4 ms·
If you have a large diverse collection without ID3 tags you are pretty much fucked anyway. folders is extremely limited in sorting music which leaves you what?
by AllenKids 15y ago
If you have a large diverse collection without ID3 tags you are pretty much fucked anyway. folders is extremely limited in sorting music which leaves you what? playlists?
- bxr 15y ago>playlists? Yeah, nobody would want to use those. They especially wouldn't want to build a playlist on the fly with their ipod.
- AllenKids 15y agoiTunes is amazing at creating smart playlists, but it can get a bit complicated. iOS devices all have to ability to create playlist on the fly to. But building playlist without proper ID3 info can get tedious real quick and endless playlist building is not a solution to the problem of quickly populating a queue on a whim.
- bxr 15y ago>iOS devices all have to ability to create playlist on the fly to. The classics don't. It is the single feature that has me using a 3rd party firmware. >endless playlist building is not a solution to the problem of quickly populating a queue on a whim Of course it isn't, but browsing to a song/artist/album and being able to say "append to end of playlist" or "insert into queue next" are simple operations that are very friendly on a portable device, and once I had the ability to do so I couldn't go back.
- dagw 15y agoI've got my entire music collection (100 Gigs) in folders (mostly genre/artist/album) and have never felt "fucked". Sure there are strange things I can't do (give me all music recorded in 1986, that isn't jazz and that I haven't listened to in more than 6 month), but I've honestly never felt a desire to do that. So while folders may be extremely limited in some sense I've never run into those limits and can't really think of any realistic limits I might run into.
- AllenKids 15y agoThere are quite common things which are impossible or rather clumsy to do with folders, for example produce a view by specific composers then a view by performers. Can not be done with folders unless suffer large amount of duplicates. If you listen to your music in a rigid way where folders works fine then obviously iTunes and other music management software are of no use to you. But you are not typical.
- r0s 15y ago> example produce a view by specific composers then a view by performers. Is this really common? I might be out of touch, but I doubt anyone really uses this.
- AllenKids 15y agoIn classical music listeners, yes. If you are into pop music, there are easy examples as well. Sometimes I need all the dance music, other times I only want dance music that are retro, or dance music from certain group etc. Folders will never be as flexible.
- shrikant 15y agoMaybe not that specific example, but the situation of listening to Indian film music is a classic case of folders being 100% inadequate. Any given Indian movie corresponds to an 'album' of songs. However, each song can in the album have a different set of artistes associated with it. Hell, sometimes there are multiple composers within the same movie's soundtrack. And Indian movie soundtracks are more tightly coupled than "Western" movie OST albums, so you can't just treat them as an independent collection of songs either. (Indians typically identify songs first with the movies they appeared in, rather than the composer or performer) Basically, a majority of Indian movies are musicals - and a simple folder structure is just not enough to deal with such a collection of music!
- randallsquared 15y agoI don't understand... do you not typically want to listen to the soundtrack in the order it was in the movie (that is, exactly the case in which a single folder for the soundtrack excels)? If not, how?
- randallsquared 15y agoWell, I used folders and filenames for years, from 1998ish through June 2003. Worked fine; I mostly wanted to listen to entire albums, which mapped well to folders. Then I got a Mac, and pointed iTunes at my music without backing it up first (because, after all iTunes was an MP3 player, and why would it write to my MP3 collection?!). Oops. Later I found that there was some import option I shouldn't have checked, and iTunes happily moved all my MP3s from their well-sorted folder structure into "Unknown Artist - Unknown Album - Unknown Title". Yay. Even when I eventually got some software that would use a music database to figure out what tracks were, there were a distressing number of tracks that it couldn't identify (hundreds), and of the ones it could, it mostly did so in a very literal way, such that I have a lot of folders like "Movie Soundtrack - Artist Name" with a single track inside. Could I fix all this? Of course. Eventually. Can you tell I'm still, eight years later, extremely angry at iTunes? Now I just listen to Pandora. Screw it.