a dubious step

[egypturnash]

Lately I've been using iTunes a lot instead of Audion. Audion had just become increasingly unstable, and the quick library search and manipulation features of iTunes were tempting. I think I've switched over now; I pulled Audion out of the dock and out of the stuff launched at login, replacing it with the CD-and-green-notes of iTunes.

Audion still has some features I miss - skins, and better song info tag management - but iTunes has its advantages, as well. Plus the fact that Audion has a weird inexplicable problem with Panther; it kinda hangs up when trying to close off a file it's finished encoding. And iTunes can do a CD-Paranoia type thing where it very carefully encodes difficult discs, which means the scratched-when-I-got-it copy (bad batch; I exchanged it and the new copy was scratched too) of the album mentioned in the music field is finally mostly listenable (would anyone like to hook me up with a raw .wav of 'Mission'? please? *bat eyelashes*). So it looks like I'm joining the monoculture.

But... do I want to take this step?



If I hit 'OK', iTunes will move all my files around, breaking the careful structure of folders I've imposed. It'll manage everything for me. Which is kinda what computers should do in some views - automate things out of the way, leaving you to concentrate on the important stuff. It's nice to be able to point people to a particular directory on my machine when I want to share some music with them, though...

I'm not hitting it yet. But I might in the future.

And new stuff is getting encoded in AAC rather than mp3. Which will also cause problems with sharing. But, eh. It survived the torture test of Björk's vocals-over-raw-noise in 'Pluto', with smaller filesize than a corresponding-quality VBR MP3, it'll work.

Comments

[goforthbyday.livejournal.com]

i wouldn't hit "OK." iTunes's method of organizing music drove me batty. but you might find it useful, i dunno. i finally had to go in an re-arrange all 900 something MP3s I had at the time by hand, because iTunes was doing wacky things.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

*nod* I've heard it has its own ideas. Of course, the idea is that you don't care about the organization on the disc once you have iTunes to sort and categorize the tracks for you. So far, the stuff it's encoded for me has been in almost exactly the same structure I'd want it in, except it puts it in an 'iTunes/iTunes Music' folder inside my main directory of music... *shrug* I've heard conflicting reports, and if I do it, it won't be until after backing everything up. Um. If I have room to back up a little more than 20 gigs!

[higginsdragon.livejournal.com]

You can change the default place for the music folder. I just have mine on a share named MP3. I accidentially hit yes once, and it sorted everything. A fair amount of stuff ended up in Unknown Artist:Unknown Album. But the nifty thing is, if you change the artist/album in the MP3 info, it'll put it in a similarly named folder.

I got used to it, mainly 'cuz over half the stuff I imported was already in iTunes happy structure.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

*nod* Mostly I wonder what it'll do with stuff off of compilations! Most of my music is stuff I encoded myself, so it actually has artist and album tags in it.

[mattlazycat.livejournal.com]

My iTunes (for windows) install didn't actually move the tracks when I checked that box. It just moved stuff there if I changed the tags, or imported new tracks. It was quite happy to leave stuff where it was until I changed it. The annoying thing for me really was that "consolidate library" (in the advanced menu) only copies, not moves files into the iTunes folder, so then you have to go back and delete the originals (which feels really weird, and also requires you to use twice as much hard drive space -- I guess things are different on the mac because it can use aliases/hard-links :)

As for compilations, they go into a sub-folder called "Compilations", so file-system wise they stay together. You can show them any way you like in the Library of course. I like that in iTunes you can shuffle by album rather than by track.

I think people who've downloaded more of their collection than they've encoded themselves really get a bad time in iTunes since it operates entirely on ID3 tags. On PC, I found that using MusicBrainz to fill in the missing tags before adding them to iTunes made things a lot better for my "found music" selection. Like you though, most of my library is now my own. Helps to keep the size down ;)

Oh, and finally, don't sweat AAC incompatibilities. Sure, people won't be able to leech from you to put stuff on their MP3 players, but they'll be fine on the desktop. www.audiocoding.com has an AAC decoder plugin for Winamp 2-5, and Winamp 5 Pro (the pay-for version) has ripping/playing support for AAC built in, too.

[fourprint.livejournal.com]

Augh! No!

Well, that was my experience, at least. I hit it by mistake, and it made hash of my carefully arranged folders. Live and learn.

[mutleyjames.livejournal.com]

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Aaaah! You're the second person to do this!

It is time to set up a PayPal button somewhere labeled 'Buy Peggy an iPod'.

[electricdog.livejournal.com]

Don't do it. I hit it by accident, and it put most of my music in stupid places, and a lot of the filenames were such that I couldn't easily re-organize it, if at all. Ended up having to wipe the drive and start downloading everything again. Which isn't fun on 56k.

Other than that, iTunes is fantastic... between that and foobar2000 I've got all I need. Winamp? What's that?

[mattlazycat.livejournal.com]

No shit, it moved all your music? I wish it had for me! I clicked that a month or so after installing and it didn't move anything. Pissed me off that it didn't.

[markpasc.livejournal.com]

That means your organization was already perfect.

(This thread is on page two of Google results for “foobar2000 musicbrainz,” btw.)