Ah, but if *iTunes *can do it, why can’t the iPod? Apple integrates their software with their hardware, giving me no other option unless I want to hack my own device. If they’re going to paint me into a corner, they might as well make it a useful corner.
No, it’s not just “one click”–sorting by year sorts EVERYTHING by year. You have to put in another filter for the artist. IIRC, there’s no way for me to look at my whole library with everything sorted by Artist (alpha) → Album (year) → Track (number). (Not 100% sure on this, because I’m posting from work, where I don’t have iTunes available to screw around with to make it do what I’m effing telling it to do.)
Also, IIRC you can’t move the “Name” column from its position as the first one. (At least you didn’t used to be able to.) Screw you, iTunes, I want the column furthese to the left to be Artist! ARTIST, DAMN YOU!
PC, yup. And I don’t like this part - if they’re offering it for PC they’d damned well better have it work well.
I let it organize my music - except that I have the music folder on an additional (external) hard drive instead of on the C drive. It seems like once a year or so it forgets, and creates me a new folder on the C drive, then starts trying to find music and sync my iPod.
(I do see that the album no longer on my hard drive is still on the iPod so I’ll have to use the above-mentioned utility to recover it; thanks for the heads-up on that.)
I’ve tried to use alternate programs to deal with my podcasts and unfortunately I’ve never found them to work properly. I ended up with a bunch of podcasts mislabeled as songs and scattered amongst my music.
Nope. I showed you how to solve that above. I will absolutely grant you that the “frames” (for lack of a better term) are hard to find, but will do exactly what you’re asking.
Ah ha! Clicking multiple times on “Album” brings up a series of different ways to sort. By year and by artist. Interesting.
If that was the rule, there’d be very little software for Windows. PCs tend to get confused a lot. My PC had a habit of losing config files every few months, or forgetting who I was. Once, it totally forgot what USB was or what it was used for. Had to reinstall the OS to get it back. I don’t miss my PC.
See, other than a battle with my last laptop over Vista and the BSOD, my computer’s been pretty good to me. iTunes is my only headache of any note these days.
This is because Macs have dedicated hardware–they can design the OS to work specifically with the parts they know the computer will contain. Windows, on the other hand, has to work with pretty much any old thing you pull off a shelf and throw in there. You trade off stability for flexibility.
I’m in the latter camp, and while I can defend my presence there quite easily, I won’t bother, but instead point out that a program that lets you do things the way you want them done is inherently superior to one that only lets you do things the way the designer felt they should be done. In my experience, most of my Mac’s software is flexible and intuitive and lets you do things however you want. iTunes, for some bizarre reason, is stuck firmly in the other category and refuses to budge.
I hope to god you don’t save files by hitting control-s (or command-s), because that’s just succumbing to a programmer’s whim. You really should be syncing your saves to the location of the read/write head with respect to the disk (or, better yet, magnetic drum).
Yes, because the particular keyboard shortcut chosen for a command in one application is entirely analagous to something that affects the basic functionality of another. :rolleyes:
Remember the old Apple Commercial where the chick in red shorts throws the hammer through Big Brother Orwellian style screen where it’s spouting thought conrol propaganda?
Guess they gave up on that “think different” thing. Do what the apple product wants or it’ll harass you into compliance. Think different about how to organize your music? Not ob Apple’s bloody watch, they are the borg.
I’d never owned any Apple products before until I decided to purchase an iPod Touch a couple of years ago. Since I work 12 hours per day in an office…I listen to my iPod about 12 hours per day so I’ve definitely gotten a lot of mileage out of it. Although I haven’t’ had many major problems with the iPod or iTunes, I swear that the shuffle feature is not very random at all. It seems to have its own favorites as there are a couple of songs that get chosen every day while other songs very rarely get played. I don’t if anyone else has experienced this or if its a problem with just my particular iPod/iTunes.
Oh, and also, my iPod like to reset itself randomly for no reason at least a couple of times a week when I’m listening to a song. But other than that, I love it.
I also love iTunes although I’ve never tried using any other program to manage my music. I used to organize my music with just the actual files and folders but my computer liked to randomly rename my songs after a few weeks or months. “Mmmbop” by Hanson would suddenly become “track 1” by Unknown Artist, and so on.
I’ve noticed this with my G1. It really really really likes Shakira. I have several Shakira tunes that pop up a lot. Doesn’t matter if it has the works of Muse, Arcade Fire, DJ Alligator project, Weird Al et al to choose from. It wants to rock to some Shakira.
The nearest I can figure is maybe about the Shakira ID3 tags that affect shuffling.
There used to be a setting where you could adjust how “random” songs were (less random would play more clusters from the same artist). I think that’s been removed, as I can’t find it.
No, they’re really not. See, we only come out when douchebags from the Church of Apple attempt to preach to us. It’s not as if we walk around saying APPLE SUCKS! randomly.
Church of Apple accolytes are much more likely to bring up how great apple is or how evil Microsoft is for any reason. There was a cool guy I used to know years ago who decided to become an Apple fanatic and COULD NOT SHUT THE FUCK UP ABOUT IT EVER UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCE. Any and every conversation, from the weather to how explosive a particular item on the taco bell menu made an anus, was steered towards either why Microsoft was evil or how Apple was the single bastion of light in an evil world.
It sounds like you yourself are an Apple fanatic, and people’s attempt to get you to STFU have you thinking “fucking non-Apple users are so abusive!”
Edit: Incidentally, I own an ipod touch and it’s the coolest gadget I’ve ever owned. iTunes is the worst piece of shit I’ve ever had to deal with. I actually bought the ipod touch used in part because I didn’t want to give money to apple - I hope their headquarters explodes in a nuclear inferno so that all their fanatics will commit ritualistic suicide.
People making reference to winamp or other programs being able to transfer data back and forth - does that apply to the touch? Back when I looked, it didn’t - no program could sync with the touch. Has that changed?
Holy crap you can’t just mount the itouch as a mass storage device? Holy crap cubed (†crap³) the device can’t just make and maintain it’s own database?
Putting tunes on my G1:
1 Plug in USB and Mount G1 as usb mass storage device.
2 Copy tunes to anywhere on the G1’s SD card.
3 Go masturbate to internet porn because I’m done.
That’s it. My Android phone Just Works™*. I could sync my phone using a console or command prompt if I had a mind to. You should write Apple and complain about the horrible job they did with that and ask them to fix it for next upgrade.
*trademark belongs to apple, used for satire, and cause I’m a jerk who likes give the apple fanboys a taste of their own medicine.