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iTunes Has Slowly Destroyed My Will to Collect Music

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Re: iTunes Has Slowly Destroyed My Will to Collect Music

#22
post #17
post #14

Someone has to say it: why do people keep using it? If it's not doing the job it's supposed too, or worse, actively deleting your music it's time to scrap it!

There's still nothing better than iTunes, at least on OS X. It's the best of a bad bunch.

I've found Swinsian to be a viable alternative: http://swinsian.com

Re: iTunes Has Slowly Destroyed My Will to Collect Music

#23

When I was a young teenager in the early nineties I dreamt about having all the worlds music available to me via the internet. This is more or less the reality today. Access beats ownership anyway IMO.

A lot of people repeating that line will change their tune when Spotify finally goes out of business in a couple of years time.

Re: iTunes Has Slowly Destroyed My Will to Collect Music

#24

When I was a young teenager in the early nineties I dreamt about having all the worlds music available to me via the internet. This is more or less the reality today. Access beats ownership anyway IMO.

I consider reliability to be a fundamental element of access. If I have music on my hardware, I can always play it. If other people are granting me access to download music from their hardware, I can play it whenever I have access to their hardware, up to the limits of whatever constraints they have chosen to apply to their service, which may include having to spend money or listen to ads.

Different people have different needs; I'd rather have a smaller collection of music I can count on than access to all the music which is encrusted with hassle and advertising.

Re: iTunes Has Slowly Destroyed My Will to Collect Music

#26
post #16

http://beets.io/ beets has done an amazing job helping curate my music. I'm sure it's been covered here before.

Has it gotten better at tagging classical music? I used it for a while a year or two ago and back then it was pretty bad for tagging classical music.

I tag everything the same way, no matter what I use to listen to the music, the OS I use, tag app, music source etc. Just Artist, Album, and track number. Clear all the other fields. For classical, I appreciate that there can be different labels releasing different masterings of the same recording, or different conductors of the same piece, or a given conductor conducting the same piece with different orchestras etc but for me I'm happy sticking that info as part of the Album. For example: Gurrelieder (Boulez). I don't see any point in getting anal about it all. You can stick the notes in the folder you store the music in, or have filenames with extra details but as long as the music player lets you drill down from artist to album, and plays the tracks in the album in the correct order, that's good enough. I don't waste my time with cover art etc because if I want to look at it I can do that on a pc or in real life; i'm never going to be staring my my phone while it's playing, and it's never going to be quicker to wade visually through cover art to find what you're looking for (although I guess it might aid lazily browsing through your collection if you're not sure what to play).

Re: iTunes Has Slowly Destroyed My Will to Collect Music

#27
post #23

When I was a young teenager in the early nineties I dreamt about having all the worlds music available to me via the internet. This is more or less the reality today. Access beats ownership anyway IMO.

A lot of people repeating that line will change their tune when Spotify finally goes out of business in a couple of years time.

Streaming Music in the cloud is not going anywhere.

Not sure why that would change that?

There have never been as much access to music as there is today. It's a good thing.

Re: iTunes Has Slowly Destroyed My Will to Collect Music

#28
10 years I had 10,000+ songs on my iTunes - their version updates and switching computers (prior to / not fully utilizing Time Machine) slowly decayed my library down to ~150.

Then along came Spotify, Soundcloud, etc and I haven't returned to iTunes. No Apple Music either. Not sure what would get me back to my iTunes habit of 10 years ago...

Re: iTunes Has Slowly Destroyed My Will to Collect Music

#29
post #23

When I was a young teenager in the early nineties I dreamt about having all the worlds music available to me via the internet. This is more or less the reality today. Access beats ownership anyway IMO.

A lot of people repeating that line will change their tune when Spotify finally goes out of business in a couple of years time.

And we will call this the golden decade of music access, as our children fetishize the 2010s

Re: iTunes Has Slowly Destroyed My Will to Collect Music

#30
post #17
post #14

Someone has to say it: why do people keep using it? If it's not doing the job it's supposed too, or worse, actively deleting your music it's time to scrap it!

There's still nothing better than iTunes, at least on OS X. It's the best of a bad bunch.

http://coppertino.com/vox/mac is a good alternative.
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