The iTunes rant


a) I don't like any application thinking it knows better than I do how to organize my stuff on my computer. Even when such apps have checkboxes somewhere in Preferences or Options to turn the stupid features off, that doesn't excuse much if they're on-by-default. An app that starts out trying to synch up with other devices, delete files, put copies of existing files in places in don't ^$#@ WANT them, etc, is off to a very very bad start with me.

b) ID3 Tags, or whatever they're called, are fine for metadata, but I prefer to organize my playlists around FILES, not TRACK NAMES.

c) My favorite MP3 player app of all time is SoundApp, which was never ported to OS X. Very minimalistic. These days I use Audion, which is also inobtrusive. iTunes just looks and feels like a Windoze app. Giant screen-eating monolith. Especially clumsy for creating new playlists — even with two monitors going it's a cumbersone frustrating klunky thing to muck with, see previous note about how it isn't properly FILE-based. It carries over to playlists THEMSELVES. I like having having a huge number of playlists, each of which is a FILE, placed in a FOLDER which is in a SUBFOLDER which may also be in a SUBFOLDER; and any of which may have aliases insofar as the playlist falls into several categories. iTunes's playlists are not navigable except WITHIN iTunes, and an improvement on the MacOS Finder it aint

d) I like being able to double-click a sound file just to hear it without having the damn thing added to some "library". I like being able to double-click a sound file and not have some other, massively unrelated file start playing when it's done.

e) I blame the hegemony of iTunes for the die-off of development of most of the competition on the Mac.

Application designers have to design for what the majority will want. Most people don't want to fiddle with individual song files - they just want it to work and don't particularly care where the files are, or indeed even if the songs are stored in files. Hence the state of the defaults for iTunes.

But I do understand that this sort of thing may make you dislike an application since it is not designed for the way that you want to work.

But I can't resist pointing out that your insistence on managing the file storage yourself is reminiscent of the laments of programmers back in the old days of the transition to high-level languages: "I want to put my variables in the memory locations that I choose! I don't want that &%@* compiler deciding where my code is going to be located in RAM!"

This indeed is power-user functionality that is not available within iTunes.

Note that it is of course possible to change the file associations so that songs (or other sound files) play in some other application when double-clicked. That doesn't affect iTunes' ability to play them from within iTunes itself.

For example, you could change them to use "Play Sound" (http://microcosmsoftware.com/playsound/) which is a faceless background application. And since "Play Sound" is AppleScriptable, it would be relatively easy for someone to create a GUI of their own design that interoperates with "Play Sound".

Sorry if this seems like I'm attacking you for your likes & dislikes. I did ask you to explain why you "detested" iTunes (in this other thread) and you responded to that. Thanks.

You're entitled to your opinion, but I think it's obvious at this point with a variant (another poor copy?) of Spotlight even coming to Windoze, that in the future we'll all be far less inclined to worry about where files are located. For 99.9999% of us, the song name is far more important than the file name.

As for playlists, I suggest you spend some serious time learning to use Smartplaylists. Especially when used in combination, they can do things you couldn't begin to attempt while managing your music manually. You're pretty good with scripting, but I doubt you can manage to get the same kind of results that way either.

I strongly prefer Stupidplaylists that play back the songs I put in 'em.

For anyone who missed the cue-in, I didn't really start a thread to diss iTunes, but rather was asked why I didn't care for it. I'll readliy grant that it may do things that have appeal to many folks, perhaps even a few that I'll acknowledge to be good features (the spotlight-esque search), but in my experience and opinion those don't balance out the massively frustrating ones.

It will probably surprise no one who has used both programs that another application I absolutely detest is Microsoft Word, and for a surprisingly high number of identical reasons.

I remember using SoundJam MP - iTunes' daddy, and you HAD to remember to save playlists after spending ages manually typing them up, and then go on to organize them via the old classic Finder. And at times it was a pain in the backside, but I knew no different.

I didn't get iTunes until I got my G4 iMac around March 2002, and I pretty much carried on with iTunes as I had with SoundJam MP, I was still stuck in the same mindset and immediately disabled the auto management and just added to my organised collection. I came to appreciate the lack of worrying about actual playlist files though.

I still don't like the idea of letting iTunes look after everything, I tried and gave up on iPhoto 2 for similar reasons. I keep things pretty organised - for example once "Compilations" reached approx 4.2GB, I started with "Compilations 2" to make backup onto multiple DVDs nice and simple, even though iTunes received the ability to do it directly by playlist in the interim.

Contrast with my brother - when iTunes came out for PC he was made up as he'd used it on my iMac. But he just rips his new CDs and forgets about them, doesn't even particularly worry about typing them up or correcting mistakes from CDDB. When I go and backup his files for him every once in a blue moon, his music files are a bit of a mess, as I told him it was best not to let iTunes manage them. But he doesn't care, as long as they appear in his library and play from his playlists.

In fact when I told him it was better to start encoding in AAC instead of MP3 it eventually backfired when he wanted to burn MP3 CDs for his car. He's got an iPod mini now though, for when he goes the gym etc. He just grabs it and goes, with little or no messing about with the computer - and do you know what? - That's the way it SHOULD be.

Rob.

Indeed! I agree. I dislike Microsoft Word not because of the 'Microsoft' part but because the degree to which one must fight with it to get it to leave the user alone. Moreover, (speaking about the so-called grammar-check) sometimes the passive voice is just what I want to use.

I also would like to double-click on a sound file without having it added to a library, and thank hayne for the tip. I don't mind iTunes so much, but I am sad about the demise of Audion.

AHunter3, do you buy music from Apple's music store...if so, do you convert these so you can play them in Audion?

Interesting. I find myself on both sides of the fence. First off, I'm just a general user. So I prefer the simple interface of iTunes. I leave it hidden most of the time, so it's not a big deal if the main screen is huge.

But, I can see the problem in killing the competition. Sure I like iTunes, but not everyone does. What would be cool is if you could use another program to purchase from the iTunes music store, and then be allowed the freedom that AHunter demands from a music player. Not much into competition killers, that's one of the various reasons I don't get along so well with Microsoft...I guess it's the way most big companies go though...

It wouldn't be too surprising if it is a requirement to use iTunes to actually purchase the songs from the iTunes Music Store. (I don't know if that is true or not - there might be another way to access the ITMS, but I doubt it.) Apple wants to maintain control over the financial transaction.

But you don't need to play purchased songs in iTunes. I'm not talking about converting them to some non-protected format in order to play them in some other application - you can play the unmodified purchased songs in any application that uses QuickTime for the low-level mechanics of playing the sound.
For example, you can play back purchased songs with the "Play Sound" app that I mentioned above - I just tried it with one of the songs that I bought from ITMS.

Shouldn't they be able to control the transactions serve side and allow different programs to access the server? I'm not really up on servers, so I have no clue.

Another app I'm taking a closer look at is xmms. I just compiled it for the X11 environment and it's cute and plays my tunes and does playlists. With Audion not going any further, it would be good to know of another that I could use and like!

It's a matter of security. The client side always has to handle at least a small portion of the transaction and the server side needs to take the client side at its word.

Thus a common language must be in place, I see. I wonder if it would be to much to ask Apple to make a development kit so you can create your own player to buy from the ITMS...um, yeah, probably since there would be a lot of security info in that kit wouldn't there?

Maybe they can make a simpler version of ITMS?

And if I took the part of Apple here, I'd be saying:
"Umm, like, what's my motivation for doing this???"

In addition to the security issue, Apple would end up fielding lots of calls about somebody else's software not working right with their music store. It would be a microcosm of what happens in the Windoze world where the buck often gets passed until the user gets angry or tired.

It's a simple matter of not being able to please all of the folks all of the time so they have to please most of the folks most of the time.

I can understand AHunter3's not liking iTunes for whatever reason he chooses as we all have various apps we don't like for this reason or that. I think the problem is that iTunes is so highly integrated within OS X that it's hard to avoid. Most of the time, when you don't like an app, you simply don't use it, but it's not quite as easy with iTunes.

Personally, I love iTunes. I don't care one whit about the files themselves. I simply want to click on a song and hear it come out of the speakers. But that's just me. I can appreciate that others have different ways of doing things which may conflict with the way iTunes is designed.

Now if we were to talk about iPhoto! Ugh! That is one app I cannot stand because of how it handles the files! But that's another thread (that I'd rather not start ;)).

Different strokes... To each, his own... and all that jazz. :)

Well, I rarely buy from iTMS — their offerings haven't caught up with my esoteric musical interests, and since I can usually find the music I want in used-CD stores and avoid the proprietary-format problem, I rarely even check it out. And Audion can actually speak to iPods! (Don't know about the latest ones but it's on good terms with my girlfriend's 60 gig Photo iPod). Unfortunately, the iPod itself thinks like iTunes :(

I agree w/regards to iPhoto. Never really tried it, though. I'm a GraphicConverter guy from back in the days when it first nudged GIFConverter aside as the simple graphics shareware app of choice. iPhoto is another one that wants to move your files around, isn't it? Ugh.

hayne ::nods approvingly::

IANAP, so I don't deal in pointers and allocations of blocks and whatnot. But I do strongly prefer that Mac app "installers" consist of .dmg files from which you simply drag the app to the location of your choice. When I run installers that insist on dumping the damn thing in /Applications, I generally let them do their thing and then copy the resulting app or app-folder to where I want it to be and delete the original. I have almost nothing in ~/Documents and mostly only Apple's own stuff in /Applications. It's my file system and I'll bloody well put my files where I want 'em!

To me, a good Macintosh application is one that hides complexity from you unless you want to customize, but is very very flexible about letting you work the way you want to work. Newly installed browsers should be able to copy or reference your bookmarks/favorites/shortcuts from the prefs of various other browsers you might have been using, but shouldn't muck with them w/o the user's permission, and should be able to designate themselves as your browser of choice but shouldn't do so automatically. If I install the latest FileMaker Pro, it is nice that it can convert older FileMaker databases and can convert Excel spreadsheets into FileMaker databases, but I'd be annoyed as hell if, on first launch, it went rummaging around and made all these conversions and moved the results into a "FileMaker Solutions" folder I never asked it to create for me, etc; if I decide to try out Thunderbird, it's nice to know that it can read my Eudora email, but it has no freakin' business moving my Eudora mail files to some location it thinks would make more sense!

A Macintosh environment should be smooth and sleek on the outside, but, like a G4 tower opening from the side, should give you easy access to the inner workings.

I have a dozen apps or so that, on initial launch, invite me to create some kind of document or project from a short list of templates. I always click the "Don't even think of ever showing me this stupid screen again" checkbox and hit cancel and go about the business of creating my stuff from scratch.

Amen!

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe iTunes does ask if you want it to move your files around when you first start it up. Your answer then sets the initial preference setting which you can change at a later date. Is this only with older versions of iTunes? Or am I just dreaming this up? It's been a long time since I've fired up a new install of iTunes.

Regarding iPhoto... I prefer Photoshop for my editing and then I have my own filing system for my photos, and it doesn't bury the photos in umpteen folders that are nearly impossible for me to find. But at least iPhoto works well for my 12 year old daughter so it's good for something. :)

Pardon me for saying something really obvious, but I usually use whatever program seems to work for my given situation. I've used iPhoto before, but when I need more power I use GIMP (not enough money for Photoshop...).

But I have to admit, I stopped organizing files a while back. I'll put them in general locations, but after that I'll use the spotlight/search function in my Finder window, and just pull it from there. I guess I'm just lazy like that, I don't like moving through folders. Heck, I do the same thing when opening a file. Usually I'll pull it straight out of finder, and when I'm in a program I'll use the search bar to find it. And if the program doesn't implement it, I'll go back out to finder to open it. Anything that his horribly important (class notes, downloaded files I haven't opened yet) goes on my desktop.

Yes, yes, I'm terrifically lazy. But, as has been said, different strokes for different folks ;).

Zalister, while I dislike the way iPhoto attempts to organize photos, I can't say I'm the best at organizing them either. Right now, I have my photos in 3 main folders. One is a special case with only 56 photos waiting to be sorted. The second folder has 2,240 photos waiting to be sorted. And I've started a third folder that only has 197 photos so far. That doesn't included the photos that I have sorted already.

Honestly, what I need is an app that can sort the photos based on what I've photographed, renaming the photos to something more intelligible than "P1010079.JPG" or some such meaningless filename. When I can get an app that can do all that, I'll be very happy. LOL! ;)

I haven't used iPhoto in a couple of years -- and I'm still running Panther -- so I can't do a true feature comparison, but you might want to look at Kodak's EasyShare software. When you import photos from your camera (or other source) it allows you to automatically rename the pictures you're importing and designate a folder (and album) to import to.

Thanks, Reacher, but the software isn't the real problem. It's the laziness of the person running the software. :D

Usually, my mode of operation is to have a sudden need to take some photos, discover that my camera is already full, run to plug in my camera to transfer the photos to my Mac, and run outside to take whatever pictures I wanted to take in the first place (assuming the subject hasn't disappeared already). That's how the photos pile up in one folder. Then, finally, I go through the uploaded photos and sort them out. I stopped trying to rename the files a long, long time ago. Instead, I just make sure they are placed in folders with names that describe the subject matter of the photos. That is somewhat hierarchical which allows me to dig down and pinpoint the precise photo(s) I want at any given time regardless of the filename.

It works for me even though it's not at all efficient. :)

GraphicConverter lets you preview an entire folder and rename the image files while you're looking at them. (Or delete them, or reveal them in the Finder to do Finder-level things to them).

Ultimately, the real solution to photos, music, and whatnot lies with the promise of true metadata for each file, a promise inherent in 10.4 but as of yet not implemented yet in a big way.

On the file level (yes :)), each file can have a virtually unlimited number of fields. Actions by system or application can differentiate based on the values of any such fields. The various bits of data that constitute ID3 tags could be among them, as would JPEG comments and file creator-app codes and whether it is part of Project X or Project Y and number of CMYK layers and bitrate and codec version of the video track and so on. And once some useful degree of standardization had been adopted so that different apps and the system and its subsystems all expected to find the same kind of data in the same fieldIDs, you could search and sort on any combination of these.

The only drawback of the finder (and/or the file level) is the sense that not all the data you need is effectively stored there.

(And klunky workarounds like naming your Classical-music .mp3 files with a naming convention that begins with the composer followed by the orchestra, conductor, date of perf, name of overall composition, item number within it, track name, album name, label, album catalogue code, release date, bitrate, and whether or not it came from live-to-digital-file, CD, master analogue tape, vinyl, etc., and encoding software name and version# just doesn't address the problem at all — dumping all that crap in the filename makes for pretty useless searching possibilities)

Metadata fields at the file level, as described in the linked Ars Technica article, would allow for continued elegance and ease-of-use at the file level. (A list view with the ability to do subsorts — e.g., to sort by one category and then sort all items within that category by a second category — would also help immensely. Alt-click on a column title to subsort within the existing sort-order, for instance).

In contrast, if each individual app is reinventing the Finder-wheel, creating a resources-management tool that essentially manages the files used by that app, but which isn't portable to any other app, well, then something's stinky as all getout in Denmark.

It would only be helpful if it could do global file renaming while either still keeping the original filename attached as a prefix or suffix OR performing a smart, logic based renaming. The original filename is a date code that I don't want to lose so I want to keep that as at least a suffix to the final filename.

Ideally, what I would want is a file sorter. And this is going to grate your nerves, but I would like something that uses an interface somewhat like iTunes! (Ducking and running for cover! :D)

I would like to be presented with a mess of my photos on one side of the screen, be able to create nested folders (i.e. "playlists") on the other side, and then drag and drop the photos into the folders. But rather than burying the files under a million folders of its choosing, I'd want to have it physically move the files to the actual folders I set up with folder names that I control.

Sure, I can do this somewhat with the Finder by opening two windows, using the icon preview in one window with the file hierarchy of folders in the other (which is what I usually do, actually), but I run into a problem with my photos being too large for the previews to work in OS X. So I cannot see half of my photos in the previews even when I try. (I haven't checked to see if this is still true with Tiger.)

Once the photos are organized into their own folders, I can then run renaming tools to do mass renaming of the files themselves; although, I have found this to be of little importance to me in the long run so I've stopped messing with this.

Have you tried using the keywords feature of iPhoto?
iTunes is able to do its sorting etc by virtue of the metadata that is associated with each song file (ID3 tags). For photos, there is metadata that comes from the camera (date etc) but obviously this does not include any info about the subject matter. You need to supply the subject matter info manually.
iPhoto allows you to do this and then you can search by keyword etc.
There have been many articles written about this - here's a few from the main macosxhints site:
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.p...40818070433708
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.p...05041900454453

No, I honestly haven't. I don't want to sit and rename 2,500+ photos, and I think I would have to do that for a keyword feature to work, right? It's faster and easier to select 30 photos and drag them all into a folder which is named with their subject matter than to try to name all 30 photos individually. Even if I tried to use some sort of batch renamer, I would still need to sort out the photos before applying the renamer as I don't always take photos in order (I can go from one subject, to another, back to the 1st, then to a 3rd, then back to the 2nd, etc.). So the subject matter is somewhat random among the pictures themselves.

Or maybe I'm just being stubborn. :D

Well, if you can select them (e.g. to drag them to a folder) then you can apply a keyword via a batch utility like that mentioned in one of the articles I linked to above.

If you really want to drag to a destination, you could create AppleScript droplets (each named according to a subject) that would apply keywords to the files that are dropped on them.

Don't scream at me, but I honestly don't know anything about AppleScripts! I have no idea how to make them or use them! :eek:

But all this talk has reminded me of iView Media Pro. I haven't fired that one up on a long time, but I always liked it when I did use it because of its flexibility and the complete control it gave me. Since I'm really not concerned about renaming the files themselves, I may see about upgrading my current version of iViewMP and seeing if that will help me speed up the sorting of my photos.

As it is... it truly doesn't matter how well organized a filing system might be if you don't use it. Having around 2,300 unsorted photos isn't doing me a bit of good no matter how much I stomp my feet about how I don't like the way iPhoto handles the files.

So I guess I should stop fussing and start sorting! :o

hmm, I also dis like iTunes for many various reasons. One thing that always kind of got me is that its random, is not written very well. I had about 9 gigs or so of music on one of my older work G4s (700Mhz) and it basically just acted as a mp3 player since it was older and no one used it. I would hear the same song 8 or 9 times a day when I played the whole 9 gig library on random, that just shouldn't happen IMHO.

I did a quick versiontracker search linked below, anyone else use any of these?

http://www.versiontracker.com/php/se...macosx&x=0&y=0

The randomness of iTunes' shuffle has been much discussed and even experimentally measured. It is in fact random, but the properties of random sequences do not correspond to what many people expect. (There is a certain probability of repeats in a random sequence and it's higher than what might seem reasonable intuitively.)
That is why Apple introduced some non-randomness via additional preference settings in more recent versions of iTunes.

working with network security I am somewhat familiar with RNG (random number generators), and I am aware that a lot of times devs create pre made random strings and then the RNG picks one of the random preset strings (randomly) to produce random results. They do that for a sense of control, and I can see that, and understand why some developers do such things.

That is just one of my peaves with iTunes...

and I must admit I have not really played around with itunes 6, since I did not like the previous versions. Maybe it has gotten better, but I don't think i will use it simply because of all the bells and whistles. I like media players that take up little to none resources. I have seen itunes hog up some resources.

I do some web developement on the side and some other computer related things on the side with my contracting job and I like to have anything running in the background running at minimal resources. OS X in general, has pretty good memory management from my experience which is why I tend to blame iTunes and not the OS for it sometimes hogging up some system resources.

Reacher, I've heard some good press about that program. Would you tell us more?
tommaso

I am just curious, what is it that bothers you so much about iTunes system of orginization? It seems pretty intuitive to me. I also don't understand what you mean by orginizing music by file name rather than track name. Isnt' the track name the file name? I guess it doesn't have to me, but I don't get why you would name a track "file blah.mp3" when it's "Another one bites the dust" Unless I totally missed the point on orginization by file name. But what is the point of knowing where all your music files are? They play in itunes, and go on your ipod from where they are. If you ever need the track, you can drag and drop it right out of itunes, and if for some reason you need to know where the track is, you can always spotlight it.

I guess I am just curious what kind of work your doing with your music files that you have all these gripes. I have never needed to actually find the location of a music file before. I know they are all nice and tidy in the music folder, and I can play them from itunes. What else could you do with a music file? A few times I wanted to open a file into garage band or audacity to try to play with it, and I just dragged it out of itunes to the desktop, opened it into my app of choice, and tossed it when I was done.

Having just spent some time locating and downloading a few interesting podcasts and viewing movie trailers within iTunes, I wonder what other app offers such a diverse array of options, all seamlessly integrated. Playing a newly purchased song now, iTunes in the background using only around 9% CPU and 30 MB RAM. My music is organized; I know where the actual files reside (not so hard to track down). Hard to find much to complain about.

Some early adopters of the new-fangled horseless carriages complained that they didn't come with whip holders or grain storage bags. :)

Twelve Motion, I've already explained what I dislike about iTunes.

It's not just the file name, it's the entire file path:

a) FileName: "11 Atom Heart Mother". Location in file system: "Primary/MP3-X/Spillover Pink Floyd/Pink Floyd: Total Eclipse 2" Track Name: "Atom Heart Mother"


b) FileName: "05-Atom Heart Mother.mp3". Location in file system: "Primary/MP3-I/P/Pink Floyd Additional/Pink Floyd at the Playhouse Theatre London 16.9.1970" Track Name: "Atom Heart Mother"

c) FileName: "Pink Floyd - AHM1Suite.mp3". Location in file system: "Primary/MP3-I/P/Pink Floyd Std Rels/Atom Heart Mother" Track Name: "Atom Heart Mother"

d) FileName: "01-Atom Heart Mother.mp3" Location in file system: "Primary/MP3-I/P/Pink Floyd Additional/Rarities Off Live Radio" Track Name: "Atom Heart Mother"

To organize my music in the Finder is a simple matter of creating folders and subfolders and giving them names. To organize my music using ID3 tags, which is what iTunes uses for "Track Name", means overwriting the default track names that my MP3 encoder inherits from CDDB.

I can create hierarchies of folders and subfolders as I see fit, and if I change my mind I just move the tracks, I don't have to edit a batch of ID3 tags. Let's say I only have a couple albums of Berlioz but a huge batch of Vaughn-Williams. I might toss the Berlioz album loose in the "B" subfolder of Classical/Romantic, whereas I might put my Vaughn-Williams album folders into separate subfolders divided up by Orchestral versus Choral, with Orchestral subdivided by three conductors I have multiple pieces plus an "Other" folder for all other conductors. Later on, if I continue to get recordings of Vaughn-Williams with Sir Adrian Boult conducting, I might subdivide the Sir Adrian Boult folder up in some manner. Meanwhile, if I acquire a lot more Berlioz, I'm eventually going to want to subdivide the Berlioz folder into major categories of some sort. Wanna try doing that with ID3 tags? Aside from the problem that they don't have enough slots to accomodate Composer, Performer, Orchestra, Label, Soloist, Series, Major Work Title, Individual Piece Title, Album Title, Album Label, Composition Year, Recording Year, and Release Year, they are a pain in the butt to redo. I've had to revamp ID3 tags for my girlfriend's freakin' iPod, and mass-editing even 20 or so tracks is annoyingly slow not to mention cumbersome. And you have to do it for annoying things like "Simon and Garfunkel" versus "Simon & Garfunkel" whereas for music apps that use the Finder's own native file system for organizing, it's just the folder you tossed them in, you don't have to deal with that in order to dump freshly-encoded tracks from "Concert in Central Park" in alongside of "Bookends".

If I want to create a new playlist, I open a "new playlist" window in Audion and I drag actual FILES into the window, after finding them within my hierarchy. Then the playlist is saved and it exists as a file, and I can organize my playlists hierarchically within systems of folders and subfolders.

Having worked with several different media players on both windows and linux platforms I find iTunes a bit sluggish and a bit annoying. It is a personal preference, and I have always found a good third party media player that I like better on other platforms, just not so much with the Apple platform yet.

I actually like to run an old version of winamp on my system that is just a basic music player with a play list. Takes up practically no resources and it plays files as I organize them. I also take the time to Alphabetically organize my music by artist name, then by album. I have been doing that since before iTunes ever existed.

I also don't purchase music online, I do not like how you have to authorize it vis ITMS. I will just download it from the artist themsleves. A lot of times you can just download an .iso file of the artist which means I can rip it to audio cd in no time via nero, and the .iso is already ready to archive for back ups.

Off topic, but word processors really piss me off. I mean, how arrogant those developers are to think that I should use their program to organize the letters on my page.

I like to keep each of my documents in a separate Finder directory. I copy into each directory the individual letters I need to create my masterpiece--in the correct order. To organize my writing in the Finder is a simple matter of creating folders and subfolders and giving them names. I can create hierarchies of folders and subfolders as I see fit, and if I change my mind I just move the letters.

If I want to create a new document, I open a new window in Finder and I drag actual LETTERS into the window, after finding them within my hierarchy. Then the document is saved and it exists as a file, and I can organize my documents hierarchically within systems of folders and subfolders.

It's all very logical.

Ummm, you can do all of that in iTunes without touching a single ID3 tag by using playlists.

Chris

You aren't far off. Yes, I do want my word processors to put the characters on the screen for me (I don't want to drag them out of folders on my hard drive:))...

But I don't want my word processor to change margins for me. To indent for me except as I've specified. To apply some bloody "style" to things I've typed or pasted. Certainly not to override what I'm inputting because it thinks I ought to be using a bulleted list. If I want bullets I'll type option-8 and put a bullet.

So, yeah, Microsoft Word has no space on my hard drive. I do not use it, I do not own it, I will not touch it.

No you can't.

Look, you want to use iTunes, by all means don't let me dissuade you. I made a passing comment in another thread about hating iTunes and was asked to elaborate, hence the existence of this thread. I'm not on a crusade to eliminate iTunes, I just don't like it and don't use it.

Fair enough. I personally think iTunes is great. I think I can do everything you want to do with playlists. Still, that doesn't mean you have to like it. You are free to use whatever method you choose to manage your music. Choice is good.

Chris

Keywords are independent of filenames. That's part of the beauty of them. You could have 100 photos named as they came out of the camera with numerical gibberish, and yet they can be keyworded for easy search. The only batch renaming I do is to serialize by date. There is no reason to add content info in filenames if you are keywording. I strongly recommend that you read this book. It will show you the power you already have in iView and while it doesn't describe music, it should also give insight into what Apple is trying to accomplish in iTunes via metadata.

I let iTunes organize my music and I love how iTunes allows me to manipulate and organize music using metadata so that I do not have to worry about folder and file names. This does not mean AHunter is wrong, because I don't have much classical music and I could see how that could be a real problem.

But metadata is the way forward, I am convinced of that. I still have a well-organized computer, but I no longer try to force folder structures and filenames do more than they are ever going to be capable of. For that we have metadata.

I agree that metadata is eventually the answer. And OS X has some great underpinnings even if they aren't being fully used yet.

I think it amazing that this thread has run on to three pages. AHunter3 doesn't like iTunes and knows why. My wife doesn't like scallops and knows why (they make her ill). This is a discussion about taste. iTunes does what it does. Apple thought that would be the way folks liked it, and with few exceptions, they were right. There is really no need to defend iTunes - it is what it is and making it otherwise would disappoint a lot of others. [Edit: I don't like it either].

You hit the nail right on the head with that one. I feel that iTunes is not for me, and that is what I said. I may have come off like I was feeding everyone anti-iTunes propaganda but really I don't care what everyone else uses. If it works for you then great. iTunes is not the only media player out there to use metadata. In fact you can find metadata in every OS out there. It has been there for a while in every OS, but Apple just recently revamped theirs majorly in Tiger which is why they are plugging it so much.

I feel that with Mac OS X I am forced to use some of Apple's apps and not given a huge plethora of thrid party apps to choose from like I do in windows or Linux. So, I may very well be biased towards iTunes from the get go.

If it works for you then it works. I think you should form your own opinion about based off your own experiences. I have tried and found many better media players to my taste, and I choose to use them over iTunes.

This reminds me of a really good mac versus pc article I read on digg.com the other day. It said something to the effect that apple is the architect and microsoft is the customer pleaser (or something to that effect). It was posted like 2 weeks ago if you got some free time you may want to digg thru digg.com and try and read it.

Found the article. I thought it made sense.
http://www.engadget.com/2006/03/08/s...the-architect/

::points to NovaScotian::

::disables smilies to avoid above sentence reading :SMILEYFACE WITH TONGUEoints to NovaScotian::

What he said. I don't like it, I won't use it, I have my reasons, but what the hell, kudos to Apple for giving most folks what they want. And if you use iTunes, no offense intended.

Hunter, everything you say here can be done in iTunes, and without ID3 tags. You can make a folder in the playlist window for "Classical/Romantic" in which you can have as many folders as you want starting with "A" and ending with "Z" your Vaughn-Williams can even be in here also, in the V folder, and that can be subdivided into Chral and Orchastral (this being divided yet again by conductors.) Everything you talk about folders and playlists, can be created, and easily manipulated in iTunes. Actually dragging real files around and making an re-naming folders is just the old way of doing what iTunes automates and keeps all in one window. If you want to make smart playlists for everything your saying, you connot. But as for as just making folder within folders within you can easily do it. You can even have the same song in multple playlists with out actually duplicating the song in real folders. In your case, you could have a playlist of Sir Adrian Bault, and one of Vaughn-Williams, and both of these playlists can have several songs that intersect without any actual dupes in your system.

One thing I noticed that I hate about iTunes is still there. If you like hip hop at all you will always have several tracks by an artist featuring at least one or more other artists. This confuses how itunes organizes your music and they often put stuff in different folders.

You can easily opt to just organize your own music, which I do, but it still doesn't organize them quite the way I like it.

That annoys me too, tlarkin. My Buddy Guy is strewn all over the place.

Can anyone confirm that iTunes seems to consume only 2/3 of the CPU that it did before? I was afraid that it was going to be more of a hog with the additions (I have it on the third album view), but I think it might be better.

agreed i prefer barebones media players with no flashy or added graphic features. I want it to transfer music to a portable device and play music. Anything else I will just use like vlc or some other app.

I don't mean to hijack this thread, but tLarkin's reasons are why I use BBEdit instead of Microsoft Word and then if the format must be MSWord, I copy to it. That's why I prefer Camino as is (no additions or plug-ins) instead of Safari, Firefox, or Opera. It's why I use NewsNetWire without frills instead of Safari to read rss feeds. That's why I use Eudora instead of Entourage - it's just an email client.

In general, I don't like highly integrated apps - I prefer to start one (or leave one running) that does exactly what I want to do and nothing else - a series of single functions. Most of the rest is bloatware in my view.

No, it doesn't do better. Its usage just depends upon the song playing. I was playing Pink Floyd's 'The Wall" (to check out gapless playback after I reripped it from CD), and playing "The Wall" definitely takes less CPU than playing the song "Need a Friend" or almost anything else (so far) by Buddy Guy.

Interesting (to me).

at my old job I had a G4 as my test system for the mac stuff. I had itunes on it and about 5 to 10 gigs of my music at work (you know the work appropriate stuff).

I would run top in terminal and watch how itunes would eat up to 35% of the cpu sometimes, just running by itself. This was with panther installed though, and I haven't really used itunes since then.

I tried installing itunes on my PC a while back ago and it crashed during the install everytime. Not sure what that was about, but every other application works flawlessly on my windows machine. Itunes crashes horribly, could maybe be my hardware configuration, I don't run intel processors.

The difference in CPU draw noted above is related to how it was ripped/recorded and of course, whether it is 'protected' or not. A song ripped from a CP at 256 kbps seems to take less CPU and than one ripped at 128 kbps which takes less than another from Apple (protected track) at 128 kbps as well. These were all using AAC. I don't have enough mp3's at the same kbps as these AAC's to tell what kind of a difference that makes.

I have the command line utility play installed, and I wrote a quick AppleScript which asks for some information about the song and uses mdfind and grep to send the correct song to 'play'. Play uses typically about 60% of the CPU that iTunes uses on the same song, including protected songs.

This data is from an original eMac here at work...speaking of which, I'd better get back to work.

almost all of my music is 384 mp3 vbr, with some flac stuff

VLC takes up about 1 to 5% of my CPU cycle while playing my rip of Tool's new albume which is m4a lossless (no DRM) audio rip. that is all while I am browsing the web so I have firefox open and running as well, as well as several apps in the system tray as we speak.

VLC's UI may not be as intuiative as iTunes but the perfomance is so much better.

Of course there is always the once in a while spike where it will jump to like 40% usage but other than that its pretty stead at 1% ~ 5%

why would this matter? Ever play a FPS, burn a dvd movie, rip audio or video, or even install applications with itunes playing music in the background? it blows

Have you tried the "album artist" field that keeps getting mentioned?

Speaking of rants, the applications forum has exploded with iTunes 7 questions. Are there issues with the upgrade or are there just differences to get used to?

Sorry if this is considered off-topic, I just didn't want to start another iTunes thread if it was going to kick off more general ranting.

what do you mean tried?

For example, the last album I tried to rip into itunes was Ghost Face's new album Fishscale. Instead of listing Ghost face as the artist it listed every artist and then listed every album (from samples) that was sampled from that artist.

I have had the same problems with john coltrane albums that feature miles davis or some other jazz artist.

I just really hate how much resources itunes hogs up and I don't like how it organizes stuff.

I am not sure what you mean by try the album?

I have done this:
1) Go into the info manager for each track
2) Cut out the "featuring artist x" text, but leave the main artist intact
3) Paste the "featuring artist x" into comments

For more complex albums without one "main" artist you will need to label it a compilation.
Maybe Apple will include a "featuring artist x" text entry field in the next update. :)

yeah i still prefer to just manually enter the info myself when I rip the music and then let the audio player read it as is.

Winamp and VLC have no problem doing this for me

Yeah, 7 has got some funky problems it would seem. They did one thing that bugs me to no end, the removed the EQ button from the bottom of the browser window. I have a bunch of different situations I'll be playing my iTunes in (I have a laptop and take it everywhere) and each situation needs different EQ settings, so I really wish the button was still there...

Anyway, there are some problems, hopefully they will fix them soon.

Allow me to join a long line of Illustrious forum members in quietly sharing my rightful thoughts:

I don't like the new iTunes 7 update and I definetely don't appreciate the fact that I can't stop and control the "Determining gapless playback information". It's unbelievable that is on as a default. What a nerve. I bet it's gathering some information on my music library and sending back to Machine City.


I absolutely agree and support AHunter3 fisrt post, point n.1.