iTunes (7)

1 Name: 4n0n4ym0u5 h4xx0r : 2007-09-26 02:29 ID:hA+JbOlT

What the fuck is wrong with iTunes? I mean, this whole thing seems to have been designed with the intention that once you have installed it, you will then use iTunes and nothing else to manage and play your music, and if you make any changes outside of said program it is incredibly reluctant to acknowledge them without a lot of unnecessary buggering around. Honestly, fuck off, iTunes. I just want to sync shit to my iPod, no more, no less.

Rio Music Manager was perfect in that regard - despite the name it had no pretentions of actually being a music manager, and the developers certainly weren't under the illusion that you actually wanted to use their shit for any other reason other than to transfer music to a portable player. And it did this:
1. Maintained a list of folders in which to look for music
2. Scanned said folders for changes (including changes in the ID3 tags) each time the program was run
3. Displayed all the music found in a list which can be sorted by artist/album/etc
4. Allowed you to edit the ID3 tags
5. Transferred music to a player

AND THAT'S FUCKING IT.

Incredibly iTunes doesn't do 1 or 2! At all! Really! If you add new music to your music folders, by means other than purchasing it from iTunes or ripping a CD using iTunes, you have to add all that shit manually! And if you change the ID3 tags outside of iTunes, even if you re-add the files, iTunes (and therefore your iPod) won't recognise the changes unless you play said files in iTunes! I mean for fuck's sake!

I suppose the above isn't news to all the people who have been using iPods and putting up with this shit for years, but I just got one to replace my broken Rio Karma, and I'm amazed at how truly godawful iTunes is.

And it runs two background processes.

Doesn't even look that nice.

2 Name: 4n0n4ym0u5 h4xx0r : 2007-09-26 05:20 ID:Heaven

> I mean, this whole thing seems to have been designed with the intention that once you have installed it, you will then use iTunes and nothing else to manage and play your music

Indeed. It is a port of a Macintosh program with exactly this role.

3 Name: 4n0n4ym0u5 h4xx0r : 2007-09-26 15:27 ID:3Do8v+Bv

I use WMP 11, no problems.
But I use Windows.

4 Name: 4n0n4ym0u5 h4xx0r : 2007-09-30 17:11 ID:+i5Tn4Kf

I hate iTunes. I have it for my iPod, but when I want to listen to music, I use winamp. Not only is it trash, but it also sounds like garbage for some reason (that they STILL haven't fixed).

5 Name: 4n0n4ym0u5 h4xx0r : 2007-10-01 15:10 ID:jcSPGrKD

>>2
This may have been its original intention, but I'd imagine a large number of people now using it (whether on Windows or Mac) only installed it to transfer music to their iPod, and still want to manage and play their music using other software.

Those people would certainly be better served if Apple offered an alternate version that was closer to Rio Music Manager (for example) and was geared entirely towards iPod management rather than attempting to take over all music-related functions on your computer.

6 Name: 4n0n4ym0u5 h4xx0r : 2007-10-03 13:54 ID:CKqjwtoB

Don't buy an iPod if you're not going to use iTunes.
Don't use iTunes unless you use a Mac, Apple apps ported on windows are always horrible pieces of shit.

I have a perfectly sorted 80GB of stolen music in iTunes on my mac, synced to a 20GB iPod automatically using smart playlists. I've used Winamp for years before iTunes, and iTunes taking over the management part makes it much less of a pain to use. Nothing can beat this setup, I don't see why I would ever want to use something else.

7 Name: 4n0n4ym0u5 h4xx0r : 2007-10-05 13:02 ID:ofw0M04z

I'm a long time Mac user. When iTunes first came out, I resented it, in part because of how bossy it was. (Also, brushed metal.... But I digress.) The various third party mp3 players I'd been using didn't impose any sort of constraints on where I put my files and such. After I short time, though, I came to love iTunes and everything it represents. (Brushed metal aside, etc.) I didn't care what filenames my mp3s had or which folders they were in. That's just clutter and organizational overhead.

While it uses the filesystem, iTunes is a music database in concept. You import stuff into it and it handles it. (At least on a Mac (as I have the preferences set), when you open one or more mp3s with iTunes, it copies them to ~/Music and adds them to its library, leaving the original files where they were for you to do with as you please. Don't know what happens in your world.) All those files are hidden in some folder you don't have to bother with. Instead, you deal with listings by metadata and playlists.

I wish everything were like my iTunes library. (In some respects, at least.) I want the Finder to list pdf files by title and author, not by meaningless filenames. I want to put a file in half a dozen different collections (sort of like playlists) at the same time. File cabinets suck; computers don't have to act like them. I'm hoping Spotlight and its infrastructure evolve that way. (I was actually rather sorry that WinFS got cancelled. That sounded neat.)

So, yeah. iTunes is designed to be your primary music manager. That might not work well in the Windows implementation or for your needs. If you try to use it against its grain, it will suck. (I know some Windows users who like it.) But the underlying philosophy is exactly the future I want.

Return Entire thread Last 50 posts
This thread has been closed. You cannot post in this thread any longer.