Now that I have a Mac with two 500G hard drives, I’m downloading my cd collection onto one of my drives, via iTunes (6.0.5), and downloading some of the tracks to my iPod.
To put it mildly, iTunes is crap. It has so many bugs in it, and so many limitations, it’s turned into a totally frustrating experience. I suppose it’s ok for someone whose musical taste is limited to pop tunes, and who has a high tolerance for bugs.
So what is an alternative software? Obviously it has to work on a Mac, be compatible with an iPod, and not as buggy and amateurish (kid-friendly and adult-hostile) as iTunes. And it doesn’t have to be free.
I’m curious what you meant by that. In my experience, other software are even worse for non-pop tunes - many don’t even use the “Composer” field of the MP3 header.
And a lot of CDs don’t offer up more detailed info anyway. My Phantom of the Opera Original Cast Recording just lists the Artist as ‘Original London Cast’ or something like that.
No idea what you mean by all your intimations - iTunes has had minimal bugs for me in multiple years of usage, and I certainly don’t find it to be adult-unfriendly. Sorry you’ve had any trouble
I was wondering the same thing. My musical tastes are quite diverse, and I find that iTunes does an excellent job of letting me define genres and build smart playlists using the comment field to define sub-genres. I listen to very little pop, and it seems to work well for me.
One thing I need is the ability to customize the columns. I’d like them to be Composer, Work, Artist, Disk Title, Disk #, Track #, and Time, plus an additional column for miscellaneous codes. In iTunes, the “Name” column has to be first, so I have to actually use that as my “Composer” column. And I can’t override the “disk #” and “track #” columns with my own numbers, replacing the useless “x of x” format.
And when I insert a new cd, why do I have to tell it, each and every time, which columns to show? Why can’t it automatically show my “library” columns?
Ok, with a little creativity, I can work with these limitations, it just means a lot of extra work, retyping everything into different columns.
Another problem is when I have to change something in “Library,” after the cd has already been downloaded. Very often I type an entry, only to have it disappear, or the cursor moves to a different entry entirely. It doesn’t happen most of the time, but enough to be a problem.
And sometimes I can’t eject the disk. And this never happens when I’m not in iTunes. When this happens, the only thing to do is restart (and this is the only time I ever have to restart). But I can’t restart because iTunes won’t quit. It won’t even force quit. I have to shut down the computer with the power switch, and power up again, thereby losing the work I’ve done on that disk.
Either I don’t understand what you mean, or what you are referring to as “bugs” are features in the program that are not obvious to you.
e.g. customizing the columns: I do that by dragging the column titles around to rearrange them in my current view, and by the “Presentation Options” menu command in the Edit menu (n.b. I use iTunes 6.0.5 on the Macintosh and am translating commands from french to english.)
Overriding disk and track number columns: I do this all the time after I have imported the CD into the iTunes music library. Highlight the entry, and use the “info” command from the file menu (command+I on the Macintosh) to edit the fields.
As far as changing columns that display when you insert a new CD, I don’t know if that’s possible. Having the cursor move around when editing entries, and having iTunes refuse to quit - that has never happened to me either, sorry.
Well, if you click on a column title, it sorts by that column. I guess I’m not sure what you mean. The difficult part is that, if you import CDs into iTunes, iTunes automatically pre-fills the fields from the Gracenotes database, and the entries for fields in the Gracenotes database might not correspond to how you think they should be. I spend a lot of time changing the “composer” field for orchestral music when I import a CD.
Seems weird, but going into the console and typing kill -9 iTunes (or whatever the process id of itunes is) should do it. You can use ps -axl to get the process id. (Those are generic Unix commands and they might be slightly different on the Mac.)
We are talking about the columns in the lower half of the screen correct? Having composer there is not all that useful to me. I want to be able to sort through my albums and see which ones are Bach and easily choose one. With iTunes I can only choose by Genre, Artist and Album. The Roku device I have can be set to replace artist with composer for the clasical genre but that is sort of a hack. I realy want to be able to sort by composer. I would really like to find a media player that does a good job with this but so far I have not found one.
Itunes does not have a very good id3 tag editor, most media players don’t, so I use a separate tag editor. Itunes does not have a good way of getting these changes back into it’s own data base. Winamp lets you easily import these changes and I find winamp is easier to use with my ipod.
As with much of Apple’s software if you use itunes in the one or two ways they have spent a lot of time thinking about it is pretty good but if you try something different it doesn’t work all that well.
gazpacho: I use iTunes on the Macintosh. Below the top bar that shows the title of the song being played and the start/stop/pause contgrol buttons, my screen is divided into three parts:
left bar top - shows all my playlists
left bar bottom - a small box (that you can hide) to show the artwork for that song
right side (what I call the main window) - shows a list of songs with a customizable set of fields to display
There is one playlist that shows everything in your library. If you select that playlist, display the composer field, then you can sort by the composer field and find all pieces by that composer. When I do that, it is sorted by composer and then (automatically?) by album title. I wish you could sort by more than one field at a time, but as far as I know, you can’t. Isn’t that what you want when you say “I want to be able to sort through my albums and see which ones are Bach and easily choose one”?
There is also a “comments” field that you can fill in for a song or group of songs. You can use this “comments” field to create “intelligent” playlists - e.g. an “intelligent” playlist finding all entries that say “my favorite bach pieces” in the comment field. Is this similar to the “id3” tag editor you mention?
Arnold I must have my itunes setup differntly than you. The main window is split into a top half and a bottom half. The top half has three columns Genre, Artist and Album. These columns cannot be adjusted or changed. The bottom half has the songs that are in the selected entries from the colums from the top half. I can easily see all the pink floyd songs, for example, because I can select Pink Floyd in the artist column. There is in the upper right coner a eye icon labeld browse. If you click on this it shows or hides the top half I am talking about here.
As for your idea about using additional meta data that is probably a good workaround but it is realy lame that it needs to be done. The songs already have the composer data in them and I would like to use it. You really should be able to quickly sort through things one any of the meta data not just the 3 that you can now.
The main thing is I want to quickly be able to see the albums by composer. I can do this by artist or genre but not composer.
gazpacho, are you using iTunes on the Macintosh or the PC?
If on the PC, do you have an Edit menu? In the Edit menu, there is a “View Options” entry. Try that.
You’re not talking about something you are seeing on the iPod screen, are you? You are talking about using the iTunes application on a desktop computer?
Itunes Version 6.0.4.2 on a PC. The edit view options allows you to add columns in the lower half of the mian window. The lower half of the main window lists songs so there is no easy way to choose the songs from one album via that window. You can add composer and sort all the songs by composer. How do you easily choose the album and have the songs play in the correct order. This can easily be done with one or two clicks by artist but not by composer or any other tag data field.
I use iTunes on a PC and I understand what gazpacho is talking about. The top right panel does indeed have three fixed lists of Genre, Artist, and Album. There appears to be no way on the PC to change this. Underneath this is the song list, which does have customizable columns where you can include the Composer field if desired.
What I do for composers is to set up a smart playlist, where the Composer field contains the name of the desired composer. I usually just set it for the last name, so I don’t have to worry about whether the composer field was set as “Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart”, “W. A. Mozart”, “Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus”, or “Mozart”. Unfortunately, you’ll have to do this for every composer you’re interested in. (Yes, this is lame.)
