Hatred of Itunes

dummy

twat.

I keep it checked and then periodically delete the original mp3s from my downloads folder. I like that iTunes keeps the them organised in one place automatically.

I also wonder whether it slows things down if it has to catalogue mp3s that are spread all over your hard drive . Does anyone know?

iTunes: DO IT OUR WAY OR FUCK U

AND THERE'S NO STOP BUTTON

Press the space bar and then hit the left arrow. Magic!

The first time a song loads into iTunes, iTunes "optimizes its volume" or something, which stops playback for a second or two. Wow, thanks, Apple. Everything's so seamless now.

iTunes can't do a 0-second gap between songs if you're burning a CD.

The fastest it can burn a disc on The Lovely Emma B's iBook is 4x speed, which was the norm in what, 1996?

What do people use instead? I'd love to ditch it.

I've never thought that iTunes was TEH GRATEST or anything like that, but I do think that overall, it handles everything together better than most other programs. It's certainly not flawless, though, but to get everything I need at a perfect level (for me) in a music/ripping/encoding/purchasing/burning package, it takes at least six different programs. Luckily, I don't usually need anything that precision, though, so iTunes handles most everything else just fine.

her iBook is two years old. The file renaming thing happens on my machine though, which is a relatevely ancient 1st gen silver Powerbook with a paltry 284M RAM, so maybe it's the RAM that's doing it.

I've actually just tried burning a CD on her iBook with Toast, and it fucks up the gap between songs, too, so iTunes is off the hook for that.

I'll check out Musicmatch.

It's four programs, but two of them are free legally (as long as you stick to Winamp 2.9 or no later), the other two are cheap.

For winXPers, it's a way of life, but it works well.

T, which Candi have you been downloading?

you shouldn't be futzing with your id tags during a party, you should be partying!

s1ocki the party is often only in my head.

I think it was "Do Your Duty," Porkpie.

Just occasionally, a track (downloaded ones it seems - never ripped ones) will not let me change the tags on it. It looks like it's changed, but as soon as I play it again, it reverts to the old data. Looked elsewhere on net for an answer, but no one seems to have worked out why it sometimes does it. The only solution I've found: using (the free) MP3 Rage to retag these rogue tracks.

The itunes version of this (aside from the slightly clunkier hands-on interface after you load it) is to take your entire mp3 folder and, based on what might be incorrect tags, just put them into the folders it deems best in an automatic process that you have no control over. Have a compilation folder with a bunch of different' artist's tracks? It'll create a folder for each individual song. That gets really tiring after you get more than a few gigs of mp3s downloaded or ripped.

What I still don't understand about all this is why it matters to you what folders the mp3s are in. I hardly ever even look at the file directories for mp3s. I just use the Library. If you retag the tracks correctly then it will put them in right artist folder. I'm not sure why you are having that problem with compilations - the V/A compilations I have all seem to go in a folder called 'Compilations' and then in subfolders named after the title of the compilation. It doesn't create a separate folder for each song at all. I don't know if this is caused by checking that 'part of a compilation' check box. As I say, I never really look at the folder structure when it comes to my mp3s.

Anyway, if it's working properly then you should just be able to uncheck 'keep organised' and 'copy to itunes music folder' in Advanced Prefs, to stop it doing all the auto organising, should you wish. I don't know why this wasn't working for Jay. I wish one could do the same in iPhoto.

Well, do you mean manually? Because that seems to make itunes' first-time-run "we'll organize your files for you" function irrelevant. I care about what folders my mp3s are in because I use different programs for burning them than playing them...either musicmatch or nero, and usually browse my music folder and click 'n drag the files into those programs. Also, I've mostly used winamp to play mp3s so I queue them up from folders as well. I'm just used to dealing with folders so it's much more of a psychological thing.

the idea of not having my music in folders gives me anxiety

I guess it depends on what you're used to, but my library is about 40,000 tracks and probably around 15 years old and I've never really had a problem with it. There are the occasional annoying quirks (the one that's enraging me now is having to toggle "Show filter field" every time I open the app -- why would I ever want that field hidden??) but for the most part it works fine for me. I like that it copies files to its own folder system and keeps them organized -- talk about anxiety, I can't imagine having to maintain that structure myself (if it's not something I've ripped from CD directly, I delete the original files as soon as the import is done so no duplicates, and I tag everything/correct cover art issues/etc immediately on import). And I definitely prefer seeing things organized like a library. Looking at my music as a list of files in the Finder (or Windows Explorer) feels too abstract; I don't want to look at songs the same way I look at other data. I've never owned a PC though so the whole idea of thinking of music files in that way is just totally foreign to me. I don't think it's so much an issue of the Mac people you've been talking to not using music the same way you do, it's that they (we?) are just more familiar with a completely different way of storing/organizing/viewing/playing the files.

I suppose it's different when you're switching to a whole new system with a huge existing library though. I didn't have a digital library when I started ripping CDs and importing downloads way back when, so it was easy enough to keep everything organized and tagged from day 1 and it's the only system I've ever known. Digging through folders to find the music I want to play seems like a really weird system to me.

I use iTunes for one task only, and that is to auto-organize my new music files on my PC

Yeah, like with photos, as soon as your collection grows beyond a certain size, basic folder organising doesn’t cut it anymore. I’m fairly happy with Music (the iTunes successor on macOS) because it’s still pretty fast even with 200,000+ songs and it’s quite powerful in terms of scripting, all the ways to slice and dice the library views and the smart playlisting.

My biggest gripe is that Apple’s music ecosystem still can’t handle multiple artists per song or multiple genres per song - there’s a couple of players/library managers that do support this, but they all have various other downsides.

Oh, and it also appears that my library size is now too big for the Genius playlists feature - it times out every time it tries to upload the Genius analysis results to the Apple servers. I’ve understood that this starts happening somewhere beyond 50-100k songs.

when I speak to Mac users, they don't seem to understand what the issue is, and just keep telling me to use iTunes/Music.

The universal talking-to-Apple-fans experience! Just wait until you find a bug and they tell you all the ways that it's All Your Fault, Actually. Avoid discussions.apple.com at all costs and go straight to apple.stackexchange.com when you have a problem.

This is good advice, speaking as a Mac user and broad fan. The 'advice' at discussions.apple.com is comically bad and usually consists of completely ignoring what the original poster asks.

Look, it’s simple: there is no problem that cannot be solved by resetting the NVRAM and SMC. And if that doesn’t work, go buy a new Mac. Obviously.

Desktop Windows iTunes:

In Artists view (and Composers and Compilations) I am shown the complete tracklisting of every album. Is there any way to change it to a grid of album covers, as in Albums or Recently Added? I can't find a way and it's annoying.

I think the best you can do is view Albums and order by artists. Which sucks of course.

Ah this is the doglatin thread, I’d forgotten. dl, you might consider Plex as a media server. it keeps everything organised the way you have it, and you can use Plexamp on your phone to stream from your computer if you’re out and about. it doesn’t have as powerful smart playlist features as Apple Music and i’m still not sure what the solution is for wanting to have columns in the Finder for bit rate and what have you. but you might want to check it out.

So this week I went to backup my iTunes files to an external HD, as I do periodically with never a problem, the only difference this time being a new HD. This time however something went terribly terribly wrong. Result: no files show up on the HD, and in iTunes about 15% of all of my songs will not play bc the files cannot be located. "The original file could not be found" is exactly what it says. I'm mystified as to where these files could have gone.

A tech guy looked at this for about an hour and could not figure it out. I told him I happen to have every file in my iPod Classic as well, which led to downloading an app that can transfer iPod files back to iTunes. This *seemed* to be working but after it was done I opened up iTunes and found the problem the same as before. Again no idea of where these files went when they were supposedly transferring.

So now I'm desperately clinging to my iPod Classic hoping it lives as long as possible, bc when it dies there goes 15% of my collection.

that's terrible. there does exist software I think to get the music off of your phone and onto your computer though—or at least there used to

I have most of these files on my phone too, but my phone is confusing me at the moment too, because there songs show up (and play) from my playlists but the same songs don't appear in the main list of songs, or in the list of artists. Admittedly I very rarely play music thru my phone so maybe I'm overlooking something obvious.

Have you tried using that app to transfer the iPod files to a fresh iTunes library rather than the old ones that sounds like it’s corrupt?

Good question, I think that was an idea that came up but it seemed so simple just to transfer back to the original iTunes. The app reads what's already in your iTunes so that it only transfers back the files that aren't already there, and the total number of files the app said were missing was roughly the number I expected, so I thought OK the app is smart. But as you suggest, something seems wrong with the iTunes library itself, so making a new library could be an option.

just moved to Music from iTunes

"Recently Played" is worse now. click an album and:

- where iTunes had a double-column list of songs, we're now at single-column, track name and track length are basically on separate continents.

- for SOME REASON, the keyboard focus is on the song rating when you get into this view. (see the little outline box around the star rating.) so hitting space to play/pause does nothing until you ... click something outside the song rating? NOPE. you gotta hit tab twice.

holy shit do i hate Music dot app mostly for not letting me change how things appear on the screen

" "The original file could not be found" is exactly what it says. " I don't know if your problem ever got solved, but I've def had weird situations with songs that I uploaded to iCloud that weren't matched with something in their catalog; and then, months later, for whatever reason, i can no longer play them. "no longer available'. Where the fuck did it go? Not sure if it's an icloud storage space issue where it purges files after a certain amount of time (I have a terrible feeling it did this with photos too, but I'm frankly too scared to actually investigate).

I have one artist that shows up twice in the Artists list. There is an extremely annoying-looking fix that involves adding an X to the end of every field that should be the same, then removing it ... it just seems there should be a script that does this automatically.

removing and adding files back usually fixes bugs like that for me.

Select everything by that artist (from both lists), right click, "Get Info", delete and retype the artist name in the proper field.

Or look at metadata for both lists... maybe one of the artist fields has a space at the end of it. I've had that issue.

Thanks both. The X thing was actually quite easy, just had to select all the tracks, changed the artist name to AutechreX, and then back to Autechre. Merged.

When you open the Get Info window, it grays out all the icons in the main window, so if you're wondering why you're not hearing audio and glance over to the AirPlay icon, iTunes might just be lying to you.

piece of shit

i'm givin it all i got, captain

f’in thing sucks

i'd still love a good alternative. Siegbran has talked about navidrome and Plexamp but neither one really did what I want which is basically just be a sturdy list of songs that allows me to search, create playlists and stream to my phone as long as my computer's on and running it

i’m cool with whatever iteration of music i have rn, except for the one time it deleted my entire library lol

(it wasn’t a permanent deletion, but i am still correcting album art and tagging errors from when i reconstructed my library … 1.5ish years ago)

oh, one forever beef: album artist tagging dividing an album into two albums sometimes has been a recurring issue in this fucking program since i was in college

i know how to fix it but it’s still incredibly stupid

iTunes is nearing its end, it’s already long gone on the Mac and the new Apple Music app is now downloadable as a beta on the Microsoft Store.

oh, one forever beef: album artist tagging dividing an album into two albums sometimes has been a recurring issue in this fucking program since i was in college

DIEMOTHERFUCKINGMusic Library.musiclibraryDIE..... it's bullshit how much is offloaded to this stupid file.

I don’t use “album artist” and just stick with “artist” field.

I've used itunes forever only as a way to organize mp3s on my computer, I haven't updated to a new version in years, hopefully I'm not going to run into issues if it goes away

The Tahoe rework of iTunes/Music might have finally broken me. What's the best Mac alternative at the moment? Is there anything that would allow importing of playlists/playcount data?

+1

Playlists are relatively easy to export to .m3u and importable in most alternatives.

For playcount you'd probably have to script something unfortunately.

iTunes/Music-like replacements, although none offer native sync-to-iPhone/iPad:
- Swinsian is most similar to Apple Music, recent new version is a nice improvement
- foobar2000 mac version is decent, bit clunky interface
- Rekordbox is great for managing big libraries & making playlists, but it's 100% DJ/tracks-focused, not so much for listening to whole albums
- same for EngineDJ, Serato, djay Pro

Server/client setups:
- Navidrome is just a server app (so you need to manage/edit your tags elsewhere), but for serving big libraries it's really good, plenty of clients on desktop and mobile, also with sync
- Plex/Plexamp also very good, the nicest features are for the paid tier but the "lifetime pass" has been well worth the money
- tried Jellyfin a while ago, not as polished as the two above
- Roon, looks very fancy but super expensive

i still have this issue with Plexamp not working outside my home network that frankly i’ve just been too lazy to try and diagnose. it’s annoying because my Plex movies ARE available outside it

Why are the player controls at the bottom now. Why wtf GrRRRrrRr

ugh yes, so stupid

Why do software companies do stuff like this? Like actually why? I'm having a similar thing at work with new Outlook and I've felt like quitting my job in frustration

it does feel like iTunes and the iPhone music player as a whole is slowly falling apart. its messing up my playlists, its pasting in random album art, also I feel like the shuffle function ain't really working as it should...I've got a massive playlist of basically every song I really like and it's just now started to play a bunch of tracks it wasn't before, admittedly it's been fun to be reminded of a bunch of stuff this way. but for like several years I suspect it was just shuffling a group of like, half the list

Yes, Apple Music is really only useful as a streaming music client these days, for library management it’s deteriorated to the point of uselessness.

Still annoying - while I can do all things that Music/iTunes did with a combination of other apps/tools (tagging, listening, creating playlists, sync-to-phone, stream to tv/speakers), there was a lot of value having it all in one place.

I only moved to Apple Music a few months ago and I'm surprised by how poor its UX is generally. I've always preferred player controls at the bottom tho. Might go back to MediaMonkey..

xp: does iTunes not stream to tv/speakers from specific devices (ie phone vs desktop), or at all? I’ve never tried, but my ipod’s in the other room

Another annoying thing is that even though I'm toggling "Show status bar" in the View menu, no status bar shows up at the bottom like it used to. Often it's really helpful to know the exact length of the songs in a playlist, but now the UX only shows you an approximation (e.g., "35 minutes") rather than an exact time (e.g., "35:26"). Despite googling and messing around with parameters, it seems this feature is totally gone and you can only ever see a rounded number now.

In the music app on my phone it doesn't tell me what album the song that is playing is from. I have to go down two or three clicks if I like a song and want to know where I can find it again. Mind boggling how bad all of it is, wtf

My Apple Music (desktop) has just developed a quirk where hitting the "play" button starts playback at a track in the middle of the album, rather than the start. At first I thought I had shuffle on, but no. This joins the annoyance that developed awhile back where I can no longer bulk delete tracks from the Continue Playing queue; I have to delete each one individually. Annoying when I want to listen to an album but not the bonus disc.

I think I just finally hit my literal limit the other month as to how big my music library could get before the program just couldn't load it anymore and sending to 'damaged' over and over. Thankfully I had said library all properly backed up so I said 'heck with it' and switched over to Swinsian. A couple of things that aren't as smooth in terms of working with track info and the like but zero crashes and everything works great so I'm sticking with that.