I may have outgrown iTunes...
Hi, my name is Benjamin, and I have way too much music.
585.86 GB of tunes. 107,925 songs. 325 days of music. If I pushed play as the ball dropped on Newyears, the last song in my collection would finish playing some time on November 21st.
When you've got that much music, iTunes has trouble thinking about all of it at once. It probably doesn't help that I have a computer with a not-all-that-huge internal harddrive, so my music is actually stored in a larger-capacity external drive. That means that it stops spinning when it hasn't been used recently (I get to define what "recently" means, and so it shuts down pretty quick after I'm done listening to music, to drastically increase the lifetime of the drive), which means that there's a delay of a handful of seconds the first time I touch the program after I've left it alone for a while. I'm okay with that, but ... the delays get bad.
I'm pretty sure that iTunes just isn't cut out to think about as many songs as I've got in it right now. Most people can sync their iTunes and iPod with no trouble. The biggest iPod they make right now is a 160GB device, which holds about 1/4 of my music. Mine is only 60GB -- I hardly even use it any more, now that my commute is so short! But the inability of iTunes to even let me type in the name of an artist or song for it to search for without a 15-second spinning-wheel-of-potential-doom is kind of frustrating. An update came out recently that showed a marked improvement... but now, as I was doing some stuff today, adding new albums I just bought at a concert last night, it was back to its previous slowness. I wish it scaled up better than this... I'd like to love it as much as I used to.
Today I tried to burn an MP3 cd, and I got an error that all the files I were trying to put on the disc couldn't be put on an MP3 cd because they're not MP3s. (I rip my CDs to a higher-quality compression format called M4A, better sound than MP3.) I thought it would be easy to convince iTunes to do the task anyhow, but it's a completely unnecessarily irritating process:
--Select MP3 as the format iTunes will now import CDs as (even though I don't want to import things as MP3s)
--Select the tracks I want to put on the MP3 CD (That's easy, I made a playlist just to make this easy!)
--Right-click and select "Convert to MP3 format" (Before completing step 1 a moment ago, I could only have converted to the higher-quality M4A format that they are already in!)
--Note that none of the tracks in the playlist are MP3s, they're all the original M4A files
--Go to the album itself in iTunes and note that there are two copies of each track. One's a M4A, one's the newly created MP4. Two copies of track 1, then two copies of track 2.... and not a single thing to indicate the difference between them unless I summon the detailed information on each.
--Note that the MP3 is not reliable in whether it's the first or second copy of each song. *Grrrr...*
--Pick out each individual MP3 copy of the songs I want to burn to CD, and drop them each into a new playlist
--Burn the damned disc.
If I had listed my expectations for how this routine would go, there'd be a couple options.
**I'd be able to convert any tile to any format without having to change my selected format for importing a new CD
**MP3 versions of files that used to be a different format would have a tag on them so at a glance I'd know which was which
**If I got a "These files aren't MP3s!" error when trying to burn an MP3 cd from an otherwise acceptable playlist, there'd be a button to click that would create temporary MP3 format copies of the songs, burn the damned disc, and then throw away the unneeded files. Seriously! Is this such a stretch?
It's sometimes frustrating being a technology engineer saddled with not-as-good-as-I-want-it-to-be technology from one of the companies that advertises itself as one of the best technology companies in the world.
585.86 GB of tunes. 107,925 songs. 325 days of music. If I pushed play as the ball dropped on Newyears, the last song in my collection would finish playing some time on November 21st.
When you've got that much music, iTunes has trouble thinking about all of it at once. It probably doesn't help that I have a computer with a not-all-that-huge internal harddrive, so my music is actually stored in a larger-capacity external drive. That means that it stops spinning when it hasn't been used recently (I get to define what "recently" means, and so it shuts down pretty quick after I'm done listening to music, to drastically increase the lifetime of the drive), which means that there's a delay of a handful of seconds the first time I touch the program after I've left it alone for a while. I'm okay with that, but ... the delays get bad.
I'm pretty sure that iTunes just isn't cut out to think about as many songs as I've got in it right now. Most people can sync their iTunes and iPod with no trouble. The biggest iPod they make right now is a 160GB device, which holds about 1/4 of my music. Mine is only 60GB -- I hardly even use it any more, now that my commute is so short! But the inability of iTunes to even let me type in the name of an artist or song for it to search for without a 15-second spinning-wheel-of-potential-doom is kind of frustrating. An update came out recently that showed a marked improvement... but now, as I was doing some stuff today, adding new albums I just bought at a concert last night, it was back to its previous slowness. I wish it scaled up better than this... I'd like to love it as much as I used to.
Today I tried to burn an MP3 cd, and I got an error that all the files I were trying to put on the disc couldn't be put on an MP3 cd because they're not MP3s. (I rip my CDs to a higher-quality compression format called M4A, better sound than MP3.) I thought it would be easy to convince iTunes to do the task anyhow, but it's a completely unnecessarily irritating process:
--Select MP3 as the format iTunes will now import CDs as (even though I don't want to import things as MP3s)
--Select the tracks I want to put on the MP3 CD (That's easy, I made a playlist just to make this easy!)
--Right-click and select "Convert to MP3 format" (Before completing step 1 a moment ago, I could only have converted to the higher-quality M4A format that they are already in!)
--Note that none of the tracks in the playlist are MP3s, they're all the original M4A files
--Go to the album itself in iTunes and note that there are two copies of each track. One's a M4A, one's the newly created MP4. Two copies of track 1, then two copies of track 2.... and not a single thing to indicate the difference between them unless I summon the detailed information on each.
--Note that the MP3 is not reliable in whether it's the first or second copy of each song. *Grrrr...*
--Pick out each individual MP3 copy of the songs I want to burn to CD, and drop them each into a new playlist
--Burn the damned disc.
If I had listed my expectations for how this routine would go, there'd be a couple options.
**I'd be able to convert any tile to any format without having to change my selected format for importing a new CD
**MP3 versions of files that used to be a different format would have a tag on them so at a glance I'd know which was which
**If I got a "These files aren't MP3s!" error when trying to burn an MP3 cd from an otherwise acceptable playlist, there'd be a button to click that would create temporary MP3 format copies of the songs, burn the damned disc, and then throw away the unneeded files. Seriously! Is this such a stretch?
It's sometimes frustrating being a technology engineer saddled with not-as-good-as-I-want-it-to-be technology from one of the companies that advertises itself as one of the best technology companies in the world.