iTunes - awful

am i the only one in thinking that portable cd players are still fashionable?

 

Good software is software that does a given job in a fast, stable, efficient manner. For me, iTunes is bloatware, its not fast, to me, its not efficient (foobar and winamp far better IMO), and according to another ipod owning colleague, its not particularly stable for him either.

In fact to me, it seems like a nice interface to tempt you to buy their music, and frankly if you dont do this, then most of it seems pointless.

I'll stick to organising my own music, I dont need software to decide for me how its done... as I said before, if you started from scratch with iTunes, it might make sense, but I didnt...

 

Nope - I still use one and playlists consist of maybe 30 seconds grabbing CDs and putting in my bag.

I'm sorely tempted by an iPod Nano though...

 

Not here either, ive never invested in an mp3 player, I either grab cds put in bag or play through pc, easy as pie, I also dont see the point in paying nearly(or more than £100 for something that plays music when i can have exactly the same thing for twenty or less and ten times less hassle

 

i bought a nano last month and its been excellent, i have had a few problems with itunes though, i also went through a number of upgrades which resulted in the installation changing languages without asking me from english to swedish! even though the install from cd was in english, odd and quite annoying!

 

The planet you live on sounds interesting.

Back here on earth, carrying around 100+ CDs in a bag and have to swap them around all the time is a lot more hassle than carrying around something that fits in your pocket.

Michael.

 

I'd agree 100% with regards to the usability of an ipod vs a cd player, in terms of actually listening to music, but for some people the process of installing itunes, plugging the ipod in, ripping their cds and so forth represents something of a technical challenge not matched by the difficulty involved in carrying and swapping a cd over now and then!

Having recently been educating my mum to use a computer for various things (including using an mp3 player), whilst it seems hard for us relatively technophiles to comprehend people finding an mp3 player difficult to use, I can assure you some people find the whole thing harder to learn and use than you'd imagine

 

Once its set up though, its definitely less hassle. If my parents can do it, anyone can

 

recording music from a cd library onto an alternative storage device like a portable mp3 player always reminds me of the meetings I used to have at my old employers.....

every meeting, someone would get the thankless task typing up all of the hand written minutes of the meeting and emailing them to everyone.

It was just putting the same information in a more easily readible and storable format.

It was a bollock-boring job, and I'd have been just as happy with a photocopy of the persons handwriting.

To really get into digitally stored music, you've got to have something of the librarian about you IMO Its just putting something you already have into a new format.

I get about as excited about storing music digitally as I did about replacing all my LPs with CDs.

At the end of the day, you're either a techy-logically-minded-everything-in-little-boxes sort of bloke, or a messy-bone idle-I've-already-got-the-music-so-why-should-I-fanny-about type.

thats my take on it anyway

 

What ever ones opinion of iTunes, where you have legally imported music it should organise it for you very logically, i.e. if you decided to move to something else you will find all that music beautifully organised in respective folders in the itunes music folder.

However iTunes has been ported to an already heavily populated software area, and other software clearly does not take as much care, or presumably Paul would not have had the issues with untagged music etc that he has had.

As I said earlier, once settled I think Paul will like it. I have itunes on the main mac and use remote access from my lap top to get it started up through the HIFI, I can then start a playlist and keep adding to it as the music is playing, great for get togethers or when I frankly can't be arsed to play with CDs and Records all night.

 

Gary, I think part of the problem is, a lot of my tracks are actually DJ sets, so as you say, not a lot of care is probably taken with tagging, etc... but as I have so many files, making sure they are all uniformly tagged is, as bottleneck says, a boring, time consuming task that I've just never bothered with - and the software i've traditionally used doesn't really care if its tagged or not.

Like I say, if you start with nothing, and import your CDs into it, chances are it works well, but i doubt i'll ever get round to putting in the required amount of work.

 

Excuse my ignorance but if they are not tagged how does other software know what they are, or do all your DJ sets just say untitled or what ever?

 

It usually just uses the filename, which is pretty much always correct.

 

Dont worry Paul, you're not alone. I installed itunes, and then promptly uninstalled it a day or so later. Horrible piece of software in so many ways. And as for 26 million people being wrong, thats easy - many more than that voted for Bush and you dont get much more wrong than that.