aguywhoplaysthief on 20/2/2006 at 21:56

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All I wish for is a media player with the resource usage of an XMPlay or a foobar, with the Gracenote CDDB accuracy of iTunes.

dvrabel on 20/2/2006 at 23:00

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Why the need to plan your music 40 hours in advance?

Rug Burn Junky on 21/2/2006 at 01:53

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You're right. I did forget that it had OR and NOT options, but that's simply because their piss-poor implementation makes them virtually useless. Having them be all AND or all OR, means OR is pointless 99% of the time. And without being able to choose the order of operations, it's difficult to imagine using NOT effectively either.No, my frustration comes from the fact that I have to override it in order to prevent it from doing things that are totally counterintuitive and make my ipod useless. And furthermore, the fact that I have to override it ENTIRELY when it's behaving wrongly, rather than just on a case by case basis. Including such lovely quirks as it either syncing ALL of the music on the ipod (not an option when you have three times as much music as your iPod will hold), or none of it. It shouldn't be too hard to force it to sync certain subsets I designate, and then let me add to it on a case by case basis, rather than having it take any option of control out of my hands the moment the software is responsible for syncing.

And I love the fact that if you tell it to manage only certain playlists, it helpfully just erases everything else on the damn ipod. Nice touch there, Apple. Really useful.

Or the fact that suddenly there are 3000 songs done by "Various artist" because Apple, in their infinite wisdom, uses ONLY the "album artist" tag to sort by. Making the "album artist" tag totally fucking useless since it now has to be coordinated with the "song artist" tag to be useful in the management software. Oh yeah, btw, try having it do a batch rename copying the 'artist' field to the 'album artist.' Get back to me when you've got that one all sorted out.

Try organizing a 35,000 mp3 library with itunes and then come back and tell me what kind of an option that is, mmm kay?

Once you're done syncing the artist fields, try this one on for size, grab a 200 file audiobook, and batch tag all of it to "remember playback position" without writing a custom script. Tell me how that works out for you. ;)

Or better yet, clear out the dead links in itunes for songs that have been moved or renamed.

Fucking christ, I'd have to be a masochist to even think of letting it actually organize the FILES themselves, based on how poorly it handles just organizing a database LISTING of the files.


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I know what I do want from the file/playlist management (and I'm betting one thing that is driving Ton's complaints), is to be able to truly, and easily create random playlists of songs that can be drawn from based on reasonable filters - "Hey I want it to shuffle, but only a certain subset of songs.". It doesn't even have to be perfect, as long as I can tweak the list so that it's useful. And it should be able to do that WITHOUT having the hassle of setting them up manually or retagging each and every song you have just to be able to deal with the poor quirks of software which, for all you know, you may no longer be using in six months.

BTW, Ton, while it doesn't quite do the job for sorting and playing back music, (http://www.softdepia.com/tag_rename_download_1291.html) Tag and Rename does a great job of organizing them in the first place.You may want to check it out.

Scots Taffer on 21/2/2006 at 02:24

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Jesus. I wonder if you're this much of an asshole in person.

Rug Burn Junky on 21/2/2006 at 02:59

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People with as little imagination as yourself and Zylonbane are the reason that most radio is crap and stations can get away with a setlist strategy of "HEY, LET'S LISTEN TO THE SAME 23 SONGS IN A DIFFERENT ORDER!"

If you can't see the usefulness of having a large playlist like that for randomization, sorry, but it's not because there's no explanation for it: it's that you're just too stupid to be able to comprehend that there's ways of doin' stuff that maybe, just maybe, you ain't done thought of yet. Capesche?You're absolutely right on that. Rather than being useful for people who'd actually take advantage of it, it's being written for the lowest common denominator: ie. simpletons like yourself.