New Apple Lust Objects

Almost all of Zappa's catalogue...

xpost: yeah yeah i know! somehow those two have become the canonical examples in every article ever - it has infectulated my brane

play count - not sure why this is important? i'm being honest here - if you use this, how come?
So that I can have a playlist of songs that I haven't listened to yet/have only listened to a couple of times.

other metadata - ?
Year: So I can see songs made in 1994 for best-of lists etc.
Album art.
Is Compilation: so that songs by different artists can be grouped. Composer: Good for classical music, where composer and artist are v. different. etc etc etc.

Your original photoshop thing also falls down, because Aperture is bascially what you're talking about, and as an image workflow it stamps all over using the finder for organisation and versioning of images.

so does Flickr

Have you tried the Feed Your Reader extension?

the album-art feature is a heap of fucking shit. coverflow was a standalone app that worked pretty well ... you'd think iTunes might look to see if there was a copy of coverflow here too, and whether it had any artwork it might want to copy over? but no: i'm back to manually adding stuff. stupid fucking bastards.

that said, the rest of iTunes 7 seems pretty cool. although i'm not 100% convinced it isn't taking a lot longer now to import CDs.

the whole interface is still hideous tho.

http://www.ipodwannahaves.nl/images/ibuzz.jpg

but don't you know that already? i'm just confused about that. if there's a song or an album i haven't listened to, i mean, i know that i haven't listened to it. i don't need my computer to tell me that!

the other metadata you mention is not exclusive to itunes. any mp3 player can access it. and you can make smart folders that can access that stuff, too (genre, etc). no need for itunes. the problem for me with mp3 metadata is that the tags are rarely done properly, so there's this enormous - and never-ending - busywork of fixing them all, or adding them when they're missing - and you need to really do it, or else the entire system doesn't work (if, say eight songs out of your library of 10,000 songs don't have the year tag, then you're going to overlook those when compiling your "best of 2002" compilation). i have got enough things keeping me awake nights without wondering if my id3 tags are on straight.

i have to say i do like the idea of tagging things "single song", "full album" and "spoken". (if i could be asked)

if the aperture thingie is that good, do you think the concept could be applied to music? i keep bigging up the finder because i dislike itunes so much, but it course does blow, too. it would definitely be interesting to see something that DOES work well. (coverflow is beautiful but useless for my music, which is almost all singles).

I frequently find I'll rip a CD and then totally forget about it, only to rediscover it weeks later. If I bothered to use iTunes' smart playlists I'm sure it would be quite handy in reminding me what I haven't listened to yet. (I only really use iTunes to copy music to my iPod)

the problem for me with mp3 metadata is that the tags are rarely done properly

You don't tag your own mp3s properly? Oh, you mean you download them from p2p networks and they're not tagged how you like? Why don't you just use iTunes' nifty metadata editor to retag each album as you import it into the database? It takes about 30 seconds.

itunes 7 pissed me off this morning by seeming to have forgotten that i'm managing the ipod myself, necessitating another reset and 2 hours refilling it. fingers crossed it works this time. still, all worth it for gapless playback,which is making me go back to loads of mixes i haven't heard in ages.

wot a surprise eh

Andrew OTM here: I often rip six or seven CDs at once, and can then forget to listen to a track here or there.

the other metadata you mention is not exclusive to itunes. any mp3 player can access it. and you can make smart folders that can access that stuff, too (genre, etc). no need for itunes.
Well, aye, but I didn't think you were talking about other MP3 players -- you were suggesting using the Finder to do it, which can't access any of this.

compilation). i have got enough things keeping me awake nights without wondering if my id3 tags are on straight.

i have to say i do like the idea of tagging things "single song", "full album" and "spoken". (if i could be asked)

I decided to do it a long time ago -- so I spent a night or two making sure my (much smaller then) library was properly tagged. Now I only have to sort out new additions, and they're easy to spot because the wrong genres stand out.

if the aperture thingie is that good, do you think the concept could be applied to music?
I don't think it would work especially well for music -- it's about keeping 20 images shot a second apart in one stack, and adding new versions you make of images in the same stack. It's great for editing and processing, but for a ream of separate things like songs it wouldn't be useful.

is there a proper "turn off" command? or do you mean just avoiding that view? (which is what i'm doing on the other mac.)

http://pzacad.pitzer.edu/~mma/teaching/MS74/images/marclay5.jpg

http://static.flickr.com/44/250164075_036101897a.jpg

It's something that the classical music fans have been wanting for years