stcanard said:
Huh?
What are you expecting?
That iTunes will put the DVD in for you if the song is on another disk?
That iTunes will be able to play the song when the DVD isn't in the computer?
How does iTunes even know which songs are on which DVDs?
Well, I was expecting something more than a flamebait answer. Do you know ANYONE that would expect a computer program to sort through a CD wallet and pull out the proper DVD? No? Didn't think so. Let's stay on target.
iTunes should know which songs you have because you've imported them into the database. That's a really cool feature. I love how iTunes lets me get to my files so easily. I just don't like how it's a little more than insistant about organizing them in its own way.
A great leap forward would be not putting them into directories based on albums.
So, what do you plan to do to find your songs when you have 80GB of music and 40GB of free space?
THERE IS an Ogg Vorbis plug-in for Quicktime and iTunes if you want that. But then again, Ogg is such an unstable format I don't know who in their right mind would have a big enough collection of ogg files to really say it's worth consideration.
I realise that iTunes can support ogg. What I don't understand is why it doesn't support them straight out of the box. Yes, I know that the iPod doesn't and can't play them, but that doesn't mean that my comptuer can't. It still smells more of marketing, and less of engineering.
And I don't understand the comment about oggs and stability. At all. The only place I've ever seen ogg be anything less than a really great codec, one that seems to beat the others in comparison tests, is in iTunes. Why iTunes refuses to play them unless it has imported and sorted them in its own way, I cannot say. If anyone has advice, I'd love it.
When you rip music, it IS compatible for everyone. I don't understand what problem you are having- all the info in my mp3s is recognized across other PCs and Macs. I don't understand your comment about burning DVDs either- there is no issue there. Strange issues you seem to have indeed, but you won't find a better or more full-featured player.
Sorry, I wasn't clear. By compatible, I don't just mean, "Can it play in my music player?" I mean, is what I've done in one system compatible with another. If I've organized music and made playlists in Windows, can they be read in exactly the same way in other systems, on other computers? In iTunes, that's not the case, as it does NOT change tags the way it should. I discovered this when I spent 4 hours cleaning all the file names up and then found much to my chagrin that it was all lost. ALL OF IT. iTunes had simply updated its internal database without updating the tags. The proof is in the pudding, as I now have to go change all my Magnetic Fields songs AGAIN. So all the work that I did to get this straight would never have been compatible with anyone else's system, as it meant nothing without the internal iTunes DB to go along with it.
Equally, I'll try to better explain my DVD comment. Basically, how do you plan to manage your music when there's too much of it? How will you go about finding it before burning it, and how will you go about listening to it once it's been burned to DVD and removed from the HD? I just burn it into the same categories I have on my HD, and then ask winamp to play a directory. Works like a charm, and works on Linux, Windows, and Mac. I fear for my collection when I try to listen to music under Linux. If you've got some experience with Linux, you'll understand why having all these files spread all over the system is my worst nightmare.
Lastly, what do you guys think about using the Spotlight DB for music? Wouldn't that basically give us easy access to the best feature about iTunes? Just write a program to read the tags, an interface to show just music, and pipe it to a music player.