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