's become the default for interfacing with hardware which I don't even have.

* compilations scattered across 12 different artist directories? uh, no thanks
** maybe iTunes is OK on this front, but since Windows QuickTime routinely steals all yr file associations in some weird way that bypasses the normal file association system so you can't put them back, I am not too inspired at the idea of touching any other Windows software by Apple

compilations scattered across 12 different artist directories? uh, no thanks

you can fix that. there's a checkbox. i can't remember what it's called.

What I really want is a magic app that'll sift through my entire collection, deleting all duplicate files and somehow converting all compilations into playlists using the one copy of the relevant track that remains. I'm dreaming, aren't I?

"Part of a Compilation"

Akkkkkk Foobar seems to split my compilations into separate tracks, one per folder! There's no way to listen to them all in a row, as far as I can tell. What am I doing wrong? It's almost enough to make me bin the whole idea.

itunes' saving grace is this wonderful site:

http://dougscripts.com/itunes/

despise compilations...I want "artists" to show up as "artist" not "compilation". maybe doug's got a script to do that, because if you select multiple tracks, you can't unclick the "part of a compilation"

this one might do it -

http://dougscripts.com/itunes/scripts/ss.php?sp=notpartofacompilation

although this is a v good program for dealing with ID3 tags in general -

http://www.chaoticsoftware.com/ProductPages/MediaRage.html

Media Rage is amazing. I remember using it way back when OS 9 was around, so I'm glad to see it's still alive and kicking.

I'm on a PC...

oh yeah sry - i'm sure there are even better ID3 programs for the PC

Mediamonkey will be able to do pretty much everything said above. Search is great, you can browse by file directory, artist, year, whatever you want. Convert filenames from tag information. You can make a playlist with your duplicates. There's a lot of playlist stuff you can do. And it is free, though there is a commercial version with bells and whistles. Seriously, try this.

Winamp can do a lot of it too with its library, but not so much the file changing level.

Mp3tag is a great free dedicated program for tag cleanup and sorting, also does the fancy filename from tag stuff.

This update is taking the piss. JUST WANNA PLAY WITH NU ILX IPOD APP!

Status: copying old files
Status: validating install
Status: checking component registration
Status: validating install
Status: chillin with sum hos
Ststus: hold on imma thinka sumfing

....

Haha yeah I got that when I did the upgrade dance cos I had to u/g the ipod to v3, which meant downloading it, which meant upgrading iTunes, which meant all the above. It seemed like it took 20 mins to install.

I only use itunes to copy shit over to my tooch tho - winamp rules all.

about once a week, iTunes stops recognizing my iPhone and i have to reinstall it.

AWESOME! THE FUTURE!

last night i installed my iPhone into the pavement. after i deinstalled i noticed that it had been "cracked" as the young programmers say.

The Comedy Podcasts: your suggestions please has given me the first occasion to think about podcasts since 2007 or so, but itunes is giving me shit for it.

For some reason, none of the podcasts I download will sync to my ipod. I checked out some forums and the advice I found most often was to set my ipod to be synced manually. I tried that out and it worked, but from the standpoint of someone who acquires large amounts of music on a regular basis, it has been an unwelcome change.

Does anyone else have this problem? Does anyone have a solution?

Thanks.

Nevermind, I just found the solution.

http://www.podcastpickle.com/forums/lofiversion/index.php/t8808.html

Neeeeevermind.

So, I'm an IT manager and my department just bought twenty iPads. Apparently I cant just set them all up on the same iTunes account; I need 20 different credit cards and 20 different iTunes accounts and 20 iTunes installations on 20 different boxes. And if there's an OS update or an app I want my people to buy, I need to purchase and download it 20 times.

This is the worst computer application ever written by anybody.

http://www.apple.com/iphone/business/integration/mdm/

I dunno. I use iTunes and it does quite well. The only real problem I have is that it seems to randomly convert my MP3s to some weird format that won't play on my iPod unless I hit "Convert ID3 tags" on them. I really have no idea why it does that. Other than that I don't have any real complaints. Every software has its problems.

dont get itunes hate, i mean you should see the state of winamp

I'm pretty sure you can have an itunes account set up with a limited amount of computers? Years ago when I ran into that problem it gave me a no more than three to an account limit or something, maybe five. That could have been the case 6 years ago though.

hey here is an iTunes problem.

If I click Pop as genre then it accepts it, then actually labels the track as

[Rock-Pop] Indie Pop

I cannot find a solution to this.
Any advice welcome.

Only listen to indie pop?

Every time I load a CD, it labels it "indie rock", like this is still 1993 or something.

I need 20 different credit cards

Haven't investigated Joe's link yet, but when I had this problem in the past I found that you could 'gift' apps from one account to another.

Barbara Brotman on her war itunes Genius.

Here is the article. Sorry for the typo.

It was a victory for Hoku!

I ponied up for a song by heroin poster child Nico. "The Acid Queen" by The Who, the aural equivalent of 200 micrograms of blotter. Ten Years After's "Love Like a Man," a misogynist classic beloved by 14-year-old boys in 1970 and also, for some reason, a middle-aged mom in 2011.

You download Herman's Hermits but are offended by Britney Spears and the Cowsills.

"The Acid Queen" by The Who, the aural equivalent of 200 micrograms of blotter.

She's got some cold, hard truths to face up to about the "acid" she was taking.

This article is an ad for itunes, which I chucked in favor of Spotify (which doesn't have these stupid analyzers).

Can anyone help me with this shitty iTunes issue?

I load music on my iPhone. When I connect my phone to my computer at work, I can browse and play the songs on my phone, but I can't arrange them any way I like - including by track number so I can, say, play an album from start to finish. iTunes only lets me play the tracks as they were uploaded to the phone, in a random, haphazard manner. One solution for this is to make playlists, but I can't be bothered to make playlists for every album I put on my phone. Is there a setting I need to change/unlock so I can find an album, arrange it from first track to last and play like that?

no, sorry. i dunno what's up w that. my tale of hatred and woe:

i wiped and restored my hard drive last year. when i did this, i had to reinstall itunes. okay fine, but i foolishly allowed it to "keep itunes media folder organized" (the default setting). holy fuck! it went through my folder of miscellaneous single tracks, many hundreds of them, and created a new artist and album folder for each one. it also created a new folder for each full album and moved all tracks into it, leaving only the cover art jpegs in the original folders. way too big a hassle to fix, so i just left it.