iTunes 7 -- major step backwards? (1 Viewer)

[Christ Reynolds]

i installed itunes 7 on my windows VM, and it seems to be a nice upgrade. i like the automatic album art download, but i had to try it 2 or 3 times for certain albums. about half of them worked on the first try. could be busy servers on the first day of release. but i like it so far, better than other versions.

here's my BIGGEST complaint against the ipod/itunes. and if it's able to be fixed, it's not a complaint anymore, just my ignorance showing. i would really like to be able to place albums in chronological order without renaming them.

here's a short example of how it is now. in alphabetical order.
the who
>quadrophenia
>tommy
>who's next

here's an unwanted method to get them in order:
the who
>1969 - tommy
>1971 - who's next
>1973 - quadrophenia

but here is how i want them displayed. no renaming, NOT alphabetical, but chronological.

the who
>tommy
>who's next
>quadrophenia

if there is any way to accomplish this, i'll be very happy to know how to do it. if it isn't able to be done, get on it, apple!

CJ

 

[Yumbo]

Apple J (View Options)
Tick BY YEAR (Assuming data is present)
Sort up or down!

A,B,C!

 

[Ted Todorov]

I'm sorry, but I don't get it -- what constitutes an outdated file? Are you talking about old Podcasts? It certainly does remove unchecked ones when you sync in v6 (in 7 you have various ways of synching, like "3 latest", etc.)

Ted

 

[RichP]

Almost every "complaint" I see regarding iTunes from a feature standpoint (e.g. Sorting, drag & drop, auto synch, etc.) can all be learned by simply reading the help file. All of those features are in the documentation, yet without fail some people continue to post that "iTunes can't do this" and "iTunes can't do that" when in fact iTunes actually can do exactly what they want, they just either couldn't figure it out or didn't bother to read the docs.

There are 2 things you must understand before being able to use iTunes to its full potential:

1) Your ID3 tag data must be Complete & Accurate! Sorting your MP3 library by folder structure and file name just isn't going to cut it in iTunes. Step out of 1998 and embrace ID3 tagging, you'll be happy you did.

2) Understand how playlists work. That includes Smart Playlists and Static Playlists. Learn how to create 2 smart playlists and then a third playlist that selects a subset of the prior two based on a logical expression. The potential here is essentially limitless. I have 76GB in my iTunes library, yet I am able to sync a 2GB Nano such that it not only has a great selection of random tracks on every sync, but I can also keep the 5 albums on there that I am listening to the most at any given time, and it's all done automatically through smart playlists.

Understand those 2 things and there's virtually nothing that you cannot do with iTunes.

And yes I agree that the "fetch album art" feature needs tweaking.

 

[MarkHastings]

Before you get an answer, how are you viewing right now? By artist or by album?

There is the new "Album Artist" ID tag that may be of some use, but it appears that this tag only works under "Album View"...

 

[Steve Y]

There's another feature that is long overdue: you can now put videos in the "TV Shows" and "Music Videos" category! Up until now, only "official" video from iTunes was allowed into those categories. If you tried to label your own videos as "music" or "TV" they would still reside on your iPod but would be unaccessable.

Now you can label shows by season, show title, episode title, and in episode order, etc... I also like that music, movies and TV Shows are now separate categories when you view media directly from your iPod.

So it's still not perfect, but this is a major improvement. As for the "CD Cover" browsing, I love the idea, but on slower computers the animation tends to stutter, and it's useless to anyone like me with my entire library foolishly stored without a computer backup. I wish you could view the library directly from your pod! Still, I like that Apple is starting to embrace the concept of "the album" rather than just individual songs.

 

[DaveF]

I've since found that the new version can be set to behave as the previous version -- so it's not truly a step backwards as I initially thought.

However, the album art continues to confound me, and is the one feature I've most wanted. Is it documented somewhere in the help?

• I had to create an iTunes account to get artwork
• It fails to find all Disney soundtracks.
• It requires multiple attempts to download many albums.
• Other albums it knows, but selects the wrong artwork.
• Manually, I must select all songs in an album, Get Info, and then paste the artwork there -- I can't bulk update via the main artwork space.
• After synching my iPod, not all the artwork was copied to it.

I like my iPod nano. I like the updated iPod preferences menu in the new iTunes. But the new artwork system, which I was excited about, is bungled, seemingly untested.

 

[RichP]

Or poorly tested. This I agree with, the artwork feature seems like a tack-on (which it was) without a lot of testing time behind it. I'm sure Apple will have it running smoothly in a month or so.

 

[Yumbo]

Podcast settings
Keep: X ie. delete others.

A,B!

Methinks it's a Mac/Windows user syndrome.

 

[drobbins]

I don't necessarily disagree with that, but With enough research, anyone could be a rocket scientist also. I don't remember the details but it took over an hour the first few times I used itunes and I was using the help files. Most other software I have used I can figure out easily with out instructions. Heck, who uses instructions?

 

[Yumbo]

Think different

 

[MarkHastings]

Yeah, it doesn't seem perfect, but it also seems like it's all based on the iTunes music store settings and not something like CDDB. In other words, in order to get art for some of my singles, I had to rename the album according to how the iTunes Store named it.

For example, for the Four Non-Blondes single "What's Going On", I originally named the album "Four Non Blondes Single", but had to change it to "Bigger, Better, Faster, More!" in order to get the art to download.

Oh well, the album art has nothing to do with functionality, so I don't mind if it's not perfect. And as RichP said, they'll probably work out the issues at some point.

 

[drobbins]

I don't really care who writes the software. I just remember Christmas morning with all the unpackaging and assembly activities going on, needing to get the ipod working. The software is not user friendly in my opinion and it took hours for something that should be quite simple. The software I use to burn a CD just requires me to drag a song into a box then press burn. I feel that loading songs into an ipod should be just as simple. If it can be, finding the instructions to make it that simple is hard to find using their help system.
I also don't understand why QuickTime thinks I want it in my start-up. It is constantly reinstalling a shortcut in that folder.
Anyway, I downloaded itune v7 last night so I will see if it is better.

 

[MarkHastings]

In your start up folder? What OS are you using? I've never had iTunes do that to me.


Again, not trying to be a dick here, just trying to understand all of your troubles.

 

[Craig S]

I agree with everyone that the album art downloading system is not ready for primetime. Tuesday night I wasn't able to get any art at all (I noticed at the same time that the iTunes store was very flaky). Last night I was able to download art manually, and when I ripped the new Bob Seger CD I had just brought home it did find the art and automatically apply it. Seems VERY slow, though.

I will say the quality of the cover art from the iTunse store is much higher than what I've been downloading myself. Hopefully a 7.1 update down the road will fix most of the problems.

It is frustrating that you can only get art for stuff that is in the iTunes Store, but I suspect this is a copyright issue. Apple has probably negotiated the rights for the art in the store, but doesn't want to make itself a lawsuit target by downloading art from other sources.

The album cover browser is nice eye candy, but after a few minutes of playing with it I put it away and went back to the "classic" view. It's just not paractical to browse a large library (I have over 1200 albums/20,000 songs in my iTunes library) this way. I suspect Apple added this feature (they actually bought another company that developed it) to help compete with similar features in Microsoft's upcoming WMP 11 (which looks rather impressive, I must say).

RichP is absolutely right when he talks about Playlists/Smart Playlists. Spending a little time learning how to use SmartPlaylists (including combining & nesting them) is key to using iTunes effectively. I do something similar to him for my Nano, which has a set of genre-based "best of" lists that is refreshed at every sync with tunes that are "least recently played". The result is a fresh set of my favorite music at every sync with no effort on my part (other than the initial setup & testing, which took about half-an-hour). SmartPlaylists are freakin' awesome!!

 

[drobbins]

It is not itunes, it is "qttask" for QuickTime. Every month or so when I do computer maintenance, it shows up again. I don't know how much resources it uses, but I don't need it running in the background anyway.

I was going to try out itunes v7 tonight, but I think I will play "Lego Star Wars 2" with the kids

 

[MarkHastings]

Ah, that. Is that the system tray thing? That's the first thing I turn off after an update to QT. No more annoying than all of those AOL links that AIM puts in every browsers favorites list.

 

[Ken Chan]

It's designed to Just Work for the vast majority of people and how they use it. The fact that it's not intuitive to you or your daughter, does not by itself make you bad people

You say you don't care about playlists, but from what I'm reading here, that's how you solve the problem. Setup a playlist, and set the iPod to sync just that playlist. Then drag-and-drop songs to the playlist, or use a smart playlist. The advantage of using a playlist is that you can manage your music without having the iPod plugged in. The next time it is, the changes get synced.

 

[Andrew Pratt]

FYI for those running Roku Soundbridges be advised that iTunes 7 doesn't work with the Soundbridge's as there's an incompatibility with the daap services. They're working on a firmware update but in the mean time stick with iTunes 6....or download and install the FireFly software that will serve up your iTunes instead. I dabbled with mt-daap which was what FireFly was called before Roku got involved and I must say the install is now MUCH easier as its a simple install file you run and that's about it If Firefly is something that interests you you can read more about it here. You'll need to download and install Apple's Bonjour software first but that's easy enough as well as its readily available and its also free.

I seem to be getting more album art now then I was when I first tried it so maybe it was a traffic issue more then bad code...either way its found most of my CD's now and i'm now just using iTunes Art Importer (freeware) to do the rest from Amazon.

 

[MarkHastings]

Definitely agreed. Mine's processing MUCH better than last night.