Has anyone used http://swinsian.com/ Swinsian for any extended period of time here? I am curious to give it a try, but I don't really want to do the leg work yet.
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Can iTunes suck anymore than it already does?
- Thread starter Cave Man
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Undesired and unavoidable automatic album rating messing up all smart playlists. This is the thing I hate most. And, though not fair and correct, I started wishing the worst for those in charge of this mess
It only takes a run through Subler (or any other metadata tagging tool) to get these problems sorted. iTunes relies 100% on metadata and it expects to find it inside the media file.
If you took a bunch of 18 year olds and gave them OSX 10.5 and IOS 5 devices, they would think "WOW, this is soooo much better. But where is the Facebook and Twitter integration?". I disagree that iTunes used to suck. It's sucked for a very long time because they keep gutting it. Like they keep gutting OSX. But there was a time where iTunes was a wonder and did what the USER wanted. Now it does what Beats and Apple Music want, users be damned.
Post Jobs Apple: "The best feature is one that has been REMOVED!"
Post Jobs Apple: "The best feature is one that has been REMOVED!"
iTunes also sucks because of the weak database structure it's built on. I've had to rebuid my iTunes database from scratch at least 6 times! I mean, start from zero, no records, and feed each CD in to the machine and re-rip them. One. By. One.
The database just gets freaky, and blows up. The last time, tracks were disappearing. Like I could not find them on a search, and yet they played during a shuffle session. That's just not right.
Why did you have to re-rip your media? If you lost your media files as well, this means you either deleted them yourself or you have problems with your storage.
Even if you lose iTunes database (iTunes Library.itl), you can easily rebuild it, because iTunes relies on metadata embedded into the media files themselves.
You will lose your playlists. ratings and play counts, though.
That's where Time Machine comes in handy.
Each time I had opened cases with Apple Support, and each time was told that the CD's would have to be re-ripped.
I used to edit the information for tracks a lot in my iTunes. Stuff like conglomerating multiple CD's of a set into one entry, and edit the details of tracks and full CD's. Some of the data from CDDB is so crap, and I hated the 'noise' and mislabeled tracks, and (LIVE) after each track of a live CD
, and the separation of tracks because of guest artists and such. It drove me mildly batty.But each time, something really bizarre would happen. Tracks disappearing, once all of the Sammy Hagar tracks disappeared. And I do mean disappeared. *POOF*, couldn't find them anywhere. None of the individual tracks could be located either. That was a few years ago, but anyway. I was told that the database, and the metadata on the tracks were 'broken' and the tracks would have to be re-ripped. Once I did just re-rip the tracks I was having issues with, and the database just went tits up, and I had to delete it, and copy the data from another system, and things went sideways soon after that again.
Now? I don't edit the data. I have on some rare tracks, but for the most part I just try to live with the noise and chaos of the listings in iTunes.
Re-ripping had the bonus of me finding some CD's that I hadn't ripped, so...
Don't over edit the tags/metadata in the iTunes database. It seems to like to detonate at some point. AND one update to iTunes actually removed most of my edits anyway. Freaking most peculiar. Cheers...
I have been running my iTunes for many years now and it has grown quite large by now (can get the exact numbers later), but it has not happened to me that it by itself loses media files.
Any edit inside iTunes is copied out to source file (aac, mp3 or mp4). The only exceptions to this may be gapless album flags.
I also let iTunes keep my media folder organised and move media files into media folder.
If anything happens, I simply can drop that tree onto iTunes icon and it will take care of the rest.
Any edit inside iTunes is copied out to source file (aac, mp3 or mp4). The only exceptions to this may be gapless album flags.
I also let iTunes keep my media folder organised and move media files into media folder.
If anything happens, I simply can drop that tree onto iTunes icon and it will take care of the rest.
I have and I think it's a nice piece of software. Kind of like iTunes was maybe 10 years ago but supports more file formats.
I've been using iTunes since 2002 and never any problems. I keep everything in my iTunes - Music, ripped CDs from the olden days & CD imports, HD video, HD Film etc. I keep everything local on my MacBook. Only problem once was when I deleted a playlist only iPhone, it then deleted it on my MacBook.
I've used iTunes since 1.0 (And SoundJam MP before that!) and my library is around 300GB, without any movies, and I've never had a single database issue. In that respect, iTunes have been rock solid for me. And I've copied it around multiple machines without issues.
I've used iTunes from day 1 and I can't recall any problems. Yes, the UI has gotten somewhat crammed with clutter due to feature-creep, but otherwise iTunes is still working fine for me as a music organization and playback tool.
Is there a web page that tells how to manage Audiobooks in iTunes 12? I cannot for the life of me figure out how to organize imported audio CDs.