I tried to extoll it’s ‘tightness’ today to fellow CSHers and was practically laughed out of the room. It’s definitely a hot piece of action, I assume that Apple’s next move will be to make the iPod wireless, which would just be damn sexy.
Jeebuz, jackpot, Batman! I was actually looking at something kind of like this or some funky audio over Cat5 thingy in order to listen to my MP3’s from a (yet to be purchased :) ) living room stereo. The AirPort express doesn’t have the video, but is so nice and small, and at $129 it surely beats running RCA or optical ;P. It seems like you need to use iTunes, though. What’s your experience (if any) with iTunes for Windows?
My experience with iTunes for Windows is that it is nearly identical with iTunes for OSX.. iTunes is nice, although I don’t let it manage my collection of MP3’s (I encode them, name them, and place them in the FS on my own and then just add them to iTunes.. I don’t like the way iTunes names/places my files).
I’m not trying to be a jerk here, I am genuinely curious. Why do you care about the naming and organization of your music?
Shortly after I moved to using iTunes as my jukebox I stopped caring about the naming and organization. iTunes’ organization *is* good enough that I can browse the filesystem to find anything I to, but I never need to find thing that way and I never do. At this point my feeling is that as long as iTunes keeps it’s music under a given dir I couldn’t care less how it organizes files.
I have been accruing music and MP3s for a long time now, and in that time I have used many different audio players on many different platforms. During that time I went out of my way to make sure my music was properly organized, tagged, and named.
Currently I am using iTunes, but this may not always be the case. Even if I decided to stay with iTunes for the rest of time, it is also possible that I may want access to my music from another OS which iTunes doesn’t support. Regardless of my specific motivations, I don’t want to tether myself to iTunes, nor am I interested in having to rename/move hundreds of files at some point in the future.
Up until I moved out of the apartment with and , all of my mp3’s were stored on the apartment file server. iTunes was a complete dog catalogging 60+ gigs of mp3’s served over SMB. When I moved into ‘s place, the file server seemed silly (since I was the only one accessing it, and Corinna’s condo is pretty tiny), so I moved all of the files directly onto my mac. In the future, however, I my go back to the file server approach.
My biggest gripe with iTunes is the way it hands “Various Artists” albums (or even an album which has a “Guest Artist” included in the id3 tag). In it’s collection dir it will create a subdir for each artist, and underneath that artist it will create an album dir. The problem with this is that it “scatters” the tracks of an individual album across many directories (appropriate to the artist who recorded each individual track). This makes tracking down all of the tracks for a given album a real pain in the ass.
One correction to that last bit. If you turn on the Compilations bit for a track iTunes puts it in a Compilations\[album name] directory. If I change players in the future that is good enough for me.
I know about the comp bit, I was just using that as an example… But this effects albums that I don’t consider compiliations as well. Just as an example, say you had an Beastie Boys album with one track featuring guest vocals from Biz Markie, you either have to mark the whole album as a compiliation (which it really isn’t) or have iTunes store that one track in a seperate directory (or somewhat invalidate the id3 tag by forcing all the artist tags to be the same).
I’m also not particularly fond of how it adds album art to the file instead of using the folder.jpg file that everyone does. “Sure, I’d like 15 copies of this image please. One is just not enough”
That’s a good point, although I have never bothered with the album art, so I haven’t seen that one.
iTunes is definitely designed with a “track” mentality than a “album” mentality, imho, and that is probably why they chose to store the art in the id3 tag.
I tried to extoll it’s ‘tightness’ today to fellow CSHers and was practically laughed out of the room. It’s definitely a hot piece of action, I assume that Apple’s next move will be to make the iPod wireless, which would just be damn sexy.
That is sexiness2
Jeebuz, jackpot, Batman! I was actually looking at something kind of like this or some funky audio over Cat5 thingy in order to listen to my MP3’s from a (yet to be purchased :) ) living room stereo. The AirPort express doesn’t have the video, but is so nice and small, and at $129 it surely beats running RCA or optical ;P. It seems like you need to use iTunes, though. What’s your experience (if any) with iTunes for Windows?
My experience with iTunes for Windows is that it is nearly identical with iTunes for OSX.. iTunes is nice, although I don’t let it manage my collection of MP3’s (I encode them, name them, and place them in the FS on my own and then just add them to iTunes.. I don’t like the way iTunes names/places my files).
I’m not trying to be a jerk here, I am genuinely curious. Why do you care about the naming and organization of your music?
Shortly after I moved to using iTunes as my jukebox I stopped caring about the naming and organization. iTunes’ organization *is* good enough that I can browse the filesystem to find anything I to, but I never need to find thing that way and I never do. At this point my feeling is that as long as iTunes keeps it’s music under a given dir I couldn’t care less how it organizes files.
I have been accruing music and MP3s for a long time now, and in that time I have used many different audio players on many different platforms. During that time I went out of my way to make sure my music was properly organized, tagged, and named.
Currently I am using iTunes, but this may not always be the case. Even if I decided to stay with iTunes for the rest of time, it is also possible that I may want access to my music from another OS which iTunes doesn’t support. Regardless of my specific motivations, I don’t want to tether myself to iTunes, nor am I interested in having to rename/move hundreds of files at some point in the future.
Up until I moved out of the apartment with
My biggest gripe with iTunes is the way it hands “Various Artists” albums (or even an album which has a “Guest Artist” included in the id3 tag). In it’s collection dir it will create a subdir for each artist, and underneath that artist it will create an album dir. The problem with this is that it “scatters” the tracks of an individual album across many directories (appropriate to the artist who recorded each individual track). This makes tracking down all of the tracks for a given album a real pain in the ass.
OK Cool.
One correction to that last bit. If you turn on the Compilations bit for a track iTunes puts it in a Compilations\[album name] directory. If I change players in the future that is good enough for me.
I know about the comp bit, I was just using that as an example… But this effects albums that I don’t consider compiliations as well. Just as an example, say you had an Beastie Boys album with one track featuring guest vocals from Biz Markie, you either have to mark the whole album as a compiliation (which it really isn’t) or have iTunes store that one track in a seperate directory (or somewhat invalidate the id3 tag by forcing all the artist tags to be the same).
Good point, I hadn’t thought of that.
I’m also not particularly fond of how it adds album art to the file instead of using the folder.jpg file that everyone does. “Sure, I’d like 15 copies of this image please. One is just not enough”
That’s a good point, although I have never bothered with the album art, so I haven’t seen that one.
iTunes is definitely designed with a “track” mentality than a “album” mentality, imho, and that is probably why they chose to store the art in the id3 tag.