Good mp3/music player *besides* iTunes?

[ChrisBrightwell]

So, what do you plan to do to find your songs when you have 80GB of music and 40GB of free space?

Label the discs? iTunes will load an MP3 CD or DVD and let you browse it just like it does anything else.

Burn entire artist collections to each disc, burn compliations to another, and label all of it.

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.

I think you've answered your own question here. Why have something in iTunes that won't be moved to (or played on) the iPod? That's bound to confuse more users than it will benifit.

[iTunes] does NOT change tags the way it should.

Sorry, but I still don't buy this. iTunes has never dropped the ID3 editing ball on me, nor do I ever expect that it will.

 

[ChrisBrightwell]

If you have 80GB of music [...] the first step is to admit that you have a problem and spend way too much time on limewire and kazaa.

Wow, I'm not sure if I've heard something so profoundly ignorant all day.

I just finished ripping a co-worker's CD collection for him (he got a new iPod and didn't have time to rip his stuff, so I offered to do it for a modest sum), and it weighed in at 93GB (160kb MP3).

It was all legal and all of it sees regular rotation.

 

[stcanard]

Wow, I'm not sure if I've heard something so profoundly ignorant all day.

I just finished ripping a co-worker's CD collection for him (he got a new iPod and didn't have time to rip his stuff, so I offered to do it for a modest sum), and it weighed in at 93GB (160kb MP3).

It was all legal and all of it sees regular rotation.

Well based on my music collection profile that's over 3000 CDs (650 albums@128 is 13GB =~ 16GB@160). When you consider that CDs have really only been around for about 20 years, 3000/20/52 means he's been buying almost 3 CDs a week for 2 decades. IMO that is a monumental collection, and I bet fairly unusual. If that's all music, and he listens to it all regularly I am quite surprised. And yes, after spending $45,000 (based on an average CD price of $15), I do wonder if he should look at his priorities.

But in the context of what I was replying to, I bet he's not trying to cram it onto a 40GB drive.

 

[infect]

Well based on my music collection profile that's over 3000 CDs (650 albums@128 is 13GB =~ 16GB@160). When you consider that CDs have really only been around for about 20 years, 3000/20/52 means he's been buying almost 3 CDs a week for 2 decades. IMO that is a monumental collection, and I bet fairly unusual. If that's all music, and he listens to it all regularly I am quite surprised. And yes, after spending $45,000 (based on an average CD price of $15), I do wonder if he should look at his priorities.

But in the context of what I was replying to, I bet he's not trying to cram it onto a 40GB drive.

Haha. I think I enjoyed reading that almost as much as you enjoyed typing it.

To add my two cents regarding this topic, I'd just like to say that one of the biggest problems, in my opinion, regarding Platform dependent applications (lest we forget that although iTunes has become a windows application as well, its usability philosophy stems from all things mac) is that unfamiliar users do not understand "the way things are done" on the original platform write off their ignorance as a usability issue. "This doesn't work the way I am used to working therefore it is bad." What about all of the other people for whom that is the way they are used to working?

My basic point is this: Instead of lamenting the lack of "good engineering work," try to understand what you are using and why you are using it. If it's not meant to solve the problems you're having, then ultimately it is your responsibility to find something that does. For the vast majority of users, iTunes does solve the problem of keeping their music library organized, or they wouldn't use it. It is called the "iTunes Music Library" and not the "iTunes Sound Sampling Station" for a reason.

 

[James Philp]

Eh?

Not true. It plays AIFF, MP3, MP4/AAC, WAV, Lossless, etc. Ogg is OPTIONAL because its open-source, and if they were to take an open source plug-in, and completely steal it, then they'd be no better than MicroSoft. Then again, they also don't see Ogg being a viable format, since a fraction of music listeners, or even computer users even care about ogg.

When O first heard about Ogg, I was like "hell yeah, that's awesome." But after using it for a while and finding that it was just a pain in the arse all the way around, I stopped using it.

iTunes is gorgeous. It makes me feel.... Sexy.

I don;t think you quite got the point of stcanard, he was bigging up iTunes too!
I really don't see what all the fuss is about - here's a novel way to review music - the Finder! Column view, simple!
VLC is V good too.

ACQlite is a lovely little downloading app too - it downloads an iTunes-compatible track (AAC (MP4), MP3 etc - anything you have specified as opening defaultly to iTunes), verifies it, copies it to iTunes (into the folder structure) puts it automatically into a playlist of your choice (so you can keep track) and deletes the original - clean and easy. It can also play it straight away and other stuff. Then, if the MP3 sucks, you can use "whack current track" script (google scripts for itunes) to get rid of it straight away! Also, it runs on the Limewire servers, you don't HAVE to share any data, and is Freeware!

P.S. - changing folder structure / file names within the itunes music folder is a BAD idea - you're either going to be wasting time, or mess things up.
P.P.S. - I dunno if this works, but after updating id3 tags, try "Consolidate Library" under advanced - you never know!

 

[James Philp]

Wow there...

Originally Posted by stcanard

If you have 80GB of music [...] the first step is to admit that you have a problem and spend way too much time on limewire and kazaa.

Wow, I'm not sure if I've heard something so profoundly ignorant all day.

I just finished ripping a co-worker's CD collection for him (he got a new iPod and didn't have time to rip his stuff, so I offered to do it for a modest sum), and it weighed in at 93GB (160kb MP3).

It was all legal and all of it sees regular rotation.

Hold on there, this guy's basic thread was that he was having problems because he would DOWNLOAD this music and just want to play it before deciding whether it went into iTunes - lest we forget that!
And Yes, 80GB of music seems an enourmous ammount.
@3000 CD's ripping at even 15x (CD average length 1h) that's 25 days @ 8 hours a day! - that's 5 working weeks! - You're a very good friend! Hourly sum of $2 an hour would get you $400. Yummy sums!

Also, why MP3 160? When there is THAT MUCH, do you not think a more efficient codec would have been applicable? I use AAC 128 and it sounds pretty good through GRADO SR80's (you SHOULD know what they are) for 99.9% of my music. MP3 at the same 128 sounds A LOT worse. I think MP3 equivalent to AAC 128 is around 192.

 

[James Philp]

Also, why MP3 160? When there is THAT MUCH, do you not think a more efficient codec would have been applicable? I use AAC 128 and it sounds pretty good through GRADO SR80's (you SHOULD know what they are) for 99.9% of my music.

But i do suppose .1% of 93Gb worth is quite a few tracks! Haha!

 

[ChrisBrightwell]

why MP3 160?

Because I work and play in enviroments and applications that don't always play well (if at all) with AAC.

My backup MP3 player is a MP3CD player. My PC at work, due mostly to network restrictions, doesn't have an AAC player. Most of the people I work with on freelance projects don't have AAC-capable apps.

I understand that both MP3 and AAC are "open" standards, but MP3 is just more prevalent. I'm going to wind up re-ripping all of it, I'm sure, to something better down the road, but I'm content with 160MP3 for now.

Now, to address your bitrate question -- 160k MP3 and 128k AAC are, to my ears, indestinguishable (sp?). When I ripped all of my albums, I had a 20GB iPod and a 40GB system drive.

160k MP3, for me, was the perfect balance between quality, compatibility, and filesize. YMMV, obviously.

I asked him what to use and he said, "Just use whatever you use." I explained that 128AAC would save *tons* of space over 160MP3, but he handed me a 250GB HDD and said he'd just bought a home media receiver (not sure which one) that didn't support AAC.

I had burned him a CD-R of some of the MP3s I had in my collection so he could give it a listen on his system at the house (they were albums that he owned, so he could do side-by-side comparisions w/ the original CD and the compressed files) and he couldn't tell the difference, so we went with 160k MP3.

 

[James Philp]

OK

I asked him what to use and he said, "Just use whatever you use." I explained that 128AAC would save *tons* of space over 160MP3, but he handed me a 250GB HDD and said he'd just bought a home media receiver (not sure which one) that didn't support AAC.
MP3.

Fair enough, but I would still love to know how long it took to do all this ripping! Days and days methinks? I did my collection of ~15Gb and it took a long while!

 

[kubark42]

I don't know what made my experience so different from all of yours, but I know the effort I put into arranging my tags is GONE. I changed the tag information using the info screen in iTunes, so I might have done something wrong, I might not have pushed the right button somewhere. I have no idea why this was, and I'm open to input. (And, no, I wasn't changing the filename or directories because, yes, that would really mess things up with the DB.)

(P.S.- I wonder if it wasn't only the tags on ogg songs that I lost? I've got both mixed together. I know that I said id3 in the beginning, so maybe I threw you guys on the wrong track?)

Originally Posted by stcanard
If you have 80GB of music [...] the first step is to admit that you have a problem and spend way too much time on limewire and kazaa.

I have to agree with ChrisBrightwell. This was just mind boggling bizzare. I don't have 80GB of music. I pulled that number out of thin air. Next time, I'll say "I have only PI snagglepuffs free but I have MU snagglepuffs of music," okay? Because I think the basic question remains unsolved, and you spent a whole lot of time picking apart a made-up number. Although I do like your superplaylists idea. I just don't see the need for it. Does iTunes really need to handle my music? Isn't it just enough to know where it is and let me put it where I want it?

-Get a bigger hard drive. That will solve your DVD issues. You honestly want to manage your music collection across multiple DVDs? Kinda defeats the purpose of having it all right there on demand.

Hey, that's a great idea. Why didn't people just think of this before? Who needs removable media? Why, we'll just all go out and buy new hard drives! And when I don't have enough space in my computer for all my hard drives, I'll just swap out the ones I'm not using.

"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."

Sounds like iTunes.

You almost had it. Sounds like OPENSOURCE iTunes.

 

[James Philp]

Does iTunes really need to handle my music? Isn't it just enough to know where it is and let me put it where I want it?

Ok, so having a single folder as a download 'Bin' Would be useful, but this can also be done in a playlist / "whack current track" that I explained in a previous post.
BUT - What about for the majority of the music you own? You will have to create a folder, name it, open it, create another one, name it etc, to get a decent standardised structure to you files. What then will you do if you want a mix of a few tracks? Create aliases? Copy files into another directory - Ouch!
iTunes does thigs with such ease man, smart playlists, normal playlists, I get a headach simply thinking about having to chage the file structure manually, and "Creating Directories" A La SoundJam.

Hey, that's a great idea. Why didn't people just think of this before? Who needs removable media? Why, we'll just all go out and buy new hard drives! And when I don't have enough space in my computer for all my hard drives, I'll just swap out the ones I'm not using.

Umm, I think you're forgetting external drives! You can get 80GB for ~$90 - Maybe not quite as cheap as using DVD-R - $17 for ~100GB, but imagine the kind of problems you're going to get into while trying to maintain a structure to your DVD's - alphbetically until you get new music? You're goingto run into a lot of headaches - Like Mac OS 1 being split over 2 disks - constantly having to swap! Imagine you want to make a good playlist up, and so you do, and then your computer keeps asking for different DVDs so you can transfer it to your music player! - Ouch!

External drive sounds like the best bet, and if you don't have USB 2.0 or Firewire, where've you been?
Get a PCMCIA card (Laptop) or internal card (desktop) (all all-in-one computers have at least one of these if not both).
So enough sacasm ok? You can get 250GB for $180 these days!
(All prices based on Amazon when I wrote this)

 

[James Philp]

I don't know what made my experience so different from all of yours, but I know the effort I put into arranging my tags is GONE. I changed the tag information using the info screen in iTunes, so I might have done something wrong, I might not have pushed the right button somewhere. I have no idea why this was, and I'm open to input.

I really don't know what's up. I know I have imported songs and named them later, and then when you reveal the file (apple-R) they have been re-ordered into the respecive folders. Do you have the "Keep iTunes Music Folder Organized" checked under the "Advanced" tab in prefences? Simple I know, but that would be the only way I can think that if you changed tags in iTunes, the folder structre would change.
(iTunes folder structure being iTunes Music>Artists>Album>songs)

For example, changing an album (with multiple artists) by making it a compilation SHOULD take the album folders out of the artist folders (a single track in the same album name folders within multiple artists folders), combine the album folders into one, delete all the artist folders, and place the single album folder into iTunes Music>Compilations. - Can you imagine the legwork needed to do that by hand! And it preserves the Artist ID3 tag. - A very complicated procedure - wish i could draw a picture.

 

[ChrisBrightwell]

Fair enough, but I would still love to know how long it took to do all this ripping! Days and days methinks? I did my collection of ~15Gb and it took a long while!

Well I had my PC and my Powerbook going at the same time (not 24/7, obviously) and it took about a month.

 

[James Philp]

Well I had my PC and my Powerbook going at the same time (not 24/7, obviously) and it took about a month.

Did you use iTunes?
If so, how did you get the two computers to sync the libraries.
The only way i can think is to do them sepatarely, drag from one to another (at the artist level of the iTunes Music folders) and then do Add to library, is this basically what you did?

 

[stcanard]

I have to agree with ChrisBrightwell. This was just mind boggling bizzare. I don't have 80GB of music. I pulled that number out of thin air. Next time, I'll say "I have only PI snagglepuffs free but I have MU snagglepuffs of music," okay? Because I think the basic question remains unsolved, and you spent a whole lot of time picking apart a made-up number.

Huh? You think writing one sentence is a lot of time?

Of course I did spend some time taking apart Chris's number as that wasn't made up, and yes, I do think that his friend averaging 2.5 CDs a week every week for 2 decades could well be indicative of obsessive or addictive behaviour.

Although I do like your superplaylists idea. I just don't see the need for it. Does iTunes really need to handle my music? Isn't it just enough to know where it is and let me put it where I want it?

No, iTunes doesn't need to handle your music. But you seem to think it is insufficient to organize the music, and that is what I am refuting. Anything you can do in a directory structure and be done in iTunes playlists, and there's a number of things like the smart upating that cannot.

But, back to the original point you brought up -- I came into this because you said that iTunes had insufficient ability to back up to a DVD and organize:

For instance iTunes must be an absolute catastrophe when you start burning your music to DVD to make space

Now, you still haven't answered my question: What do you expect it to do?

It writes everything to a disc, and carries all the id3 tag information with it so that you can pop the disc into [any] machine see who/what is archived, and in the case of iTunes search the contents based on that id3 information.

What improvements would you suggest? If you're going to say iTunes is a catastrophe archiving I assume you have a better idea?

 

[ChrisBrightwell]

Did you use iTunes?

Yes.

If so, how did you get the two computers to sync the libraries.
The only way i can think is to do them sepatarely, drag from one to another (at the artist level of the iTunes Music folders) and then do Add to library, is this basically what you did?

Basically, yeah. No magic tricks here.

 

[ChrisBrightwell]

[...] I do think that his friend averaging 2.5 CDs a week every week for 2 decades could well be indicative of obsessive or addictive behaviour. [...]

To be a bit more fair, it is his *family's* collection, which includes a wife and two kids.

They have everything from bluegrass and country to jazz, rock, metal, funk, old-school hip-hop, and VeggieTales. There are even some discs of Native America, African, and Asian music.

It was an interesting collection to say the least.

 

[stcanard]

To be a bit more fair, it is his *family's* collection, which includes a wife and two kids.

They have everything from bluegrass and country to jazz, rock, metal, funk, old-school hip-hop, and VeggieTales. There are even some discs of Native America, African, and Asian music.

It was an interesting collection to say the least.

You would have to have quite a range to fill up that much unique music!

As a family collection that's reasonable I do wonder how many people stop to think about how much they have spent on music collections over the years. I know people with over 1,000 albums (stretching back into vinyl) and it's mindboggling when you sit down and add it up. $15 here and there becomes a huge sum over time!

 

[ChrisBrightwell]

[...] $15 here and there becomes a huge sum over time!

I have more than 400 albums, all mine, but I rarely pay more than $12 for a CD.

I usually get what I want the week it's released, almost guaranteeing that I'll score it between $10 and $12.

Additionally, I'm a huge fan of second-hand CD shops, so I buy a lot of used discs for $3 to $10 on a fairly regular basis. I've even scored a few gems from eBay.

People look at my CD and DVD collections (more than 700 discs total) and are like, "How do you afford all of that?" My answer? Never pay MSRP.

 

[Bedawyn]

If it's not meant to solve the problems you're having, then ultimately it is your responsibility to find something that does.

Which is exactly what he tried to do, asking about other apps, and promptly got jumped on for daring to suggest that something from Apple wasn't perfect for everyone. (With the stock answers to any such criticism, of course: "spend more money on hardware" and "rearrange your life and brain to serve the computer; don't expect it to serve you")

For the record, I've also spent hours spread over months updating and changing ID3 tags in iTunes only to find that when I burned the songs to disc or opened them in another mp3 player that the tag changes were not reflected in the song files themselves but apparently only in the iTunes database.

 

[stcanard]

Which is exactly what he tried to do, asking about other apps, and promptly got jumped on for daring to suggest that something from Apple wasn't perfect for everyone.

Here is the statement again:

For instance iTunes must be an absolute catastrophe when you start burning your music to DVD to make space

I asked why it was a catastrophe. I am still waiting for that answer. If I missed the answer, or if you believe you know that answer, please eludicate. It is very difficult to present a viable solution to a problem that the poster refuses to define.

If you are finding that updating info in iTunes and then exporting the songs is not being reflectes in the tags, please provide an example. This is a serious bug, and needs to be addressed. If you are going "behind iTunes back" and directly into the filesystem, of course the results will be undefined.

If you think that explaining to someone how they can use the software to do what they want it to do is unreasonable (instead of just letting them complain that it doesn't work exactly the way *they* are used to based on experience with a much older, less flexible program) again, please expand.

 

[dubbz]

If foobar2000 were ported to Mac OS X the gates of heaven whould open and the angels whould sing its glory and the world whould be at peace. Well, maybe not, but it's one of those Windows apps I'm going to miss...

I do miss some more options when it comes to audio players on the Mac. iTunes basically killed the competition. It managed to do it because it's very good, but the situation sucks if you don't like iTunes. I like iTunes, but I do wish there were some strong alternatives.

Curious to see what the Whamb team is up to with v2.0... They seem to be taking their time.

 

[stcanard]

If foobar2000 were ported to Mac OS X the gates of heaven whould open and the angels whould sing its glory and the world whould be at peace.

Okay, maybe you can explain, what is the big deal with foobar2000? The guys at Ars were so big on it that I tried it on my work machine (this was in the days before I had tried iTunes).

I just couldn't see what the deal was. It is the footprint? I saw no real improvement over the days when I just put a CD in the drive. I could tell it to play all the songs in a directory, or I could manually create a playlist, but there was no way to really make use of a large collection.

Maybe its the way I listen is different from most people? I have a varied taste, I know. Lately I've been bored with what I was listening to, so I've put it on a playlist of the top 25 sorted by least recently played.

The other day I had an urge to listen to my K-Os, so I go into the library and select that artist. I can do that with Foobar, but then it's more of a pain to also put him into my hip-hop collection, and if I do that, getting Crabbukit added to the colleciton of my favourite songs requires manually going through the entire collection and picking the songs.

In my "general" listening I like to filter out the stuff I've listened to in the last week, and if I get tired of a song I know that dropping it to 3 stars automatically takes it out of those favourite song lists. Its such a pain in Foobar or Winamp to have to manually go through all my playlists and take it out.

Anyway, to stop rambling: Since as far as I can tell, iTunes is a superset of Foobar, what is it about foobar that you miss? After using it for 6 months then switching to iTunes I couldn't find anything that I missed, and going back would be painful.

 

[infect]

For the poster that wanted to play songs in iTunes without adding them to their library, I ran across this and thought I'd give you a heads up:

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20050413022159670

Hopefully that helps.