The iTunes rant
As I've mentioned recently, we're about to get new phones, as our current contract has expired and we'd like modern devices with more features than just 'make and accept calls.' As part of my research I've created a spreadsheet with all the phones currently available that meet a basic requirement or two (large screen, 3G,) and a few that aren't available yet, for comparison. There's only one phone currently remaining in the 'Possibilities' section, because all others have been rejected for lack of something necessary. That phone is the new iPhone 3G, available on July 11th.
In anticipation of probably getting it, I decided to install iTunes and check it out, to try buying some music and see how it all works. Well, the buying part was simple and easy. I liked that, though I wasn't able to right-click a song and convert it to mp3 like my friend at work who has an iPhone can do. Perhaps that's only a function on the phone and not on the version that gets installed on a computer? If that's the case, I guess I'll have to buy a separate converter, though I don't like that idea.
My biggest problem is the way iTunes appears to want me to deal with my music.
To give you an idea of why this bothers me so much, let's start with a description of how I've managed my sound files ever since I started storing them on my computer.
On one of my hard drives, I have a folder called Music. Inside that folder are more folders that contain various genres, like Celtic, Pop, Funny, Audio Books, Podcats, etc. Inside each of those folders are folders named for the artists they contain. Inside the artist's folder there's a folder for each album which contains the audio files and whatever else is needed.
For example, one path looks like this:
Music
[+] Celtic
[+] Capercaillie
[+] Delirum
And inside that Delirium folder is one mp3 for each song, plus album art and my winamp playlist .m3u file.
When I want to listen to some music, I generally open my music folder, peruse the genres, decide what I feel like listening to, see what's availble in that folder, and after choosing what to listen to I either drag the playlist file into winamp (which I like best and have been using since the late 90's,) or drag the files directly, if it's not the kind of thing that comes in an album (several weeks worth of the Sci-Friday podcast, for example.)
When I move files to my (crappy, tiny, off-brand) mp3 player, I generally choose what I specifically want to hear for the few hours that the device will hold, and once again drag that stuff over by hand, knowing exactly what I'm getting and where it's going.
In all these cases, all I need is windows explorer (which lets me see my file structure,) my player of choice and my mp3 device.
When I loaded iTunes up, I figured I'd let it do its thing to detect what I have and set it up the way it thinks is best. Apparently, genre tagging is hugely important in iTunes. So much so that you can't hardly manage anything without every tag on every file being exactly right. Tags have almost never flown above my radar before, because they haven't been needed. My files are organized already. In the case of iTunes, some of the songs from the same album aren't even tagged the same way, so I have to manually adjust them. And for some albums, files that all belong in the same one are scattered across several identically-named album entries, and there's no way to drag them to where they're supposed to go.
I like the three views of music available from the top right or so of the window, but there's one thing I don't think I can forgive in an application that's supposed to be your music management system: there is no way to create subfolders under the various nav options in the upper left. All I can do is create playlists, which is a gigantic duplication of effort. I already have all my files arranged on my hard drive as I want to see them. I can't even fathom how long it might take me to recreate everything in iTunes playlists, and I shouldn't have to.
If it's not going to detect this stuff on its own, I should be able to create subfolders under each of those nav options in the upper left and drag folders from windows explorer into each one. For example, under the Podcasts nav (which, btw, doesn't display soundfiles tagged as podcasts, only ones you're actually managing with iTunes) I'd create subfolders like 'Food', 'NPR', 'Writing' and 'Gaming' to hold what already exists in folders named like that on my hard drive. My iTunes 'library' should give me the ability to mimic that structure exactly.
I can't imagine that I'm the only one who deals with sound files this way, and finds iTunes completely non-intuitive. Why would anyone NOT want to filter their content for easier viewing?
I haven't even gotten to the whole syncing aspect yet, as the phones aren't out and there isn't one in my hand, but I have the feeling that I'm not going to like it either. I want to specify exactly what I want on the device, since I have more content than will fit into 8 gigs, and I'm going to want to move things on and off as I see fit. (I think the manual option will allow this, but I need to look into it further.)
Even though, based on my requirements, the iPhone looks to be the best one, I'm having giant red flashing second thoughts and wondering if I should go with something not quite as good to avoid this iTunes crap. I use my mp3 player at the gym five nights a week now, and I've been looking forward to getting a new phone with the ability to play videos too. But now I'm starting to wonder if something that uses Windows Media Player (which I don't use, but looks closer to what I think is required functionality) might be better.
And I've also started poking around to see what alternatives exist out there, and a couple have caught my eye. How well they work is another question, of course.
In anticipation of probably getting it, I decided to install iTunes and check it out, to try buying some music and see how it all works. Well, the buying part was simple and easy. I liked that, though I wasn't able to right-click a song and convert it to mp3 like my friend at work who has an iPhone can do. Perhaps that's only a function on the phone and not on the version that gets installed on a computer? If that's the case, I guess I'll have to buy a separate converter, though I don't like that idea.
My biggest problem is the way iTunes appears to want me to deal with my music.
To give you an idea of why this bothers me so much, let's start with a description of how I've managed my sound files ever since I started storing them on my computer.
On one of my hard drives, I have a folder called Music. Inside that folder are more folders that contain various genres, like Celtic, Pop, Funny, Audio Books, Podcats, etc. Inside each of those folders are folders named for the artists they contain. Inside the artist's folder there's a folder for each album which contains the audio files and whatever else is needed.
For example, one path looks like this:
Music
[+] Celtic
[+] Capercaillie
[+] Delirum
And inside that Delirium folder is one mp3 for each song, plus album art and my winamp playlist .m3u file.
When I want to listen to some music, I generally open my music folder, peruse the genres, decide what I feel like listening to, see what's availble in that folder, and after choosing what to listen to I either drag the playlist file into winamp (which I like best and have been using since the late 90's,) or drag the files directly, if it's not the kind of thing that comes in an album (several weeks worth of the Sci-Friday podcast, for example.)
When I move files to my (crappy, tiny, off-brand) mp3 player, I generally choose what I specifically want to hear for the few hours that the device will hold, and once again drag that stuff over by hand, knowing exactly what I'm getting and where it's going.
In all these cases, all I need is windows explorer (which lets me see my file structure,) my player of choice and my mp3 device.
When I loaded iTunes up, I figured I'd let it do its thing to detect what I have and set it up the way it thinks is best. Apparently, genre tagging is hugely important in iTunes. So much so that you can't hardly manage anything without every tag on every file being exactly right. Tags have almost never flown above my radar before, because they haven't been needed. My files are organized already. In the case of iTunes, some of the songs from the same album aren't even tagged the same way, so I have to manually adjust them. And for some albums, files that all belong in the same one are scattered across several identically-named album entries, and there's no way to drag them to where they're supposed to go.
I like the three views of music available from the top right or so of the window, but there's one thing I don't think I can forgive in an application that's supposed to be your music management system: there is no way to create subfolders under the various nav options in the upper left. All I can do is create playlists, which is a gigantic duplication of effort. I already have all my files arranged on my hard drive as I want to see them. I can't even fathom how long it might take me to recreate everything in iTunes playlists, and I shouldn't have to.
If it's not going to detect this stuff on its own, I should be able to create subfolders under each of those nav options in the upper left and drag folders from windows explorer into each one. For example, under the Podcasts nav (which, btw, doesn't display soundfiles tagged as podcasts, only ones you're actually managing with iTunes) I'd create subfolders like 'Food', 'NPR', 'Writing' and 'Gaming' to hold what already exists in folders named like that on my hard drive. My iTunes 'library' should give me the ability to mimic that structure exactly.
I can't imagine that I'm the only one who deals with sound files this way, and finds iTunes completely non-intuitive. Why would anyone NOT want to filter their content for easier viewing?
I haven't even gotten to the whole syncing aspect yet, as the phones aren't out and there isn't one in my hand, but I have the feeling that I'm not going to like it either. I want to specify exactly what I want on the device, since I have more content than will fit into 8 gigs, and I'm going to want to move things on and off as I see fit. (I think the manual option will allow this, but I need to look into it further.)
Even though, based on my requirements, the iPhone looks to be the best one, I'm having giant red flashing second thoughts and wondering if I should go with something not quite as good to avoid this iTunes crap. I use my mp3 player at the gym five nights a week now, and I've been looking forward to getting a new phone with the ability to play videos too. But now I'm starting to wonder if something that uses Windows Media Player (which I don't use, but looks closer to what I think is required functionality) might be better.
And I've also started poking around to see what alternatives exist out there, and a couple have caught my eye. How well they work is another question, of course.