Yes. Yes it does.

Thank you, mystery meatling!

The best thing about iTunes' reliance on id3v2 tags for ALL file classification:

magenta@zorkachu:/media/music/_MANGLED_$ du -k | sort -n | tail
193120 ./Frank Zappa
212928 ./Penguin Cafe Orchestra
217440 ./The Orb Remix Project
232736 ./Konami/Beatmania BEST soundtrack disc
232768 ./Konami
260960 ./Fantastic Plastic Machine
324864 ./Renku Corporation
4924544 ./Unknown Artist/Unknown Album
4986784 ./Unknown Artist
16973408 .


HOW VERY USEFUL!

I know it'd take ages, but will you be able to fix it?

Yeah, I'm well on my way already, actually.

Most of it won't be too difficult, aside from tidying up filenames where it munched them from id3v2 tags. A few of my really old rips were so badly-mangled I'll just have to rerip them, but it's not too bad (right now the pile's only 7 big, though I'm sure I'll find more as I go).

The difficult things are Songfight (which I'll probably just redownload), Coverfight and SongFight Live (which will be horrendous, and can't be done in any semblance of automaticness), and a few of the weirder exotic stuff which probably isn't online anymore.

On the plus side, this is prompting me to do a few cleanups I"d been meaning to do anyway (like giving each artist their own directory even if I only have one track of theirs), and I'll also probably take the initiative in finding all of my tagless stuff and dealing with it in appropriate ways.

Damn. I guess this is why I write my own tags. Even still, I arrange my mp3s the same way you do. My mp3 CD player arranges files the way the toc on the CD was written. So it follows the directory structure and ignores the tags(which is what I prefer, personally).

Someone warned me the the iPod does the same thing iTunes did to you. Aside from requiring a playlist, it won't arrange your songs unless the tags are valid, and directory structure doesn't matter(If I'm wrong, feel free to correct me).

I know you hate XMMS, but I've taken to using that. It handles Ogg Vorbis without barfing, too. Sucks that Fink's port relies on ESD, but other than that, it works fine. It helps that AudioCompress works fine on OS X too. <p>

I use grip at home to rip my audio (hey, I listen at both places, and I'd rather just rip my CDs at home anyway) and it makes nice .m3us of albums if I want. And I generate a toplevel music.m3u by doing find $PWD -name "*.ogg" > music.m3u from the toplevel of my music dir. I usually just listen to random tracks all day anyway.

I'm trying to move away from X11 apps. Also, I've never had xmms work without choppiness under OSX. I suppose I could give it a try again, though.

And yeah, I never bother with playlists anyway. To me, a playlist is "xmms Path/To/Album/*"

FWIW, iTunes does play and catalog (but not index) oggs just fine (when you install the QuickTime CODEC), and of course, the ogg files were the only ones which WEREN'T totally messed up.

Also, X11.app doesn't seem to want to let me actually set a working path, even in .xinitrc. Hell.

god damnit. xmms+esd+SMB-mounted fileshare FUCKING SUCKS.

Hm. I see a correlation here between 'SMB' and 'FUCKING SUCKS."

SMB had nothing to do with the iTunes-rearranging-things issue, except for that it means that it affects ALL of my computers, not just the Mac. If I'd had the media drive connected directly to the Mac it'd have still pissed me off just the same though.

fluffy

I'm trying to move away from X11 apps. Also, I've never had xmms work without choppiness under OSX. I suppose I could give it a try again, though.

And yeah, I never bother with playlists anyway. To me, a playlist is "xmms Path/To/Album/*"

FWIW, iTunes does play and catalog (but not index) oggs just fine (when you install the QuickTime CODEC), and of course, the ogg files were the only ones which WEREN'T totally messed up.

The machine I use at work is a 500MHz G4 (Sawtooth). Audio skips when I attempt to do anything other than twiddle my thumbs.

Oh. Mine's a Sawtooth G4/450, so it might not even be an SMB buffering issue (or maybe the SMB buffering is just exacerbating the problem anyway).

It doens't help that xmms is a huge timing whore, and gets angry if X11 isn't totally responsive. Like in X11.app.

XMMS also fucking sucks, by the way.

Too bad there's no modern OSX audio players which support plugins. Unsanity Echo seemed interesting but they've discontinued it.

That's what I'm using, and the way I've got it configured, it arranges my music by directory structure. It doesn't suck, for the most part (though I'd rather have playlists handled the way Winamp or XMMS do).

that doesn't FUCKING SUCK? I mean, really. RealPlayer, MusicMatch, gqmpeg, Winamp3 (need I go on?)... Winamp2, XMMS and iTunes come the closest to not sucking, but XMMS doesn't really like any platform but Linux (I think it's somehow optimized for Linux's scheduler, though it's responsive on NetBSD, too), Winamp2 is for Windows (which I hardly ever use, except at work), and iTunes has the file management bogosity, weak ogg support and is a screen real-estate hog.

Of course, the res-hogging issue is partially because OSX, IMHO, doesn't really look quite right in less than 1280x1024 (which sounds right - NeXTSTEP didn't, either). But I agree, XMMS sucks on OSX. (And mostly doesn't suck on Linux, at least to me).

Winamp 3 was such a piece of crap that the developers decided to scrap it in favour of continuing work on Winamp 2. Wmp2 now features video playback(everything from WMA to AVI and Xvid, etc..) and a few improvements here and there.

I liked Winamp 3 for its skinning capabilities, but the damn thing was a resource hog of the highest magnitude. Not to mention it was buggy as hell(I don't think they ever fixed the volume/player freeze problem) and took forever to restart. Winamp 2 works like a snap, although it will be nice to see them improve on it.

Good. I'm glad they dropped that piece of dren. What an unmitigated turd. 'Wasabi'... Feh. About as useful as an owl-proof bookend.

devtrash

Personally I like mpg123 or if I need something to handle playlists and randomizing I use mp3blaster.

mpg123 with esd output + AudioCompress as esd plugin module is nice. I like having a bit more control over the actual playback though.

Somehow I'd kind of forgotten about that option though. I should revisit it, yes.

Ah, that's better.

Ali: LOL

Um, what?

I love iTunes. It's a great player with a great library interface, and although I haven't bought anything from iTMS it seems pretty slick. But it also has some pretty obnoxious behavior when it comes with interoperating with collections of audio which aren't managed by iTunes.

Somehow the "let iTunes keep my library organized" setting was checked, probably set by default (since it was a fairly new install of MacOS on this system), and so when I pointed my library directly at the SMB share (to see if that'd keep things synchronized automatically) it went and renamed everything. I'm positive I never checked the setting myself. That's what pissed me off, that it went and set a setting I didn't want set and then did a destructive, non-undoable operation because of it.

Or maybe it's the person who decides to post a random comment on an ancient weblog entry which was found by searching on "itunes plugins w32" (which indicates being on a platform which doesn't like to mangle that setting) who sucks.

Yes, and I have my own id3tag management shell scripts which work great, when the stuff is laid out or already has a seed of tag goodness to work with. But when tons of files become 'unknown artist - unknown title' it becomes a problem.

Well, considering this weblog entry was entitled "iTunes FUCKING SUCKS," I have to question your motives in telling me exactly how iTunes FUCKING SUCKS, but:

anonymousRWC

Create a new folder, named the way you want, for each new album?

No, but it's easy enough to rename in retrospect. (I actually have iTunes put its output into ~/music/encoded/(whatever) and then have various shellscripts to fix its braindead file naming based on the id3 tags. And the barrier to setting up shellscripts on the Mac is WAY lower than on Windows, what with it coming with a complete UNIX environment built-in.)

Rip to VBR, OR fixed rate, from 96 to 320?

Yes, but its encoder sucks, so I use iTunes-LAME instead (which is an Applescripty drop-in, which is only available on the Mac version since there's no Applescript on Windows).

Maintain several libraries, simultaneously?

No, but genres mitigate this.

Save playlists anywhere you want? (Not export, kids- Save)

Yes. Exporting is just another term for saving.

Move your library files and access them on a removable USB drive? (Not the music file, Sluggo- the library database)

This has always been possible. Just copy ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music Library to wherever you want it, or you can export it as an XML file (for import into anything which speaks XML).

Access the same library files from different machines?

Not directly, but you CAN enable Rendezvous sharing which does more or less the same thing.

Alter ID3v2 and 3 tags across large batches?

Yes, actually, and it has one of the best id3v2 tag batch editors I've ever seen.

Choose alternate tags, or hand-write your own?

It has always supported this.

View the music information columns in any order or configuration you want? Including filepath?

Yes, except that title must come first, and there's no filepath option (they really want to hide that from the user).

I bought the Archos because during my visit to the Apple Store in Palo Alto, it took three employees to figure out that no, you can't have separate folders to organize your music on an iPod. The iPod Knows Best. And you obviously then can't have the iPod create a playlist on the fly from just the music in a specific folder. The drive can't be upgraded or repaired, and there are no developers for applications on the iPod.

To organize things separately in the iPod, I use genre tags.

Also, you CAN create a playlist on the fly. Either you were looking at an older iPod, or the Apple Store employees had never heard of "on-the-go playlists," which I use all the time.

The drive can be upgraded and repaired, just not by authorized Apple dealers (and the hard part is finding the replacement part). And yeah, it'd be nice if Apple would open up an iPod SDK — it's already been reverse-engineered, actually, but it's certainly not ready for primetime.

I hear the Mac faithful bleating in pleasure when I pass a Mac store..."Ooooo, yes! Tell us how we will work! Tell us how we shall listen! Tell us what is best for us, for we have not brains of our own..."

90% of everyone is idiots. Most Windows users are EXACTLY THE SAME. The Mac provides just as much hacking/customization possibility as XP; it's just that the way you go about it is different, is all.

To compare the computer and automotive products, Microsoft is selling the engine, you pick the chassis, tranny, body and interior. Matching them all up is a pain in the ass, but getting better. Some companies have made a fair dollar satisfying the 97% of the world that knows what it wants. Not perfect, but you get what you make of it.

I'd say that the 97% of the world *doesn't* know what it wants, and that's why they accept any old crap that's shoveled at them. At least what Apple shovels at its userbase *works*.

Also, the Mac comes with amazingly powerful tools — like a complete UNIX environment, what with being UNIX internally — it's just hidden in the trunk. Whereas Microsoft makes you actually buy your own spare tire and jack.

And really, what's wrong with "idiot lights?" The "Macintosh" car you described is just like my Echo (except that neither of them have a sealed hood), which I'm quite happy with; detailed diagnostics don't do me any good anyway when the problem is more complicated than my expertise or desire to become a mechanic on top of all the other crap I have to do in my daily life.

But like, with your filesystem management issues, it sounds like *you're* the one who's unwilling to even do simple file management on your own — how does that make you all-so-superior when you have to rely on the front-end software to hold your hand on everything?

There's an old saying: "Those who are in the middle of the road get hit from both sides."

Given my middle-of-the-road opinions about iTunes, and the sudden visibility of this thread on every websearch for people who are strongly opinionated about iTunes one way or the other, this thread has outlived its usefulness. Take it to Slashdot or whatever.