61–70 of 114 posts
Between dodgy iCloud and bloated iTunes, Apple has destroyed the "computer self-esteem" of a generation.
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.
But if your music collection is already sorted into filesystem folders, all you need is VLC!
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 don't understand why you say access beats ownership. Do you think this only about music? Or books? Or movies? If so, do you apply it to other things in your life? Do you own a car, or do you only rent? How about your home? Is it better to rent, or buy a place to live? Clothes? Why buy a pair of jeans, when you could pay a monthly fee to have new jeans delivered to your house and return the (month) old ones? For me,…
Although a house is not comparable.
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I've found Swinsian to be a viable alternative: http://swinsian.com
No file organization? Having the files automatically organized when the metadata is updated is literally the entire reason I've stuck with iTunes so far.
It's more powerful than iTunes and can sync with databases like Discogs and Musicbrainz to keep data up to date.
From what I've seen of iTunes ability to keep album art that I've added or automatically download ones I'm missing, there's no way in hell that I'd let it match my music collection. Some of the cover art is ok, some is meh (special edition banners), and some is in the WTF range (one zydeco album especially). Not that I have that much that's not mainstream, but I'm kind of particular about the stuff that's in there.
If you're looking for something to organize, tag, and locate album art I recommend musicbrainz. They have an app for osx. It's not incredibly intuitive at first but I'm currently cleaning my collection up with it
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!
On the music side it forces people to use streaming services instead which the music industry prefers to digital ownership, and Apple's own service is doing well. They've (Apple) always played ball with the music industry as everyone must, they've just managed to get better deals than most when working with them.
Where it really hurts is in podcasting. I think podcasts & audiobooks would be much bigger if syncing worked worth a damn on iTunes.
On the i-device side, syncing should be be removed wholesale from the media player. Honestly, it should be relegated to a little task icon like Caffeine. The only reason this isn't the case is because the storage capacity of these devices is so (needlessly) tiny, again perhaps purposefully in order to prevent day to day users from keeping a lot of downloaded music/videos locally.
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No file organization? Having the files automatically organized when the metadata is updated is literally the entire reason I've stuck with iTunes so far.
HN is populated by enough "geeks" to make this recommendation relevant: use beets. http://beets.io It's more powerful than iTunes and can sync with databases like Discogs and Musicbrainz to keep data up to date.
oh and it's written in python, which means it's quite easy to hack upon it.