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Help! I hate iTunes.

buddhanoir said:
melodramatic ********
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You need to calm down man, seriously.

all that aside, thanks for help. i'll look into this tagging software your recommended. there's always a mix of slaps in the face and useful tidbits.....so i can't be totally mad at you. seriously, i appreciate your help. unlike many PC users who might actually deserve or even want your name calling.....i'm now a Mac user....so back off a bit. my hard-earned cash went to Jobs and not Gates. i'm making a major switch here and I'm trying to find the value in my decision, but obviously there exist major transitional issues.
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Please. I've been more helpful in this thread than maybe any other. I've held your hand through the entire process. If you want to act like a kicked dog when I point out that you've missed out on stuff that's been well known for nearly ten years, that's your prerogative, but I'm not gonna feel bad about it. You made bad decisions, whether you knew you were making them or not, and no one in their right mind is going to hold you gently, rub your head, and tell you it's all right. Except maybe your mother. :mad:

Good news is: it's only digital music files on a computer, and none of it actually matters anyway. :rolleyes: I'm so done with this thread.
 
i dont need to be rubbed...i just wanted answers. you've been very helpful. hwever, you could have given me the same answers without the putdowns. that's all. telling me that i'm "silly" or it's my fault or i did this wrong or that wrong doesn't really help. i'll take for blame for all of the evils done around the world in the infinite number of years prior to this very second. the holocaust, 9-11, and black death..all me. okay. what i needed however was advice on how to fix the situation that is NOW.

help, i burned a bunch of music to WMAs back before Ipods. trying to crossover to itunes.

sorry buddy. that sux. not much you can do....or wait, you can do X, Y, and Z. i feel your pain man. Windows really screws a lot of people over. just be sure to burn all future recordings to MP3s or something neutral. if you do this that and the other in itunes, it's possible to make it through...good luck

instead i got:

your own fault....you made bad decisions....you're silly.....damn you for not knowing more about tags.....

anyway, i'm all set. thanks again for your help. i really do appreciate your assistance and your willingness to walk me through what is obviously been out for a long time. i admit that i am a beginner.
 
*wakes up and staggers into the thread, wiping sleep boogers out of his eyes, ready to disrupt whatever fragile peace might now exist*

killmoms, you've the patience of a saint :)

buddhanoir, I recommend that you take a look at http://www.dougscripts.com/ -- the AppleScripts (tiny programs written in a simplified, casual programming language) will help you to get your library straightened out. For instance, there's a script called "Search and Replace" that will ask you for a word or phrase or whatever and then replace it in all of your song titles or artist names or whatever. There are scripts that'll take the numbers at the beginning of song names and put them in the track numbers. There are scripts that will remove a specified number of characters from the front or back of a song name or artist name. Etc etc etc. It'll make the repeated operations a lot less tedious.
 
Here's a low-stress story.
When I bought my Mac in '02, I was a lot like the OP. I had a whole pile of music files, named every which way, it was insane. I kept my folders system organized, as much as possible considering that I had to keep half of it on discs due to HD space (it was the olden days!) I can't help you with the WMA problem, even when I had Windows I did everything in my power to avoid stuff with "Windows" in the name.

When I got the files onto my shiny new Mac (which is currently my grumpy old Mac) I loaded them into iTunes but didn't let it rearrange my files. I held onto my naming and sorting system like a security blankie, because that's what I was used to.

Eventually, however, I came to the slow realization that my old naming and sorting system sucked @ss. It was too much work to maintain, to add in new stuff, and it limited the flexibility of iTunes, which I was growing to love.

So first I checked the box "allow iTunes to organize my music" which was just miraculous at the time. Because I no longer had to leave iTunes and get into the finder to sort out new additions.

Then I started fixing the tags. Just a few at a time, if I had a half hour to kill. it took a year or so, but who cares, I had more important stuff to do than assign a whole week to this. the Autofill feature was a big help. Ultimately, the speed of achieving organization was less important than real life stuff. Change 20, 40, a hundred songs in a sitting, reminded me of stuff I had forgotten about, and gave me the opportunity to delete stuff I never listen to.

Anyways, having taken a relaxed, no-rush approach to fixing my library was, in retrospect, a great idea, and now I'm way happier with it.

Funny thing is, I didn't learn about the "change multiple items at once" option until after I was done. The option might not have been there in earlier versions, not sure.
 
Orng said:
Funny thing is, I didn't learn about the "change multiple items at once" option until after I was done. The option might not have been there in earlier versions, not sure.
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Oh Jesus. Wow, no wonder it took you a year. Was that a major "D'oh!" moment? :eek: :D I started using iTunes back around version 4, I think. Whatever was out in late September of '03. (According to Wikipedia: 4.0.1.) That was definitely one of my favorite features early on, since I'd come from Winamp on the Windows side, which didn't allow for multiple-file tag editing.

Still, there is something oddly pleasant about having a nice, neat, well-tagged library, isn't there? It just makes you feel good.
 
I hate iTunes haters

just kidding...

just wanted to say that all you KNOWLEDGEABLE users out there are WAY too kind to people like our iTunes "hater" here!

I have already spent too much time in my life helping people who don't take the time to educate themselves before making ignorant, rash comments and then asking an entire online community to devote themselves to reversing their bias.

Any more, I just tell people to get a PC. It's like my neighbor telling me how awesome his Ford Focus is. I don't argue anymore.

But my point is deeper-by even acknowledging these people, we become the enablers.

Hey wait a minute. I just acknowledged this idiot. Oh crap, I'm an enabler too! Get me out of here!!!!
 
I hate iTunes too because..

I think that the difference is that serious music collectors and especially for those who collect classical and jazz music.
iTunes takes too much control over the import process and over the organisation among other aspects.
I unchecked all the checkboxes that allow a control to iTunes and even like this it acts as a dictator.
1) I cannot chose proper names for the tracks and album. It searches them and decides that it knows better than me how to name them (rarely well tagged).
Mediamonkey proposes the tags it finds over the net but you can change them if you want to.
2) Even though I have unchecked the option to let iTunes organise the library, each time I insert an original CD it is converted with a bit rate of 128 and I have no way to change it.
3) Mediamonkey lets you assign artworks much more easily. I have scanned all my CDs covers and named them front.jpg and back.jpg. With Memdiamonkey it is a matter of some clicks to have them assigned to each album. With iTunes is a nightmare.
 
Ok forget about back cover but problem #3 remains for front

Imagine that you have more than 500 albums, all of them organised in folders as composer/album/track1, track2, ..., front.jpg
Each folder(i.e. each album) contains its cover as an image ALWAYS called front.jpg.
Now you want to assign each front.jpg image to its corresponding tracks, i.e. all the tracks in the same folder as each image.
As far as I have seen, the only way is selecting the tracks of one album, opening Finder and browsing for the corresponding image and finally drag and drop to the tracks in iTunes. Then go with the same for the next album and like this until you complete your more than 500 albums. Isn't it too much work?
It would be much more intelligent providing a way to bulk assign images to tracks when they are well organised...
 
kamaron said:
I think that the difference is that serious music collectors and especially for those who collect classical and jazz music.
iTunes takes too much control over the import process and over the organisation among other aspects.
I unchecked all the checkboxes that allow a control to iTunes and even like this it acts as a dictator.
1) I cannot chose proper names for the tracks and album. It searches them and decides that it knows better than me how to name them (rarely well tagged).
Mediamonkey proposes the tags it finds over the net but you can change them if you want to.
2) Even though I have unchecked the option to let iTunes organise the library, each time I insert an original CD it is converted with a bit rate of 128 and I have no way to change it.
3) Mediamonkey lets you assign artworks much more easily. I have scanned all my CDs covers and named them front.jpg and back.jpg. With Memdiamonkey it is a matter of some clicks to have them assigned to each album. With iTunes is a nightmare.
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1. You CAN enter titles manually into iTunes even after it auto fetch album info which works for most people. You CAN also select not to have the app download titles if you are really anal about discography.

2. iTunes supports various kinds of conversion (i.e. loseless, mp3, mp4 of various bit rates), just because you did not bother to change the setting doesn't mean it does not exist. Hint, every Mac app has something called "Preferences".

3. iTunes can get a lot of artwork byitself without scanning. On the Mac, there are also various third party apps that downloads cover art (either automatically or manually). The cover art is embedded into the music files so no need to keep separate cover files.

Add:
By the way, to assign album art to songs manually:
Go to the album (there are various ways to do this, one is by typing the album name, or add new albums to a temporary play list),
Command-A, Command-I, drag and drop, hit ok.
Takes seconds.
 
MQAvatar2k said:
Everybody, thanks for your responses. I have found them very helpful.

Okay, I don't "hate" iTunes, but I have had bad experiences with the XP version. I figured the title would garner a bit more advice. I'll definitely give iTunes on Leopard a chance.

It's really more that I love MediaMonkey and its features: speed, organization, tagging, file compatibility/conversion, etc.

Yes, I like to control the organization and file folder structure, which may become a non-issue with OS X.

Just because I like Macs and OS X doesn't mean I have to like iTunes (or any OS X program for that matter), that's just silly. I'm trying to come up with this solution because I like OS X.

Really though, thanks for the posts so far.

to jf8- I suppose I could just run windows... but then there's no point in getting a mac. I want to have my cake and eat it too.
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iTunes preformance on Mac OS is much much better then in windows....

how do you like real player?
 
When it comes to all the different spellings and capitalizations in the tags, I feel your pain. I hate having 4000 artists, when in reality it is many fewer.

I just stumbled on Beatunes. I believe that the main purpose that it exists is to analyze the files for BPM and create playlists based upon track style. However, a very nice feature is that it will go through your database and create a list of differing spellings and capitalizations and let you reconcile all the differences. Believe me, changing "NiRvAnA", "nIrVaNa" and all the names with varying spaces after the name....all with just one click, has made it worthwhile. It has a 14 day test period, which should be enough to fix all those annoying things. In just a few hours I managed to wrangle almost all the artists in my 32,000 track 133GB iTunes database. Of course, there are plenty more categories to go....Genre, track names, etc...Still time left on the demo..

If it makes good playlists, I will definitely buy it. I am too lazy to make my own.
 
iTunes sucks on XP for the same reason MS Word sucks on OSX, they simply don't like being away from home. :D
 
buddhanoir said:
t

as a general rule, i won't convert into AAC. it's the same thing as converting to WMA. at some time (as unthinkable as it is), microsoft will throw down the gauntlet and come up with a player to rival the ipod...and i'll be in the same situation all over again.

beware all of you who use AAC. this is the voice of xmas past, present, and future telling you to stick with the most universal format that you can.
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Just Had To Point Out That AAC Is Not An Apple Invention, It Is A Standardised Format , Like MP3, Developed By Dolby, Nokia, AT & T And Some Other Men With Beards. MP3 ( Or Class 1 MPEG Layer 3 ) Is The Older Format, That AAC ( Class 4 MPEG Layer 3 ) Superseded.
Just Like MP3, Any Manufacturer Can Opt To Put This Technology In Their Players - Apple Doesn't Really Have A Say In Who Can And Cannot Use This.

But Then Again You Are Not Just Limited To These Two Great Codecs GIVEN FREE By Apple, You Can Also Encode In AIFF For CD Quality Audio, Or Another Apple FREEBIE, The Apple Lossless Encoder For Better Then CD Quality Audio At Half The Storage Space. Im Sure There Are Also Others, But I Forgot Them. ( Sorry For The Emphasized Words There, But It Sometimes Ticks Me Off When My Friends Forget They Had To Pay For These Things Pre iTunes.. If They Were Gonna Pay For Them That Is...
Like Japanese Car Manufactures Giving Radios As Standard, The Rest Of The World Had To Follow)
 
Thanks for your help. Nevertheless I can't afford embedding manually all cover arts.
It would take take ages.
I have been searching for a script to do the job.
There are scripts that re-embed or delete the emebedded artwork etc but not for embedding the artwork called front.jpg that exists in each folder (album) of my data collection to all the songs of that folder.
I have tried to modify the existing scripts without success. I have also tried to learn more Applescript but I haven't found a good manual.
I can write in many programming languages but Applescript seems to be completely different.
The thing I would like to do must be very simple. Something like (in pseudo code)

for each folder f in my_music_folder
if a file called front.jpg exists then​
for each song s in f​
embed folder.jpg into s​
end for​
end if​
end for

Another point is that I think that embedding an artwork is much worse than maintaining a database where each song or album is LINKED to an artwork.
The advantage is that you don't need to replicate the artwork thus saving A LOT of disk space.
Another advantage is that it is easy to change a poor quality artwork by a better one just replacing the corresponding file without the need to embed it again

Consultant said:
...
3. iTunes can get a lot of artwork byitself without scanning. On the Mac, there are also various third party apps that downloads cover art (either automatically or manually). The cover art is embedded into the music files so no need to keep separate cover files.
Click to expand...
 
This thread has turned from "Why I don't like iTunes" into "iTunes stinks because it doesn't deal with my own personal music organization system the way I think it should".
Lots of us have been there. Suck it up, put in a little time, and get your music tagged and formatted properly. That way whichever program you choose to use will be infinitely more useful both now and in the future.
(And you might want to think about throwing out those poorly encoded bootleg downloads and repklacing them with something higher quality and legal while you're at it)

My $.02
 
I'm surprised that no one asked him WHY he has 300gb+ music in the first place do u really need 300gb+ have you even listened to 300gb+? whats the point of having it if u dont need it or listen to it?
 
when i first tried iTunes a few years ago.. i hated it! i was so used to having all of my songs in folders (very messy layed out folders.. but still folders!). But i finally gave iTunes a shot, and i cant picture useing anything else. whenever i import a cd, or files the first thing i do is make sure they are tagged correctly, and that i find album art for them. if you do it right away there is less issues and a much more organized library later.

i really adore looking at my coverflow in iTunes, its quite beautiful haha!
 
BaldiMac said:
What do you hate about iTunes? It would help to know what to avoid in making any suggestions.
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it sucks!!!!!! anything above 11.4 SUCKS! the layout, the look, how it moves, the lack of a side bar, the lack of ability to maintain a simple layout with your choice of columns to add to the display like the bpm"s!
 
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