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>And that was the breakthrough, as an example, in iTunes. You don’t keep your music in the file system, that would be crazy Actually I do and it works great. I

>And that was the breakthrough, as an example, in iTunes. You don’t keep your music in the file system, that would be crazy Actually I do and it works great. I hate iTunes.

alexchamberlain 14y ago
Devil's Advocate: Why do you hate iTunes?
- randallsquared 14y ago
  I'm not the OP, but in 2003 iTunes was the single biggest drawback to switching to the Mac, for me. I had a fairly large collection of MP3s at the time -- maybe a coupla thousand -- and a bunch of versions of the same song in some cases (an album version, a radio version, live at here, live at there), and it was all neatly categorized in the filesystem, band/album/name, when I switched from Gentoo to OS X. I freely admit I should have had a backup. When I "tried" iTunes, there was an option for it to rename all your files (I don't remember whether it was the default or if I stumbled on it), but what I did NOT expect was that all my carefully named folders and files would be lumped into "Unknown Artist"/"Unknown Album"/"Unknown Track NNN".mp3, while my old files were all carefully removed. My MP3 collection literally never recovered. I could choose to play the few hundred tracks that had happened to have good ID3 information, but all the tracks I'd ripped myself were essentially randomized. I also never found an ID3 creator that could successfully differentiate the various versions of songs I had, though I stopped trying around 2006 or 2007, and now I don't bother buying music any more -- I just listen to Pandora.
  - Gring 14y ago
    Why didn't you do a backup before using such a risky feature, or use the feature on a copy of your original files?
    - Mavrik 14y ago
      Because you don't really expect a music player to destroy your collection without as much as a warning.
      - alexchamberlain 14y ago
        This is Apple we're talking about!
    - randallsquared 14y ago
      I should have had a backup in any case, but I didn't actually know I was "using such a risky feature", to be clear. It was quite a while before I understood why my tracks in iTunes had been replaced by the Unknowns, and "iTunes moved rather than copied all my files" was not my first assumption.
  - gcr 14y ago
    MusicBrainz to the rescue! http://musicbrainz.org/doc/MusicBrainz_Picard http://musicbrainz.org/doc/MusicBrainz_Picard Harness the power of machine learning to identify your songs by what they sound like! Take control of your sprawling library with folder names that YOU define! Re-embed missing ID3 information to that mystery music! Sure, it probably won't catch your live/album/recording distinctions, but I've had pretty good success rates with it. I think there's a port to Mac OSX somewhere.
- sp332 14y ago
  iTunes is slow and buggy, especially on Windows. I used to be able to press Esc to shrink from a movie from full-screen to windowed, but after an update, it stops the video. Then if I restart it, it runs in full screen mode again which is quite surprising. If iTunes ever crashes or is quit, it won't remember your place in any of your files. Syncing iPods is a pain, especially when you try to find which podcasts you're syncing. And there's no way to get songs from your iPod onto your computer.
- jlarocco 14y ago
  Poor platform support. No Linux version at all, and their Windows version is lame. Poor format support. I don't care either way about Ogg, but no FLAC support is a deal killer. There's a FLAC plugin, but it requires using 32-bit iTunes, and even then it's not supported very well. It insists on "managing" my music collection itself. It's constantly renaming, moving, editing ID3 tags, and what not. I think most of those features can be turned off, but it takes forever to figure out what all the options are, and by the time you realize they need to be turned off, it's generally too late and you have to pull the altered songs from backups. It also doesn't handle poorly tagged music very well. For example, a while back I had a two CD collection of trance music, something like "The Best Goa Trance of 2010". The MP3s were tagged with the artist and song names, but no album name, presumably because they were originally on different albums. In iTunes there's no way (that I know of) to group the songs in my library, except going through and manually adding the album tags. This is made even worse by the default settings where it moves around and renames the files without telling you. I'm sure I could train myself to immediately fix all of my music's ID3 tags, and to conform to Apple's arbitrary way of managing music, but it's easier to just use a different player.
gouranga 14y ago
Similar. I keep my music in the filesystem in one directory and Zune just abstracts it behind a series of views (very differently to how iTunes does it). You get the best of both worlds then.
- nfg 14y ago
  Actually with an uncheck of the "Keep iTunes Media Folder Organised" and "Copy files to iTunes Media Folder when adding to the library" options in Preferences this is precisely how iTunes does it.
  - gouranga 14y ago
    I didn't find that, with the PC version. It decided to reorganise everything automatically after an iTunes update. I couldn't trust it again after that.

>And that was the breakthrough, as an example, in iTunes. You don’t keep your music in the file system, that would be crazy Actually I do and it works great. I hate iTunes.

alexchamberlain 14y ago

Devil's Advocate: Why do you hate iTunes?

randallsquared 14y ago
I'm not the OP, but in 2003 iTunes was the single biggest drawback to switching to the Mac, for me. I had a fairly large collection of MP3s at the time -- maybe a coupla thousand -- and a bunch of versions of the same song in some cases (an album version, a radio version, live at here, live at there), and it was all neatly categorized in the filesystem, band/album/name, when I switched from Gentoo to OS X. I freely admit I should have had a backup. When I "tried" iTunes, there was an option for it to rename all your files (I don't remember whether it was the default or if I stumbled on it), but what I did NOT expect was that all my carefully named folders and files would be lumped into "Unknown Artist"/"Unknown Album"/"Unknown Track NNN".mp3, while my old files were all carefully removed. My MP3 collection literally never recovered. I could choose to play the few hundred tracks that had happened to have good ID3 information, but all the tracks I'd ripped myself were essentially randomized. I also never found an ID3 creator that could successfully differentiate the various versions of songs I had, though I stopped trying around 2006 or 2007, and now I don't bother buying music any more -- I just listen to Pandora.
- Gring 14y ago
  Why didn't you do a backup before using such a risky feature, or use the feature on a copy of your original files?
  - Mavrik 14y ago
    Because you don't really expect a music player to destroy your collection without as much as a warning.
    - alexchamberlain 14y ago
      This is Apple we're talking about!
  - randallsquared 14y ago
    I should have had a backup in any case, but I didn't actually know I was "using such a risky feature", to be clear. It was quite a while before I understood why my tracks in iTunes had been replaced by the Unknowns, and "iTunes moved rather than copied all my files" was not my first assumption.
- gcr 14y ago
  MusicBrainz to the rescue! http://musicbrainz.org/doc/MusicBrainz_Picard http://musicbrainz.org/doc/MusicBrainz_Picard Harness the power of machine learning to identify your songs by what they sound like! Take control of your sprawling library with folder names that YOU define! Re-embed missing ID3 information to that mystery music! Sure, it probably won't catch your live/album/recording distinctions, but I've had pretty good success rates with it. I think there's a port to Mac OSX somewhere.
sp332 14y ago
iTunes is slow and buggy, especially on Windows. I used to be able to press Esc to shrink from a movie from full-screen to windowed, but after an update, it stops the video. Then if I restart it, it runs in full screen mode again which is quite surprising. If iTunes ever crashes or is quit, it won't remember your place in any of your files. Syncing iPods is a pain, especially when you try to find which podcasts you're syncing. And there's no way to get songs from your iPod onto your computer.
jlarocco 14y ago
Poor platform support. No Linux version at all, and their Windows version is lame. Poor format support. I don't care either way about Ogg, but no FLAC support is a deal killer. There's a FLAC plugin, but it requires using 32-bit iTunes, and even then it's not supported very well. It insists on "managing" my music collection itself. It's constantly renaming, moving, editing ID3 tags, and what not. I think most of those features can be turned off, but it takes forever to figure out what all the options are, and by the time you realize they need to be turned off, it's generally too late and you have to pull the altered songs from backups. It also doesn't handle poorly tagged music very well. For example, a while back I had a two CD collection of trance music, something like "The Best Goa Trance of 2010". The MP3s were tagged with the artist and song names, but no album name, presumably because they were originally on different albums. In iTunes there's no way (that I know of) to group the songs in my library, except going through and manually adding the album tags. This is made even worse by the default settings where it moves around and renames the files without telling you. I'm sure I could train myself to immediately fix all of my music's ID3 tags, and to conform to Apple's arbitrary way of managing music, but it's easier to just use a different player.

gouranga 14y ago

Similar. I keep my music in the filesystem in one directory and Zune just abstracts it behind a series of views (very differently to how iTunes does it). You get the best of both worlds then.

nfg 14y ago
Actually with an uncheck of the "Keep iTunes Media Folder Organised" and "Copy files to iTunes Media Folder when adding to the library" options in Preferences this is precisely how iTunes does it.
- gouranga 14y ago
  I didn't find that, with the PC version. It decided to reorganise everything automatically after an iTunes update. I couldn't trust it again after that.