With an extra side of geekiness
For a long time MusicMatch was the hands-down best program to store and play one's MP3's but the latest version is a giant pile of crap. I don't know what went wrong they broke it.
I spend 99% of my life on a computer that runs Linux and on that computer I have discovered Amarok which is absolutely the greatest music player ever made. Everything about it is great. Ok, there are one or two little database tweaks that I would recommend (and hopefully are in the works) but otherwise it is awesome.
Unfortunately I run Windows on my desktop computer (for reasons that I won't get into) and that is where I keep my music library. Now that Musicmatch is crap I've been searching far and wide for a decent program to sort and run my library from. None exist. Realplayer sucks in the same ways that Windows Media Player sucks. Which by default led me to Itunes which may be the most frustrating of them all.
My major Itunes complaint is that the first column MUST be songs. You cannot change it. While virtually every other organizational system on earth starts from the smallest and goes to the biggest, Itunes prefers to turn that on its ear. Dumb, dumb, dumb. Let's say I want to hear a particular Ani Difranco song. I happen to have about twenty-two hours of Ani's music which is spread over about 300+ songs and probably twenty albums. If the song I am looking for is 32 Flavors in any other music player I could click on "Ani Difranco and see all her albums. Then I could open "Not a Pretty Girl" and go right to the song. In Itunes I have to look scroll through about three screens worth of shit to find it. With 4500 songs in my library it makes going from Ani to Warren Zevon a real chore. Hasn't Apple ever heard of folders? It makes Itunes virtually useless to me because instead of having maybe a hundred collapsible entries to scroll through (one per artist) I have 4500. But this isn't really the point.
The point is that I'm spoiled by open-source programs. I'm sure that there are thousands of loyal Itunes fans who love the way it sorts music (though I can't imagine why) but I'm equally sure that there are others, like me, who find it to be annoying. Unfortunately the only person whose opinion counts is the designer at Apple who makes those decisions. If Itunes was open-source if enough people hated it somebody would just fix it. That's why Amarok is so great. People saw potential in it and everyone added their own little bit. Now there are tons of variations on how the individual user can make Amarok look and feel and many of the best ones get incorporated into the official releases. Itunes stupid organization wouldn't have lasted three weeks in an open-source universe. Instead it has been years since Itunes first came out and there is still no way for me to make it work the way I want it to. That would never happen in Linux.
Which is why I can't believe everyone doesn't switch. It's free. You can download any one of hundreds of Linux distributions at absolutely no charge and have an entirely new operating system running on your computer in an hour or so. The more people who switch the more the big popular programs that people think they can't live without (but really you can) will be forced to officially support Linux as well. Once that happens then it really is a free for all. Finally we could all have stable software made to order. Or we could just make it ourselves if the desire overcame us. Technology in general, and particularly the Internet, have become the manifestation of a lot of "hippie" ideals about community, free exchange of ideas, etc. Blogs are a great example of that. But they are almost all running on closed-source corporate technology. People are downloading MP3's but are organizing and playing them the way Apple wants them to. Why not just do it the way you want to? Open-source isn't just a way of creating software. It is a way of thinking. It is a way of approaching business, technology, and the future. Helping it grow, and helping yourself to its advantages is totally free. So what are you waiting for?
I spend 99% of my life on a computer that runs Linux and on that computer I have discovered Amarok which is absolutely the greatest music player ever made. Everything about it is great. Ok, there are one or two little database tweaks that I would recommend (and hopefully are in the works) but otherwise it is awesome.
Unfortunately I run Windows on my desktop computer (for reasons that I won't get into) and that is where I keep my music library. Now that Musicmatch is crap I've been searching far and wide for a decent program to sort and run my library from. None exist. Realplayer sucks in the same ways that Windows Media Player sucks. Which by default led me to Itunes which may be the most frustrating of them all.
My major Itunes complaint is that the first column MUST be songs. You cannot change it. While virtually every other organizational system on earth starts from the smallest and goes to the biggest, Itunes prefers to turn that on its ear. Dumb, dumb, dumb. Let's say I want to hear a particular Ani Difranco song. I happen to have about twenty-two hours of Ani's music which is spread over about 300+ songs and probably twenty albums. If the song I am looking for is 32 Flavors in any other music player I could click on "Ani Difranco and see all her albums. Then I could open "Not a Pretty Girl" and go right to the song. In Itunes I have to look scroll through about three screens worth of shit to find it. With 4500 songs in my library it makes going from Ani to Warren Zevon a real chore. Hasn't Apple ever heard of folders? It makes Itunes virtually useless to me because instead of having maybe a hundred collapsible entries to scroll through (one per artist) I have 4500. But this isn't really the point.
The point is that I'm spoiled by open-source programs. I'm sure that there are thousands of loyal Itunes fans who love the way it sorts music (though I can't imagine why) but I'm equally sure that there are others, like me, who find it to be annoying. Unfortunately the only person whose opinion counts is the designer at Apple who makes those decisions. If Itunes was open-source if enough people hated it somebody would just fix it. That's why Amarok is so great. People saw potential in it and everyone added their own little bit. Now there are tons of variations on how the individual user can make Amarok look and feel and many of the best ones get incorporated into the official releases. Itunes stupid organization wouldn't have lasted three weeks in an open-source universe. Instead it has been years since Itunes first came out and there is still no way for me to make it work the way I want it to. That would never happen in Linux.
Which is why I can't believe everyone doesn't switch. It's free. You can download any one of hundreds of Linux distributions at absolutely no charge and have an entirely new operating system running on your computer in an hour or so. The more people who switch the more the big popular programs that people think they can't live without (but really you can) will be forced to officially support Linux as well. Once that happens then it really is a free for all. Finally we could all have stable software made to order. Or we could just make it ourselves if the desire overcame us. Technology in general, and particularly the Internet, have become the manifestation of a lot of "hippie" ideals about community, free exchange of ideas, etc. Blogs are a great example of that. But they are almost all running on closed-source corporate technology. People are downloading MP3's but are organizing and playing them the way Apple wants them to. Why not just do it the way you want to? Open-source isn't just a way of creating software. It is a way of thinking. It is a way of approaching business, technology, and the future. Helping it grow, and helping yourself to its advantages is totally free. So what are you waiting for?