I think I'm offended.
Aug. 5th, 2006 09:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
theweaselkingI opened my new toy to find *this* printed on the shrinkwrap.
Gee, thanks, fuck you, Apple.
I was seriously tempted to return it to the store on the spot.
I didn't. I am, however, going to send a rude note to them, informing them that if I really wanted to be treated like a complete asshole, I would have bought a Sony.
(PS: Serial number written in tiny font, in white, on silver? Hard to read. Bitches.)
Gee, thanks, fuck you, Apple.
I was seriously tempted to return it to the store on the spot.
I didn't. I am, however, going to send a rude note to them, informing them that if I really wanted to be treated like a complete asshole, I would have bought a Sony.
(PS: Serial number written in tiny font, in white, on silver? Hard to read. Bitches.)
(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-06 04:45 am (UTC)Who the fuck makes a music program that doesn't let me sort by OR EVEN SEE the folder structure of the source files?
(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-06 05:46 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-06 06:10 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-06 06:15 am (UTC)Or at least I did, until I became disillusioned by it's corporate shinyness and washing-machined it in a fit of rage.*
I didn't do it accidentally, oh no. ahem.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-07 05:06 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-06 01:03 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-06 01:36 pm (UTC)My problem is that my music is all sorted, by artist, album, genre, etc, and iTunes WILL NOT RECOGNISE THAT. I can't just hit a button and have all my Industrial in one place, subsorted by artist, like I've been doing for the last half decade in WinAmp.
And I don't want to start going through and updating ID3 tags *manually* on 5000 files because they *ARE* set correctly, just not the way iTunes wants them.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-06 04:46 pm (UTC)iTunes has a different philosophy of organisation than WinAmp, and I vastly prefer it. The playlist model of WinAmp irritates me to no end. I prefer having iTunes organise the music according to its system, but I’ve long been willing to surrender control for convenience, when it comes to applications.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-06 04:52 pm (UTC)"Set X tag to Y on all these MP3s" would just be TOO EASY, you see.
My problem is that I've already got my entire music library organised. I've got it sorted by genre then artist then album, so that winAmp opens whatever I tell it to open and it all shows up in the correct, predictable order, and iTunes *won't do that*.
Fuck iTunes. I've uninstalled it, and I'm just using WinAmp's ipod plugins. At their worst, they imitate iTunes, and they actually have proper sorting functions.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-06 05:17 pm (UTC)iTunes would sort as you like, but it needs the ID3 tags. To me, using the file system to categorise is hopelessly messy.
If you have something that works and that you’re familiar with, good enough, though.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-06 05:37 pm (UTC)And if I'm not using the file system to categorise, how am I supposed to, say, grab an album and copy it to another disk if I want to move it or share it?
(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-06 05:44 pm (UTC)iTunes organises the filesystem in Artist - Album format, so you could copy an album that way, but I prefer to simply select the album in iTunes and drop it on the destination volume.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-06 06:07 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-06 06:16 pm (UTC)Advantage: WinAmp.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-06 05:47 pm (UTC)Or use the show file function in iTunes (File > Show File) - since iTunes organises the songs as Artist/Album in the filesystem (if you let iTunes itself do the organising), you should easily be able to find the songs you want.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-06 05:39 pm (UTC)Also, iTunes has both a very good search and a browser (Edit > Show/Hide Browser) - the latter easily lets you select a genre, an artist or an album.
(I might be talking out of my ass here, since I simply can't understand your comment that iTunes doesn't understand you ID3 tags.)
(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-06 07:15 pm (UTC)Anyway, sounds like you've got it worked out by going back to winamp. Enjoy the iPod, I've been quite happy with mine to date. Thinking about upgrading to one of the nanos when they get around to bumping up the capacity.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-06 07:56 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-10 06:25 pm (UTC)The other problem, is that once you have it in there, there's no way to get them out effectively. You end up losing all the work that you put into it. At least with WinAMP, you can edit the ID# tags and it will always work based on the ID3 tags. This way, you can always put the files into another system.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-06 07:12 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-06 02:24 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-06 03:18 pm (UTC)You might find this of interest. I installed it on mine with ease. Ogg support, too. Wee!
There's some bugs in the playback making the audio pause for a second every 10 secs or so, but my install is of an older version: I'm sure it was either fixed or was due to some misconfiguration on my part...
Best part is, you can boot back to the old firmware if you want. ;)
(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-06 07:13 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-06 09:06 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-07 01:46 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-07 02:32 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-07 04:15 am (UTC)And the point is not supporting piracy or not supporting piracy or even whether or not DRM interferes with your right as a consumer or whether or not "information wants to be free" justifies "I don't want to pay the asking price so I'll just take what I want and pay nothing".
The point is that I legitimately bought a piece of hardware for the purpose of legitimately listening to music that I ALSO legitimately bought, and when I opened it up I was presented with a "Gee, you're a fucking thief, and we, the makers of your device, can't think of anything more important to write on the shrinkwrap than to tell you that you're a thief and stealing is, like, totally wrong, dude."
And that's why I'm offended.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-07 04:28 am (UTC)However...
"Gee, you're a fucking thief, and we, the makers of your device, can't think of anything more important to write on the shrinkwrap than to tell you that you're a thief and stealing is, like, totally wrong, dude."
... would be freaking hysterical. :)
(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-07 04:31 am (UTC)If anything, that's worse - they assume their ENTIRE CUSTOMER BASE, every single person who shells out the money for their hardware, are the kind of person who need that message.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-07 04:35 am (UTC)What do you think would be a good massage to put on it to achieve the cause without being curt about it they they did?
(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-07 01:10 pm (UTC)They did, in German. Just not in English or French (and I don't speak Japanese to check, there.)
As for an appropriate message? How about "Enjoy your iPod"?
There *is* no appropriate way to say "use your new toy for good, not for evil".
(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-07 05:03 pm (UTC)PERFECT!
(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-07 02:49 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-07 05:30 am (UTC)As for iTunes, it doesn't acknowledge filesystem hierarchy because such is notoriously subject to corruption. In fact, to have both FS and iTunes organization be consistant, iTunes has a feature to "keep music organized" which will keep it organized by artist first and then by album (with consideration for things tagged as compilations too). Also, that feature makes it so that if you change the tags then the files are relocated as appropriate (e.g. if you make artist names consistent instead of having "Beatles" and "The Beatles" and the like). Since I have very little reason to muck with my music outside of playing it or backing it up, this is more than sufficient.
Now, bear in mind that I'm one of those people who is impressively neurotic when it comes to organizing my music. I've taken the time to go in and check all the tags on my 6~7k songs including those fiddly bits like publication year, total tracks for the album, etc. And of all the programs out there iTunes is the only one I've found that can respect that sort of anal retention, even if it has its other failings.
If by "the information's already there" you mean encoded in the filesystem names then it shouldn't be too hard of a task to write a script to grab the information from there and put it in the IDv3 tags. I've written a few of them to do that before, though that was before the days of iTunes and I don't develop for windows so much.
As for grabbing everything by genre and the like, if the information is in the tags then you can pick any column to sort your songs by (and by selecting columns in order you can sort by multiple columns ala genre, then artist, then album, then track number). Also, from the main Library view you can click the Browse icon in the upper right to make a dropdown to list only songs matching a given (set of) genre, artist, or album.
if you're neurotic enough about genres to, say, distinguish between EBM, Futurepop, Industrial, Darkwave, etc but you want to make a logical grouping of all of them, you can use "smart playlists" where you can specify a number of search criteria[1] and could just list all those genres under your playlist for electronica.
[1] Alas, while well done for casual users, it's hopelessly primitive for truly resplendent things. You can only have all queries logically or-ed or and-ed together, can't mix them or use other logical operators. Also last I checked there was no scrollbar given once you pass too many queries so there's a limit on how much you can group together. However, newer versions of iTunes offer folders for playlists, and the folders themselves serve as playlists derived from combining all the playlists you put in them.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-16 12:48 am (UTC)