Not only that - you can drag and drop over a straight Bluetooth or WiFi connection. Not to mention a VPN.
File conversion I can understand. And the stuff Mr. Moto mentions is a huge feature that Apple will never implement.
But I drag and drop shit onto my iPhone all the friggin’ time. Yeah, it’s in iTunes - but it’s still dragging and dropping. I simply do not understand this argument.
Drag a .pdf. Drag an .avi. Drag a .wmv. Can you even drag a .txt file?
Drag a video that you just got out of one of the “blahblah to iPod” programs. It might work, and iTunes might spontaneously decide it doesn’t like that one, even though you used the same settings as the last time, when it DID accept your video. Or, hell, it might accept it, but it’ll need to re-convert it inside iTunes first.
-Joe
Ah, very good point. Thanks - that was a necessary distinction that the iPhone doesn’t have an answer for. (As well as points out a need I didn’t realize I had - but yeah, having and being able to use such a document on your phone would be handy.)
Edit: there are third-party things like Evernote that do basically push a .txt file to your iPhone. But certainly not .avi or .wmv. You can open .pdfs via an e-mail.
If you have iBooks installed, you can do the same with pdfs. I haven’t tried it with text yet. GoodReader lets you do all sorts of things(including over WiFi), but it’s third party.
Eh? All I use it for is music and it does that just fine, and always has. They’re called Playlists. I’d expect it’ll do that for videos etc too
I hate to tell you this, but a playlist is not a folder. A folder can be put into other folders, and then you can “organize”. You can even create a “folder” called Rock and then put all your Steely Dan CDs in there. Look, as part of my “organizing” I can now get straight to my particular CD. I don’t even need to create a playlist. iTunes just lets you drag everything into a big pile and then sort through it to try to find what you want so that you can create playlists. It’s a step backward from what I was able to do with my first Sony MP3 CD player in 2001.
By default it also copies all that music to your C: drive, so that way you can have two copies of everything. Thanks, Steve!
I also (didn’t) love how I wasn’t able to delete music from the actual device itself. Did I load that entire Steely Dan CD and then decide that I don’t actually like Black Cow all that much? Well, because Jobs Knows Best I get to just hit the skip button every time it comes on. Or, I can preview ALL the music on the iPod while it’s still connected to the computer, and then I can weed out songs that way.
MP3 players that don’t make your decisions for you allow you to delete songs. Revolutionary, I know. No more Todd Rundgren retarded “sugar water” novelty sketch for me!
-Joe
Merijeek - you’re doing it wrong. Stop auto-syncing, and all of those problems go away. And you can sort by 6 different categories in that program - how in the world are you having a problem finding one particular album after sorting Genre/Artist/Album?!?
Not all the music I have is going to necessarily have those six difference categories set. So, then I’m sorting by blank fields.
Auto-syncing is default, right? And that’s how Apple products are supposed to work, right? “It just works”, or so I’ve heard.
-Joe
What category do you think you need to be sorting by that 6 different categories won’t cut it? I’m honestly curious as to what song you won’t be able to find after sorting by Genre/Composer/Grouping/Artist/Album and one of 39 (whoops - 34, I forgot to subtract out the 5 listed) other categories you can look through.
Once again, I’m not defending everything about the program. Auto-syncing as the default “just works” for my mom, because she has 8 albums. People with large collections who need more customization will need customization in ANY program. Stating you can’t do that in apple’s is simply wrong.
Seems to me that Apple products are simply targeted at a different consumer audience - those who want to do stuff like listen to music, play games and watch videos, but have limited interest in computers, and don’t want to be bothered with understanding the technical differences between different computer components, shopping around for the best build, or dealing with problems like computer viruses, etc. Naturally, there is a price premium for that; no doubt someone knowlegeable about computers can put together a better system for cheaper outside of the Apple product line … there is nothing surprising about that.
It isn’t that one system is better and another worse - they are simply looking to different markets.
Well, iTunes (and iPhoto) are content management systems (CMS). What you do with physical folders, CMS does logically (meaning “not physically”; not “sensibly”, though it is that, too) using metadata. You probably came up in the old days, when the only way to organize things on a computer was through the file system (or use a million dollar application). Put all your Thursday invoices in a folder called “Thursday” inside a folder called “Invoices,” etc.
If that’s how you want to continue organizing, then you might not want to use iTunes, because there’s no real value in using a CMS and circumventing its CM functionality. That just leaves you with S.
What the others are trying to explain, is that with metadata, you can make requests like, “Show me all the jazz albums that I haven’t listened to for more than 3 months that I rated 4 stars or higher,” or “Show me all the rock songs for artists starting with ‘Ste’ (and there’s your Steely Dan),” or “Show me the songs with a Bit Rate of 128 kbps that I purchased.” Or whatever. A lot of music has tags where a lot of that data is already filled in, so by importing it into the CMS, all that work is done. And you can move the file anywhere, and that work is still done.
So for people who just use iTunes and let it do its thing, it can be said that it just works. For them. It won’t just work for you, because you don’t want what it does.
Steve Jobs turned you into an idiot by default?
If you’re going to approach an iPod with the brains God gave a stump, it’s probably for the best that you just don’t use an iPod.
No, the way the system is designed to work by default is half-assed and counter-intuitive.
It just works! Poorly!
-Joe
Which is really my biggest issue with using iTunes: A fair to large proportion of my music collection (most of which was ripped by me from my CDs) has incomplete, inconsistent, or wrong metadata. GraceNote etc made it worse, so my only option to use iTunes to the fullest is to hand-check several thousand tracks. Whee.
That’s like blaming Word for your lousy spelling.:rolleyes:
Except that my music is currently arranged in nice nested folders, and iTunes is about the laggiest program imaginable for trying to do bulk edits on id3 data.
Man, I can’t keep checking this thread. The logic is too much like the customers I deal with on my job. “I know it works this way, but I want it to work this completely different way that makes sense to me! Change your program to suit MY needs! Right now, while I’m on the phone with you. Just remote log into my computer and change it! NOW!!!”
Right - except that I am not really demanding that iTunes change as I use software that actually does the things I need - and I didn’t have to beg developers for it for the most part.
As end users themselves, they typically designed their software according to how most people would use it, not to feed an overplanned business model.
Does anyone actually select music like that? I never think to myself ‘Hey, I’d like some jazz, but only jazz albums that I haven’t listened to for more than 3 months that I rated 4 stars or higher. Yeah, that’s the ticket!’
No, what I say is “Hey, I want to hear some Miles Davis. Where the fuck is my Miles Davis music?”
I want to listen to rock songs by artists that start with ‘ste’? C’mon, really? Sure, it’s possible - it’s just not useful.