Re: More iTunes complaints

iTunes has to be one of the worst applications Apple make. It is truly awful.

I find it incredibly difficult to track where files came from, what's on my iPod Touch and not, what are duplicates and so on. The poor interface means I have files littered about my hard drive and on my iPod which I can't be sure I've listened to.

For a long time I used a MobiBlu cube. This is a fantastic device. Mine has 2GB of memory, a tiny screen and simple USB interface. By numbering my MP3 podcasts, I could easily see how many I'd listened to and delete them by number. The process worked - the numbering system I assigned meant I could easily change the order I listen to the files. A simple and effective process.

iTunes ruins all that. It insists on referring to the files by their MP3 ID3 tags, regardless of how I rename them. It fails to delete duplicates, it doesn't let me easily delete files which I've moved to my iPod.

I wanted to sort out an alternative to the MobiBlu for the car. I've got an iPod connector which broadcasts my iPod on the radio, but obviously it has a standard iPod plug and won't connect to the MobiBlu. However I've also got a standard 3.5mm jack one too - perhaps I should go back to the Mobiblu.

Has anyone seen any competing software to iTunes or do Apple simply not allow it?

I find that the most of the people I see complaining about iTunes don't really grasp its mode of operations. First and foremost, iTunes is not a file manager. It does include a fair bit of automated file management, but it's designed to be the front end of a variety of media objects. With this in mind you have to back out and look at a few things differently:

• If you're using iTunes, don't touch iTunes managed files directly. iTunes is a database front end that works with from the assumption that it is responsible for the management of all referenced media objects. Changing these objects manually is like going and poking with the contents of your database with a hex editor and then complaining that it's not working properly. iTunes identifies files by their pathname, so if you move them or rename them, iTunes can't find them any more.
• File naming is directly linked to the name tag in the MP3 atoms. If you want to rename the file object change the name tag of the track in the iTunes interface and you'll see the underlying file name is automatically updated. Update the Album or Podcast tag and the enclosing folder is automatically renamed as a result.
• Play count is a built-in feature that is nicely tied to podcasts. Use it to keep track of which podcasts you've listened to.
• Files should enter iTunes through consistent means. If you're using iTunes as a podcast player, then subscribe to the RSS feeds directly from iTunes. This ensures that they are tagged appropriately as podcasts and a number of automated functions come into play. Notably for iPod syncing, you can ask for only unplayed podcasts to be copied to the iPod, automatically doing the housekeeping of managing played vs unplayed podcasts.
• Should you decide that getting podcasts from another source is your preferred manner of dealing with them, you can roll your own automated management system with smart playlists. I have one playlist that is built from all unplayed audio podcasts sorted by creation date. If required, you could easily sort these by name and then manually add your own numbering scheme using the iTunes interface to rename the files.
• You can go fairly far with the smart playlists. I use one playlist as a staging area on my portable before integrating them into the main library. It's a smart playlist of songs to be rated, based on a manually managed playlist, that have no star assignments. As I listen and rate the songs either on the iPhone or within iTunes, they disappear from the list. Once the list is empty, I burn a copy to a CD and import the contents, with metadata into the main library (and keep the CD for archival and backup purposes).
• On an iPod Touch you can delete files directly on the iPod. Just like in the Mail interface, a swipe action over a podcast will display the Delete button.
• By using the iTunes interface exclusively, I suspect that all of your duplicate file issues will disappear.
• iTunes (at least under OS X) is eminently scriptable, so if you want to automate tasks associated with the addition of managing manually entered tracks from various different sources (such as many of the lame sites that advertise "podcasts" that are actually just manually available mp3 downloads not linked to an RSS feed) you can easily do some scripting to import files from a web page and then add appropriate tags which aren't present (like the podcast atom, since the file didn't come from an RSS feed).

I have some mixed feelings about the current approach that Apple uses, trying to let people still see their files (mostly because we've become accustomed to seeing our music tracks as files) rather than go the bundle approach used in iPhoto. All of the individual files are still stored as file objects, but they're hidden inside the iPhoto Library bundle file. Of course, Windows doesn't have this kind of abstraction for folders so the point is moot if you're using iTunes on Windows, but it would go a long way towards people getting used to the idea that the iTunes interface is the one you should be using.