iTunes stinks
Having had a good thanksgiving and heard some good christmas music over the weekend I decided to go back and revisit the music on my ipod to see if I could get a playlist of christmas music.
I was quickly reminded about how much I hate the itunes software.
Who in the world thought up the idea of presenting every single song on a persons computer in one big list. That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen. Let’s say I have somewhere around 5,000 songs. That means that in order to find my dumb christmas music on itunes I have to look through an asseninely large list just to create a playlist. My library is tiny compared to most peoples.
That’s besides the fact that when I opened up itunes it had magically added a ton of songs to my “library” 2 times, only to put an exclamation point next to all those duplicates telling me there was a problem. The problem didn’t exist the last time I opened itunes, and I haven’t touched the folders since then.
I’ve had nothing but problems with that stupid software since I got it. Apparently, others have too.
I don’t understand why people can’t just stick with what works like winamp. Why did apple have to go screw up the winamp process. I store cd’s on my computer in folders. When I rip a cd my ripping program puts all the files nicely into a folder in My Music. It’s organized. It’s easy.
iTunes has to go and un-organize everything for me, so that I can re-organize it all.
All this, plus the fact that when I play a song in winamp that sounds great, I can play it in itunes and it sounds like the cd had a billion scratches on it.
Plus it crashes all the time.
Here’s another problem that I can’t solve (all these problems from apple, the company that makes stuff that’s “soooooo easy to use”): I can’t have songs shuffle through a playlist on my ipod! Does anyone know how to make it do this? When I want to shuffle through my christmas list, I don’t also want to shuffle through the rest of my music. I’m enjoying my christmas music and all of a sudden I have a random chapter of The Da Vinci Code playing. Obnoxious.
I love the ipod itself…the iTrip is great. But I’m sick of dealing with iTunes.
Filed under Technology by John
Comments on iTunes stinks »
John, sorry to hear iTunes has been so problematic for you. I’ve always liked it. I can’t speak for the audio quality compared to Winamp (I like the sound quality of iTunes), nor can I speak to crashes on the Windows version. But I have to beg to differ on the usability issues. One thing that helps a lot is to turn on the “Browser” by clicking the eyeball at the top right or choose Show Browser from the Edit menu (at least it’s under Edit on a Mac.) You can then drill down by Artist and Album, or by Genre, Artist, and Album if you have “Show genre when browsing” checked in Preferences. That makes it easy to get away from the 5000 song list and get to what you want. Then you can click any of the column headers to sort. You can also right-click the column headers to show more columns, some of which are obscure and helpful such as “Track #” or “Kind” or “Last Played”. You can create Smart Playlists to show all the songs that match a certain criteria. Some of my Smart Playlists include “Everything with 4 Stars or Greater”, “All Music” which excludes audio books and podcasts, and “Popular” which includes anything I’ve played more than 10 times. These playlists are all copied to my iPod so that helps a lot while on the go. One complaint I have about the iPod is that I can’t easily switch between Shuffle mode and linear play mode, but other than that I’ve been happy with it. In general I’ve heard good things about iTunes’ usability, including that a graduate program somewhere was using iTunes for cataloging scientific documents because it was so easy to drill down, sort, or filter. (Besides songs, iTunes will also work with movies and PDF documents.)
When I add my Christmas music, I select all the songs just added and do a Get Info on them all, then I change _only_ the Grouping field to “Christmas” or “Christmas Vinyl” depending on how I want to group it.
That way I can type “Christmas” in the search box and there they all are! With the search still active, I can do the browse to get to the album quickly.
My only gripe: I’d like to archive just the Christmas songs for about 10 months out of the year in a seperate library. But I haven’t found an easy way to do that. And deleting them out after backing them up has sometimes lead to accidental over-deletion.
–Jim D.
Thanks for the suggestions.
Richard, the real problem with the browse thing (which I’ve tried), is that itunes didn’t import all that information when it searched for music on my computer. I had everything organized into folders and when itunes imported it, none of the folder information came in with it. It just un-organized it all and put it into a list. If I go to albums, I only get half my albums. Same thing with artists, genres, or any other category.
Any suggestions?
To shuffle through a playlist on your iPod:
1. Enable shuffle mode from the settings menu (set to “On”).
2. Highlight the playlist of choice.
3. Press the play button (bottom of wheel).
Mine’s a new 2GB nano so it may be different for you.
Also, click “Browse” in the top right of iTunes to filter the huge list down to something managable. I prefer Winamp too, but iTunes is nice for Podcasts.
–Dave
P.S. How’s life?
I have a opposit problem, my files were just music files in 1 folder and thats how I like it because when I transfer new files from my lap top to the big computor, I will be told if I transfer a duplicate…. Now I have to spend ours to see if there are same files…
If any know how you UN ORGANIZE the music please let me know, I started to move one file efter anouther but after 1 1/2 hour and barly thrugh with A I figgured it was going to take me weeks to do it manually
ANY SUGGESTIONS?????
Michael
Hating your ipod is normal. You are not alone. Telling us about your hate will make you feel better. Join us and spread the ipod hate around the world!
iTunes sucks!! But the folks at Apple couldn’t give a shit how you feel about it. They’re the cool people and if you can’t get with the program, you’re not. So good customer service is a foreign concept to them but in the end, they’re really a bunch of idiots.
About the un- or re- organize thing: It shouldn’t do anything to your folders if you have unchecked “Organize iTunes-Music Folder” and “By adding new music to the library copy it to the iTunes Music folder” (or similar) in the preferences menu.
Just be sure that you don’t move the files after adding them to iTunes, other wise you will get the exclamation mark!
Speaking for me: I love iTunes and the way it handles and keep my music folder organized
iTunes is one of the most unusable pieces of trash available today. My favourite feature is when you ask it to "Sync to my Library" — which will, on occassion, wipe your iPod clean; losing every track you've added to it. Not to mention its revolutionary "update my album details" – which renames all of your tracks to individual numbers and moves them into arbitrary folders. Lovely stuff.