iTunes for Ipod-management for the Complete Idiot

Factual Questions
1

I detest iTunes and always have but on the intermittent occasions over the years when I’ve helped someone else manage their iPods, I’ve been able to manage the task sufficiently.

• iTunes has a setting that, if invoked, causes it to think you want it to “synchronize” shit between your local-computer world of iTunes playlists and songfiles etc and the corresponding iPod world. And by “synchronize”, it has, at least in some versions and some eras, meant “I will delete anything from this iPod that isn’t in your local iTunes universe and auto-add everything you’ve added to local iTunes since last time these were synchronized”. I’ve always disabled that feature with a visceral shudder of horror.

• Then to manage the damn iPod you would plug it in to the computer, wait for it to show up in iTunes, then you’d see “My Pod” or “Susie’s Contraption” or whatever the iPod has been named appear somewhere on the immense left panel of iTunes , below which would be “Playlists”, below (or submenu’d from) which would be the individual playlists. So to add Song X to “Songs To Twiddle My Thumbs To” you would select the play list “Songs To Twiddle My Thumbs To”, double click it to open a window to “Songs To Twiddle My Thumbs To”, then awkwardly reposition all the damn plethora of iTunes windows sufficiently to see the goddamn Finder, get to the location of the actual MP3 file you wish to add, then drag it into the “Songs To Twiddle My Thumbs To” window. A progress bar at the top would reflect the uploading of the file to the iPod and the song would appear at first in greyed-out type or italics type (forget which and maybe they changed it at some point) then normal type once it was finished being copied to the iPod.

• To yank a track back OFF the iPod you had to go to Music (not a playlist) and find the damn song then delete it. If you deleted it from a PlayList it would remain on the iPod just not part of that playlist.

•Never in my life messed with an iPod that does Movies or Pictures so I don’t know if managing those from within iTunes is identical or different. (Do movies and pictures belong to movie and picture “playlists” ???)

Fast forward to last Sunday evening. We had people coming over and I was asked to add a song that’s on my own computer to my companion’s iPod in order to play it for our guests. I take her iPod to my computer, plug it into the USB port and launch iTunes and wait for the iPod icon to appear on the left. I select a playlist and drag my file into that window. Suddenly a dialog pops up: SYNCHRONIZING… I forget precisely how the rest of it was worded but it was definitely trying to synchronize iPod with iTunes. I visualized my partner’s library of songs all being erased and replaced with the two or three songs that iTunes knows about on my local computer. WTF??? I long since told iTunes not to go around doing that synchronize thing! Rapid Command-Alt-Escape and force-quit iTunes and yank the iPod icon into Trash can. The moment the iPod screen says “OK to disconnect” I yank the cord loose. Eek! It’s OK all her playlists and songs appear to still be present. I burn a CD instead and we use that to play the song for our friends.

This morning my partner from the city had manually recorded herself, resulting in a handful of files on her Desktop, and was trying to load those into the iPod. Called me on the phone while I was on the train. I described to her the process that I described here in the above paragraph where it begins with “To manage the damn iPod…”

She says: “I see my iPod on the left in iTunes, yes… yeah I see ‘Music’… under that there is only one playlist showing called ‘Sync Tracks’ {or something like that}… no, it won’t let me create a new playlist… I don’t know where all my playlists went, I think maybe it erased them…”

I know that on her computer, also, I disabled that damn “synchronize” option. She had previously been using a Windows laptop to load things onto her iPod and I also loaded things onto it from my own Mac, so her current Mac laptop definitely does not contain the playlists and songs that are, or were, on her iPod. I have to admit to her that I can’t help her. Not sure I’d be of any use even if I could see her screen.

EDITED TO ADD: Oh, and she says the iPod is crammed with zillions of pictures from her computer that she DID NOT do anything to put on her iPod, it just auto-added them of its own accord and she wants it to not do that.
OK, what the fuck did Apple do with iTunes and the synchronization setting?

Is there a 3rd party MacOS application that can manage iPods so one does not have to use godforsaken iTunes?

Has the procedure for sticking songs onto an iPod (songs that btw are NOT part of an iTunes library or iTunes playlist, just loose MP3 song files) changed?

2

If both your Macs were set up to manually mange music, then this is all user error. iTunes might very well be a bloated, confusing dump of software, but in the situations you are talking about, it doesn’t delete data without a user clicking “OK.”

The first “synchronizing” message was probably just iTunes telling you it was indeed transferring that one song to the iPod. (I don’t have an iPod to test what message dialogs come up when transferring songs, so I might be wrong, but if, as you say, it is set to manually manage, then I don’t know what else it could have been.)

The 2nd problem of your partner losing her playlists is the same deal- if it is set up to manually manage, it didn’t automatically do anything destructive. At some point she clicked “OK” without realizing what iTunes was about to do.
edit to add- its also possible something got messed up when you force quit iTunes during a transfer. The playlists might have still shown up after you did that, but they were really gone and she saw this the next day.

I’m pretty sure the default setting on iTunes is to not automatically sync photos, so the photos are on her iPod because at some point she chose to sync them. Maybe she just didn’t notice that they were on her iPod until now. To remove them from the iPod, connect the iPod to the computer, go to Photos under the iPod in iTunes and uncheck “Sync Photos.”

So while there is plenty to hate about iTunes, it probably doesn’t deserve your scorn this time.

Also, the way you describe adding songs to your iPod sounds very wrong. It can all be done in one window. Don’t drag the songs from the Finder, drag them from your iTunes Library list. Then just drop them onto the name of whichever playlist you want that is already in the sidebar of that same window. In other words, the playlist doesn’t need to be opened in its own window in order to add a song to it. It’s a bit different in iTunes 12 in that the sidebar won’t appear until you actually start dragging the songs from the library.

3

I feel your pain OP. Mac iTunes is different from iPod iTunes. Mac iTunes/Internet/radio has thousands of radio stations. World music has over 500 stations! Most don’t talk.
Can’t find it with the iPod.

4

Uhh, I don’t freaking have an iTunes Library list. I detest iTunes and hence none of my songs is in iTunes library nor would I want it to be there.

I use something else to play MP3 files on my computer.

5

Granted, iOS iTunes doesn’t have the 50 zergillion internet radio streams built in, but have you tried an app like iHeatRadio? It offers live audio streams from a lot of terrestrial radio stations.

6

Ok, but it’s still as simple as dragging the song from the Finder onto the iPod playlist in the iTunes sidebar then. You seemed really aggravated at how you thought you had to do it.

Again, I wouldn’t contradict anyone who thinks iTunes sucks in many ways, but as a dump-and-play organizer of music it’s fine. What is it specifically that you detest?

7

Your friend should just Google how to do stuff instead of calling someone who not only doesn’t know how to use ITunes but DETESTS it. Sounds like helping is too stressful for you.

8

Thank you for the link. Nitpicking, its iheartradio.

I went there. Said it was not valid in The Mexican store. When I clicked on change store, I get a white page. I will keep trying.

9

That’s odd because it actually streams several Mexican stations. It’s all about the rights, I guess.

10

a) It sticks a layer of bullshit between me and the file level. I use computerspace as an environment of folders and files.

b) It is unduly picky about what are otherwise good-quality variable bit rate (VBR) encoders, deciding on the basis of (I am guessing) average bit rate of the first few seconds plus file size to estimate duration and then chopping songs off in late mid-song. I had to stop using VBR settings and generate comparatively huge MP3 files at 320 or higher to get comparable quality sound that iTunes (and hence iPod) would not do that to.

c) It takes up way too much screen for something just to play back sound and create, edit, and play back playlists. I think it may nowadays have a mini-screen setting, don’t know for sure? But my favorite MP3 player was one whose entire interface was about 300 x 400 pixels including the list of songs on the playlist. Audion is pretty minimalistic too. iTunes sprawls all over the place, hence my original-post about yanking windows around to get to where I can also see files in the Finder.

d) Until I dragged it out back and beat it over the head with a length of stovewood, it wanted to COPY every freaking music file I played or added to an iPod to some mystical magical music-file kingdom. STOP DOING THAT!!! Likewise the desire to “synchronize”. I gather that this annoying behavior has been curbed over the years? It used to be a default. Of COURSE you want to erase everything from your iPod that’s not in your local iTunes library.

e) Still can’t keep it from “adding things to my iTunes library” if I ever, just once, by accident or otherwise, played the damn file with iTunes. I do not have or wish to have an iTunes library. Admittedly I might if I wished to use iTunes as my default music player but don’t make that assumption!

f) MP3 tags. Other MP3 players display files as files, although they may also display MP3 metadata “tag” information. Not iTunes. If you don’t edit your MP3 tags your fully named file will appear as Unknown by Unknown on the album Unknown.

g) I like to organize my files into albums (usually but not always corresponding to the original album), albums into collections, collections into collection sets. Folder, subfolder, subfolder, file. iTunes only has the file and the playlist, hierarchically speaking. It will also display (and let you play) albums as identified by the MP3 tag, genres as identified by the MP3 tag, and a few other such alternatives-to-the-playlist, but you can’t queue up a nine-album set of Pink Floyd to be played in the order you arranged your PF collection. As “albums”, iTunes isn’t set up to let the same file be a component of different albums either. (In regular file hierarchies it’s easy to put an alias to the file in, let’s say, the Greatest Hits album, without literally having to have two copies of the file, the other being on the original release album.)

h) For someone just using it casually to manage the iPod, like me, it’s complicated to click the iPod icon, go to Music, find the playlist, drag the file in, edit the MP3 tags to get it to appear properly and show up in the right place in the playlist, then, for deleting it, go to a totally different place (the root of the Music submenu). Not impossible to learn and use, though. I was on board with it, but it used to be that you only saw the word “synchronize” in a dialog if it was doing the awful do-not-want annoying thing about making the music on the iPod be an exact replica of what’s in computer’s iTunes music library.

11

Well, you do seem to have issues with iTunes, I’ll give you that. But, no offense, I think most of them are self-inflicted in that you have some outdated notions and probably haven’t taken a good look at iTunes’ preferences which change its behavior to be more in tune (sorry) with what you want. I think that could alleviate like 80-90% of your problems, but you sound pretty set in your ways. I understand the draw of a comfortable work flow, so I won’t bother telling you your business if you don’t want.

But just because I’m curious I do have 2 questions- are you using an older Mac with a lower res screen? What do you use to play your music on your computer?

12

I have iTunes for Mac, and I also have two iPods. I have it set up to do everything manually, because I have way more music in iTunes than would ever fit in a 64GB iPod. I have never encountered any of the problems the OP has had. I’ve never even heard of MP3 tags, never go to the submenu root, and copy a track onto my iPod simply by sliding the listing over to the iPod’s “Music”. Sure, I have my issues with iTunes, but the functions you’re describing work as expected for me . . . and always have.