# Why iTunes kicks ass



## cellfish (Dec 7, 2002)

I recently switched to the Mac completely and brought over all of my MP3's. The first thing I didn't like, probably because I didn't expect it, is how iTunes copied the MP3's into a different file name and placed each song in its own folder and everything. On top of it all, it made the folders according to what was written in the Tag attached to each MP3 (resulting in misspelled artist names, misspelled albums, erroneous albums, etc.)

The reason iTunes rocks is because when I listened to the song and changed what appeared in Get Info, it automatically moved the MP3 to the right area according to my changes. If a song in a list appeared that I didn't want, it gave me the option not only to remove it from the list, but also from the HD.

What I'm getting at is: NOBODY MENTIONS THIS TO PC USERS! It's not enough to say 'iTunes is better' because on the surface it doesn't look even slightly better. You have to pound these options into their head and let them know what they COULD do. I dunno about everyone else, but iTunes reacting to my changes in the MP3's tag is damn impressive.


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## ex2bot (Dec 7, 2002)

I'm glad I am not the only one who thinks iTunes is superior. Media Player on 98/ME/XP stinks. (Of course, I haven't seen the very latest version.)

Whenever I do try to use MP, I usually get very frustrated, because the interface is so annoying. And, why won't it encode in MP3 format??? Stupid Microsoft.

iTunes really does rock.

Doug


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## cq107 (Dec 8, 2002)

> Whenever I do try to use MP, I usually get very frustrated, because the interface is so annoying. And, why won't it encode in MP3 format??? Stupid Microsoft.


mp sucks period. any windows user knows that. the fact that it doesnt encode to mp3 is very stupid too, but smart. wmv has many copy pertection features that mp3 will never have. 
anyways, I am not an MS lawyer to explain why that move was smart, but wmv sucks too- I mean you cant even play it on a mac (ok you can but why would you want too?), and anyone who is serious about ecoding or "archiving" knows that LAME or OGG will do it better and faster.


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## Jasoco (Dec 8, 2002)

Damn right, iTunes Rocks. I just Organized my Music folder. The only thing is that the Finder is now stuck trying to open a folder with three items in it. Guess EVERY Apple app can't be perfect.


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## Jasoco (Dec 8, 2002)

Whoa.. That was cool.. but weird.

When I organized the folder it left a folcer with 3 songs in it. This was my "Other" folder that I used for just songs that there were only one of the artist. When I organized it movedd all the songs I had in my library into their respective folders. (Which now means instead of 50 folders in the Music folder, I have 279 different artists.) The three left were not in my library. And for some reason they were dupes of what I already had. I doubleclicked each one one at a time. Listened to it in iTunes and deleted it from the Library. I answered Yes to place in Trash and when the last song was gone the "Other" folder disappeared.. BEFORE I COULD DO IT MYSELF! THAT is cool. I love Organizing my Music folder.

Now.. if only my room had the same option.


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## senne (Dec 8, 2002)

i love iTunes, but there's still one thing i don't like. When you select the option "Copy musicfiles into the Musicfolder when importing from a folder", it doesn't delete the original file....My brother (who knows the average things about how macs works, not too much knowledge) had that option ON, and when i came to visit his new eMac, his HD was almost full! And that was because of all files were kind like duplicated on his computer... by cause of that option.


i hope that disadvantage will be erased with iTunes 4!


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## toast (Dec 8, 2002)

I'm with senne on this one.
I'll add: could there an organization by Genre too ? I mean having not only the MP3 organized by Artist in the Music folder, but also by genre:

Rock
/ Led Zep
/ Stones
/ etc

Hard
/ Metallica
/ Manowar
/ etc

and so on


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## senne (Dec 9, 2002)

> _Originally posted by toast _
> *I'm with senne on this one.
> I'll add: could there an organization by Genre too ? I mean having not only the MP3 organized by Artist in the Music folder, but also by genre:
> 
> ...



that would be really cool!


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## chemistry_geek (Dec 9, 2002)

cellfish,

Apple has been doing these nice little impressive features for years.  It's a hidden secret for us Mac folk who have to come to expect these things from Apple.  THIS is what is meant by a Macintosh being "INTIUTIVE".  Nice little changes are oftem system-wide.  Want to see another cool thing?  Place an MP3 file on your desktop, open it, and then move the file to wherever you like WHILE IT IS PLAYING.  The file will be moved to the location you designate and iTunes won't skip, cough or hiccough.  Try doing that with Windows Media Player, I think you'll get an error about the file being "busy".


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## namaste (Dec 9, 2002)

I love iTunes, but a big problem for me is that it doesn't let me choose a naming convention for my files, like track-Artist-Album-Title. The ability to format the file name like mp3rage uses would be nice.


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## symphonix (Dec 10, 2002)

I like the fact they've added autocomplete in most of the text fields, such as artist and genre, in both the info display and on the itunes playlists themselves.
Also, the CDDB lookup is neat because it is transparent to the user - if you're on the net, it just works!
The only thing I'd like is a neat way to split out those annoying 'hidden track' things you get on some CDs into seperate song files, thus eliminating the need to store 3 minutes of nothing.


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## fryke (Dec 11, 2002)

If iTunes would automatically remove the original files when imorting from folders, what would happen if I attach my Firewire harddrive to a friends Mac so he can import my tunes? I certainly _don't_ want iTunes to erase them from my hd... I think that feature is perfectly okay as it is...


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## jrun (Dec 27, 2002)

> _Originally posted by dktrickey _
> Whenever I do try to use MP, I usually get very frustrated, because the interface is so annoying. And, why won't it encode in MP3 format??? Stupid Microsoft.
> 
> iTunes really does rock.
> Doug [/B]



I wouldn´t say Microsoft is stupid (because they don´t let you encode MP3, they may very well be stupid because of something else). They try their best to get the world to encode everything to .wma. They won´t let you make mpegs either. Real Media and Quicktime are just as bad. 

Who made MP3 a ´standard´anyway? RedHat realized the licensing issues with MP3 and decided not to include MP3 support in their latest release (8.x). We should all go for open standards, like ogg. But then again, who will explain to all the parents and 70-year olds that the MP3 player they bought won´t work any more and that they should get an ogg player.


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## hazmat (Dec 27, 2002)

I guess all MP3 players aren't (software) upgradeable enough, like the iPod, to be able to easily support ogg?


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## fryke (Dec 27, 2002)

usually those players (and the iPod, too, I guess) have hardware chips that are capable of decoding several MPEG standards and layers (and not a fast 'general use' chip like a G3 or G4 that you can throw other software at), so i guess they're basically un-upgradable in that way... it'll be interesting to see whether Apple can upgrade the iPod to AAC-sound (MPEG-4's sound standard).


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## cabbage (Dec 27, 2002)

>>serious about ecoding or "archiving" knows that LAME or OGG

Actually they would use Shorten (shn)  lossless compression

http://www.etree.org


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## bigbadbill (Dec 27, 2002)

My buddy has MP and after comparing the 2 side-by side MP has only 1 feature that I would like to see added to iTunes, the ability to gather album art from the net. This is such a cool feature. Maybe in the next update?


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## MikeXpop (Dec 28, 2002)

> _Originally posted by bigbadbill _
> *My buddy has MP and after comparing the 2 side-by side MP has only 1 feature that I would like to see added to iTunes, the ability to gather album art from the net. This is such a cool feature. Maybe in the next update? *


 http://www.apple.com/switch did that too. I think that although apple could do that (a la Sherlock 3's movie feature), I really don't think there'd be a good place to put it. Think about it. Where would it go? And besides, I really don't think that's an integral listening experience either. Most of the time my iTunes is in it's smallest possible form in the corner so i can easily press forward or back.


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