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I remember when iTunes came out for Windows ca. 2003. I had friends with Macs so I leapt at the chance to try it for myself---it just seemed lightyears ahead of
by nategri 7y ago
I remember when iTunes came out for Windows ca. 2003. I had friends with Macs so I leapt at the chance to try it for myself---it just seemed lightyears ahead of whatever I was using to interface with my music library at the time (Winamp, probably).
And what a long, slow, weird, decline it's been since then.
- kvark 7y agoMinority here, I never understood why music players shifted towards iTune-ish style of owning and re-categorizing everything in their own way... I mean, OS has a file system, why not just rely on it? Throw some searchable tags in, and you get the same abilities but without obscurity.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- mcrider 7y agoOS level doesn't have enough metadata. I remember tirelessly starring and categorizing my music to make smart playlists -- AFAIK you can't do that in the OS without some weird file naming schemes and a lot of extra work.
- mullingitover 7y agoiTunesFS sort of gives you this. You get a read-only disk that maps to the iTunes database. Playlists are their own directories, along with artists, albums, etc.
- sethhochberg 7y agoI have a lot of friends who do literally all of their work out of their "Downloads" folder - I don't know how they survive that way, but they love music players which they can just point at a directory and say "index this and make a neat library" and know that everything lives in one place. Personally, I'm in the camp who kept a manually-organized directory tree for music for years, and would still prefer that mode of working, but even among my technical friends I think I'm in the minority there. Presumably Apple was right that this is what most people prefer.
- ergothus 7y ago> know that everything lives in one place. That was what bothered me about iTunes...I was never sure WHERE things lived. Even if I pointed it at a folder, was that my music, or just an input source for where my music actually ended up living?
- reaperducer 7y agowas that my music, or just an input source for where my music actually ended up living? If you have "Organize my music" checked then iTunes copies the files to its library. If you have it unchecked, then the files stay where you left them.
- eridius 7y agoIf you right-click any local song¹ there's an option in the context menu to show the song in the Finder. ¹Music available in iCloud Music Library but not explicitly downloaded locally doesn't offer this of course.
- klodolph 7y agoWhat are you asking for, specifically? iTunes lets you organize music how you want on the filesystem, or you can let it organize the music for you. The only thing it doesn't do is present a view of the filesystem, but the Finder already has that.
- kvark 7y agoI guess what I'm missing is just system-standard metadata format, like the one BeFS featured back in the day.
- thirdsun 7y agoBut there is a standard for tagging audio data and iTunes uses it, just like any other half decent audio player / music management software. As long as your meta data is clean your library should present in a very consistent way between different players.
- chrisseaton 7y agoBecause despite what everyone thinks again and again, music is not hierarchical, as a file system is. Does my album go under the composer, the conductor, the orchestra or the soloist?
- ken 7y agoSame as any other document on my disk: it doesn't matter. Just dump everything in there and let Spotlight index it. (That's basically what iTunes does now, except the exact behavior is hidden behind a mysterious "Keep iTunes Media folder organized" checkbox, and the index is stored in big opaque XML files rather than Spotlight.) My email has hierarchical folders, too, but I don't know anyone who worries about the folder structure of their email. All messages are indexed, and search is quick, so there's not much point.
- jjdjr0odo7 7y agoWhy can’t it read what’s what and generate a map without all the mv’ing? The answer is probably in the realm of “That’s how we wrote desktop apps back then.” Files are not real things. Just identifiers for an organization of bits that sound like a Neil Young sing when played through the correct decoder.
- dwaite 7y agoIt seems many people also under the misunderstanding that iTunes has to control the location of your music - that was just the default
- benj111 7y agoHow do I organise my album collection? Alphabetically? By genre? Year? Record label? You can organise your collection how you like. There is no right answer (although its obviously by genre). If you're indecisive then just dump everything into one huge flat file, or just add links.
- scrooched_moose 7y agoI'm still annoyed how long it took to get "featuring" to be a common tag. An album like 2.0 by Big Data would create 10 different distinct "artists" in most music players: Big Data and White Sea Big Data and Joywave Big Data and Jamie Lidell Big Data and Kimbra Big Data and Rivers Cuomo Big Data Big Data and Jenn Wasner Big Data and Dragonette Big Data and Bear Hands Big Data and Twin Shadow Even Amazon Music had this problem up until 2018 or so, when my library collapsed from nearly 2000 "artists" to ~300 actual.
- scarface74 7y agoNo you don’t. With iTunes you could have smart playlists like “create a list of all of the songs I haven’t played in X days”. Normal people didn’t want to tag songs and use the filesystem. Do I really need to bring up the “No Wireless. Less Space than a Nomad. Lame.” Meme and how geeks didn’t get the iPod? https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-ipod https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-i...
- altmind 7y ago“create a list of all of the songs I haven’t played in X days” - this can easily be done in winamp. they got full query language that can be saved as a playlist. i even think they got this as one of pre-sets.
- scarface74 7y agoYes because giving users “a full query language” is appropriate for the masses....
- altmind 7y agoWell, I only measure the things how they work for me. And these smart playlist were the default - you can press "edit" and see how they did it to learn and customize. "?playedLast < 30d" is not a hard query filter
- asveikau 7y agoI think you may be envisioning two extremes when the parent comment wants a happy medium. I.e. files on disk in any way the customer wants, but add a db on the side to do things like play counts and tags. With reasonable defaults for most people who don't care about filesystem layout.
- klodolph 7y ago> files on disk in any way the customer wants, but add a db on the side to do things like play counts and tags Literally iTunes does this, by default, without changing its configuration.
- cuddlybacon 7y agoWhat do you get from having the OS filesystem do the organization?
- kvark 7y agoI get better reliability (say, restoring after power shutdown), portability (can copy files via external drives and/or network), discoverability (songs show up in regular search), interoperability (hypothetically, I'd be able to drag a song file into my browser to share it, accompanies by full metadata), and finally simplicity of the software (no need to reinvent the filesystem).
- manigandham 7y agoSince HN likes technical analogies: why do you use a RDBMS instead of flat files? People don't care about how the files are stored, and they shouldn't need to. We've seen this in everything from music catalogs to file sharing to productivity software. We want content organized logically with metadata, tags, folders, lists and search that's completely removed from the physical location. Let the computers do what they're good at while the software lets you consume it the way you want.
- octorian 7y ago> We want content organized in a logical manner with tags, folders, lists and search that's completely removed from the physical location. The problem is that there's a lot of room for interpretation as to what is the best way to actually translate media metadata into an organizational scheme. Furthermore, the most appropriate interpretation is DIFFERENT depending on the type and/or genre of the music. Most metadata-oriented media players tend to pick one scheme, apply it across the board, and completely screw up somewhere along the way. For whatever kind of music the developers had in mind, it'll work okay. For anything else, it's borderline unusable as you constantly struggle to find/browse what you're looking for.
- manigandham 7y agoThe whole point is you can structure it however you want because of the separation between logical and physical representation. Some players are better and more flexible than others but that separation is still a requirement to offer any kind of rich interface beyond just files on a disk.
- wwweston 7y ago> People don't care about how the files are stored, and they shouldn't need to. The second clause of this sentence is a pretty good software design value. The first part is overgeneralizing at best. Some people care very much about where in a folder/directory system their files are stores. I'm not just talking about HN audiences, I'm talking about actual people I've observed from personal acquaintances to real live user testing. Files are not some weird obscure technical point they're a dominant metaphor that's been used in computing workflows longer than more than half of HN has likely been adults. Lots of people know and care how they work. This is especially true for music files, where people have been ripping, transcoding, slicing/processing into derivative works, backing up, and yes sometimes sharing files for longer than iTunes has existed. They're not perfect for every application and user. An application-specific database with a different use profile might be good to have between the filesystem and a user. Users shouldn't have to care. But if we really mean "the software lets you consume it the way you want" then you don't really want it completely removed from filesystem location. You want to keep facilities that allow users to find underlying files and keep them easy enough to find. You want to accommodate use profiles where users may bring in files from outside your curated market, or even choose to intentionally organize files in a way that your application doesn't by default.
- jrochkind1 7y agoThe files managed by iTunes on MacOS are indeed on the file system, and indeed organized in directories by artist name and album name (from the tags). I'm not sure what you mean.
- thirdsun 7y agoI consider myself a huge music collector/enthusiast that maintains a carefully organized collection and the file system is way too limited to handle anything but the most simple music organization and browsing tasks. I’d go as far as far as suggesting that relying on the file system is a rather casual way of handling a music collection. iTunes brought library management and meta data editing to the masses, which is a good thing. While Roon is my main player/management software I still use iTunes to sync to iOS devices. Of course I won’t let iTunes move any files - there’s an option that tells iTunes not to move anything. So you could actually have it both ways: Use your preferred file structure and benefit from proper library management software.
- khazhou 7y agoI was a long-time winamp user and I've still never found that sweet spot in any new player, of being able to easily queue up albums and always be listening to exactly what I want, in the order I want.
- soulofmischief 7y agoAlso chiming in for foobar2k. Several custom modular interfaces are a tab-switch away. Takes a while to get everything the way you like it but you've got modules for autotagging, working integration with Winamp's Milkdrop2 (and any other Winamp plugins one might have), youtube search & playback, lyric fetching, advanced playlist organization, direct playback from VGM music files, pop-up search, artist bio fetching, etc. It's very easy to get exactly where you want to be with a custom queue within seconds. I would also recommend Amarok, not sure how it performs on Windows, but there's a KDE build[0]. It comes a lot more configured out of the box, plus it's still fairly customizable and its playlist creation features surpass even fb2k's. [0] https://community.kde.org/Amarok/GettingStarted/Download/Windows https://community.kde.org/Amarok/GettingStarted/Download/Win...
- dredmorbius 7y agoFrankly, console/command-line players, mostly mpv/mps and kin, hit that spot for me now. You might try VLC for a GUI.
- Sendotsh 7y agoI still use Winamp 2.x on my Win 10 PC. I have had my MP3s sorted as /mp3/genre/artist/album since mp3s first started and it suits me just fine. I’ll right-click either a genre, artist, or album folder and Play In Winamp. I use Spotify on my phone but I’m someone who listens to pretty much all the same music that I always have, so Spotify is more replicating my mp3 collection due to a lack of being able to have Winamp on iOS. I’d love to have Winamp on mobile though, it’s still the easiest fastest and cleanest music player I’ve ever used.
- downtide 7y agoAnd it has only gotten worse and worse. I still resort to Foobar2k on Linux under Wine, because it seems to be one of the only apps that has it all.
- return1 7y agothat s not my memory at all. there were tons of all kinds of fancy player players in linux or windows (winamp? i dont think it was relevant then). Itunes was nothing special, in fact it was so odd that it had to scan every file, and have its own library, ending up with a stale library if you deleted a few songs. I doubt people who did not purchase songs used it
- duxup 7y agoI remember doing that and hating the fiddly interfere and instability of iTunes. It felt to me like too much style over some unstable software.