iTunes newbie (mode: disgruntled) questions
 

I've been pretty much ignoring iTunes because I had somewhere between 300 and 400 albums' worth of music divided up into playlists created and managed within SoundApp, and I figured it was only a matter of time before a Carbon version popped up.

It didn't :(

I experimented briefly with Cabrio but didn't care for it. Now I've downloaded iTunes for MacOS 9 and X.

Question 1: Folders -- I see how to create playlists, but how the heck do I organize them? In SoundApp, each playlist is a file so I just stick them in folders and use the Mac Finder to organize them into a hierarchical arrangement. In iTunes, the playlist I create doesn't seem to correspond to any new file that I can find, and within iTunes itself it's just hanging there below the default icons for Radio and Library. So after adding 50 or 60 playlists it's going to be one buttugly cumbersome interface. This can't be right. How the heck do you create folders or equiv?

Question 2: Sharing the Playlist XPlat -- I don't mean between my computer and someone else's, I mean between MacOS X on mine and MacOS 9 on mine. The whole idea of going with iTunes was that it existed for both platforms and therefore, presumably, both versions could open the same files so I wouldn't have to create 400-some-odd playlists twice. As I said, I can't find a file that corresponds to a newly created playlist; therefore I don't know what to go open from within the other copy of iTunes to acquire it there. Clue me in here, folks.

1) I don't think there is any way to organize playlists into folders.

2) I think the playlists and song info (i.e. all the database info) is in the files "iTunes 4 Music Library" and "iTunes Music Library.xml" under ~/Music/iTunes/
So you could try making your OS 9 files be aliases to the OS X ones in order to have the same playlists on both. I think there might have been a MacOSXHint about this sort of thing - so have a search.

Question 2: Look in iTunes preferences: Advanced and you can specify the location of the iTunes library. I believe you can do this in OS 9 as well. Point both iTunes apps to the same place and you should be OK.

Question 1: As far as organizing music on your HD, there are checkboxes for "keep iTunes music organized" and "copy new songs to iTunes music folder" in the preferences. Organizing the files on your HD has nothing to do with how they are organized in iTunes. Using smart playlists and using the genre and comments fields can help with organization in iTunes.

I don't think Apple ever suggested or recommended anybody use iTunes in 9 and X on the same machine. I don't think it was made with that in mind. I suspect you will have a lot of trouble when you add songs in one OS and want them to come up in the other. Particularly if you are using different versions of iTunes.

I've pretty much decided to go with Audion instead of iTunes at this point. Audion works on both platforms; the playlists are files, as nature intended, and can therefore be placed in folders and subfolders to organize them. I'll keep iTunes X around to access the music store but that's it.

I guess I'm missing the point, but why does it matter if playlists are files? It's not like the location of a playlist file makes a difference. You still see them in the application as they're intended.

Your .mp3/.m4a/blahblahblah files are organized, and your playlist data (if you need to back it up) is in the XML iTunes library file.

The need to organize a bunch of playlist files is negated by the existence of a single music database that contains the dozens random playlists you might create on a whim.

Why do you want to hide your playlists away in subfolders? I can kindof understand why you want an actual playlist file, but why keep it with the actual files in the playlist, that's just more work to find it to load it. Harder at least than just selecting it from the always-there playlist area in iTunes...

And if I created the playlist while running MacOS 9, and I happen to be in MacOS X at the time that I want to play the playlist?

I don't know how many playlists other people use, but I have an average of 12 per CD times approximately 27 CDs to date = 324 playlists. I most emphatically do not want to scroll down through 324 entries all of which sit there at the root of this PC-reminiscent "My Music" sort of screen. Even if there is some simple method for opening or referencing your library of playlists originally created in one OS while booted in the other.

And I most emphatically do want to have them organized by which CD the actual MP3s are on, if/when that's the way I wish to view them, or by genre, if that's the way I want to view them -- and some playlists I may conceptualize as pertaining to more than one genre and therefore would be aliased to more than one folder.

At any rate, as I said, Audion looks like a winner to me at this point. Unless I finally get an email back from the author of SoundApp indicating a forthcoming Carbon version of SoundApp so that I don't have to recreate all my SoundApp playlists in Audion format, I'm going to send the Audion guy my shareware and go with that.

you have 12 playlists for a CD of ten songs?!

exactly how many different play orders are necessary for N songs?!

how do you get any work done?!

what, to you, constitutes a playlist? could you enumerate, say, two playlists of one of your CD's? then explain the need for any single playlist of a CD?


i don't mean to sound scornful, but i think some preparation H on your glasses might relieve that itching :D

/edit

have you discovered the browser in itunes?

current inventory, here:

46 genres
1274 artists
1616 albums
7937 songs

18 playlists, several of those just for management

a) Select playlist (in first OS)
b) Choose 'Export Song List' from File menu
c) Open iTunes (in other OS)
d) Choose 'Import' from File menu, browse to saved 'NameOfPlaylist.txt'

You can reorder tracks in iTunes by any id3 tag info, including your own keywords in the comments box. I'd really like to know what you do with 12 playlists per CD,:confused: I feel like I'm missing out on something...

As for a long list down the side, mines around 400ish, a necessary evil so I can use my AlbumLink icons:
http://www.solve-id.net/albumlinks

dD

yes, as merv says, Command+B is your friend in iTunes, especially with a large library. it might help you eliminate some of your playlists from the getgo.

It's not that big a deal guys. AHunter's used to organizing and enjoying music a certain way, and wants iTunes to work that way. Apparently it doesn't, so he/she's using something else that does.

Isn't choice what the Macintosh platform is about? Even Windows has several mp3 players with a variety of ways of doing things, giving Windows users a choice-in that area, anyway.

I love iTunes myself, but I don't have nearly as large a song library or as many playlists as AHunter does. How do you guys with huge song libraries and many playlists manage them in iTunes, anyway?

Everyone has their own personal flavor of anal-ity, especially when it comes to music.

Mine?

I've never been a big "mix tape" maker: I like to listen to albums (CD's) all the way through without interruption. Don't know why exactly, I just like hearing all the tracks in order right to the end. So for me, although playlists aren't even necessary, I make a playlist for each one anyways and scroll through them much as I used to paw through all my CD's or LP's in the "old days".

well, it is a big deal if we can determine that the user is frustrated because of functional issues rather than a lacking in the interface. i can't imagine 12 playlists for a CD of ten songs, and ahunter hasn't enlightened us, so, until we hear that the user actually wants to listen to trax:

. alphabeteticcally
. reverse alpha
. by size ascending
. by size descending
. by time
. by vowel u present in the title
. title contains no vowels
. play track four 7 times
...
that's it; i'm all out of playlists for a CD without becoming, uh, well, euphemism deferred until we can hear from the user.

re: choices, many choices become daunting if one needs quality product (windows users must tire easily of shopping and just choose and then justify their purch with smug satisfaction [some marketing term for that {purchase rationalization}]). fewer quality choices makes selection easier.

Even then, mT, you don't need custom playlists for all of those. ;-)

Of course not! I have 12 playlists for a CD of 10-12 albums' worth of MP3 files, silly!

Right, but as mT was saying, you don't need a playlist for each of those albums. iTunes does this for you by ID3 tag info:

www.mikey-san.net/itunes.jpg

Is that what you're doing?

so these are mp3 CD's, not 'Shop' CD's, and you have 1 playlist per album right?

dD

i give up. i don't get what you're doing nor what you want. i suspect functional issues. i suggest you explore the interface some more.

personally, i think the interface is awesome. one can navigate to a particular set with a few keystrokes.

I just do not like the iTunes way of doing things. I can replicate what I did in SoundApp in one relatively mindless afternoon in Audion. To get to the same point in iTunes? Not even sure I can, despite you folks' well-intentioned suggestions and helpful hints. It just steers different and it's not like I lose out on something terribly important if I don't embrace iTunes.


Here are the playlists for a typical CD -- "Disk B", a "hybrid HFS/ISO" disk full of folders full of MP3 files that was burned in Toast a couple eons ago:


Carly Simon’s Greatest Hits = as you'd expect except leaving out one song that I hate
CSN&Y / So Far = as you'd expect (my rip from my copy of commercial CD)
Enigma / Cross of Changes = as you'd expect (my rip)
Enigma / MCMXC A.D. = as you'd expect (my rip)
Joni Mitchell / Origs of Aisles = the same songs by her that went into her album "Miles of Aisles" except the original more famous recordings of the same songs, not the live versions recored on "Miles of Aisles"
Kansas / Leftoverture = as you'd expect (my rip)
Kenny Loggins / Leap of Faith = as you'd expect (my rip)
Pink Floyd / Rarities = combination of some home-digitized bootlegs and some bootlegs digitized by someone else, mostly with no metadata in the MP3 files.
The Los Alamos Choir = home-digitized choral music
The Shape of the Land = home-digitized soundtrack to a TV movie about a Japanese mountain climber


Now...one of the most important things I need to know about these particular playlists is that they are Disk B playlists. They are playlists that I would only invoke if I have inserted Disk B into the CDROM drive. So I want aliases to all of these playlists inside a folder labeled "Disk B".

I don't want these twelve playlists merged and mingled on one screen with the playlists for Disk A, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, and Y because they would stretch down past my toenails and I'be scrolling and cursing in frustration. Too much information. If (and I do say if) I wish to insert Disk B and then play some playlists from Disk B for awhile, I just want to look at Disk B playlists.

Now, suppose I want to examine playlists by the genre of the playlist instead of by the CD that they apply to. I'll still want to know for any given playlist what CD it's on, but let's say I want to see all the non-classical backgroundish instrumental-oriented playlists that I've got regardless of what CD they are on, in order to pick which one I feel like listening to today. Well, the folders "Disk A", "Disk B", "Disk C" ....etc. to "Disk Y" are subfolders of a folder titled "By Disk". In a folder titled "By Genre" I have a folder titled "Instr (non-classical)" and within it I would find an alias to the playlist "The Shape of the Land". That playlist is relevant in this folder because it fits the genre. The alias is renamed so as to reflect which CD the actual MP3 files are on so I know which CD to insert before launching the playlist.

All of these folders and subfolders and playlists and aliases to playlists are available to me before I even launch SoundApp (or, in the future, Audion) because the entire hierarchy sits inside a folder that is aliased within my OtherMenu folder so I can access it via OtherMenu under MacOS 9, and aliased again within my FruitMenu folder so I can access it via FruitMenu under MacOS X. I can navigate it all very quickly as an hierarchical menu.

Under iTunes, I am aware that I could refrain from creating playlists for regular albums such as Kansas/Leftoverture because iTunes could bring it up by album title; but to browse what I've got would be significantly more complicated, see? I am also aware that I could use the identification flags within the MP3 files themselves to bring up a list by genre, but quite aside from the fact that any given piece of music can belong to several genres or categories simultaneously, many of my files do not have the metadata fully filled out on them. I have one playlist called "Rock about Rock" which does not correspond to a commercial album, it's a compilation of 52 rock singles concerned with the subject of rock 'n roll music itself. That's a genre as far as I'm concerned. But the individual files identify themselves to iTunes as being "rock", "classic rock", "pop", "oldies", "(blank)", "pop/rock", "album rock", ....yeah, yeah, I know, I could edit all the metadata and make it work.

The entirety of "Disk I" is Pink Floyd. Here are my playlists:

Consecutive Play I
Random Play I
PF/Animals
PF/Atom Heart Mother
PF/Dark Side of the Moon
PF/From Relics
PF/Meddle
PF/More
PF/Obscured by Clouds
PF/Piper at the Gates of Dawn
PF/Saucerful of Secrets
PF/The Wall
PF/Ummagumma
PF/Wish You Were Here

The two topmost playlists are meta-playlists that incorporate all the others. iTunes can't instantly give me "Consecutive Play I" or "Random Play I" by doing some kind of Find for all Pink Floyds because I have other Pink Floyd on other disks. I would not want to include songs from The Delicate Sound of Thunder or Total Eclipse Live because DST and TE are not on Disk I and I don't want it spitting out the CD and telling me to hunt up and insert the correct disk.

ROFL @ "Estrus Gearbox"!

so your playlists that you have now point to files that are ONLY on CDs and not locally stored? i think that answers some questions i was silently having...

AHunter3:
I think a lot of people would be interested to hear your explanation of what you are doing with the playlists.

But in the absence of facts, let me speculate about what you are doing.
You said that you usually have one playlist for each album (of which you have 10-12 on your MP3 CDs). I suspect this is a list of your favourite songs from that album. So then you have two choices for each album - you can play the whole album (all the songs) or you can play your playlist (just the favorites). But the problem is that you get a huge list of playlists since you have one per album.

A different way of doing things would be to label each song as a "favourite" and then tell iTunes to play only those songs which are labelled as "favourites". That way you don't need to keep a separate playlist ofr each album but still get what you want. And in fact, iTunes already has a facility built into it to support "favourites" - it allows you to rate songs and then play by rating.

You also have checkboxes next to individual songs. Don't like track 7 from some specific CD? Turn it off.

Ah, well.

Your dissatisfaction seems to be centred around not being able to launch playlists from the Apple menu and not having a big enough disk to contain all your music.

My iTunes collection is available from a dock folder like this each album icon is an Applescript which links to an album playlist in iTunes.
This system could be arranged to mirror your own Apple menu selections.

80 gig disks are so cheap these days, why go through the hassle of digging out a CD every time you want to listen to a different track? Also iTunes keeps a separate database for CD's so you don't need a playlist for each album on a mp3 CD, just sort by Album (click the column header) OR type Album name into search box, use the shuffle button for random play of that album or all tracks on the CD. etc etc, If the problem is that none of your music has id3 tags, then iTunes will not be of much use to you, but its hardly a fault in the software.
Personally I like the fact I can random play for 16 days without hearing the same track twice, and the rating system quickly becomes indispensable, but then I'm kinky like that ;)

dD