My husband’s had an 80gb iPod for ages, and he just got given an iPod Touch for some work he did. He’s giving me his old iPod. It’s not my choice for an mp3 player (the last thing I wanted, in fact) but it’s better than nothing. I’ve never had any mp3 player before so all this is new to me. He uses iTunes, but I don’t. I’ve got way more than 80gb of music on my computer, but I pretty much know what I want to put on the iPod. How can I do this without using iTunes, or at least, without having to do anything special to the music I already have ripped and in various music folders?
Right now my music is in this general configuration:
MP3s (name of top level folder)
Artist name (subfolder)
Album name (subfolder)
Album name (subfolder)
Album name (subfolder)
Album name (subfolder)
and my files in the Album directories are all named the same way, as such
ArtistName_AlbumNameTrackNumber_SongName.mp3
as in
JeffBuckley_Grace06_Hallelujah.mp3
(I use CDex or Exact Audio Copy to rip my music. I refuse to use iTunes to rip music because it puts tracks into folders without adding the artist’s name to the track itself, something I consider vital.)
I’ll have this iPod in a few days when he gets back home. What can I do to get ready/set up so that when he gets back, all I have to do is (have him) plug it in and start uploading? I’ll have several of my favorite artists, and each of their albums, plus a directory for random songs, and a directory for videos.
So, do you HAVE to use iTunes to set up an iPod? If so, please at least tell me that I don’t HAVE to change the names of all my mp3s to iTunes’ brain-dead (to me) method. If I don’t though, how will those files look once they’re on the iPod?
I don’t know if you can do it without iTunes (I suspect you can), but in the Advanced preferences of iTunes is a preference labeled “Copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding to library.”
Uncheck it, then import your music. It may or may not have any idea who the artist/album is, depending on your ripper’s metadata, but the full name as you’ve given it will appear on the iPod (since they’re long, they’ll scroll onscreen when the song is playing). You’ve also made the cannonical sin of descriptive filenames, and put the most variable part at the end. This may make scrolling through lists harder, since all you’ll see is a bunch of “JeffBuckley_Grace…” titles; finding the actual song you want will be a matter of trial and error.
You’re probably already seeing the problem with your naming scheme: since the artist and album name is already in two other places (the folder structure and the metadata), and every program you’d use to access them has access to at least one and probably both of them, why repeat yourself? That’s what metadata is FOR, and once you go down this path, what else will you decide needs to be in there? Date of release? Rating? Bit rate? It’s a filename, not a database. This way lies madness; plus, you’re deliberately making things harder on yourself by adding weird constraints that apply pretty much just to you – you can expect programs to honor those constraints, but you can’t reasonably expect it.
I can understand why someone would not want to use iTunes (that’s a pit for another day), but some of the reasons you cited don’t apply, at least to the newest version. iTunes doesn’t care what format the filenames are in, it really looks at your ID3 tags. If those aren’t there, then you might have problems. The folder format definitely doesn’t matter, I use genre > Artist > Album myself.
You might be able to plug it into a computer with iTunes (any computer) turn off autosync and enable using the ipod as a hard drive, and copying manually, but I’ve never tried that.
Ah, but thanks to you and thelurkinghorror’s “iTunes doesn’t care what format the filenames are in, it really looks at your ID3 tags” (thanks thelurkinghorror) I now know that all I have to do is change the ID3 tags (if necessary), and not the actual filename. That’s important to know.
It’s not a cannonical sin, what’s a sin is when filenames don’t have the artist’s name on it. To me, anyway.
There’s no problem with my naming scheme, but if iTunes uses the ID3 info, and not the filename, then that’s ok.
The important information is right there on the file itself: Name of artist, name of song and name of album. The track number isn’t that important, but it’s something I sometimes like to know at a glance. I can get that other info by hovering or Googling.
I use, and only use, Winamp to play my music, and it uses the ID3 information as well, so the filename doesn’t affect how it shows up in the playlist.
It doesn’t just apply just to me, not if I’ve gotten the song from someone else, or I’m giving a song to someone else. I’m a big believer in checking out music before I buy it. I often go to artists’ web sites and take advantage of their “download these samples for free” type offers. Plus I used to use Indy quite a bit (a legal song-sampling program containing music that, with artists’ approval, downloads songs to your computer) and so have accumulated thousands of one-off songs which I put into a folder called “Misc Downloads.”
What’s madness is having a file folder full of songs from years’ worth of downloads with filenames like this (actual samples from the folder):
03 Tsintsqaro.wma
BeQuiet.mp3
Astronuts.mp3
BabyLulu.mp3
mc2005_09_16.mp3
brave_elephant.mp3
drizella.mp3
MarkieDiary.mp3
OhRegret.mp3 (ok, I now know that’s Mary Lorson and Saint Low)
trak01.wav
Except for Mary Lorson I haven’t the faintest freaking idea who those artists are, and because they didn’t care enough to make sure I remembered, I don’t care who they are. Add hundreds more to that list. Artists who take things directly from their iTunes ripping folder and offer them for download are very fucking egotistical to think that the person downloading will automatically either 1) buy their album immediately and then get to know that song very well or 2) rename the file themselves so they’ll know 2 weeks, 6 months, 3 years down the road who the hell sang a song called “Astronuts.” Sure, I could try to Google and be a song detective, but why should I? I don’t want to do that. I have better things to do and other music (that I know who it’s by) to listen to.
As soon as I see a download like that, unless I really REALLY REALLY like the artist, I just throw them into my Misc folder. The ones I really REALLY REALLY like I’ll take the time to re-name the stupid file, but I begrudge every second I have to spend doing so.
I have an entire web site full of authorized songs by Happy Rhodes for download. Once a person downloads one of those songs, they will never, ever get lost on that person’s computer. 10 years from now they could look at the filename and see that the song’s by Happy Rhodes.
Everything you say is perfectly valid for someone who rips their own, well-known to them, music to listen to themselves. But any file that in any way, shape or form that’s going to be given to anyone else, by any means, ought to have the Artist’s name on the file.
Anyway, I do thank you both for your tips. They were very helpful. I can load the songs I want to put on my iPod into Winamp first, to see at a glance how the ID3 fillename looks and change any if I need to.
That’s good to know, thanks! I just need to make sure that if I upgrade, I can still use the skins I made myself and have been using for years. I have Winamp 5.08e. If not, I’m not going to upgrade. I like my skins too much. Unless I can put the new one in a separate folder on my C drive, so it doesn’t overwrite my old Winamp, and use it just for the iPod thing. That might be dangerous though. If it does go ahead and write over anything pertaining to my old Winamp to where I can’t use my skins, I’ll have to restore the old Winamp from my backup disks.
If you’re not particularly attached to the native iPod interface (and it sounds like you’re not), you should look into Rockbox. That’ll let you do whatever you want. Forget not just iTunes, but every other iPod-specific app, and just treat the thing like another hard drive.
It’ll also let you play a lot more file formats, like flac or ogg.
Do you use Rockbox? Do you find that the battery life changes from the Apple code? Battery life always seems to be a hard thing to optimize without access to really detailed knowledge of the hardware implementation.
I’ve heard the battery life is shortened, but I can’t really say personally because in my case I switched to Rockbox at the same time I got a longer-lasting 3rd-party battery (the original was dead). One thing Rockbox does, though, is tell you how much battery life you have remaining, along with an estimate of how long it will last. So in the corner you’ll see something like “93% 8h12m”.
I’m definitely going to look into that. I like the idea of Open Source, as well as the idea of an Open Source program sticking it to iPod, as well as making it better. I also have a lot of individual ogg files, and I can flac some of my concert wav files. This sounds great! Since it’s my husband’s iPod, and he’s the geek in the family, I’ll have him look at it too, but he likes Open Source even more than I do (his iPod and iPod Touch were gifts, he wouldn’t have bought them on his own).