Just got back from getting my hair cut over at “A Cut Above”. I’m sure that
It was snowing this morning, coming down pretty good for awhile and it started to stick to the streets. If it kept up it probably would have caused some accumulation, even on the roads. I love snow…
So after hearing reports from friends that iTunes 4 is better at handling large numbers of files, I decided to drag my MP3 share (mounted via SMB from my file server) onto it’s window and let it index all my songs (but I’m still not interested in letting it manage the files and directory format for me). It took about 45 minutes to index 13684 songs, weighing in at 66.02GB, which according to iTunes is 40.8 days of music. iTunes takes a few seconds to start up, nothing unbearable given the hugeness of my music archive.. Searches are surprisingly fast and scrolling the index is “fast enough”. But what is unbelievably awful is adding to the archive. If I drag a single new album onto “Library” to add it to iTunes’ database it takes upwards of 10 seconds PER SONG. I guess I’d rather the pinch-point be on database insertion, but it still seems ridiculously slow… The one nice thing about having all this stuff in iTunes, though, is that it makes it easy for me to find missing/incomplete id3 tags in my collection. It is going to take me awhile to fix the thousands of incomplete tags, but at least I know where to start now.
As far as the features of iTunes that everyone raves about, namely smart playlists and the like, I am not sold.. But perhaps over time this will change…. I wish more organization was available for playlists (folders, etc). I have the same gripe with iPhoto, I have tons of folders to organize my photos, but I wish I could organize the folders into some kind of logical hierarchy.
I am still not interested in having an application manage my music for me. But it is nice to know that iTunes 4 performs a bit better than it’s predecessors. And as long as I don’t let iTunes manage my actual music files but instead catalog them it seems a bit less annoying to me.
the one thing that people don’t mention (and my only gripe with iTunes) is that it occasionally forgets songs. You’ll have an album, and one of the tracks has the little exclamation point in the gray circle next to it. If you click on that track, it will tell you that it can’t find that track… so you point it to the same directory where the other tracks are, and then it rememebrs. It’s annoying
Not sure if this only happens when it manages tracks for you or not, but I see it happen occasionally on my smallish (4-5gig?) collection.
I know it has happened to other people as well.
When I sleep my computer, it loses my SMB mounts. If I start iTunes before I remount them, then try to play a song, I get the exclamation point (regardless if I have subsequently remounted those shares).
iTunes
At first, I was a big iTunes fan… But now I just use it for ripping, which it does great. I have found Winamp 5rc8 to be better at playing mp3s, particularly mp3 streams. I didn’t like iTunes would take a long time to start (relatively) and then would put the stream at the top of all of my songs – playing the stream then the songs after, rather then just the stream. I also got tired of using the mp3 library stuff rather then the filesystem. I also like Winamp’s smaller visual footprint, scrolling titles in the task bar and customize-ability.
Re: iTunes
Unfortunately, the mp3 player landscape on the Mac is kinda limited. I would kill for full Winamp 2 on the Mac.
Re: iTunes
To be clear: There are several mp3 players for OSX, but they are all fancy lookin’. I just want a plain square window that plays music, with a decent playlist editor.
Re: iTunes
Yeah, that is pretty much all I want in a music player these days as well. I don’t mind anything extra as long as i can reduce it to those features. Time to write GrahamsAmp.
Not sure what to make of that. My collection is currently at 20,100 tracks. I dragged a new album into the library and all nine songs were completely imported in under three seconds. This is on an 867MHz G4 with 1GB.
It must once again be a samba thing. While it shouldn’t take a long time to open a file, read it’s id3 tag, and close it, it must be the problem. I wish Apple would get their SMB performance up to par. I can’t even stream a DiVx file off of my file server, I have to copy it to my Mac first to play it back in VLC.
I just dragged an album from a local drive onto iTunes and it still took forever for each track to be imported into the iTunes DB. And my mac is a 733MHz G4 with 768M, btw.