Ok. I took the plunge. I’m going to switch from winamp to Itunes. However when I booted up Itunes it says it can arrange my files for me. Anyone use this before? How well does it work? I’m afraid it’s going to screw my files up.
My library is easily 5000 songs. Some sorted, some not.
This is the handiest way to use iTunes. It won’t screw your files up, but it will duplicate them, so you’d better have enough disk space. It uses its own iTunes folder (you can change the location of this before importing in the Preferences pane), and creates a directory structure based on the songs’ ID tags - first by artist, then by album. If there’s no ID tag it calls the folder “unknown album” and “unknown artist” respectively.
Doh. I don’t have the space for that. Danke.
now… anyone willing to buy me an ipod to go with my itunes? 
ahh, what the hell is this “analyzing” it’s doing? Itunes is eating half my cpu power!
Not entirely sure.
I think actually there’s a way of importing in situ, but I’m not terribly familiar with it.
My god, I think it’s the sound volume attenuation thing.
So, anyone have any tips for itunes?
I love the iTunes self-organizing myself. It does it far more faithfully than I know I could ever.
It’s been a while since I set myself up, but I do believe that there is an option to *move *your existing files rather than make *copies *when you set iTunes to organize your existing library.
The analyzing, if I’m thinking if the right thing might be because you have the volume leveller set to “on”, which may be the default. What its doing is looking at the levels of all your songs to find the maximum high and the maximum low so it can play everything back at the same volume. Again, this may be a default setting. Personally I don’t use it because I have a lot of songs of varying quality and I find it tends to ‘dumb down’ my high quality stuff to bring it on par with the low quality stuff. ymmv.
One bit of advice though. There is a fair bit of a learning curve here. It takes a while to get a grip on how iTunes handles your music and the different ways you can browse it, but once you do it’s simple. Hang in with it and you will be rewarded with an excellent all-in-one music handler.
Hear hear.
Oh! I almost forgot, here’s a tip:
It seems odd at first but iTunes cannot burn an “Album”. It can only burn a “Playlist”. So, if you want to whip up a CD, you need to add the songs to a new playlist, then burn it.
Took me a while to find that out!
Also, iTunes, like most Apple products make great use of drag & drop. So, if you can’t figure somethig out, try to simply drag & drop. I used to forget that quite a bit and spent a lot of time looking in the various menus for different options when the simplest way to move something was to grab it.
BLARGH. Why can’t they do it on demand? user does the first course volume change and every other song should be done on demand! Alas, I turned it off.
Anyone have know why Itunes lags? Winamp changes songs as soon as I hit the next button. Itunes lags a small but noticable amount. Anyone have any idea why? It’s quite annoying.
Thanks for the responses.
Can one delete a file directly from the playlist?
No, that just removes it from the playlist. To get rid of the file, it has to be deleted from the library.
Check out ‘smart playlists’ too. Very handy. And party shuffle… ooh, and the little-used radio function. Iranian pop music, anyone? 24-hour comedy?
Indeed . . . You can make a playlist from an album quickly by dragging and dropping. Go to your Library and turn on Browse mode (Command-B toggles this on and off on a Mac; is it Ctrl-B on a PC?). Drag the desired album from the Album list of the Browse area into the blank part of the playlist (Source) area. (You can also d&d to make playlists from artists, genres, and individual songs.)
On the Mac version you can (option-delete). Maybe alt-delete or ctrl-delete on Winows works?
Thanks.
Does Anyone else have that annoying lag between switching songs? I can’t possibly see it as a CPU processing power. The Cross fader settings don’t see to have any effect.
More props for iTunes. Especially the radio feature. I love the variety of stations to listen to. Also, all the different ways to classify music is growing on me.
Don’t know why, but I really like the fade feature, where the song quickly fades out and is replaced by the next tune. Makes it more like a radio.
It’s nice to think I can stick with this music handler for a few years. I used to switch around a lot, but iTunes has everything I need.
Just FYI, the analyze/sound check thingie doesn’t actually change the volume of your music, it merely sets a flag in the database/header to adjust the volume upon playback to get a “consistent” volume. Last time I checked, this information is not used when you burn a CD, so you may end up with a disc where the volume between tracks varies.
I found iTunes incredibly simple to use from the get-go, myself. The most important thing to do with iTunes is to trust it to handle your music. You don’t need to go mucking around the bowels of your hard drive – just handle everything through iTunes and let it do all the work for you.
Small note: if you’ve got any non-music files in with your tunes (cover scans, notes, whathaveyou) and tell iTunes to organize your music, it won’t move them if it moves the tunes.
Big thumbs up: Compilations.
Complaint: if you change your default music location (say, from ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music to /Volumes/Reserve/Tunes) it won’t automagically copy existing tunes from the old location to the new.
Just wait, a flash based version of the iPod is rumored to be released in February or so.
(Of course, I DID see a 4Gb Rio-mumble-something or the other for, like $150 today.)
Just wait, a flash based version of the iPod is rumored to be released in February or so.
(Of course, I DID see a 4Gb Rio-mumble-something or the other for, like $150 today.)
This from a guy that bought a 10 gb iPod, then bought an iBook to go along with it. Lovem BOTH!