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Chuck Wintle
10-20-2011, 5:31 PM
Am I the only one who thinks this program is a major pain? After trying to sync files, get artwork etc it just seems this program was designed by a sadist who wants to make someones life miserable. Is there some trick to making it work properly?

Eric DeSilva
10-20-2011, 6:25 PM
I haven't had any problems getting my various gens of iPods/iPads/iPhones to sync files... I generally sync only a specific music folder, however, to avoid having it try to sync the whole library. Takes a while, but I think that is probably the fault of the USB connection to the device, not iT.

What is the issue you have with artwork? I usually run a google image search on a CD while it is being imported into iT. Once I find a good image (I'm picky; usually aim for something 500x500 with minimal jpg compression artifacts), I select all the imported tracks, select "get info" and drag and drop the picture into the frame.

My complaints are more along the lines that iT is pretty bloated and has all sorts of stuff I can't turn off and ignore. At this point, I just use it for syncing my devices and ripping/tagging. Since my library is pretty huge and located on a network drive, iT isn't the most responsive program on the planet, but it seems pretty reliable.

Chuck Wintle
10-20-2011, 6:49 PM
Eric,

I have noticed that for whatever reason it will split an album into 4 or 5 or 6 parts. Researching that supposedly the tags are not the same so this is the reason but in carefully looking at the tags there seems to be no difference so i cannot fathom why it does this. Very annoying.

Greg Portland
10-20-2011, 7:07 PM
If you are importing or purchasing with itunes then the program is great. If you're using other rippers then yes, the ID3 tags and album images don't always work 100%. I hacked my ipod to use Rockbox instead so I'm free from all of the Apple program requirements (there are also 3rd party programs for loading a stock iPod).

Greg Portland
10-20-2011, 7:08 PM
Also, I find dbpoweramp to give me the best meta data (tags) with my rips + the rip quality is excellent.

Jim Koepke
10-20-2011, 8:29 PM
Gee, I just use iTunes to get stuff off of a CD and put on other CDs to play in the car or load into the iPod so I can listen to it on the radio in the shop of car.

Din't know I was supposed to have any problems.

jtk

curtis rosche
10-20-2011, 8:46 PM
be careful when accepting the terms and conditions. watch the south park episode for refrence :D:p:D:p

Tim Morton
10-20-2011, 8:54 PM
be careful when accepting the terms and conditions. watch the south park episode for refrence :D:p:D:p

that was a great episode...:D:p:D:p

Lloyd Kerry
10-20-2011, 9:31 PM
I don't think iTunes is nearly as intuitive or user-friendly as Apple would leave people to believe (I've heard dire warnings about downloaded updates and people losing their entire libraries). And as much as I admired Steve Jobs, I don't think technology will cease to change...

curtis rosche
10-20-2011, 9:58 PM
yes. yes it was. i love how relevant some of their episodes are

Shawn Pixley
10-20-2011, 10:01 PM
I have never experinced any issues with iTunes. My library is >5,000 songs and >20 gb synched to iPad, 2 iPhones and an original IPod nano. Never experienced a problem. Most are ripped from CD's or vinyl but some are purchased from iTunes. The iTunes library has been transfered and syched across several computers - mostly macs but one PC. I think it is incredibly intuitive and easy to use in my experience.

Bryan Morgan
10-20-2011, 10:31 PM
Am I the only one who thinks this program is a major pain? After trying to sync files, get artwork etc it just seems this program was designed by a sadist whi want to make someone life miserable. Is there some trick to making it work properly?

Uninstall that bloated useless nonsense and use sharepod or yamipod or any of the other more useful and reliable programs. While iTunes works more or less ok on a Mac, it is a disaster on the PC. We had to designate a computer we call "the icrap" that we had to put itunes on to setup the ipads we give to our sales people. It basically just sits there and gets cussed at whenever we have to use it. Doesn't get used for anything else.

If you use it for buying music know that you can get songs a lot cheaper from gomusicnow without any DRM or anything... just plain old MP3s you can copy wherever you want.

Eric DeSilva
10-20-2011, 10:39 PM
Couple possibilities come to mind--is the artist the same? There are compilation albums with multiple artists that it will file as different albums unless you check the box "Part of a compilation". If you have an album, say like a best of Gram Parsons where it might also have tracks by the Flying Burrito Bros., you also have to treat that as a compilation.

If you still have issues, there may be minor variations in the album title or something. In that case, select all the songs that belong to an album, right click, select "get info", and then either edit the album fields (not track specific fields like track name or number) like artist, album and make sure the box next to the entry is checked. Then it will apply that field to all of the selected songs. That should help. In some ways, with soloists and the like, classical tagging is a real art of its own.

Eric DeSilva
10-20-2011, 10:43 PM
Greg, the reason iTunes works better with iTMS music or stuff you've ripped in iTunes is because tags are sort of misunderstood. Take MP3s--FLAC is even worse--the tags that different players recognize are not really standardized. So the data isn't necessarily stored in the song file (and therefore portable), but rather in a database unique to the program you are using. Even in iTunes, there are things--last played, rating--that exist only as data in the XML file that is the library. Those aren't really tags, so there is no real way of cross exporting/importing those to other players. Even the things that are supposed to be standardized really aren't. FLAC is horrible in that respect, and that is why I don't use it.

Eric DeSilva
10-20-2011, 10:51 PM
While I'll agree it is sort of bloated, I've used iTunes on a PC for probably 10 years without any real issues. It is there, it works, and I'd hardly call it useless. The ripper in iTunes is, as far as I'm concerned, second only to EAC and EAC is a horrendous pain to apply tags too. The keys, as far as I'm concerned, are not letting iTunes manage the library and only letting it sync a particular folder per device for music.

Frankly, I really dislike the cult of Apple, but even as a nonbeliever, I tend to think iTunes does a decent job for what it is. I've used other players and taggers, and iTunes tends to misplace things far less than any other program I've interacted with. And I've got a rather large and unusual setup--20,000 songs in ALAC on a NAS with the libraries on the NAS and with iT syncing to two iPhones, an iPod and an iPad 2.

Eric DeSilva
10-20-2011, 10:54 PM
The dire warnings you've heard are from people that apparently don't know what they are doing. iTunes may wipe the library file, but you have to do something pretty extraordinary to wipe the files that are the individual mp3s, AACs, or ALACs that make up the music. I used to nuke the library file and reimport everything on a fairly regular basis in the early days--I was using different players and rearranging things a lot. If the song files are there, they can be reimported into iTunes. Upgrading iTunes doesn't affect the song files, just the software that is the player.

Jamie Buxton
10-21-2011, 12:09 AM
It certainly is fragile on my PC. It'll hang up or crash way more than any modern program should. Specifically, it crashes if I delete a track it is playing. And it will hang up if it can't make contact with the big server in the sky.

John Coloccia
10-21-2011, 4:21 AM
My wife and I were talking about this just the other day. It's absolutely astonishing how awful iTunes is, especially compared to everything else Apple does. It's confusing, it's quirky, it's buggy and it's not organized in anyway that makes the least bit of sense. It's just a random collection of poorly designed features and bugs.

Chuck Wintle
10-21-2011, 7:44 AM
My wife and I were talking about this just the other day. It's absolutely astonishing how awful iTunes is, especially compared to everything else Apple does. It's confusing, it's quirky, it's buggy and it's not organized in anyway that makes the least bit of sense. It's just a random collection of poorly designed features and bugs.

gotta agree with that. Last night I decided to really try to make it work and, in a roundabout fashion, it works well except the logic of the program is very screwy. For instance if you put songs in the default directory they just don't simply show up, they have to be imported and this is what throws most PC users. also for artwork, again, the same thing. Now having gotten used to its features(pronounced bugs) its less formidable. However other programs doing the same job work so well and in a straightforward fashion iTunes pales in comparison.

Anthony Whitesell
10-21-2011, 8:10 AM
If you use iTunes exclusively, ignore everything else, don't worry about what it does or where it puts things. You're fine. If you're a computer power user, like to back things up, used to doing things with brute force, or have an organization already of your files; then integrrating iTunes is miserable. I'm in the second category. I hate the program. It's hard to get things into it. It's hard to figure out where it put things on the hard drive, and uses the databse names instead of the file names once you do manage to import the music into it.

I think the description of "a random collection of poorly designed features and bugs" is very suitable. Great idea, bad implementation. Makes me wonder how much the governement was involved.

Eric DeSilva
10-21-2011, 9:35 AM
I am a little baffled by the hatred of iT. I am a power user. I built the computer iT runs on. I hack things all the time. Not only is my music on a NAS running RAID 5, I routinely back that up on other drives. I manage my own folder structure for iT. At times, I've run multiple iT libraries. I've built macros to translate iT playlists to playlists that can be understood by squeezecenter (problem relates to mounted drives and server addressing, not iT). I've written software to dissect the iT XML files for the library to rearrange data for other programs and things I want to do. I have used a wide range of other programs--EAC, dbpoweramp, foobar, a host of taggers, and a variety of server software for music distribution. I put my music into a folder structure that is simple--Drive:\Lossless_Music\Artist\Album\TrkNo--TrkName. I've never had a problem importing music--import folder, point at Drive:\Lossless_Music, walk away. I think iT's smart playlists are a huge boon for managing large libraries, and I find the genius system actually quite useful. iT never crashes on me and the only issues I've really got with it is the poor integration for scrobbling off players for Last.fm. But that is probably as much Last.fm's issue as anyone else's.

I'll admit I do little to nothing with iT through the iTMS, nor do I ever use it for video. I'll also admit that classical tag management is horrendous, but that doesn't seem to be to be an iT issue, that seems to be a universal problem with a lack of standards on how to define things like "artist" in the classical context. And I will say that I find myself in a very strange position defending iT, since I typically am not a fan of Apple computers. I don't think iT is the end all or be all, but I have yet to understand why people hate it so much. For me, it is stable, does what it is supposed to, and is intuitive. Yeah, it is odd that the settings are under Edit->Preferences, but that doesn't strike me as a showstopper. Maybe I'm too close to it and have been using it for too long or something. Or just really lucky.

Jason Roehl
10-21-2011, 10:24 AM
My wife and I were talking about this just the other day. It's absolutely astonishing how awful iTunes is, especially compared to everything else Apple does. It's confusing, it's quirky, it's buggy and it's not organized in anyway that makes the least bit of sense. It's just a random collection of poorly designed features and bugs.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who thinks this way.

One of the first things I noticed that is (IMHO) stupid is all the clickable text--it doesn't LOOK like a button or link, nor does it change with a mouseover. FAIL in my book.

Eric, I'm glad you find it useful, but from your description, you are in the upper echelons of power users, not the average computer/internet/iDevice user. I'm sure I could, given enough screen time, figure all that out, but I don't spend all day in front of the computer, nor do I have time to. That's why I got an iPhone--it just works and is intuitive. Just a very stark contrast to the junk that is known as iTunes. It's as if they subcontracted its coding out to the folks who wrote Windows ME.

Derek Gilmer
10-21-2011, 10:41 AM
iTunes is like most apple products to me. What it does is what Apple wants it to do exactly. And it does that VERY well. If that matches what you want good. If not too bad. They don't make things flexible and expandable like a lot of other software packages. Apple has had that model since early on and I don't see them changing. Especially when they are one of the most profitable companies around.

That said, iTunes to me is a resource hog, has a horrible store interface and is very limited. But I'm not an "apple kinda guy". I like tinkering with Linux/Android and making my stuff do what I want. My home pc is usually booted to linux and occasionally to windows (like now) when I need specific software for work.

John Coloccia
10-21-2011, 10:58 AM
Eric: would you pay for iTunes? I'm about to pay $20 or so to upgrade iMovies because it's a good product, but I tell you that I would not pay one, thin penny for iTunes. I would be surprised to find anyone that thinks it's good enough to pay for and if so, how much they think it's worth.

Eric DeSilva
10-21-2011, 11:23 AM
Yeah, I'd probably give them $20, but largely because I can't think of anything else that does what it does and works as well for me. For example, for almost all functions, I get check box integration through iTunes with SqueezeCenter. No other music players give me that...

But then again, maybe I'm just soft in the head--I paid Adobe over a grand for the CS5 Master Suite. Hmm... Maybe that's the problem. I'm so used to dealing with the horrifically impenetrable Adobe interfaces that anything else seems easy.

Matt Meiser
10-21-2011, 3:56 PM
My complaints are that it seems pretty print to lockups and they don't like to let you manage the file location. I recently replaced our Windows Home Server and getting iTunes updated to point to the new music folder from three PCs was by far the worst part. But it generally does what it's supposed to we currently have an iPad, 2 iPhones, an iPod Classic, and an iPod Nano which will be getting upgraded to a Touch at Christmas and it is nice that all work the same and everyone is able to manage their devices themselves.

Eric DeSilva
10-21-2011, 5:30 PM
My complaints are that it seems pretty print to lockups and they don't like to let you manage the file location.

Song files or database location? If you are in a PC environment, hold down the shift when you launch and you can tell it to create a library anywhere you want (also useful if you want to manage two different libraries; I used to have an AAC library to sync to my portable devices and an ALAC library for home listening). My NAS share folder for music is mounted as Z:\, and there is a folder under that for my iTunes and a separate folder for my wife's iTunes database. In theory, although I haven't tried, that also should mean that I can use the same library from different PCs, which could be handy.

I realize I'm now proving the point that some of this is non-intuitive; I don't think the multiple library thing is documented anywhere.

Derek Gilmer
10-21-2011, 5:36 PM
My complaints are that it seems pretty print to lockups and they don't like to let you manage the file location. I recently replaced our Windows Home Server and getting iTunes updated to point to the new music folder from three PCs was by far the worst part. But it generally does what it's supposed to we currently have an iPad, 2 iPhones, an iPod Classic, and an iPod Nano which will be getting upgraded to a Touch at Christmas and it is nice that all work the same and everyone is able to manage their devices themselves.

As long as you don't tell iTunes to consolidate or manage your library for you this should be pretty easy. I got a new pc at work and had to install the latest iTunes. I have music in 3 places. All I had to do was do File -> add folder to library for each one. From then on all the media in each place was added.

And on Windows 7/Vista if you add each folder to the "My Music" library then add My Music to itunes it should get all three I think. I hate Win7/Vista libraries and avoid them.

Larry Browning
10-21-2011, 5:51 PM
I know that not too many people share my view on this, but "I" pretty much avoid anything that starts with "i", ipod, ipad, and especially iphone. iTunes falls in that category for sure. I think it is mostly because I am a diehard Windows person or maybe my age. It seems like anything Apple makes is anti-intuitive to me. I have been issued an iphone by my employer and I absolutely HATE the thing! I can't figure out how to do anything on it. It has gotten to the point that all I do with it is answer it when it rings, and look at my email. I don't make calls or (God forbid) text on it. I also think a phone should be a phone and nothing else. The iphone is not a very good phone at all! It's should be called iaggravation. It probably has to do with my age.
Please don't try to persuade me to change and "see the light", it won't work. Too many bad experiences to ever turn me around. I actually "like" hating the "i".

Kevin W Johnson
10-21-2011, 11:00 PM
My wife and I were talking about this just the other day. It's absolutely astonishing how awful iTunes is, especially compared to everything else Apple does. It's confusing, it's quirky, it's buggy and it's not organized in anyway that makes the least bit of sense. It's just a random collection of poorly designed features and bugs.

I agree. My very first experience with itunes was trying to help a niece when she got an ipod one Christmas. I vowed I'd never buy one, and I've kept my word. In fact, it's an Apple free house here.....

Chuck Wintle
10-22-2011, 8:05 AM
Update....one problem with iTunes is albums are sometimes split up into 2 or more parts.
Even with careful editing of tags nothing worked(for me at least) to merge the album. So a workaround was found.

1)In iTunes delete the album from the music library but select "keep tracks".

2)Install foobar2000, if you don't have it already. Select all the music tracks in the folder and play all in Foobar

3)In Foobar select all the tracks, right mouse click...properties and edit tags that should be the same but show multiple values (this is the cause of the problem).

4)Close foobar.

5)in iTunes re-import album. The album should be altogether now!

It worked for me! Note: This is using a PC running Windows 7

Greg Peterson
10-22-2011, 10:52 AM
It seems like anything Apple makes is anti-intuitive to me.

This has been my experience too. It took my several minutes to figure how to work the iPod Nano scroll wheel when I picked it up out of curiosity at the Apple store.

I am generally comfortable on a Mac these days but find their keyboard short cuts often times require three key combinations whereas the same command in windows is usually a two key combo. OsX seems to be mouse centric. File navigation seems very primitive too, but I have not invested any time into trying see if there is an easier way. As a result I don't nest files too deeply on the Apple.

As someone that spends hours at a time verbally (click on the picture and drag it to the document. No, put the pointer on the picture, click, do not release the mouse, and then drag the image to the document. This is not an exaggeration) guiding a user through the production of marketing materials, don't get me started on Apple's clever, intuitive use of TWO delete keys.

As for iTunes, I don't let it synch anything. I click and drag (...put the pointer on the file, click, do not release the mouse, and then drag the file down to the device...) what I want on my nano.

Jim Koepke
10-22-2011, 12:45 PM
What drives me nuts in all of this... it seems every time I get used to doing something in a particular way some software engineer decides it shouldn't be that way and changes everything and charges us a $100 to buy into the frustration.

just my

210859

jtk

David Keller NC
10-22-2011, 1:57 PM
Like Eric, I am an extreme power user (for someone whose day job is not as an IT professional). I build my own systems, won't hesitate to use a program in ways it was not intended for, and write my own software on occasion.

What I'd say about this is some of the complaints about Apple's products and the software that they run lacks a bit of historical perspective. I'm old enough to have purchased a Commodore 64 as my first hobbyist machine, remember "trash-80's" (not so fondly), and ran FORTRAN on IBM 3036's.

In other words, I'm ancient, and have been messing with PCs since the origin of the term.

One has to remember the huge war of philosophies going on in the computer world between IBM, Microsoft, and Apple. Essentially, Apple wanted to make their devices/software idiot-proof, and IBM/Microsoft wanted to prohibit idiots from using computers. A whole heck of a lot of folks do not remember that Apple was the first company to decide that it never wanted users to have to type a command into a prompt with exact syntax, nor did they want their users to be able to incorrectly type something into that prompt and have it erase their valuable documents, or possibly their operating system. It is true that Apple didn't invent the graphical user interface, but they would be correctly credited with making it a viable commercial product.

To Bil Gate's eternal credit, he "got" that he was going to lose this war, and lose it badly. So out came Windoze. It wasn't until Windoze 3.1 that it was actually a functional OS interface on the hardware that was available, and it wasn't until Windoze 95 that it was actually usable.

During this whole battle, standards for the way GUI-enabled programs should work were developed. Not intentionally developed, mind you, but developed nevertheless. Windoze to this day has undocumented function key shortcuts that were ripped right from the Mac OS - "Ctrl C" and "Ctrl V" are good examples. While I rather doubt Steve Jobs would admit this if he were around, Apple also incorporated elements and conventions of Windoze into their operating systems as well.

But the "coming together" wasn't by any means complete, and Apple's market share of the computing and device world were quite tiny even as recently as 8 years ago. Many of the conventions of Microsoft's wildly popular MS Office programs and Windoze were incorporated into the World Wide Web and browsers, because that was what most users were familiar with and expected.

So fast forward to today - Apple won the fight, battle and war over "idiot-proof" vs. "ban the idiots". Their two signature devices, the iPod and the iPhone are unbelievably popular. Their profitability curve makes even Google look like a piker. But all of this happened very, very suddenly on the scale of corporate development.

So you have a tremendous number of new users of their devices, software, computers and what-not, but (and this is the key to the whole post): Apple retained their conventions. What that means to a long-term Mac user is that their programs like iTunes and the like couldn't be more intuitive. For those of us that use Windoze and a PC and before the iPod, and didn't have any use for any of Apple's products, almost none of the way the program behaves when manipulated corresponds to what we expect.

Add to this the iconoclast, rebellious child of the 60's nature of Steve Jobs (and Johnny Ives, for that matter), and you've a company that doesn't really care that us old guard that are used to Windoze and the WWW are confused or irritated by the way their software and gizmos work.

The funny (in an ironic sort of way) is that, like most people that went to grad shool prior to the 2000's, I was steeped in Macintosh culture. Enough so that I bought an SE-30, and then a Power-PC based Mac. So I had a deep appreciation for Mac, and a deep disdain for Microsoft's early implementation of Windoze. But it's all I use now - through at least 5 generations of PCs that I've built.

And like most on this thread, I find the way the iPod and iPhone works to be counter-intuitive and frustrating. But I know where that comes from - it's that I gave up Macs a long time ago and developed the expectations of a PC user.

Phil Thien
10-22-2011, 2:46 PM
iTunes is what keeps me away from more apple gadgets.

Chuck Wintle
10-22-2011, 5:58 PM
I am a little baffled by the hatred of iT. I'll also admit that classical tag management is horrendous
Eric,
It is not so much a hatred of Apple or iTunes in my case. Over the past few days i have grown used to it and can now make it do what i want which was the issue for m in the first place. As for tag management it completely misses the mark...so I use another program to edit tags and make sure its all correct then import the album to itunes.

Bryan Morgan
10-23-2011, 4:01 PM
What drives me nuts in all of this... it seems every time I get used to doing something in a particular way some software engineer decides it shouldn't be that way and changes everything and charges us a $100 to buy into the frustration.

You speak the truth here. Add to it that they are pressured by the money grubbers in charge to release products that aren't even finished yet or not thoroughly tested and you have a recipe for disaster. When I hear of software companies struggling or going out of business I no longer have any sympathy. Even the programmers I am forced to work with sometimes are not of the quality of programmers from "back in the day".