Apple likes to believe it is the center of the universe and has anal full control. In a way that is good (i.e. less viruses) in a way that’s bad - less flexibility.
The iPad/iPod/iPhone model of software is that you have an application and its associated files; nice theory, but like all theories, a bit messy in implementation. A text file, spreadsheet, photo, sound clip may be used for multiple things by multiple applications. (A plethora of PDF and eBook readers, for example). So the “I’m the app and I know my files and nobody else has to!” model fails miserably in some situations.
The model also assumes the master of all is your iTunes, and the iP/h/o/ad is just plugged in from time to time to sync as an extension of that Desktop app into your hand. This ignores the reality that People have multiple devices and multiple computers with different functions. I have 3 PC’s and a Mac mini, plus my work laptop. We have 2 iPhones, an iPad, and 2 older iPods.
Plus as master of the world, iTunes does what it feels like. It re-arranges music by artist-album, thus exposing typos and punctuation differences ( and what to do about bands starting with “The”). Eventually I gave up and let it run the file tree show.
Moving everything from one home PC to the other was painful. I tried to copy my 30GB of mp3’s to the apple and for some reason it randomly skipped about 10% of the songs. (I at first thought it might relate to filename restrictions, but it appears not.) Similarly, iTunes does not seem to easily relate to multiple devices, so I have resorted to creating a playlist for all songs I want on each device, and copying that playlist’s contents across.
During the last upgrade to IOS5, iTunes hung several times and the running commentary seemed abiguous and frightening… “You will lose any apps you haven’t backed up.” Yet backups either take way too long or too short. The apps from one iPhone seem to be transferred to the other and the iPad every time we do system maintenance through iTunes; during the last IOS update all page arrangements on all devices were scrambled by iTunes .
So yes, iTunes needs to do some serious growing up - but what do you expect from a 10-year-old evolving software from the most perfectionist computer company in the world - quality?
It was a happy, happy day when I switched to an Android, everything synched with gmail, I drag and dropped music and photos, and uninstalled iTunes. I’ve never been so happy to uninstall a program in all my 41 years on this blue marble.
As far as the OP’s question about other PC users having similar issues with hanging and such, my answer to that is no. I started out with XP and iTunes on a machine from 2005, then switched to Win7 and iTunes on a new machine about a year and a half ago. I haven’t experienced any of the problems you described on either of those OS’s. Just slow syncing IMO due to the USB.
iTunes is a shitty bloated resource-hungry inflexible piece of software.
But anyone who thinks it’s the worst needs just to try Samsung Kies for the Galaxy SII just once.
I love my Galaxy, but fuck me what a total piece of shit Kies is. I cannot work out how their implementation of the 'droid OS can be so flexible and handy, but the PC component for the same phone can be so utterly dreadful. It truly makes iTunes look like a shining monument to Steve Jobs’s immortal soul.
I have a Galaxy SII also, but I’ll admit that while I drag and dropped some music at some point, I haven’t tried using Kies. I use a Napster account and app which will be changing to Rhapsody at the end of the month. The $9.99 subscription per-month is worth every penny to never have to deal with transferring music, and I certainly download more than ten bucks worth of new music every month. Does it all go away when I stop subscribing? Sure. I’m figuring the music market will be drastically different before I decide to do that, though.
The playlist method works, except sometimes it decides to re-sync files that I’ve never touched. And if you have missing files, you’ll get errors.
A slight relief is you can delete the actual file on your computer. iTunes will show it as missing, but it won’t delete it from your iPod. This is useful for individual, iPod optimized movies.
My solution, for movies and photos, is 3rd party apps like AVPlayerHD and Photo Manager Pro. These allow: 1. true drag and drop 2. folder management 3. greater file type compatibility 4. wifi sync (for photo)
Something else I’ve now discovered about **Playlists **is that when I display the music that’s on my iPhone in iTunes I can’t sort it by column. You know, when you click on a file attribute column like Artist or Album or Date Added etc. you expect it to just sort the display. Not with Apple. For some reason the file order that you originally created the Playlist with is set in stone.
I’m guessing, what? So you can create some sort of cool, jam-master, mix set like you’re some gay DJ at a club or something?! This is what Apple thinks the main use of Playlists is?! Would anyone over the age of 15 do this? Want individual songs to play in a specific order?! Who listens to music like that (other than dumb kids)? The remedy I kept reading on the Apple forum is to check Manage music manually, which is completely wrong because doing that just erases everything. It says you can resort the Playlist how you want on iTunes first, then re-sync, but I’m scared it’ll ------------- wait for it ------------- erase everything again!
Am I alone on this? I mean what’s more ubiquitous than Windows column sorting? Been around since Win95, and it’s totally useful and intuitive. I must have clicked those ‘unclickable’ columns and killed & restarted iTunes three dozen times before I figured out that, um, you just can’t sort those files the way all Windows file windows have always sorted all files forever!
Files just don’t exist in the Apple universe. And that is insane. Computers are nothing but files…
It’s been like two weeks since you started this thread and you’re still belly-aching about not understanding how Apple music management philosophy works. At any rate, you could just RTFM let iTunes do its thing and synch the phone overnight and all would be well… You know like 14 nights ago… :rolleyes:
Ok, whatever, just re-sync my phone for 4 hours overnight so I can, ah, sort the file list?!? There’s nothing what-so-ever wrong with that statement.
It’s just the price you have to pay to have, uh, er, um, what is it that’s supposed to be so great about Apple’s software? That it comes with one of those helmets so you don’t hurt yourself…
Your playlists in iTunes can be resorted by album, artist etc. In fact, I’ve done this. Accidentally. There is no way to undo this… it’s annoying because it messes up my carefully planned order (which I use to find specific songs in a subset of my library easier). All it does is update the order the playlist points to songs, it takes approximately 2 seconds to resync after that (assuming all the music is already on your phone), it won’t delete everything or make you do a 4 hour resync.
Another way if you don’t want to manually manage playlists is to use a smart playlist. I just thought of this, haven’t tried it out. You can make a smart playlist include all the song meeting a certain criterion - such as comments. So you can “tag” songs in their comments, like “roadtrip” or “holidays” “workout” etc., then automatically add them to appropriate playlists.
-no messing with playlists
-work on individual songs
-no duplicate songs in playlists
-ignore order in playlist
How is it that this thread is still in General Questions and not IMHO I’ll never know. But let me redeem this trainwreck of a thread by injecting some actual facts by running a semi-scientific experiment. Here we go:
The equipment:
Dell XPS M1710, Windows Vista SP2 32-bit
iTunes 10.5.1
iPod Touch 32 Gb 2nd Gen
USB cable
The setup:
iPod filled to 60% capacity pre-experiment
Playlist1: 10 songs x 10 artists = 100 songs, none previously loaded on iPod; 608 MB total size; order = artist name
Playlist2: 10 songs x 20 artists = 200 songs, none previously loaded on iPod; 1080 MB total size; order = artist name
Playlist3: 10 songs x 30 artists = 300 songs, none previously loaded on iPod; 1550 MB total size; order = artist name
Playlist1b: duplicate of Playlist1, reorder by song name alphabetically, synced after Playlist1
Playlist2b: duplicate of Playlist2, reorder by song name alphabetically, synced after Playlist2
Playlist3b: duplicate of Playlist3, reorder by song name alphabetically, synced after Playlist3
The Results:
Original Playlists 1, 2 & 3 sync times: 460 s, 760 s & 1167 s respectively
Duplicate Playlists 1b, 2b & 3b sync times: 140 s, 150 s 7 144 s respectively
The conclusions:
When syncing music not on the iPod, the data transfer rate varies between 1.32 - 1.42 MB/s
When syncing playlists with music already loaded on iPod, the sync time is consistently between 2:20 and 2:30, indicating that there is a constant time penalty to determine what to sync
Syncing consists of 4 stages, music transfer is the last stage, the first 3 stages consistently take approximately ~2 minutes
iTunes in the end is a database front-end GUI, syncing the playlist meta file is extremely fast, since that file is tiny compared to the actual music data
Playlists being playlists implies that ordering is pretty important; so the initial order of a playlist is the order in which you drag-n-drop music into it. If you want to reorder by any of the columns available in the list (song name, time, artist, album, genre, rating) is as simple as just clicking the top of that column header. If you want to get back to your original ordering, all you have to do is click the left-most column header. If you want to permanently re-order the original ordering, you can shift-click a range of songs and drag-n-drop to a different location
You can create Playlist folders to organize your playlists.
iTunes is designed with a certain usage philosophy that doesn’t match all users. When they don’t match, the user is the one who is expected to change. That’s what people complain about. Personally, I had been dealing with digital music for more than a decade before I got an iPhone. I have well-established ways of organizing and dealing with my music files, ways that do not mesh well with iTunes. So dealing with the program feels like an imposition, an unnecessary extra step. I probably wouldn’t feel this way if I felt that that extra step added some kind of value that made up for things, but I don’t since I don’t want/use any of the functions of iTunes beyond copying music to my iPhone.
Hey, I’m still asking real questions (in between my seething contempt for all things Apple).
Yeah, that’s fine. I just don’t see why I can’t do this with the iPhone’s Playlist. There should be a check box for Ordered Playlist or something. A file list should *always *be dynamic metadata that you can sort on the fly however you need it. It’s virtual, you’re not changing anything.
Exactly. And the fact that Apple is a closed system, they give you no alternative to anything (short of jail breaking). It’s the conplete opposite of how they portray themselves.
