The worst part is - Mail and iTunes don't even match, they just look similar!baleensavage said:
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Apple Releases iTunes 5
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hob said:
LOL. it looks like they took Mail.app and the iTunes.app and merged the UI to come with iTunes v 5.0 UI.
Looks like a cheap hack job. I cannot believe that I am saying this, but I can do a better job for the iTunes UI.
And I will be glad to give the design to Apple for FREE.
<-- Just Ask.jiv3turkey748 said:
Just delete the 'Podcasts' artist. See my earlier post...
https://forums.macrumors.com/posts/1718810/
maya said:LOL. it looks like they took Mail.app and the iTunes.app and merged the UI to come with iTunes v 5.0 UI.
Looks like a cheap hack job. I cannot believe that I am saying this, but I can do a better job for the iTunes UI.
And I will be glad to give the design to Apple for FREE.
It's the first time I've actually wanted to dig out a copy of ResEdit and have a go myself too. But I'm sure one of the ShapeShifter skinning types will be along shortly to fix it.
ktb53 said:
You realize that iTuns has no concept of "albums" as an entity, right? I mean, yeah, you've got cover art for your songs, and you've got album names, and you've even got artist names. But, what's the cover art for an album? Who's the artist for an album? Do you just pick one from the various songs which happen to share the same album name? Or would you want iTunes to be doing a binary-blob diff on the cover art for each song and show a list of all unique images (even if one "album name" has four different cover arts, or three "album names" all share the same cover art)?
It's "doable", but I wouldn't call it "simple". There are some hard design decisions to make, and even then you won't be making more than half your customers happy no matter which way you go!
aegisdesign said:
This is the first time I am going to tamper with Apples OS in regards to the UI. There is always a first time for everything, and I feel this is that time.
"Last Played" for iPod Shuffle / iTunes 5
A search didn't pull up anything on this...chastise me if it's been mentioned.
I plugged in my shuffle after updating to iTunes 5 and noticed something new.
For those who don't have Shuffles and haven't paid attention, iTunes used to update the "Play Count" but not "Last Played" when the tracks were played on shuffle. (This is because the Shuffles don't have a clock, and so they don't know when they were played, only that they were.)
Well now iTunes is showing data for "Last Played" for the songs on my Shuffle playlist. It seems that it uses the time you sync after having played the songs on the Shuffle. (For example, all of the tracks on my Shuffle now show "9/7/05 4:57 PM" in the "Last Played" column.
Not sure what I think of this development, as it isn't exactly correct...
A search didn't pull up anything on this...chastise me if it's been mentioned.
I plugged in my shuffle after updating to iTunes 5 and noticed something new.
For those who don't have Shuffles and haven't paid attention, iTunes used to update the "Play Count" but not "Last Played" when the tracks were played on shuffle. (This is because the Shuffles don't have a clock, and so they don't know when they were played, only that they were.)
Well now iTunes is showing data for "Last Played" for the songs on my Shuffle playlist. It seems that it uses the time you sync after having played the songs on the Shuffle. (For example, all of the tracks on my Shuffle now show "9/7/05 4:57 PM" in the "Last Played" column.
Not sure what I think of this development, as it isn't exactly correct...
jettredmont said:
Actually, its rather simple. You NAME the Album art, and browse via that. Not hard at all. Link the Album name and song name to the Album art and you are gold.
Maybe version 5.0.1
bankshot said:
i completly agree, please let me know if you find a better product
i'd love to develop one for my thesis or something, think: sub genres, GOOD car integration, a wide range of audio formats (like FLAC and Vorbis) and most importantly gapless!!
qtip919 said:
Would you like Tiger to be showing off the wonderful GUI of Platinum again?
As for me, the GUI is really irrelevant. Between Synergy, AirClick, and the Symphonic widget, I never have iTunes showing anyway.
Gapless play back
Call me out on this...
But you know that when you're importing a CD, you can highlight all the tracks on the CD, then go to "Advanced" -> "Join CD tracks" and it makes them gapless....
So difficult.
Oh and the iPod Shuffle allows you to switch to a lower bitrate when importing. I don't understand why they'd limit this feature to ONLY the shuffle.
Then again, I can't plug my shuffle into another computer and play my tracks off of *it*.
Weird priorities.
Call me out on this...
But you know that when you're importing a CD, you can highlight all the tracks on the CD, then go to "Advanced" -> "Join CD tracks" and it makes them gapless....
So difficult.
Oh and the iPod Shuffle allows you to switch to a lower bitrate when importing. I don't understand why they'd limit this feature to ONLY the shuffle.
Then again, I can't plug my shuffle into another computer and play my tracks off of *it*.
Weird priorities.
rockman2023 said:
In most formats, such as mp3, the audio is stored in frames, the file length must be a multiple of one of these frames which means that most files are going to have a partially empty last frame, this is the silence at the end of an mp3. There are 2 solutions to this, in the audio file can be stored information about where the music actually ends, or the software can look at the last frame of the file and delete any silence.
Most newish formats support adding data to the track to tell the player where the music actually ends, OGG does, Flac does, MP3 does with the latest lame codecs, and i'm pretty sure AAC does as well.
So there is no excuse for no gapless playback
Mavimao said:
sure but then whats the use of having the itunes interface, i'm only going to have a few dozen "tracks" and they are all going to be close to 80 minutes long.
i cant search for tracks, i cant skip between tracks on a cd etc. etc.
how come on other players it works fine (winamp, mpd, foobar) but i have to use a crappy workaround like this for itunes/ipod
I actually suggested they add this feature (as a user-defined preference) on the iPod feedback page when I got my Shuffle. Reason being I have a number of complex and combined smart playlists that depend on "Last Played" being greater than x number of days, and if I played the songs on my Shuffle then they would not "fall off" those playlists in iTunes or on my big iPod. Then I might have to hear the same songs again before I was readyWildCowboy said:
! I have been using a rather roundabout and unreliable script from Doug's Scripts to do the same thing.It should be a preference for the Shuffle though, a checkbox that you can choose "Set Last Played to time Shuffle connects" or something like that. I see not everyone necessarily wants this. But it will only be off by a few hours at most unless you keep your Shuffle away from your computer for days at a time (possible of course).
Oh and the iTunes 5 interface is the pits. WAY too square all over!!
Lyrics
So this lyrics thing is sort of cool, but what's now sorely missing is the ability to search / create a smart playlist on lyrics.
Let's pretend you had loaded lyrics into most or all of your library -- I don't know if that's farfetched or not -- then you needed to come up with a "theme mix", say all songs about winter or whatnot. It would be so cool to make a smart playlist of all songs where the words "winter", "snow", "december", "christmas", etc. were in the title OR in the lyrics. Now, that would be cool. But you can't do it, because lyrics aren't an option in the smart playlist settings.
More short term, I was hoping to do a quick scan to see if any of my existing 5000+ songs had lyrics already loaded into them (assuming Apple is using some standard MP3 tag for lyrics), but really, there's no way to do this unless I'm just totally missing it.
Oh well. Must be either it's too much of a CPU hog to search on lyrics, or Apple just forgot.
So this lyrics thing is sort of cool, but what's now sorely missing is the ability to search / create a smart playlist on lyrics.
Let's pretend you had loaded lyrics into most or all of your library -- I don't know if that's farfetched or not -- then you needed to come up with a "theme mix", say all songs about winter or whatnot. It would be so cool to make a smart playlist of all songs where the words "winter", "snow", "december", "christmas", etc. were in the title OR in the lyrics. Now, that would be cool. But you can't do it, because lyrics aren't an option in the smart playlist settings.
More short term, I was hoping to do a quick scan to see if any of my existing 5000+ songs had lyrics already loaded into them (assuming Apple is using some standard MP3 tag for lyrics), but really, there's no way to do this unless I'm just totally missing it.
Oh well. Must be either it's too much of a CPU hog to search on lyrics, or Apple just forgot.
aegisdesign said:
Hey aegisdesign,
Your strategy worked for me for all the podcasts that were already on my hard drive, and that made me really excited, but when I downloaded a new podcast, it went straight into my main library. Meanewhile, the others I'd fixed stayed nicely in the Podcast section. Did I do something wrong? When new podcasts download to your Mac, do they stay within the Podcasts section?
Thanks
I think the 5.0 interface is better than 4.9. They should give all the iApps and Safari this look. There's always been differences between the apps, but now this is too much. Mail, Safari and iTunes look very weird together.
I'm guessing they were thinking about Windows users as well with this design, or maybe it's simply the look we'll be seeing in iLife '06.
Finally folders in iTunes!! I can't believe how we used iTunes without them. The search bar (or whatever it's called) is pretty neat as well.
Unfortunately, video playback is pretty much the same as before. No fullscreen controls, slow and choppy resizing. Seems like Apple isn't planning on making iTunes the program to control all your digital media... yet. iPod video? They really have to make those changes if they're actually going to ever make it...
I'm guessing they were thinking about Windows users as well with this design, or maybe it's simply the look we'll be seeing in iLife '06.
Finally folders in iTunes!! I can't believe how we used iTunes without them. The search bar (or whatever it's called) is pretty neat as well.
Unfortunately, video playback is pretty much the same as before. No fullscreen controls, slow and choppy resizing. Seems like Apple isn't planning on making iTunes the program to control all your digital media... yet. iPod video? They really have to make those changes if they're actually going to ever make it...
oskar said:
this is the same I am thinknig. the next update 10.4.3 is supposed to provide fixes to almost all the corners of the OS and its standard apps. With that, they could just include new UI for Tiger and unify the look.
Mail.app could have been just the early stage of this new UI and we may expect a the final.