iTunes is the worst application in the world
It really is. If this is what apple is shoving down people's throats, I don't want to use OSX.
Want to drag-and-drop that folder of music into a playlist, or onto the ipod? Nope... it's not that intuitive. Instead, you have to:
- File -> Add Folder ->
- Scroll through painfully simple and unexpressive list of folders (without even a way to type the path to the destination)
- Add the folder
- Wait while iTunes churns for a bit
- Wait while iTunes converts any non-mp3 music in the list
- Manually select the songs that were added to the library by adding the aforementioned folder
- Take a breather....
- Right-click on the selected songs
- Scroll down through a massive popup menu with many ambiguous options, and select 'Add to Playlist' -> 'My iPod'
Then afterwards, you still have to wait for the songs to be transferred.
So this is 'user-friendly'? Every other blasted thing in Windows is drag-and-drop: why isn't iTunes?
What ever happened to treating an mp3 player as a portable media drive, and just copying files to it, dammit? That would be the simplest method.
Comments
I don't know which version of iTunes you've been using, but you've stumbled upon absolute hardest way of doing this stuff. To acomplish what you want to acomplish, you've used menu items and pull-down lists that I have never had need to bother with. I assure you, if I had to do stuff the way you're doing it, I'd be grumpy, too.
The reason iPod preference don't show up unless your iPod's plugged in is that iPod preferences are stored on that particular iPod, not within iTunes. For me, this is absolutely necessary.
I have an 30GB iPod and my wife has a shuffle. We both use the same iTunes library, but when they synchronize, my wife's shuffle (because of its limited capacity) gets just the playlists she wants, and I get the entire 20GB library.
Managing playlists on your iPod:
I guess you have too small an iPod to house all your music, so you have to pick certain playlists to prevent maxing it out. All you have to do is creat a smart playlist that will automatically update for any music added since ___ and your new stuff will added to your iPod every time you connect. Then you tell your capacity-limited iPod to import that playlist.
Once agan, remember that the preferences for the iPod are stored on the iPod and not within iTunes and that is why you have to have the iPod connected to tell it which playslists to import.
Automatic playlist creation with import
Just drag your appropriately named folder with the new MP3s into the playlist part of the window (easiest if you drop it right on the word "Playlists") and it all happens by itself.
A technical note: Imports happen directly into iTunes. No format change happens. If you start with a WAV or an AIFF, then that's what is stored in iTunes and is played on your iPod. You can force a format change to any other format as you import, but that's not what happens automatically.
I hope I've helped. If you have any more trouble with this, please don't hesitate to contact me.
-Peter
Itunes sucks.. someone please put apple out of their misery and close this crapy company down and spares us all this unreliable over prices garbage that does not work with anything !!!!
Sorry about all the typos. I'm all thumbs this morning.
I stopped by to say, along the same lines as Peter here, that 'you're doing it wrong', but I see he's covered that already.
I'm surprised I haven't accidentally trolled any mindless mac fanbois yet.
Peter, Jon: I'll respond to your comments when I have a spare moment. But for the record: it's not my ipod, it's Tasha's and she has the same complaints. I was using it when I was trying to fill it for her in preparation for an ungodly long trip. It's a shuffle BTW.
Guy looks like he needs technical help real bad. I work hard to try to help. Guy gets abusive and insulting afterwards.
Am I missing something?
Was there something that could have been misinterpreted as uncivil or derisive in what I wrote? If so, I'm sorry. I'm just trying to help.
What in what I said was 'abusive and insulting'?
I was just commenting that I was surprised I hadn't gotten any mac fanbois flaming me for one reason or another.
I'm really busy at the moment and will give your comment the full attention it deserves when I have a spare moment. It's very lengthy and you probably put quite a bit of effort into posting it, so I'll at least give it a fair shot.
I usually come off as anti-apple -- I am -- but I was not being sarcastic in any way.
I agree with the OSX sucking. The more I use it, the more I hate it. (I have to use it in the studio, else I wouldn't use it.) What's so wrong with a taskbar? Personally, I like to have a chance to just glance down and see what's open. Also, I cannot stand the whole 'one menu bar shared amongst *all* applications'.
As for mp3s and iTunes... you should see my prof in class... He's got a mac with the iTunes, but he has horrible troubles stopping a song at the end before it jumps to the next one (which we need done for the class format). And apparently his iTunes makes it so if you double click on an mp3, it gets sucked straight into the rest of your playlist/library, rather than just playing by itself. Horrible sounding. I have used iTunes briefly, but ditched it pretty quick.
My mp3 player is only 512mb, but it is good on the whole simple dragging and dropping of mp3s. Which is perfect for me seeing as how I never have enough space on my computer to maintain a music library anyway. Though I wouldn't mind have a massive mp3 player to have a library on (as I'm not really organized enough to keep switching stuff on my mp3 player). But not an iPod.
You might want to check if you can set up Tasha's shuffle to just drag and drop, though. I mean, I know you can install Linux on full-fledged shuffles, so maybe...
The trouble with using an iPod as a portable media drive is, as Peter pointed out, that the iPod maintains its own database of media (which explains why it uses 148 MB of the gigabyte of space on it when empty. Fixed sized databases suck).
Double-click to add a song to your playlist is a pretty common action, actually. Winamp does that (or it just blows away your playlist and adds the single song).
Sharing the file/edit/etc menu amongst all applications is debatable as a design decision, but since almost every window has its functionality in windows anyway, it might as well be at the top of the screen in a fixed position instead of on every window.
Amarok works pretty well with ipods - it has a plugin to handle them. The only trouble with using it is that mounting was iffy for a while due to my sudo being broken (fixed now). Kinda slow, but at least I could drag and drop. That's really what bothers me about the entire thing: you can't drag-and-drop music files into itunes directly onto an ipod playlist. Instead of taking two minutes to add the feature (the code for the rest of the low-level actions required probably already exists) some higher-up at Apple probably made the decision to explicitly disallow this functionality because of their backwards 'think different' mandate.
I use gtkpod for my ipod updating purposes. It wasn't until the most recent Debian update that they started conforming to the iPod's horrid idea of scrambling all the song's filenames to make copying back nigh impossible on a large scale.
I have to agree with you on the use of iTunes. It is big, bulky, clunky, and unnecessary. It's goal is to be the storage location of your mp3s. My roommate had 10 gb of mp3s on her computer (Mac iBook c. 2004). That 10gb of mp3s used up 21gb of space. 10 GB for the copy she loaded into a folder on the desktop and 11 gb for the copy that iTunes made in its own library. As far as iTunes is concerned, it is the be-all and end-all of mp3 storage.
I have to agree with Peter on the iPod sync problems. Sure, you can't just double-click to play an mp3. You can't drag something into a playlist without it being added to the library (for reasons I described above). And, it is an overall annoying process to do anything with it. On the other hand, when I was using Windows and needed iTunes for my iPod updating, I found it relatively simpler than what you've stated. I don't think I used menus to add playlists. I think I used right-click. On a Mac, that would be "fscked up 4-leaf clover"-click.
As for the drag and drop to load mp3s onto the iPod, unless you're using another program to interpret which horrid folder's you're looking for, it shouldn't be possible. Mac came up with the brilliant anti-piracy plan of scrambling the order of the mp3s and placing them into seemingly random folders within the hidden music folder on the iPod. These folders are named r00 - r50 (on my iPod). Within these folders are some files with names like:
Helloween - Where the Rain Grows.mp3
AXQ4YKRN.mp3
and
GTK401.mp3
The first is from an older version of gtkpod or a version of iTunes that wouldn't let me install/run it last time I tried. Apparently Apple doesn't let people keep around old versions of iTunes that don't have the horrid features users don't want. I used to have a copy that worked with iPods, but didn't have the music store. That saved A LOT on RAM and access times.
The second filename is from a later version of iTunes. Isn't it nice that iTunes does something helpful like renaming my files for me?
The third filename is one from a recent gtkpod installation. I am highly disappointed.
Finally, I will deal a bit with Linux on the iPod. It works well on my iPod (4G 20GB). And, I think it works on all of them up to the more recent Nano and Video. However, it does not work on an iPod Shuffle. They state this in the documentation and also say that it is obvious why it wouldn't work on a shuffle. I recommend it for any iPod it claims to work on. It's fun, and iPods finally get Tetris!
rernst... yup, you did it in the most awkward way.
nevertheless, itunes really is a very awkward mp3 player, at least on windows. the fact alone that you can't drag folders to create a playlist is very lo-tek.
also very annoying: itunes seems to have major problems in handling "easter egg tracks", the ones with a loooong pause where there's still something comin'. total system freeze. i mean, really...
The least-awkward way would be to let me *drag and drop*. Anything else (other than possibly a nice command-line way to add files) is awkward.
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