I need help with iTunes... or recommend a different program

First off, I hate iTunes. I HATE it. It doesn’t give me enough control, at least not that I can see. However, I’m starting to use my mp3 player again and I need to find something that can:

  • sync my music collection with my mp3 player
  • create and manage playlists that are compatible with my mp3 player
  • not screw with my files, but help me keep good file structure

I keep my music on a shared drive on my network, not on my laptop (or in any “My Music” folder), which is where I’d be syncing from. I did figure out how to tell iTunes where my music was.

My music folder setup is like this:
Artist or Band Name\Album name\Artist Name - track number - Song Title.mp3
It is important to me to keep this file naming structure because I hate it when I look at a song and don’t have the information of both who and what, and the track number lets me keep them in the right order. I’d like to have a program that checks and makes sure that tracks are in order, checks what album they’re on, etc…

iTunes seems to want to do this, however it names the files with just the track number and the song name, like “03 What’s Going On.mp3”… now if I’m looking at my file structure, I can tell who it is, but if I have the file on its own… is it Marvin Gaye? Is it Cyndi Lauper? Is it someone else? I find this naming pattern useless.

But iTunes doesn’t seem to want to let me change it. I’ve used programs in the past that will rename all of your mp3 files based on ID3 info and lets you format it with strings like %A - %t - %N.mp3 (just made that up, but you get the idea) where you can pick and choose what info gets inserted into what part of the filename, yadda yadda. Can iTunes do this and I just haven’t found the setting?

I know I could just turn off the “manage my files” feature of iTunes, but as I said, I’d like that functionality ideally.

Also… is iTunes going to know how to sync with my Creative Zen Xtra, since it’s not an iPod? (I haven’t gotten that far yet to try)

Is there a better program out there that does what I want? Preferably a free or cheap one?

Sorry this was much longer than I thought it was going to be.

I find that nothing has ever come along that beats Winamp for playing and managing .mp3 files.

www.winamp.com

You can set it to use ID3, not use ID3, show path and filename, just show filename, etc.

Don’t know about you Creative, but it works with my Archos just fine.

And it’s free, so trying it won’t kill ya.

Small warning: Winamp video playback blows.

thanks,
thwartme

Will it work on an iPod?

Yep, it has native ipod support. There are thousands of plugins, skins etc available to customize to your hearts content.

iTunes will only work with iPods, AFAIK, so there’s not much point in you continuing to suffer with it.

I use Winamp as my player… I didn’t know it would also manage your stuff or sync to a player. I will have to explore this…